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.
Psychohistory's Genuine Possibilities
Having leveled these caveats against psychohistory, we might wonder if there are any positive contents left. Yet psychohistory seems to have a rich soil in which to nourish its genuine possibilities. It has enormous possibilities–perhaps, thus far, more than actuality–both as a handmaiden ancillary to other fields in the history of thought and as a worker in its own domain. In the latter area it can cultivate a unique sensitivity to the role of symbols, dreams, and myths in the historical drama of persons and communities, to psychic transformations in the history of consciousness, and to the concrete imprint of psychic aberration on the landscape of historical situations.
Legitimate psychohistory–psychohistory, that is, as true history–would employ judiciously selected psychological theories, and the more adequate the philosophical grounding, the better. And it would apply them through a sophisticated extension of common sense to explain real change, movement, and events; its model would not be scientific deduction, but the self-correcting process of learning. Let us turn to some illustrations.
Psychohistorical studies can illuminate intellectual biography in two regions. First, there is the specter of what Lonergan calls "scotosis." This malady is caused by a kind of censorship that represses images and inhibits performance. The repression can involve biological needs, but also a flight from experiences of dread, guilt, and the transcendent; it usually entails a tension between demands of the nervous system for images and affects and a person's conscious orientation in living.10
The repression and the inhibition can inaugurate a process of psychic breakdown, thereby creating a type of hidden personality structure–a twilight land of consciousness. There is a blind spot in one's understanding, a bias that tugs at one's thought and influences one's action. It can, for example, infect moral sensitivity, contribute to moral impotence, color one's affective response to linguistic and symbolic expressions, generate excessive religious pretensions, and restrict the asking of questions in those areas that evoke experiences of anxiety and dread.
Psychohistory, then, can fathom why a certain range of questions was effectively beyond a person's horizon or why another range of questions was particularly attractive. It can shed light on half-understood motives and explain certain anomalies in a thinker's ideas. But psychohistory can provide only limited assistance to the biographer who wishes to account for cultural and intellectual creativity.
In writing a cultural or an intellectual biography, for instance, it may be enlightening to become aware of Michelangelo's sexual feelings, or interesting to learn about Saint Augustine's relation to his mother, or helpful to know of Max Weber's sexual repression, but countless people have had such psychological experiences or disabilities and very few of them become a Michelangelo, a Saint Augustine, or a Max Weber. Psychohistory, in brief, can contribute to explain the nature of a person's experience.
But what is most telling and significant from the standpoint of cultural and intellectual history is the meaning of that experience for the person, how he or she reacted to it, what he or she did with it.11 Psychological problems–at least those short of psychosis–limit the range of viable alternatives in a person's life, but they do not absolutely determine the actual choice of alternatives.
It is the obligation of the cultural and intellectual biographer to zero in on those factors, events, and decisions that actually do form the creative personality, that constitute the unique achievements of such towering figures as Michelangelo, Saint Augustine, and Max Weber. By identifying psychic aberration, psychohistory can assist the disciplines of cultural and intellectual history, but it is no substitute for them because it is incapable of accounting for cultural and intellectual products precisely as cultural and intellectual products.
Exploring Symbols, Dreams and Moods
Nevertheless, in a second area, psychobiography has a more positive task: exploring the infrastructure of cultural and intellectual creativity through the symbols, dreams, affective moods, and stories that partake of the drama of a person's existence and self-interpretation. These psychic expressions, as revealed in diaries, autobiographies, letters, poems, novels, and artworks, can give the attentive and knowledgeable psychobiographer some access to the interior dimension of a person's self-development, which is always a unique historical and existential journey.
Along similar lines, psychohistory can investigate the historical relationship between psychological situations and technical, social, and cultural realities. In conjunction with specialized histories of religion, art, literature, philosophy, politics, and social institutions, it can trace the historical flowering and wilting of those heuristic insights, those archetypical and anagogic symbols, and those myths and stories that flow together as the communal memory, inspire a vision of the future, legitimate institutions, mold the shape of art and literature, and support the love of wisdom.
If the transformation from compactness to differentiation in the history of consciousness witnesses an increasing distinction between self and other and between self and community, then psychohistory has fertile ground where it can compare significant historical variations in psychological situations, in psychological problems, and in modes of psychotherapy.12 It can consider, for instance, changing historical patterns of technological, economic, and social differentiation, of child rearing, and of cultural attitudes toward guilt and shame. Perhaps, with some philosophical modifications, the work of Jung and of his followers, such as Eric Neumann, can serve as instructive ideal-types for psychohistorians to examine the luxuriant flora of the history of consciousness.13
Presumably, such studies will locate modern psychological cases in wider and different perspectives. One may question, for example, as does Peter Berger, to what degree the psychoanalytic notion of the "unconscious" is a modern phenomenon resulting from a bifurcation of public and private selves.14 Why have archaic images and symbols, once celebrated in public ritual, been apparently relegated to the dreams of isolated individuals in modern civilization?
