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World History, Systems, and the Interdisciplinary View of Psychohistory by Luke Rondinaro 25 April 2003 00:08 UTC |
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(1) Would you please define “Psychohistory” for us. Is it more about looking at the psychology of human behavior in history or at the history of human psychological developments (via the history of childrearing)? That is to say, is PH more “History” or “Psychology”, and when it comes down to it, can it truly clarify the puzzles of human motivations in history any better than other historically-related disciplines? And, if it can, then why hasn’t it been able to catch on more successfully within the academic community? Certainly, it can’t hope to be as systematic or rigorous as Isaac Asimov’s fictional term of the same name (from his Foundation Series), but at the outset why does it seem like the World Systems Approach and World Historical Studies is more systematic and academically rigorous than Psychohistory? What is it about Psychology that causes people to see it as being “quack science” at one extreme or merely “not able to be understood” at the other end of the scale?
Psychohistory is the science of historical motivations, no more, no less. It is the "Why?" of historical events. It has three general areas: (1) The history of childhood, (2) historical group-fantasies, and (3) psychobiographies. It has been vigorously opposed by traditional academicians because they were taught that causes of history are either forbidden to discover (Jacques Barzun to me at my first Columbia University history class: "Historians narrate; they do not look for causes. That's psychology [ugh!]" When causes are discussed in the social sciences, they are only looked for in the outer world, outside the head, never inside, so developmental psychology is simply never considered. To do that, a social scientist would have to relearn everything they were taught and might even have to go into psychotherapy to discover what inner causes are all about [ugh!]
By "academically rigorous" one only means "located in the left hemisphere," as distinguished from the organization of the right hemisphere. Even Asimov thought rigorous scientific historical psychology meant reducing shared events to mathematics, which means only left hemisphere science. But psychohistory follows more the right-lobed science of biology that the left-lobed science of physics, and nearly every page of my recent books are filled with neurobiological evidence that politics and wars are shared changes in right lobed trance states, mass delusional processes, not "realistic" theories of war as fights for territories, etc.
Psychohistory is misunderstood because it is not read. Period. No one has the slightest idea what professional psychohistory is all about. This will take another half century to begin to see that a separate discipline is necessary to explain shared historical motivations. Yet freshmen in college psychohistory courses all over the world learn, enjoy and are astonished at the predictive power of the discipline, even though they have never had a course in psychology in their lives.
(2) What is the psycho-historical approach to interdisciplinary dialogue with other subjects from the humanities and social sciences?
Since my latest book has over 5,000 references cited, almost all from the humanities and social sciences, I (and my colleagues) obviously have no difficulty with interdisciplinary research. We are all trained in both a social science like political science or history and in psychotherapy. It requires training in both, I fear. So the thousands of academic social scientists who shy away from reading us do so because they know nothing about psychoanalysis, about the unconscious, about, in short, half of the brain's productions, the right half.
(3) How does Psychohistory illuminate a postmodern approach to the study of human culture (one that focuses on “systems of meaning” and how our perceptions of reality are “shaped” by our mental states and psychological conditioning from past experiences)?
Psychohistory obviously aims at just that: the study of human culture as shaped by our mental states. But not just mental states caused by exterior events, memes, outside influences, material conditions. More by the psychological development of the actors over the total span of their lives. Other social sciences simply skip over infancy and childhood as they it did not exist, or, worse, as though it was exactly the same for every period in history and every nation on earth (they SAY so! Honest!)
(4) What would you say is the relationship between PH and such disciplines as World History ("Horizontally Integrative Macrohistory" ala Joseph Fletcher) and World Systems Theory (Historical Sociology/Economics)?
I personally hope to contribute to World History and World Systems Theory as much as I can. The last two chapters of my latest book The Emotional Life of Nations (in full on www.psychohistory.com , along with other books and articles on psychohistory) are devoted to an evolutionary theory of historical change.
(5) If you had to venture a guess as to what Psychohistory’s view of the “big picture” was & humanity’s place in the larger natural world what would that view be? (How might PH straddle the line between, say, a reductionist biological view of the world (“biology is our destiny”) and the more abstract, paradoxical paradigm of quantum theory in theoretical physics?)
I think both reductionist biological views of human history and applications of quantum theory are phoney, unscientific, poorly argued, without scientific basis. The human ability to think and the ability to have a self is a result of simple Darwinian selective mechanisms, and these give mothers (mainly) the ability (slowly over history) to better nurture their children, and thus produce everything else important in history. But, unfortunately, most of the parents on earth are still at a crudely un-evolved level, still postpartally depressed, still neglecting and abusing most children on earth horribly, so the right hemisphere's amygdala and hippocampus are still full of violence, time bombs waiting to go off as adults, so the wonders of our left lobe, our sciences and industries, may soon be blown up by the violence in our left lobe, by our fears of progress. So if we continue to ignore the scien ce of that right lobe, psychohistory, one side of our brain may well blow up everything the other side has produced. The world thus is in a race between two World Systems Theories. True?
Lloyd deMause
Director, The Institute for Psychohistory
Editor, The Journal of Psychohistory
(further note from Luke Rondinaro -> Check out the Psychohistory list at Topica. The URL is www.topica.com/lists/psychohistory)
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