To the Editor:
In “The New History” [January] Gertrude Himmelfarb, echoing Jacques Barzun, swings her polemical ax in such wide arcs that very little in contemporary historical scholarship is left untouched by it. Not only are the “excesses” of psychohistorians castigated, but even the more “temperate” claims of its practitioners are disallowed; not only are the quantohistorians assigned at most the minor role of doing leg work for some cultivated generalists, but even the Marxists are placed among those pernicious progenitors of historical “fashions” which one can only “shed” with difficulty.
It would be impossible to do justice to the questions raised by Miss Himmelfarb in even a lengthy letter, but I shall attempt to deal with some of the issues she raises in regard to psychohistory. Rudolph Binion’s article on Hitler makes him something of a whipping boy for Miss Himmelfarb, in that presumably all of the worst faults of the psychohistorian can be found in his article. It is not only regrettable but somewhat unfair that Miss Himmelfarb did not point out that the article grew out of one of several lectures that Binion gave on the subject, lectures which he was extremely reluctant to publish, according to the editors of the Journal of Childhood Quarterly, because their arguments were at once too “sweeping” and too “tight” to be properly footnoted. It was only at the behest of the editors that Binion agreed to publish this one lecture, with, it is true, considerable documentation appended to it. Nevertheless, this is something of a work-in-progress report and Binion is now preparing a book on the subject, a work which might provide a more suitable basis for judging both Binion and psychohistory in general. It is notable that Binion’s well received book, Frau Lou, was completely ignored by Miss Himmelfarb.
Binion is taken to task for his unobjectionable remark that the reader must be able to “empathize” with or give “subjective assent” to the evidence being presented. Not only should a reader be called upon to do so, but so should historians. Any successful historical biographer, whatever his particular intellectual orientation, has sought to enter the mental and emotional universe of his subject; and those titans of 19th-century historiography, who remain so normative for Miss Himmelfarb, often sought to capture the “spirit” of entire ages or civilizations, a cognitive act that goes far beyond the mechanical stitching together of historical documents. Whether or not such attempts can ever be more than partially successful, they have sometimes resulted in profound and illuminating history. In any event, it is difficult to understand how Miss Himmelfarb can follow this by quoting approvingly Barzun’s charge that psychohistorians are “mechanistic.”
As the concluding swipe at Marxism indicates, Miss Himmelfarb’s vision of history is a two-dimensional one, concerned with surface and bolstered by the conviction that her eclecticism is more than an extremely attractive article of faith. This leads her to the more than slightly ludicrous position of affirming the right of the historian to “psychologize” to the extent of asserting that Hitler had an “obsession” with Jews—a generalization supported by convincing documentary evidence—but of denying to him the right to seek the roots of this “obsession.” Historians will insist upon asking “why” as well as telling “what happened” and “how it happened”; to do otherwise would greatly impoverish history and might well signal its demise as an object of the deepest intellectual concerns. These probings below the surface will of course involve a considerable degree of speculation—a word that is not a pejorative—but do not involve the exclusion of evidence, although some of this evidence may not be of the type with which Miss Himmelfarb is comfortable. A good example may be found in the brilliantly original interpretation of Isaac Newton’s schoolboy notebooks by Frank Manuel in his psychohistorical portrait of the scientist. Manuel’s work could also have served to demonstrate that not all psychohistorians write using the barbarous gobbledygook of the social sciences whose translation into historical writing is so correctly decried by Miss Himmelfarb.
Finally, one must confront the familiar accusation that because psychoanalytic theory tends to be ahistorical, psychohistorians fail to take into account a multiplicity of historical factors. Apart from the challenge that a convinced monist might mount to Miss Himmelfarb’s not uncommon belief that a fuller truth emerges from piling cause upon cause as in some overly thick review book, a “temperate” psycho-historian would see the need for integrating his findings with the total historical context. It is of course true that personality patterns broadly similar to that drawn by Binion in his sketch of Hitler have probably existed among others who in different historical circumstances ended up as little more than misanthropic village anti-Semites. Nevertheless, it is difficult to fault Binion when, in his answer to George Mosse’s criticisms, he points out that cultural, economic, and social factors in themselves cannot explain individual “doings”; for not only are a variety of individual responses logically possible, they are empirically demonstrable in most historical situations. One challenge to the psycho-historian is to delineate the ongoing dialectic between continuity and change. After all, the fact that there have been no fundamental changes in the human biological structure for more than 30,000 years has not prevented man from having a rich history.
