Fantasy and Reality in History (review)

While psychoanalytic interpretations of historical and political movements and figures had been launched by the first decade of the present century, 1958 was a watershed year: then appeared both Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther and the call of American Historical Association president William Langer for historians to take up the psychoanalytic banner. ¹ Psychoanalytic applications to history comprise a variety of approaches and range from the ridiculously reductive to the insightfully integrative. Moreover, the historian must bear in mind that there are many theoretical and methodological orientations within psychoanalysis itself—traditional “id psychology,” ego psychology and object-relations theory, self psychology, and phenomenologically oriented interpersonal and intersubjective approaches. And in recent decades psychoanalysis has been undergoing considerable scientific and epistemological critique—both positive and negative. ²

Peter Loewenberg is one of a small cadre of professional historians or political scientists who have themselves become psychoanalytically trained. His book Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach (1983) is a must for any historian interested in the subject. Indeed, its first section, dealing with the psychological vicissitudes of the graduate-student experience and the potential for regressive transferential-countertransferential interactions between student and faculty, should be required reading for both professors and students. His current work, Fantasy and Reality in History, is a collection of twelve essays covering conceptual, methodological, historical, and biographical issues.

In a brief introduction Loewenberg outlines his conception of psychohistorical method. Rather than viewing psychoanalysis as simply one of history’s “auxiliary sciences,” like numismatics or statistics, he advocates that psychohistory be approached as a dual discipline or career “that is not subordinate but integral at the point of contact between the subject (the researcher or clinician) and his or her data (documents and texts or analysands)” (p. 3). If he asserts that the historian or social scientist can gain from the intrapsychic and interpersonal orientations of psychoanalysis, he also urges that the clinical psychoanalyst better appreciate the impact of sociocultural, political, ethnic, and economic factors on a patient’s personal history and dynamics.

Section 1 (“Psychoanalysis, Social Structure, and Culture”) contains a somewhat sketchy discussion of the similarities in the approaches of psychoanalysts and historians—using parallels that are both apt and misleading. The historian often lacks the sort of data necessary to make and test psychoanalytic hypotheses, while the psychoanalyst generally lacks the third-party sources and perspectives so necessary to verifying biographical facts and interpretations. Chapters 2 and 3 in this section contain little new material, with one important exception: Loewenberg’s thesis that the insider-outsider position of the European Jew contributed to Freud’s concept of analytic neutrality—that curiously useful combination of anonymity-disengagement and intimacy-engagement on the part of the analyst toward the patient.

The most interesting chapter in section 2 (“Political Leadership and the Irrational”) deals with “Gladstone, Sin, and the Bulgarian Horrors.” The wealth of public and private data on this important prime minister, coupled with his many odd and potentially politically self-damaging habits, have made him a favorite of psychoanalytically inclined historians. Loewenberg uses Gladstone’s complex relationship with his mother and sister to explain a variety of his compulsions, preoccupations, and ambivalent fascination with prostitution, pornography, and Turkish sexual-aggressive sadism in the Bulgarian War. He demonstrates how Gladstone’s psychical issues led him to advocate an anti-Turkish foreign policy that ran counter to Britain’s historical and contemporary diplomatic best interests.

In section 3 (“Psychodynamics and the Social Process”) Loewenberg argues that Freud’s 1926 theory of anxiety as a signal of the danger of helplessness or hopelessness has not been sufficiently utilized as a category of political and historical understanding. He applies this concept to the analysis of sociocultural and political reactions to phenomena such as the Black Death and the peasants’ “Great Fear” during the early French Revolution—as well as to various phenomena in German and American history. Other chapters compare the cognitive (social learning) and psychodynamic theories of racism; link psychoanalytic theories of early childhood development to nationalism...