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David R. Beisel
Peter Loewenberg's Psychohistories
Volume 27, Number 1, Summer 1999

Fantasy and Reality in History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996

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One of the major markers in my personal journey from history to psychohistory was Peter Loewenberg's essay, "The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort," which appeared in the American Historical Review (Dec. 1971). The essay's fame is justified. It has been called "a methodological tour de force" by The Psychohistory Review, and Lawrence Walker rightly claims: "In the consciousness of most historians psychohistory began with [its] publication." Henry Lawton's Psychohistorians Handbook1 calls it "must reading." The essay was included in Lowenberg's Decoding the Past (Knopf, 1983), but for most of the 1990's was available only as a lengthy excerpt in the popular college series "Problems in European Civilization" text on The Nazi Revolution,2 edited by Allen Mitchell. (It has unaccountably vanished from the current fourth edition).
Scholars who somehow missed the essay - and those of us who have used Decoding the Past as a text in our psychohistory classes over the years - will be happy to learn that the essay and the book have been reissued, with a new introduction by the author. Its reappearance, along with the publication of a new book of essays, should prompt some beginning reflections on the overall place of Loewenberg's work in psychohistorical scholarship.
Both books begin with brief essays on method, where the notion of psychohistory as an "auxiliary science" - one which is "applied" to history - is rejected in favor of an integrated model, the quest for "a true intermeshing of the fields." Loewenberg is clear on the psychology to be used in this enterprise: it is psychoanalysis which holds the best promise for deeper understanding in all the social sciences. And it is not classical Freudian theory, but two up-to-date models, building on and adding to Freud, which are "particularly congenial to the historian's way of thinking - ego psychology and object relations."
As Loewenberg recently made clear in both an interview and an article for Clio's Psyche,3 he is a strong advocate of dual training. "There is no substitute for thorough psychoanalytical training, including an experience as an analysand, for the historian who would become sensitive to psychological data." Although I agree with him, not everyone does. What psychohistorians need to know and experience to do their work has been a perennial debate, often under the surface, for some three decades. It makes sense that because the "ultimate synthesis must take place in the mind of a psychohistorian," he or she should be "professionally trained in both disciplines" if the scholarship and its findings are "to have integrity as both historical and psychological accounts."
Loewenberg is an articulate advocate for acknowledging and using each scholar's inevitable subjectivity. In "Why Social Science Needs Psychoanalysis" (Fantasy and Reality) he reminds us that: "Older models of social science would purge or work around subjective sensations and build rigid barriers to the admission of feelings in the name of ephemeral Ôobjectivity.'" He advocates that "today's social scientists must realize that their feelings, sensations and responses both to the data and its manner of presentation are themselves a preciously significant datum of cognition." In both books he quotes Devereaux's assertion that "the scientific study of man - must use the subjectivity inherent in all observations as the royal road to an authentic rather than fictitious objectivity."
None of this is particularly new, of course, and will be familiar to psychohistorians who have used the same arguments in many places for decades. Indeed, in the aftermath of the deconstructionists (who, incidentally, Loewenberg never mentions), his words seem rather tame. Why then bother with this? I have spent more time on methodology than Loewenberg himself because I want to emphasize his sensible and reasonable words. His tone is what ultimately will help tip historians toward an even more favorable reception of psychohistory. As he points out - and who can deny it? - by and large: "Academic history dismisses as reductionism anything that is suggestive of psychological or emotional determinism. But we hear no apology for rational, material interest, social or intellectual determinism or reductionism. They are taken for granted." In the past, Loewenberg has said to me that the audience for psychohistorians is not analysts or other psychohistorians but historians: we should be writing to convince them. He is right when he says: "Programmatic statements - are now not enough." Doing counts. "Whether the method makes a permanent contribution - will - be tested in the empirical task of doing history."
Loewenberg practices what he preaches. The theme of "disciplined subjectivity" becomes explicit in Decoding the Past when he reveals that "nationalism is not only the most powerful force in the twentieth century - but also was a problem in my life from the beginning." Loewenberg was "born in Germany, but when I was six weeks old my parents moved to Shanghai, China, where I spent the first four years of my life. Nothing there was self evident about nationality." In neither book, however, does he make explicit the potential problems of coming to the U.S., growing up in a multi-ethnic West Coast community, or being Jewish. And while I am not prepared to do more than suggest, it seems likely that these factors helped shape not only his research interest in nationalism, but also in issues of personal identity.
