PARTISAN REVIEW
21
questioned whether he roared at all- that is, whether the episode
actually took place.
Apart from specific problems of reconstruction, there
is
the
larger question concerning the extent to which any individual per–
son, great or otherwise, can exemplify an entire historical epoch
- or even (as in Erikson's treatment of Luther) its major collec–
tive psychological struggles. The question takes on special force dur–
ing our unprecedentedly diverse and fickle century,
so
no less if
raised in connection with the past.
Hence the emergence of another recent approach: that of
shared psychohistorical themes,
as observed in men and women ex–
posed to particular kinds of individual and collective experience.
Examples here are Kenneth Keniston's studies of alienated, and then
activist, American students, and Robert Coles's work with children
and adults in the midst of racial antagonism and social change.
I have been much concerned with the development of
this
method
and
ask
indulgence for discussing it in relation to my own work.
I have conducted interview studies of three specific groups of
people whose historical exposures seemed to me to have bearing
on important characteristics of our era: Chinese and Westerners
who underwent Chinese thought reform (or "brainwashing");
J
ap–
anese university students during the early sixties; and Hiroshima
survivors of the atomic bomb. My focus has been upon themes,
forms and images that are in significant ways shared, rather than
upon the life of a single person as such.
The shared-themes approach is based upon a psychoanalytically
derived stress upon what goes on inside people. But, as compared
with Erikson's great-man paradigm, it moves
still
further from
clas–
sical analytic tradition. That
is,
it moves outward from the individ–
ual in the direction of collective historical experience. It explicitly
rejects the nineteenth-century scientific model of man as a mechan–
ism propelled by quantities of energy - energy internally generated
by means of instinctual drives, partially held in check by certain
defense mechanisms (notably repression), but eventually erupting in
the form of various actions of the individual directed at his outer
environment.
This
instinctual idiom (and, one may say, world view)
gives way to a symbolic and formative one.
The shared-themes approach
also
requires considerable innova-
