Bruce Mazlish and the Claims of Psychohistory

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

It is the 101^st anniversary of the birth of Bruce Mazlish (15 September 1923 – 27 November 2016), who was born in Brooklyn on this date in 1923. In many episodes I have mentioned the interest in the middle of the twentieth century to integrate the social sciences, and especially psychology and sociology, into history. An example of this is psychohistory. Bruce Mazlish was part of this as one of the practitioners and advocates of psychohistory.

First of all I should say that the psychohistory I’m talking about today isn’t the psychohistory that features in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books. Asimov’s psychohistory was a predictive science created by the fictional Hari Seldon. This predictive science of history was so certain that, before Hari Seldon died, he was able to record a hologram of himself explaining each Seldon crisis to come, and the hologram of him would play for Foundation representatives when the Seldon crisis did in fact occur. Apparently the Foundation staff were too lame to understand Asimov’s psychohistory for themselves, so they had to have a dead guy explain it to them. This isn’t the psychohistory that concerns me today.

Getting back to non-fictional psychohistory, exactly how history is related to psychology, or how we believe psychology ought to be related to history, is not at all well understood. How exactly are we to understand psychohistory? What is psychohistory trying to demonstrate? What explanatory power can psychology bring to history? I found two single sentence summaries of psychohistory. The Science Direct website says: 

“Psychohistory refers to an approach in the social sciences that focuses on understanding human behavior by analyzing the unconscious determinants of individual and collective actions.”

The Association for Psychohistory, which publishes a journal on psychohistory, says:

“Psychohistory, the science of historical motivations, combines the insights of psychotherapy with the research methodology of the social sciences to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present.”

While it’s nice to have these concise summaries, they don’t tell us all we need to know. Both of these, for example, mention the use of the social sciences to understand social and group behavior. Here we might have social psychology in mind as one of the social sciences that might provide insights into history. But social psychology has been the discipline most compromised by the replication crisis. Given a thesis in social psychology, a coin toss will get you a more reliable result that peer-reviewed research. Needless to say this is a red flag for any discipline, but given that history is already riven by interpretations that betray a party spirit, importing a further agenda from social psychology certainly isn’t going to help us to clarify history.

But there are many psychological disciplines within the social sciences. The Association for Psychohistory specifically mentions psychotherapy. There are many traditions of psychotherapy and these traditions have diverged over time. Psychodynamic psychotheraphy, which grew out of the work of Freud, diverged from mainstream psychology, which continues to develop in its own direction. Psychodynamic psychology has placed particular emphasis on the role of the unconscious, and this we associate with Freud. Freud wrote several histories, none of which strike me as being especially convincing, though certainly psychodynamic psychotheraphy has proved itself to be a fruitful source of ideas. It has, in fact, been so fruitful, that it has itself split into several branches, the Freudian, the Jungian, and Adlerian, and others. Bruce Mazlish was part of this psychodynamic tradition.

Mazlish was prolific scholar who wrote many books. He was the editor of the anthology Psychoanalysis and History. In the Introduction to this work, Mazlish despaired of history’s neglect of psychology:

“Why should history, the one discipline that deals especially with man’s past and seeks explanation of that past largely in terms of men’s motives, ignore so staunchly the one science (or, at least, attempt at a science) which centers itself on research into exactly these areas. Historians study man’s collective past; psychoanalysts study his individual past. Surely, one would have thought that a mental bridge could be built to connect the two investigations.”   

A little further on, Mazlish compares a Freudian conception of history with the classic pronouncement by Ranke:

“Leopold von Ranke, the great nineteenth-century German historian, posted a sort of Hippocratic oath for historians. Against those who ignored or distorted ‘the actual past’ (wie es eigentlich gewesen), he announced that ‘We, in our place, have a different notion of history: naked truth without embellishments, thorough investigation of every single fact. ... By no means fiction, not even in the smallest details; by no means fabrication.’ ‘Thorough investigation of every fact’ —Freud could have taken this as his motto, too.”