For example, Decoding the Past includes a long, insightful essay on a man who changed his identity, the founder and leader of Zionism, Theodore Herzel. In Fantasy and Reality, one of two essays on Freud explores his "Psychosocial Identity." Much of Loewenberg's work has been on other significant figures in central European, especially late-nineteenth and twentieth century Austrian, history (Part III of Decoding the Past, "Austrian Portraits" is subtitled: "Identity, Murder and Vacillation.") In Otto Bauer, Victor and Friedrich Adler, and Karl Renner, Loewenberg has studied figures who, in part, and as part of the multinational Hapsburg Empire, struggled with multiple, ambivalent, and sometimes conflicted identities. ("The first social democrat to systematically analyze the nationalities question and to propose a comprehensive legal solution was Karl Renner (1870-1950) - He envisioned a dual nationality for each person.") Perhaps these observations suggest something about the character of all psychohistorians.
Certainly some of Loewenberg's best work is on the psychodynamics of the Austrian Socialists. He made good use of Mark Blum's doctoral dissertion long before it was published as The Austro-Marxists 1890-1918, A Psychographical Study.4 In his outstanding essay on "Victor and Friedrich Adler" (which I first heard at an American Historical Association Convention in the late-1970's) one finds a model of historical and psychohistorical scholarship. It is a major contribution to intergenerational psychobiography, but goes beyond that by showing how "fantasies and behavior in specific crises tell us much about the personified ambivalence of the group which chose and supported these party leaders." Along the way, it uncovers the unconscious rage and repressed violence at the core of the Adler family's dynamics. It too is a must read, as is the essay "Otto Bauer, Freud's ÔDora' case and the Crises of the First Austrian Republic" which follows it.
Less well known, but equally compelling, is Loewenberg's work on the Langer family, whose relationship to psychohistory was early and important. William Langer, the Harvard University historian of Europe and diplomacy, and his psychoanalyst brother Walter, author of the secret O.S.S. wartime profile of Hitler, were pioneers in applied psychoanalysis. Because of his prestige, William Langer became something of a hero to psychohistorians due to his call for the use of psychology in his 1957 presidential address to the American Historical Association, "The Next Assignment." It is exceedingly rare for AHA presidential addresses to ever be cited once they have been given, but for decades, Langer's has been kept alive by psychohistorians as a way of generating respect from their more mainstream colleagues. ("See, the famous mainstream historian William Langer thought there was something to this.") Loewenberg gives a valuable corrective when he quotes Robert Wohl about what actually happened. "I can remember very well the snide remarks about the address that were being made in the Princeton History Department in the first months of 1958; many of my professors regarded Langer as a strange man lacking in common sense."
Loewenberg never mentions Langer's powerful essay on infanticide in an early issue of History of Childhood Quarterly,5 but does come to grips with "two puzzling questions: Why of all historians, was William Langer the champion of psychoanalysis to his profession," and why did he use the Black Death "to make his case?" Loewenberg uses Langer's small 1975 memoir and his brother's brief autobiography to try to help answer these questions. They take him back to 1938, appeasement, to the "madman" Hitler ranting on the radio, and to the stage fright which gripped Langer during each and every Harvard lecture. How Loewenberg makes sense of these and other events - like a wounding while on the Western Front in 1918 - show a master psychohistorian at work.
Decoding the Past concludes with Loewenberg's best-known studies, the "Nazi Youth Cohort" essay and "The Unsuccessful Adolescence of Heinrich Himmler." In the Himmler piece, Loewenberg attempts to show "a consistency in Himmler's adolescent and adult emotional attitudes and behavior" by utilizing an important source, his teen-age diaries. But the essay is more than just an effort to show historians the importance of teen-age diaries. It is crammed with facts, explanatory footnotes, references to Anna Freud, Guntrip, Fairbairn, and Abraham; and is sprinkled with phrases like "classic oral characteristic," "erotic displacement," "schizoid tendency," and "mature introject." Psychohistorians will have no trouble with the language, concepts or arguments of the piece. But, since Loewenberg is in part writing for historians, one wonders what readers of the American Historical Review made of it back in the 1970's, or even what they might make of it today. It is very difficult to write convincing psychohistory for audiences unfamiliar with (and unconvinced by) Anna Freud, Guntrip, Fairbairn, and Abraham; and while the essay convinces me, it is easy to see how historians can continue to conclude that psychohistory produces gross generalizations from little evidence. It is, and remains, problematic for even the best psychohistorians, and I'm not sure the problem can ever be satisfactorily resolved.
