Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory
Stannard, David E.
BOOK REVIEWS This odd and unpleasant book begins with a small deception and goes on, as we shall see, to far greater ones. The small deception is its title, for the book is not really about...
...Yet Barzun's book is about the same size, covers a wider terrain, is accessible to the general reader, and raises far more troubling questions about psychohistory...
...any anthropologist will tell him, happily, that such universals not only exist, they are quite common...
...It is a peculiar idea to be espoused by a historian, since it is hard to think of any historical study-including Stan-nard's own, of which more in...
...However we decide, the sad fact remains that Stannard consistently misrepresents the evidence, generally by omission...
...Silverman's work is meticulous...
...If so, how were they able to overcome their having been deceived...
...He quotes approvingly a silly statement by the trendy P.B...
...Both are, in a sense, psychobiog-raphies, in that they employ psychoanalytic ideas to illuminate those extraordinary lives...
...Yet the problem we have with the book is not Stannard's temper and bias as much as it is the means employed to support them...
...years ago, about a totally different culture...
...He seems to think of himself as a sort of Ralph Nader of the intellectual life, stamping out a particularly noxious form of consumer fraud, offering to intelligent laypeople-his word, not mine-the benefit of an expert, disinterested knowledge of both the logic and the empirical underpinnings of psychoanalysis...
...Too bad, for there is a good case to be made against psychohistory-one which has in fact been made by other scholars, most notably by Jacques Barzun in his elegant Clio and the Doctors...
...That is the textbook truism "correlation is not causation" we teach college freshmen, to caution them against fanciful generalization...
...The therapeutic merits of psychoanalysis-another vast area of research, theory, and disputation-are treated in similarly superficial fashion, relying on biased (and often outmoded) sources...
...In short, when are psychoanalytic modes of inference and interpretation persuasive and when not-what makes the difference...
...If so, why can an intelligent high school student pick up Jane Austen and read her with sympathy and understanding...
...Any disproof of any element of the Freudian doctrine is accepted as definitive...
...The question is whether they are heuristic, that is, useful in anthropological analysis.* Does he mean that we can make no extrapolations from era to era and culture to culture...
...For that matter Gertrude Himmelfarb discusses these issues in greater depth in the course of a single essay on the history, written several years ago (Commentary, Jan...
...He likens it to mesmerism, to phrenology, to Velikovsky, and to belief in ancient astronauts...
...From this absurdity he goes on to state that the evidence does not amount to much in any case, since it shows only an association between paranoia and homosexuality, and not that the one is caused by the other...
...Have Solomon and Bate-two of the great scholars of our time-both been taken in...
...Consider: All biography-and much if not most historical writing- depends upon some theory, however tacit, of motivation, of personality structure, and of the connections between early and later experiences...
...But the choice of so exotic an example-optical illusions among preliterate groups-suggests a radical cultural relativism, and that raises a great many difficult problems...
...or he has indeed heard of it but ignores it since it spoils his argument, which of course puts into question his probity...
...Whatever accounts for this rather abrupt shift in Stannard's outlook, it has not served him well, to judge by the sharp decline in quality between the two books...
...Furthermore, Bowlby's (and others') studies of separation fear, carried out on twentieth-century youngsters, are used quite casually (and to my mind effectively) to analyze the anxieties of seventeenth-century Puritan children-another violation of Stannard's dogma 1980...
...The older book opens with a respectful citation of Sigmund Freud, who is quoted on the unconscious-now seen as a fiction...
...Those readers can only be guided -or misled-by the imprimatur provided by the author's credentials, and the reputation of the publisher...
...Silverman's ingenious experimental studies have shown that certain threatening stimuli, presented below the level of awareness, have a distinct and predictable effect upon behavior...
...The small deception is its title, for the book is not really about psychohistory...
...If so, he is simply mistaken...
...His discussion of orality and personality has no mention of Joseph Masling's series of about thirty supporting studies...
...Literal-minded it is, and complacent it certainly is, but skepticism is not quite the word that comes to mind-dogmatism or arrogance, perhaps...
