26
ROBERT JAY LIFTON
the themes and concepts I develop in it could shed light on a mys–
teriously explosive social upheaval- and because I thought it a
useful experiment in the pursuit of psychohistory.
VI
Yet the post-Freudian paradigms, like the Freudian ones, do
not make clear exactly what they "explain," and fall far short of
providing coherent theories of historical causation. The Freudian
paradigms, we recall, lean heavily upon instinctual energies and
struggles, which inevitably reduce themselves to the Oedipal Event,
whether in connection with a prehistorical generational conflict or
with the psychopathology of a leading historical actor. Now
if
broadened,
this
principle of the Oedipal Event could be made to
connect with more inclusive versions of generational impasse, in
keeping with Ortega y Gasset's belief that "the concept of the gen–
eration is the most important one in the whole of history." But Or–
tega had in mind the "three different and vital times [or twenty-,
forty- and sixty-year olds] lodged together in a single external and
chronological fragment of time," which in tum provide an "in–
temallack of equilibrium," because of which "history moves, changes,
wheels, and flows." Implicit in Ortega's view, then,
is
an examina–
tion of the precise nature of these "three different and vital times,"
of precisely the historical dimension which Freudian models have
tended to ignore.
Erikson's great-man paradigm looks for historical causation in
the leader's singular capacity, and absolute need, so to speak, to
carry history with
him
as he breaks out from, and transcends, his
own demonic intrapsychic conflicts. Since these conflicts are rooted
jn the leader's historical period, and his solution affects a great col–
lectivity of his contemporaries as well as subsequent generations,
the great-man approach
is
relatively more specific than the other
paradigms in its causal explanations. But we still 'sense a theoretical
gap between the individual and the collectivity which none of the
paradigms has fully bridged.
The shared-themes approach
is
the most diffuse of the four
paradigms, though it
is
in many ways the most attuned to historical
complexity. Within it, effect can become virtually indistinguishable
from cause. A group understood to be
created
by a particular
his–
torical event (the Hiroshima survivors) or by an evolving set of