In his book The Riddle of History: The Great Speculators from Vico to Freud, Mazlish’s chapter on Freud characterizes Freud as a philosopher of history: 

“It may surprise some readers to see Freud described as the last of the great classical philosophers of history. Yet, the description is an accurate one. The founder of psychoanalysis is in the tradition of Comte and Hegel, and especially of Vico, whose fulfillment he can well be considered. Like the latter, Freud worked out a new science—in this case, psychoanalysis instead of philology—which offered important clues for solving the riddle of man’s past.”

This theme is borne out in the previously mentioned book Psychoanalysis and History, Part I of which is titled “Freud’s Philosophy of History.” Others have taken up this theme of a Freudian philosophy of history. For example, Martin Klüners in “Freud as a Philosopher of History” (The Journal of Psychohistory 42, 1, 2014, pp. 55-71) wrote:

“The advantage of psychoanalytic ‘philosophy of history’ over the traditional philosophy of history is based on the fact that it takes into consideration the unconscious aspects of human acting, on the holistic character of the concept of human nature—and at the same this concept is also responsible for the advantage of psychoanalytic anthropology over philosophic anthropology. A more realistic image of both Man as social and natural being and his history is made possible by psychoanalytic theory.”

Note that there are two distinct but overlapping theses in Mazlish, and in Klüners too, for that matter:

1. The thesis that psychoanalytic psychodynamic psychology is relevant to history and can be used by historians as a further auxiliary discipline, and…  

2. The thesis that there is, in Freud’s psychoanalytic writings, an implicit philosophy of history that can be drawn out and made explicit.

One might maintain either of these theses in isolation from each other. Many psychohistorians make no pretense of having anything to say about a a Fruedian philosophy of history, while many philosophers of history who might be interested in a Freudian philosophy of history may have no interest at all in psychohistory. In maintaining both theses, Mazlish has a pervasively Freudian or psychodynamic outlook.

In the paper “History and Morality,” without explicitly invoking Freud, Mazlish touches on a number of Freudian themes—modernity, moral change, the role of art, the continuing presence of the past in the present, and so on—while exploring the relationship of history and morality: 

“Twentieth-century man is in the throes of a new attempt to transcend his traditional morality. He must take as his task the incorporation of his past into a new form. Like art or science, moral thought is a developing thing, and its problems are the problems raised by the efforts of previous moralists and previous cultures.”

Here we see morality treated in a completely naturalistic way, which is to say, treated how the psychoanalyst would treat morality, and treating morality in this way we don’t see it as eternal and unchanging, but as a human phenomenon with a history. Mazlish again:

“…the new morality can only be judged in terms of past tradition—does it deal more adequately with the themes introduced by the previous morality? does it create new themes in response to the new demands of man’s social development, but in harmony with the old? does it, in short, accord with the historical evolution of the other aspects of man’s nature—art, science, literature, political and economic forms-with the whole of his culture? Clearly, the new morality must not accord merely with man’s pure, unconditioned willing. This was the Nazi error. Instead, although preserving the element of freedom—man is not helpless in the face of his history—at the same time the new morality must search for a solution in harmony with the best parts of that history.”

The questions Mazlish poses are, again, naturalistic, but here he includes a normative idea, the idea that the attempt to transcend traditional morality should be in harmony with the best parts of history. But what are the best parts of history? This is a question that naturalism cannot answer, and psychodynamic psychotherapy, as a natural science, if indeed it is a natural science, would have to make the leap from “is” to “ought” and thus to lose its status as a science, if it were to pronounce upon the best parts of history. Mazlish continues, 

“History and culture, then, will render judgment on that solution, in the same way it judges a Beethoven or Picasso, in the light of the very codes it has previously established. In short, it is not ‘success’ which determines history and morality, but history and morality which determine ‘success.’ The Tamerlanes and Hitlers have not passed judgment on culture, but culture has passed judgment on them. This is the true meaning of the dictum, first introduced by the historically-minded eighteenth century, that ‘The World’s History is the World’s Court’.”

Mazlish has here arrived at the same conclusion as Lord Acton: history will be the judge. We might even say, history will be judge, jury, and executioner. This is a strangely complacent conclusion, since history has sanctioned all manner of evils, no less than it has celebrated all manner of goods. By citing the eighteenth century Mazlish acknowledges that this is an idea with a history, but in calling the eighteenth century “historically minded” he reveals the disconnect between historians and philosophers of history on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the views of natural scientists. So while there is a lot here that is hopeful, by which I mean suggestive of a fruitful ways of taking a new perspective on history, there is also a lot of confusion here.

