Lonergan and Historiography

–Part 1 Psychohistory

by Thomas J. McPartland

Thomas McPartland is Professor and Chairman of the Whitney Young School of Honors and Liberal Studies at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.This exposition based on the thought of Bernard Lonergan is taken from Chapter 3 of his latest book, Lonergan and Historiography: The Epistemological Philosophy of History, which appears in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy, University of Missouri Press, 2010. This excerpt is presented in five parts.

The Pitfalls of Attempting Psychohistory

Perhaps of all the fields in the history of thought, psychohistory is the most controversial, the least developed, the least settled, and yet, in cer­tain of its practitioners, the most inclined to aspire to totalitarian ambition over other fields.

Can psychohistory really contribute to the knowledge of the past? Even if it can do so, in what sense can it be said actually to con­stitute a definable field of historical studies?

Notwithstanding the extrava­gant reductionist claims and glaring errors of the more zealous partisans of psychohistory, which may seem to discredit it, the answer to the first question, we shall argue, is a clear yes. The answer to the second question must be a more guarded yes.

Psychohistory confronts four major difficulties. The first problem is a methodological one: drawing hasty conclusions from scanty textual evidence. The psychohistorian has typically less data to work with than does the therapist engaged in ongoing sessions with clients. The danger is by no means entirely unique to psychohistory, but psychohistory, usually claiming a scientific status, is plagued with the temptation to apply theo­ries a priori in handling concrete historical events.

This points to a second problem, the propensity for psychohistory to be a crypto (if not pseudo) science in the disguise of historiography, to regale in the environs of ideal-types and not to take seriously enough the necessary attachment of good historiography to the terra firma of what Weber named situational analy­sis. As Jacques Barzun so perceptively states it, some versions of psycho-history are programs of "psychologizing with the aid of history," where the aim is not to study res gestae (things done), not to explain persons, novelty, or actual events, but to abstract from historical particularity to ascertain average trends and deterministic processes.⁹

Third, the prospec­tive psychohistorian is faced with a legion of competing psychological theories, styles, and schools. Even the attempt to provide a descriptive or an explanatory account would seem immediately to run into the dazzling battleground of dialectics. Just as the danger lurks that the psychologist dabbling in history will be sloppy in pursuing historical method, so the peril lies in wait that the professional historian delving into psychohistory will be unfamiliar with the most recent advances and the most intricate problems in psychology only to opt for a kind of crude dogmatizing with a convenient model in hand (often Freudian).

Finally, there is the problem of being intoxicated with reductionism, compressing the entire history of thought into the dynamics of the sensitive psyche, and, most disastrously, falling prey to ad hominem arguments against certain thinkers, labeled as sick, so as to explain their ideas in (negative) psychological categories.