Howard E. Negrin
New York City
_____________
To the Editor:
I was dismayed to note the connection in Gertrude Himmelfarb’s article . . . between service on panels for the distribution of research grants, which she casually mentions, and the utterly dogmatic view of psychohistorians she holds. Presumably, any individual grant proposal must be judged on its merits. But if all psychohistorical work is considered as failed beforehand—and Miss Himmelfarb has arbitrarily decided that this must be so—no such judgment is possible. If Miss Himmelfarb does in fact have any responsibility to any grant-awarding agency, she should disqualify herself—or be disqualified—immediately. The normal channels for the pursuit of scholarly research cannot be arbitrarily closed to any group of scholars.
Fred Weinstein
Group for the Uses of Psychology in History
SUNY
Stony Brook, New York
_____________
Gertrude Himmelfarb writes:
In reply to Howard E. Negrin, I should like to repeat what I said in my article: that the examples I selected were not, as he seems to think, those I regard as the worst of their genre but rather the typical or best. It is he, not I, who does a disservice to Binion in suggesting that I chose to discuss his article on Hitler because “presumably all the worst faults of the psychohistorian can be found in this article.” I agree with Mr. Negrin that Frank Manuel’s work on Newton is of a very different order, ranking with the very best of its kind—in my judgment, with that of Erik Erikson. One would not know from Mr. Negrin’s letter that I discussed Erikson at greater length than any other single author, precisely to anticipate the criticism that I was finding “whipping boys” among the lesser practitioners of the art.
Binion’s comment on “empathy” and “subjective assent” was not as innocent or banal as Mr. Negrin makes it sound. Binion was not uttering the usual cliché about the biographer’s desire to enter the “mental and emotional universe of his subject”; he was offering “empathy” and “subjective assent” as a “further test of truth.” It is this that gives point to his remark that we cannot “empathize with prices in 16th-century Europe to feel whether the influx of bullion from America really did cause their rise”; the implication is that an explanation in terms of bullion and prices is less true than an alternative explanation with which we can empathize.
Mr. Negrin finds it odd that I admit the validity of a “psychological” explanation about Hitler (his “obsession” with the Jews) but not the particular psychoanalytic explanation offered by Binion (the derivation of Lebensraum from Hitler’s “oral-aggressive fixation” caused by “compensatory overfeeding” at his mother’s breast). My reason is simple: there is firm historical evidence for the first and no for the second. What is interesting is Mr. Negrin’s assumption that only the psychoanalytic theories go “below the surface,” penetrate to “the roots” of the matter—which is precisely Barzun’s, and my, objection to psychohistory.
Mr. Weinstein’s letter displays a similar intellectual parochialism. If a favorable review of Barzun’s book disqualifies the reviewer from serving on a panel for the distribution of grants, should not a favorable review of a work by a psychohistorian similarly disqualify the reviewer—especially if the psychohistorian claims to have the only “scientific” access to the truth? Or a favorable review of a book written by a Marxist? Or by a Thomist? The logic of Mr. Weinstein’s suggestion would seem to disqualify anyone with any serious convictions or critical faculties. In fact, scholars of varying schools of thought have always found it possible to respect one another even while disagreeing, sometimes very sharply, with each other. It should not be necessary to assure Mr. Weinstein that I have not only recommended grants to psychohistorians, quantohistorians, Marxists, and others (including “eclectic” and conventional historians) with whom I happen to disagree on one or another matter, but that I have also recommended their books for publication, invited them to teach and lecture at my university, required my students to be familiar with their works. Indeed, some of my best friends. . . .
_____________
