Page 2 of 4
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.