...Since there is in fact a substantial body of research supporting all of these (and other) psychoanalytic ideas, one turns immediately to the index and bibliography to see whether any of it has been treated...
...We do not ask Stannard to accept it, only to let the unwary reader know that it exists...
...One cannot even recognize that.there is a debatable issue...
...Writing in the Annual Review of Psychology- the most reliable source book in our field-Nathan Brody terms these studies "the strongest body of evidence in favor of the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious.'' That being so, why is it not mentioned...
...If we set out to write a biography of Beethoven, we must give some attention to his eccentric behavior towards women, or even more so, the very nearly psychotic episode involving his sister-in-law and nephew...
...a moment-which "proves" causality...
...Having fashioned so convenient a memory-hole for inconvenient information, Stannard lays about gleefully, scoring one spectacular forensic triumph after Joseph Adelson is professor of psychology and director of the Psychological Clinic at the University of Michigan...
...Most of us would agree that they do so brilliantly, yet it is difficult to see how and why, given Stannard's belief that psychoanalysis is a confidence trick...
...There is an irony here, since the case most would make against psychohistory would stress its selective, tendentious, at times unscrupulous use of evidence...
...Although Stannard spends a great deal of time chortling about poor or outmoded examples- his exemplary specimen is Freud's hesitant, almost fanciful paper on Leonardo, written in 1910-he carefully avoids examples more troubling to his thesis...
...I was reminded of a poor lunatic man I knew in my childhood, who would spend his days standing on the street corner, debating imaginary opponents, and winning each and every argument...
...In his best known studies, he and his associates have shown that competitive performance (dart throwing) is influenced by subliminal messages of an oedipal nature...
...It is a strange argument...
...Upon finishing this book I became curious about Stannard's own historical writing...
...Stannard's "research" consists of little more than a frantic foraging in various literatures hostile to psychoanalysis...
...1975...
...And so it goes...
...Nor does he tell us what approaches to motivation the historian or biographer ought to take instead...
...Stannard's handling of this work is close to a caricature of scientific reporting and critique...
...Is Lloyd Silverman's work mentioned...
...What we have here is an overheated, biased, and largely ignorant attack upon psychoanalysis...
...One is offended throughout by the author's trading on the reader's credulousness...
...Let me illustrate by giving some attention to what Stannard seems to feel is his strongest suit-his analysis of the empirical studies of the psychoanalytic theory...
...There are the usual genuflections to science, but if we wait for scientific psychology, we will wait a long, long time-no significant branch of psychology is close to being scientific in any genuine sense, though pretensions of course abound...
...but it is hard to imagine a biographer forswearing all reliance on psychology, however defined...
...Somewhat later Stannard relies upon the work of John Bowlby, the well-known psychoanalyst...
...An oedipally threatening message reduces performance and a reassuring one enhances it...
...yet that work could not be more relevant to Stannard's thesis...
...What we teach college seniors is that in the real world of psychological research, it is nearly impossible to demonstrate causation, that to impose that demand seriously would mean that most social science would simply grind to a halt...
...The book is addressed to the general reader, or to the historian, neither of whom can be expected to know much about the recondite, technically difficult literature of experimental psychodynam-ics...
...The work of Rosenwald and others on anality is nowhere cited...
...The question of psychoanalysis as a science-the subject of a truly vast philosophical literature -is here reduced to an amateurish discussion of scientific logic (in the course of which we are gravely told about Ockham's razor), and the dropping of a few eminent names...
...It need not be Freudian theory, it need not even be a psychodynamic theory...
...Either he has never heard of Silverman's work (and Reyher's and Shevrin's, and many others in this one area of inquiry), which puts into question his competence...
...the problem is intellectual attitude...
...The problem here is not space, nor is it audience...
...Stannard's review of this literature is carried out with breathtaking self-assurance, and leads him to some equally breathtaking conclusions...
...Is he arguing, as he seems to be, against all cultural universals...
...it has been replicated many times...
...There is now a substantial body of research linking paranoia to homosexual preoccupations...
...Eysenck...