Examining Communal Psychic Experiences
The last point raises the question of the topic of psychic aberrations in the history of a community.15 Psychohistory can indeed elucidate the correspondence of psychic disturbances and communal neuroses with numerous historical factors and trends: stresses and strains imposed by technological, social, and political constellations; cultural censorship; the failure of cultural and institutional remedies in the face of adverse psychic situations; flight from the dread accompanying attacks on the central core of a communal horizon; and repression of religious symbols and experiences.
Psychohistory can expose the psychological elements ingredient in cultural and intellectual decline; it can uncover psychopathological complications that color symbols and languages, that invade the realm of popular culture, that penetrate literary themes, that define the nucleus of deviant subcultures, and that constrict the range of questions asked. It can illuminate the psychic vectors behind such movements as medieval and Reformation messianism and modern political ideologies.16 It can reveal how such psychological needs as overcoming anxiety and achieving security have historically weighed down religions and ideologies.
The psychological need for security, or any pathological condition, however, cannot explain the existence of religion, art, literature, philosophy, science, and scholarship. Religion is rooted in experiences associated with the loving openness of the pure question and attached to archetypal and anagogic symbols.17 Art and literature portray the generic human wonder in its elemental sweep, exploring, against any narrow, limited, and secure viewpoint, the possibilities of human living (see next section).18 Philosophy, science, and scholarship are grounded in the pure desire to know, which challenges the boundaries of every concrete horizon.
Psychohistorians, rather than delving into the ultimate origins of religion, art, literature, philosophy, science, and scholarship, probe the psychic reservoir and undertow of cultural and intellectual creativity or diagnose the psychic distortions that inhibit and impair these forms of cultural and intellectual life. 
[This is part 1 of a five part article. Part 2 may be read HERE.]
NOTES
(for fuller citations see the bibliography in Professor McPartland's book)
9. Barzun, Clio and the Doctors, 17-18, 148. "Their efforts are evidently to dispose of history and civilization, of human error and achievements, rather than to contemplate them. Unwittingly, motive becomes purpose; the desire to understand is undone by the rival desire to quell uncertainty through reductive ideas." Ibid., 84.
10. On Lonergan's treatment of the sensitive psyche and its bias, see Insight, 210-231; on the sensitive psyche as an "upwardly directed dynamism seeking fuller realization" (which includes Jung's notion of archetypal symbols and the symbolism of the "mystery" of the known unknown correlative to the sweep of inquiry), see ibid., 482, 569-72; on psychic development, see ibid., 481-83, 492-93; on the dynamics of the psyche as participating in the tension of limitation and transcendence at the heart of historical existence, see ibid.,498-503; on dread in relation to the psyche, see Phenomenology and Logic, 204-6, 284-89; McPartland, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, chap. 8.
There is an intersubjective dimension to the scotosis of the sensitive psyche. René Girard, for example, in Violence and the Sacred has argued for the role of mimesis in distorting desire and imagers, creating a false sense of autonomy. For applications to Lonergan's notion of the sensitive psyche and the transcendental imperatives, see Robert Doran, "Preserving Lonergan's Understanding of Thomist Metaphysics: A Proposal and an Example," 94-100.
11. The relation, for instance, of Michelangelo's sexual feelings to his work must be considered within the context of his neo-Platonism. See Howard Hibbard, Michelangelo, pp. 229-31, 233-35; Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber.
12. It is interesting to compare modern psychotherapy with the communal therapy of a primitive African tribe discussed by Rollo May in Love and Will, 331-33. May cites the example of a man who was cured of impotence by participating in a frenzied village dance dressed and acting as his mother.
13. See Eric Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic; Origins and History of Consciousness. For a reworking of Jung into Lonergan's framework, see Robert Doran, Subject and Psyche: Ricoeur, Jung, and the Search for Foundations. See also n. 5, above, for Lonergan's notion of the teleological dimension of the psyche, including Jung's archetypes and Freud's wish fulfullment (Insight, 482). Lonergan, in Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965-1980, 261-63, and Method, 68, commends Paul Ricoeur's effort, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, to retrieve an implicit teleology in Freud.
14. Peter Berger, "Towards a Sociological Understanding of Psycho-analysis," Social Research 32 (1965): 39.
15. Insight, 243. René Girard has emphasized how mimesis and its distortion of desire and images can foster a scapegoat mechanism that can pervade political society and religion. See Eugene Webb, Philosophers of Consciousness: Polanyi, Lonergan, Voegelin, Ricoeur, Girard, Kierkegaard, chap. 5; Worldview and Mind: Religious Thought and Psychological Development, chap. 5.
16. See ibid., 262, where Lonergan refers to Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony; Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium.
17. Method, 101-7; Insight, 482, 569-72, 711, 744-45; Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965-1980, chap. 20; Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion.
18. Insight, 208.