"The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort," perhaps Loewenberg's great masterpiece, is a carefully reasoned, carefully argued, beautifully written essay which unfolds with logical precision and surprises again and again with telling facts and examples. The hypothesis is simple: youth was the key to Nazi success, and much of Hitler's support came from those who had suffered massive physical and emotional deprivation as children in the last years of World War I. The first years of The Great Depression recalled the earlier trauma, and Hitler came to unconsciously represent the absent fathers and mothers of the war years. "French and British families undoubtedly experienced the sense of fatherlessness and desertion by mother as much as did German and Austrian families." But two additional factors made a crucial difference: for central European children, "extreme and persistent hunger bordering in the cities on starvation," was the first; the second was the fact that German and Austrian fathers returned in defeat and were unable to protect their children in the tumultuous post-war years. It was reinforced by the sociopolitical order being overturned: "The Kaiser of Germany had fled and the Kaiser of Austria had been deposed." Naturally, fathers and father figures were both wanted and idealized. Loewenberg dips into literary sources to help prove his points that Hitler offered himself as a fantasy object.
Loewenberg's new book Fantasy and Reality in History also contains several thought-provoking essays, and psychohistorians will find it richly rewarding. Its structure recalls that of Decoding the Past, for, following a brief discussion of method, it is divided into three sections: "Psychoanalysis, Social Structure, and Culture;" "Political Leadership and the Irrational;" and "Psychodynamics and the Social Process." The organization is sound, although all the themes overlap and interact with each other from essay to essay.
Loewenberg also provides psychobiographical insights into Gladstone, Walter Rathenau, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the latter in a series of twenty suggestive fragments a paragraph or two long, ranging from Zhirinovsky's origins and birth, to his parents, use of language, view of the Jew and concept of savior-hero. The book's last section contains Loewenberg's broadest ranging themes, "Anxiety in History" (which I heard first presented at a psychohistory conference in San Francisco); racism (with a series of excellent examples of cross-cultural poison fantasies); and nationalism (the most up-to-date essay in both volumes, citing sources from the early 1990's). The section closes with some thoughts on how psychologically informed scholarship may have some practical applications in crisis management.
But for me, the most outstanding piece is Loewenberg's ambitious essay on "The Creation of a Scientific Community: The Burghšlzli, 1902-1914." (I heard an early version of the paper at a 1987 psychohistory conference at Long Island University honoring psychoanalyst William Niederland.) He tells the story of the Cantonal Psychiatric University Hospital and Clinic of Zurich (the Burghšlzli) which, before World War I, was "a place of exciting intellectual ferment and discovery rarely matched in the history of scientific creativity."
Loewenberg notes that "European psychiatry was stalemated at the turn of the century. It had developed nosological categories based on organic lesions, but the psychiatrist had nothing to offer in the way of therapy or hope." At the time, "Zurich became the world's leading psychoanalytic training and research center." Bleuler was the director; Jung the chief resident, and those who came to Freud "out of its" workshop included Abraham, Nunberg, Bychowski, Ophuijsen, Binswanger, Riklin, Maeder, Spielrein, Otto Gross, Eitigon, A.A. Brill, and Ernest Jones.
Loewenberg uses a wide array of published primary sources, some up-to-date secondary materials like Gordon Craig's study of liberalism in Zurich (1988), and diverse archival sources in America and Europe. He makes at least two useful contributions to the general history of psychoanalysis: "Although we have known about the Jung break with Freud in detail since the publication of their correspondence in 1974, historians have known virtually nothing about Jung's relationship with Bleuler. It has been shrouded in secrecy and deleted from Jung's autobiography and letters." He finds Jung's "feelings toward Bleuler displaced to the institution," and occurring as "a two-phase process of rupture toward autonomy," first Bleuler then Freud. His second contribution anticipates A Most Dangerous Method,6 and corroborates the earlier arguments of Bettelheim, David James Fisher, and Martin Silverman that Jung's affair with Sabina Spielrein was sexual.
