Psychological Development and Historical Change

Abstract

Psychological Development and Historical Change Most efforts to marry psychology and history have ended in divorce or outright cannibalism. In the hands of psychologists and psychiatrists, psychohistorical works have traditionally concentrated upon the psychopathology of great men. Those few historians influenced by psychoanalysis have sometimes insisted that historical movements were nothing but repetitive reenactments of the basic themes of Totem and Taboo. For their part, the majority of historians and depth psychologists have been rightly skeptical of the usefulness of an approach that left one unable to understand how great men differed from psychiatric patients and did scant justice to historical events of interest primarily because they were not literal repetitions of the past. Until the last decade, most psychohistorical inquiries must be judged a failure from both a psychological and a historical point of view; despite the advocacy of distinguished historians like Langer, the union of history and depth psychology languished.I In the last decade, inspired largely by the work of Erikson, new and potentially more fruitful kinds of psychohistorical inquiry have opened up.2 Erikson's studies of Gandhi and Luther have shown that some of the insights of psychoanalysis can be applied to great men without reducing them to bundles of neurotic urges. In the works of psychiatrists like Lifton, Coles, and others, we see a new interest in the unifying psychological themes that unite historical movements as different as Southern school desegregation and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In the studies of younger historians like Demos or Hunt, we find a new sophistication in applying modern psychodynamic

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