Freud was a big picture thinker whose work naturally draws those who would elaborate and extrapolate on his themes. Both psychohistory and a Freudian philosophy of history are evidence of this. We can expect, as Freud’s influence waxes and wanes over the longue durée, that there will always be Freudians who will seek to apply and extend Freud’s work, as there will always be those who will bitterly oppose the any psychoanalytical admixture into history, historiography, or philosophy of history. We have much to learn from this approach to history, but I have my misgivings as well. I don’t want to count myself among those who bitterly oppose the use of insights from psychodynamic psychology, but there is a problem that needs to be addressed on the relationship of psychology to history. In order to express my misgivings about this relationship between psychology and history I will need to go somewhat far afield.

I think that history could definitely benefit from a better understanding of how the interplay of personalities shapes history, and a properly constituted psychohistory could pursue this. But if we get the psychology of personality wrong, then we get the history wrong. There are models of personality that have a significant basis in empirical research—I’m thinking of the five factor personality model—but there is a lot more to understand the interplay of personalities in history than empirical research into personality types. And there is also a lot of marginal and popular psychology that tends to dilute what good empirical research exists—and here I’m thinking of enneagram types and Myers-Briggs personality types.

How do we distinguish the good psychology from the bad psychology? Here we get down to the foundational question: What is psychology anyway? The foundational questions are always deceptively simple and difficult to answer, and this is true of the foundational questions of psychology. Some psychologists argue that contemporary psychology has no answer to these foundational questions. Gregg Henriques, for example, has written about the crisis in psychology, or the problem in psychology, which is, “the inability of psychological science to clearly specify the basic ontological referents for its subject matter.” Gregg shines a light on some of the problems of psychology by pointing out what he calls the Enlightenment gap, which is a useful way of indicating the implications of the philosophy of mind that grew out of Enlightenment presuppositions, that worked quite well for natural science but not so well for the social sciences, and especially for psychology and the psychological disciplines.

You may have heard of Gregg from his collaborations with John Vervaeke. Vervaeke has made a name for himself by formulating naturalistic interpretations of traditional Western mysticism, such as in Plotinus and neo-Platonism. There’s a lot more to it than that, of course, but this is the part that interests me, so this is what I remember. Vervaeke also talks a lot about meditation, and this doesn’t interest me at all. The Western way in philosophy has been to think our way through things. This thinking our way through is a conscious exercise of reason, and, at its best, it is a conscious exercise of reason that is made fully explicit in a formal system, or an axiom system. Ultimately, this leads us to rigorous systems of formal reasoning, while we could argue that the direction Vervaeke is moving in takes us in the direction of mysticism.

Since I’m coming at the problems of psychology from the philosophical side, I see the crisis of psychology in terms of a crisis in reasoning, and a failure to reason clearly. For me, the crisis is psychology entails a crisis for psychohistory, and if psychohistory is going to contribute anything to our understanding of history, then we need to address the crisis in psychology in a meaningful way, or show that it is not relevant to how we want to use psychology to illuminate history. A sense that there is something philosophically wrong about psychology has been around for some time. Wittgenstein wrote a lot about philosophical psychology in his later years, implying that philosophical psychology is a legitimate discipline, if only it is done right, but he also wrote at the end of his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations:

“The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by its being a ‘young science’; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings… For in psychology, there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion… The existence of the experimental method makes us think that we have the means of getting rid of the problems which trouble us; but problem and method pass one another by.”

It’s this conceptual confusion that troubles me, and we find expressions of it elsewhere philosophy, especially if we go back before Wittgenstein to Frege and Husserl. Frege and Husserl were both critics of what they called psychologism. Husserl’s first work, The Philosophy of Arithmetic, was written in a psychologistic vein. He sent a copy of it to Frege, and Frege wrote an unflattering review. J. N. Mohanty has written an entire book about whether it was Frege’s influence that turned Husserl against psychologism, and he argues that Husserl was already making this turn himself. In any case, in Husserl’s next book, the Logical Investigations, he devoted the entire first volume to Prolegomena to Pure Logic, and most of this is devoted to the criticism of psychologism.

