A PHYCHOLOGIST TURNS HISTORIAN
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
A Psychologist Turns Historian Reviewed by WILLIAM E. BOHN DICTATORS & DISCIPLES. By Dr. Gustav Bychowski. International 'Universities Press. 264 pp. $4.25. HITLER AND FREUD WERE CRADLED by the...
...Clyde Kluckhohn, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, has sought, in his $10,000 prize-winning book, to bring the layman up-to-date...
...Esther S. Goldfrank is Staff Anthropologist of the Chinese History Project at Columbia...
...Moreover, in searching for what makes Uncle Sam run...
...Kluckhohn here, as m the earlier sections, has tried to give a balanced view...
...The more ruthless and arrogant the dictator, the more likely he is to satisfy the need of frustrated citizens for a firm-seeming and reliable support...
...Enemies can never take vengeance on them as they did on the remains of Oliver Cromwell...
...Four of the essays were first published as comparatively slight monographs in the Journal of Clmicol Pst/chopatholopy- It is only when we come to the treatments of Hitler and Stalin that the author lets himself out and gives a full-scale treatment...
...The stage on which this megalomaniac plays his part is furnished by the breakdown of society...
...Fearing vengeance the upstart leader must commit widenfhg circles of murder in Cider to secure his own safety...
...Reviewed by ESTHER S. GOLDFRANK MIRROR FOR MAN: The Relation of Anthropology to Modern Lije...
...In the typical case the successful revolutionist-dictator is identified with the primitive father-murderer...
...The conventional historian lacks training in psychology...
...But we believe with him that "There must be bold experiments in social living and a search for fresh integrating principles appropriate to a world which communication and economic interdependence have made one — for the first time in human history...
...There is, of course, no pretense that we have here a representative list of dictators...
...Kluckhohn's analysis of the U. S. A. sedulously avoids the questionable arguments and conclusions of cerjain muchquoted anthropological writings on American national character...
...We began with historians who interpreted all things in theological terms...
...Here we have a problem in pedagogy that is a challenge to the universities...
...To guard against dictators we must have a society which gives citizens a sense of security...
...Without closing his eyes to our weaknesses and worries, or to the problems that our frontier psychology has laid upon us, he finds that ours is an "open" society, and that now, as in the early days of our history, we can again enhance our technical progress with contributions in the ideological field...
...What we are fortunate enough to have, in the meantime, is a treatment of a g:eat theme by a busy psychiatrist for whom history-writing is obviously an avoft.!.m...
...Perhaps Dr...
...Then came the economists...
...Or as Dr...
...There is hardly a. deeper symbol of our trouble than the widely reprinted photograph of the supreme psychoarfalyst leaving Vienna as the supreme dictator entered...
...Then came those who thought land power or sea power was the basis of shifting authority...
...He is, in fact, admirably capable of taking the long view of our present tragedy...
...He has given us a highly readable account of what anthropology did, not only in the war years, but before and after...
...Bychowski's book is sufficient to prove that without psychological insights the interpretations of historians will remain poor and unsatisfactory tilings...
...The reader wishes for more...
...There could not be a more eloquent presentation of the triumph of evil over good, of the lower over the higher...
...But the author is not without hope...
...Childhood training patterns," he warns, "do not in any simple sense cause the institutions of adult life," and those of our science who think that changes in the pattern of family relationships will ipso jacto bring about the good adjustment of the individual to his society, or that "a single childhood discipline" can be seized upon "as the magic key to the whole tone of a culture" will find small comfort in these pages...
...A certain correspondence between the mood of a people and the drives of a would-be dictator is necessary to the sort of unbridled tyranny which has been so characteristic of our troubled time...
...There are passages in the essays on Cromwell and Robespierre which made me wish that he could have taken economics or international politics more into account...
...Not at all interested in the physical remains of the German dictator, they are tearing his psychological impulses limb from limb...
...The author has set himself the task of figuring out how dictators are bred and how great populations are brought into a mood which leads them to tolerate or — even — to demand tyranny and regimentation...
...While perhaps overestimating the anthropoligist's "objectivity" in treating such problems, Dr...
...The latter part of the book, which in many ways is the most controversial, deals with the anthropologist at work, more particularly in government and industry...
...Whittlesey House, 1949...
...HITLER AND FREUD WERE CRADLED by the same city...
...Bohn is the editor of The Sew Vernier...
...Bychowski's concern to trace the influences which conditioned these men and the historical circumstances which put populations of great countries into a mood which made them amenable to the appeal of any Pied Piper who happened to come along...
...3.75...
...Even his hones are'undiscoverable...
...Kluckhohn is enthusiastic about the future of anthropology...
...No historical characters could seem more different than Cromwell, Robespierre, Hitler and Stalin...
...The universities of the future should give us combined efforts of the departments of history and psychology...
...Bychowski's book is a singularly happy example of the work of a psychologist turned historian...
...It is Dr...
...When old boundaries, old faiths, old authorities, old sanctions disappear, nations tend to become like fatherless children...
...But what we call history, being the story of mankind, is as various as man himself...
...Bychowski can satisfy this demand at some future time...
...The weaker the ego, the stronger the anxiety and the need for support...
...Here we have—what is so necessary in our time— the practical psychologist turned the mentor of politicians...
...What Makes Uncle Sam Run...
...But his followers are a mighty power in the world of current thought...
...He woul* like a rounded treatment of" dictators from the beginning down...
...From there we went on to men who put everything in terms of laws and constitutions...
...Among all the dominating figures of antiquity, only Julius Caesar is dealt With...
...Sigmund Freud, too, has-passed away...
...Adolf Hitler has disappeared...
...He leads us from anthropology's earlier interest in unique traits ("queer things") to concepts of cultural integration and disintegration, from a mere classification of potsherds to a better understanding of the historical process, from innumerable skull measurements to intriguing, if as yet unproved, hypotheses on the relations between physical form, disease, and behavior...
...Kluckhohn has uncovered some of the all-too-often forgotten positive values in our background and present...
...Bychowski puts it, "Some of the factors weakening the collective ego can be eliminated by altering the economic conditions so as to assure freedom from want to all members of a society and— by implication—to society at large...
...from ancient to modern myths regarding race: from the formal study of grammar to language as a dynamic of culture...
...AS THE AUTHOR GIVES us the p.ctures of his dictators, one is struck wjth amazement at the similarities presented by men who seem so far apart...
...But the author is not, of course, attempting to give a complete picture of any of his subjects...
...But in the decade since this entry and flight, history has swung a full circle...
...and with the situation in the world-at-large...
...The psychologists are quite at sea in the vast reaches of history...
...Nevertheless he knows that our science is just coming of age, that M cannot now or perhaps for a long time, answer the momentous questions with which we are faced today...
...We now experience the turn of the psychologists...
...By Cyde Kluckhohn...
...Yet, when their careers are traced in terms which are significant to the psychologist, it is astonishing to discover to what extent they fall into the same pattern...
...SINCE WORLD WAR II, when anthropologists were drawn from the classroom and library into government work, anthropology has been increasingly in the public eye...
...with culture and personality, a rapidly expanding field of research in whose name some of anthropology's most absurd generalizations have been made...
...with life in the U. S. A...
...In fact, Dr...
...313 pages...
...Their great master is being amply avenged...
...It is fortunate for the craft of historiographers that events have taken a turn which practically catapults the psychologists into the realm of national sad international chroniclers...
...Finally, as is perfectly- illustrated in the cases oi H,tler and Stalin, he achieves a megalomaniac state in which both the public welfare and the purity of absolute truth are identified with his own pci sonalijy...
Vol. 32 • May 1949 • No. 19