Loewenberg's main effort in this essay, however, is to identify the conditions which made the Burghšlzli so creative. Components include Zurich's traditions of liberalism, but more specifically the social organization of the hospital with its "informal networks" which promoted "intense interaction and creativity," along with Bleuler's "tolerant non-parochial attitude" which made it possible for group members to better "handle competitiveness, rivalry and envious feelings." He finds it was the "adhesive forces of excitement over intellectual discoveries and the social-group process of following an idealized leader and standing in opposition to rival groups [which] held the Burghšlzli group together for a decade."
Loewenberg invokes the work of Ludwick Fleck (the concept of the "thought collective") and D.W. Winnicott (the Burghšlzli as a holding environment, a "secure space in which individuals in the group can be playful and safely try out ideas"); this is the "essential precondition of creativity." He finds that during the Bleuler years there was an "intense group process," one "of personal interpretation. Boundaries between individuals and between administration, staff, their families and patients were dissolved in an ongoing group process of regressive fusion. The personal boundary in important aspects came to be the institution itself - ," a bastion of creativity against a hostile outer world.
Neither this provocative essay, nor any of the others in both books, carries citations where they were first published; but this is a minor irritation considering the richness of the essays themselves. And while no summary can capture the fullness of reading the essays, the above survey should suggest why Loewenberg's work forms such a central part of psychohistorical theory and practice.
In the new introduction to Decoding the Past, Loewenberg expresses a view on the centrality of our scholarship that I have increasingly come to share. He writes:
The evidence is clear: Given a large enough social or collective traumatic event, no one escapes a post-traumatic stress disorder - The symptoms are life-long. No one iss immune. Massive trauma is a crucial bridge to history - Trauma is the theoretical link from individual to group, cohort, population, nation, the world.
These observations should be passed on to every historian; they should form a starting point for every historical discussion. Loewenberg's writings, along with the works of a few other pioneers - Erickson, Lifton, deMause, Mazlish, Binion, and Gay - form the foundation of our field. His writings deserve to be part of every psychohistorian's library.
David R. Beisel, Ph.D., teaches history and psychohistory at Rockland Community College, State University of New York, 145 College Road, Suffern, NY 10901. He is the author of over sixty articles, the former editor of The Journal of Psychohistory, and past-president of The International Psychohistorical Association.

Ê1. Lawrence Walker, "The Nazi ÔYouth Cohort': The Missing Variable," The Psychohistory Review, 9#1 (Fall, 1980), 71; Henry Lawton, The Psychohistorian's Handbook (NY: Psychohistory Press, 1988), 23; David R. Beisel, "From History to Psychohistory: A Personal Journey," The Journal of Psychohistory, 6#1 (Summer 1978), 1-65; and David R. Beisel, "Scholarship That Mattered," Clio's Psyche, 5# 3 (Dec. 1998), 112-113.
Ê2. Allan Mitchell ed., The Nazi Revolution. Hitler's Dictatorship and the German Nation, 3rd ed. (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1990), 70Ð103; and the 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
Ê3. Peter Loewenberg, "The State, National Hatred and Its Transcendence (interview)," Clio's Psyche, 1# 3 (Dec. 1994), 4-7; Peter Loewenberg, "Professional and Personal Insight," Clio's Psyche, 4# 2 (Sept. 1997), 33-36. (Clio's Psyche is a scholarly quarterly published by The Psychohistory Forum, 627 Dakota Trail, Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, 07417.)
Ê4. Mark E. Blum, The Austro-Marxists 1890-1918, A Psychobiographical Study (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1985).
5. William L. Langer, "Infanticide: A Historical Survey," The History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory, 1# 3 (Winter 1973), 353-365: reprinted in Lloyd deMause, ed., The New Psychohistory (New York: The Psychohistory Press, 1975), pp.55-67.
6. John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (NY: Knopf, 1993).

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