This may seem like a rather narrow and abstruse quarrel, but I’m going to try to show how this is relevant to philosophy of history, but, as I said, I have to go a little far afield to do so. It might seem like this has little to do with history, and it might seem reasonable to suppose that logic is about “laws of thought” and that laws of thought can be studied by psychology, therefore shedding some light on logic. Of course there is an ambiguity in the phrase “laws of thought.” Psychology can attempt to explain how we do in fact think, but to lay down norms for thinking would mean crossing the the is/ought divide, and to cross from is to ought would be to leave the descriptions of science for the prescriptions of ideals that ought to obtain, even if they do not obtain in fact. So while logical psychologism seems a narrow basis to criticize psychohistory, there is an implicit generalization of psychologism that applies to history no less than to logic.

Psychologism in this more general sense is the illegitimate intrusion of psychology where it does not belong. We can get an intuitive sense for this kind of illegitimate intrusion of psychology into every aspect of human life when we look at the cultural expressions the high water mark of Freudianism in the US in the middle of the twentieth century. Watch some films or television from the 1950s and you are likely to hear references to psychoanalysis. If memory serves, there was even an episode of My Three Sons when one of the boys comes back from school spouting psychoanalytic jargon. This influence was pervasive for a while, and this led to it becoming rather silly and discredited. We shouldn’t allow the tastes of the vulgar to influence our philosophical judgment, so I cite these only as amusing examples to give a sense of how psychology can intrude where it does not offer a good explanation.

Where does psychology offer a good explanation? Returning to logical psychologism, there many 19^th century logicians who thought that logic was going to be fundamentally re-founded through the then-new science of psychology. And if you believe that logic is about the actual thoughts people have running around in their heads, this promise might have borne fruit. But when we look closely at logic, we see it’s not about how people actually think, but how they ought to think. And this same distinction can be applied to history.

One could argue that history is nothing but—and the phrase “nothing but” is always a red flag for a reductionist explanation—what we do in fact think about history. Historical thoughts are thoughts after all. If this were the case, if history were nothing but we thought about history, then psychology might be able to shed some valuable light on how we think about history. But historical thought is no more a function of psychology than logical thought is a function of psychology. Historical thought, like logic, is a normative enterprise. We might not be able to lay out to the same degree of precision that we can with logic what the canons of historical thought ought to be, but we know that they aren’t psychological. History must deal with psychology, but psychology does not dictate to history how historians ought to think about history.

Even in the narrower sense of logical psychologism there is an application to history. In my episode on Heinrich Rickert I mentioned that Rickert formulated what he called the logical concept of the historical. Insofar as Rickert fulfills his promise to provide a logical account of concept formation in the historical sciences, this logical account is subject to the same critique of psychologism that Frege and Husserl brought to bear on logic. Since this critique has not been made in regard to the logical foundations of historical thought, history has never benefitted from the critique of logical psychologism that played a significant role in logic proper at the beginning of the 20^th century.

We could derive a pure history from a pure logic, free of psychologism, employed in the foundations of historical thought, but do we even want a purified history? Isn’t history all about getting down into the mud and the muck and the dirt and the grime and telling it like it really was? And isn’t this exactly what psychodynamic psychology has offered us, especially in its Freudian incarnation? Human beings make human history, and if we recognize that human beings have minds, and minds are studied by psychology, then the application of psychology to history ought to offer considerable clarification. And now we have come full circle.

I think resolving this problem would require a comprehensive and detailed inquiry, and that while psychohistory has had some interesting ideas to offer, it has not made the inquiry that needs to be made to clarify the relationship between psychology and history, and to show how to overcome the problem of psychologism or prove it to be irrelevant to psychohistory. One might believe that psychology as the study of the human mind, or cognitive science as the study of human thought processes, or anthropology as the study of the human being, have all gone wrong in one way or another, but still maintain that there is potentially a legitimate science of mind, a legitimate science of thought processes, and a legitimate science of the human being, that could yet be brought to bear upon history, if only we could bring these sciences to the requisite degree of development. This hasn’t yet been shown, so there’s much work that remains to be done.

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