...it is far from learned, basing itself upon an inadequate grasp of the scholarship...
...and it is widely recognized as a significant and challenging body of research, in both method and outcome...
...ess as a book can be...
...When one is told with consummate authority that there is, let us say, no evidence to support the concept of defense mechanisms, one can only take that statement on faith, especially so when contrary data are so resolutely concealed...
...If we write biographically about Samuel Johnson, we must give some thought to his depressions, his tics and rituals, and their possible relation to the sad circumstances of his early life...
...any evidence to the contrary simply goes unmentioned most of the time...
...In fact, we can at this time make as strong a case for psychological universals-for fundamental similarities in thought, the structure of language, emotion, and so on-as we can for transcultural and trans-historical differences...
...Does he indeed eschew dynamic psychology...
...If we are merely being warned against fanciful extrapolations, that is a textbook truism...
...Medawar that "psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the 20th century...
...Stannard is so overcome with contempt for psychoanalysis that he cannot imagine it as others do -as an intelligent, intricate, fallible, provisional body of ideas and observations, to be taken seriously if cautiously by intelligent people...
...The book that made Stannard's reputation is The Puritan Way of Death, published in 1977...
...I mention these great figures because they are the subjects of two of the best biographies written in our time: Maynard Solomon's Beethoven, and Jackson Bate's Samuel Johnson...
...Such diffidence can be seen elsewhere...
...Given that degree of scorn, one ought not to expect reasoned discourse, nor should we expect a useful discussion of the many troubling issues within the purview of psychology and history...
...But neither case can be made, or made well, given Stannard's fanaticism...
...and it is this very lack of scruple that marks Stannard's method...
...Why am I able to enter empathically the world of Genji, written a thousand *It is worth contrasting Stannard's either/or method with Clifford Geertz's deft and delicate probing of the same issues in the second chapter of The Interpretation of Cultures...
...But one cannot discuss the issue at all when one is seized by an adversarial demon...
...It is derivative, large sections of it merely parroting the anti-Freudian animus of such dubious figures as H.J...
...Is he careful to avoid generalizing from one era or society to another...
...If the historian and biographer cannot turn to science, what does he use in its place...
...Bowlby is praised for his "almost classic" studies of separation anxiety-a psychoanalytically derived idea...
...He discusses only two of the relevant studies and dismisses them scornfully on several grounds, one of which is that the subjects studied are drawn from a specific time and cultural setting-"the midwestern and northeastern United States in the early-and mid-1950s"-as though the same stricture does not apply to 99 percent of work in psychology...
...The book before us is none of these...
...and it is as reckless as a book can be...
...Stannard feels that psycho-historians generalize too easily from one culture or historical era to another, and to demonstrate the hazards of doing so, he reports-at great length-studies which show that some primitive tribes do not perceive optical illusions as we do...
...We get no inkling...
...He tells us, for example, there is no good evidence for the existence of defense mechanisms, he disputes the notion of the unconscious, he scoffs at the Oedipus complex...
...There is also a good case to be made against psychoanalysis, at least in its more canonical modes- and it is one I make myself, mentally, several times a day during the course of my clinical practice...
...The important work of Smith and Glass is nowhere mentioned...
...Stannard's book on the Puritan was original, learned, careful...
...SHRINKING HISTORY: ON FREUD AND THE FAILURE OF PSYCHOHISTORY David E. Stannard / Oxford University Press / $12.95 Joseph Adelson another...
...One can imagine Stannard's response-that he did not have the space to treat these issues in scholarly detail, and that he is writing for "laypeople...
...Does he-can he-practice what he preaches...
...and the reader who comes upon it after Shrinking History is in for a series of shocks, for the author commits each and every "error" he now inveighs against...
...Even one of the dust jacket blurbs warns that we may be "put off" by the author's "literal-minded, complacent skepticism...
...It is not...
...The interesting questions are unanswered and unasked...
...It is there we find the gravamen of the indictment, to wit, that the theory is false since it is empirically a "pipedream...
Vol. 14 • January 1981 • No. 1
