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Birth Order Without Freud or Psychohistory: Sulloway as a Later-Born Darwinian

Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives, Frank J. Sulloway. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996. xviii, 653 pp. $30.

Paul H. Elovitz
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 25, N. 3, Winter 1998

Birth order is a subject which is insufficiently studied so I welcomed Sulloway's volume and read it with enthusiasm until it became apparent to me that it was flawed by Freud bashing, ignorance of psychohistory, and advocacy of an emotionally sterile approach to the study of family dynamics. This essay will elaborate on my methodology in examining it, provide a critical analysis, and discuss its implications for history, psychohistory and Freudian approaches to the study of society. Sulloway as a scientific historian, Darwinian crusader, Freudian debunker, and academic loner will also be examined.

Sulloway's Critique of Psychohistory
and Psychoanalysis

A method I have found useful in reviewing scholarly books is to examine the author's treatment of subjects in which I have some competence.1 Since psychohistory is the field of my expertise, my interest was excited by Sulloway's one direct reference to it in which he declared, "Psychohistory is largely based on Freud's notion of the Oedipus complex, a topic on which Darwinian and Freudian approaches offer very different interpretations."2 This is simply an erroneous statement about psychohistory. Though early Freudians may have tried to connect many interpretations to the Oedipus complex, psychohistorians have not made this the cornerstone of their work. And, of course, not all psychohistorians are Freudians.

In over twenty-one years of attending psychohistory seminars and conferences,3 no scholar has ever declared psychohistory to be based upon the Oedipal complex in my presence. For two decades I have been organizing and chairing Saturday Seminars on psychohistory without hearing anyone base psychohistory on it.4 In collecting and, since 1994, publishing definitions of psychohistory by eminent contemporary practitioners, not a single definition has ever included Oedipal issues. Since I have not, as a psychohistorical editor, organizer and practitioner, found this equation of psychohistory with the Oedipal complex to be the case, my concern for Sulloway's documentation is heightened. He attempts to document his erroneous assertion about psychohistory with nonspecific references to Erikson's 1958 book on Luther and to a 1980 denunciation of psychohistory by an individual with little knowledge of the field.5 These citations are totally unconvincing and lead me to question his documentation in areas in which I have little familiarity. But perhaps they are unrepresentative, so I turned my attention elsewhere.

Psychoanalysis is a second field in which I have some competence, based upon a decade of psychoanalytic training, two decades of psychoanalytic practice and extensive reading of Freud and other clinician/theoreticians. The results of my examining Sulloway's treatment of psychoanalysis are also discouraging. In this case, he devotes much of his attention to the "shortcomings of psychoanalysis" - literally the largest category of psychoanalysis in his index. Again, he uses Darwinism as his standard and finds psychoanalysis wanting.

Sulloway's scholarship must be doubted when he declares that "Freud himself (1916 - 17:334) made only one brief reference to the topic" of birth order.6 In fact, this "only one brief reference" on page 334 starts on the preceding page with the words, "When other children appear on the scene the Oedipus complex is enlarged into a family complex." It continues, to the extent of about 395 words, ending with "conclude, among other things that the position of a child in the family order is a factor of extreme importance in determining the shape of his later life and should deserve consideration in every life-history." This is not a "brief reference," though to the birth order advocate it becomes one. But Sulloway may have a case if it is the only reference. Let me survey the works of the founder of psychoanalysis to see if there are other references.

In Moses and Monotheism, written between 1934Ð38 and published in 1939, Freud expresses the belief that Jews faced envy as the first born children of God: The anti-Semitism of Christians and Muslims was based on sibling rivalry of the later born against the first born "chosen people." Since Sulloway is a Freud scholar, he can not be unaware of this book although it does not show up in the index of his book on the founder of psychoanalysis.7 Though Freud, unlike Adler, may not have emphasized birth order, he did make occasional references throughout his writings indicating that he was well aware of the phenomenon and that it was under consideration as a factor in child development.

Let me note some examples. In the case of Dora, written in 1901 and published in 1905, Freud notes the "envy on the part of the elder sister."8 In the 1909 case of Little Hans, he approvingly quotes "`some six months later he [Hans] had gotten over his jealousy, and his brotherly affection for the baby was only equaled by his sense of his own superiority over her."9 A look at the 1914 essay, "The History of an Infantile Neurosis," yields the following example: "owing to their rivalry for their parents' love."10 In 1919 in "A Child is Being Beaten," the Austrian formulates that the child's pleasure at seeing his sibling beaten is based upon the notion that, "ÔMy father does not love the other child, he loves only me.'" [italics in the original]11 In 1920, in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Freud writes that the child's relations with the parent are affected by "jealousy over the birth of a new baby."12 These and many other notations of sibling rivalry indicate that Sulloway's "only" reference case against Freud is as flawed as his definition of psychohistory.

Sulloway seems to be both drawn to and repulsed by Freud, and in the end reluctant to confront Freud's thought. He reports spending seven years researching Freud, research which resulted in a most anti-Freudian book.13 After its publication in 1979, he told a colleague that he probably would have written a very different book had he had more than a session or two of therapy. This is a measure of confirmation of Sulloway's approach/avoidance to the ideas of the founder of psychoanalysis.

It is tiresome to have people criticizing or ignoring fields of knowledge, such as psychohistory and psychoanalysis, that have so much to offer society and academia. Why does this scholar of enormous erudition, who is comfortable with family dynamics, join in this denigration of vital fields? Could the answer lie in the psychological and professional advantages of this denigration? It sometimes seems that knocking Freud is a national pastime,14 but why? I often suspect it is a case of killing the messenger while appropriating the message. A prime example of this phenomenon is the lambasting of Freud and psychohistory by authors in the New York Review of Books who are steeped in many of the same concerns (e.g., childrearing, emotion, personality, trauma, and unconscious motivation) as Freudians. Psychohistory, because it is less well established, suffers even more than Freudian thought from this expropriation of the message by those who denounce, ignore, or misrepresent the messenger.

Sulloway is an enthusiast for Darwin, and so am I. (As a matter of fact, Freud was inspired by "the great Darwin.")15 But why must it be one versus the other - Darwin versus Freud? Why must he constantly announce that Freud had an "incorrect theory of Human development" as opposed to Darwin's theory?16 Why does he feel the necessity of tearing down Freud in the name of building up Darwin? For over thirty years, I have taught Darwin and Freud as two of the greatest thinkers in the West. In teaching a seminar on Darwin and Freud, like most scholars, I was quite favorable to both men. Perhaps the answer to Sulloway's need to idealize the one and denigrate the other can be found by questioning the author, reading many of the numerous interviews he gave about his work, and looking closely at Born to Rebel.

I asked Herbert Barry III to interview Dr. Sulloway for Clio's Psyche, a publication which I edit and which features scholars who have made major contributions to developing the psychosocial paradigm. Professor Barry is a research psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh from whom I have learned a number of things about the birth order of presidents. In preliminary discussions regarding setting up the interview for Clio's Psyche, as relayed to me, the MIT researcher declared himself amenable to the idea and made a statement to Barry which puzzled me. He expressed surprise at the notion that he was not in agreement with our field and indicated that the contrary was the case. However, he specified that it was non-Freudian psychohistory that he favored. This left me puzzled. If Sulloway has friendly feelings towards psychohistory of any variety, why do these not show up in Born to Rebel? After all, there are numerous non-Freudian psychohistorians who make important and varied contributions. In Sulloway's previous volume on Freud as biologist, I found no favorable comments about psychohistory in the index or during a quick perusal. I eagerly looked forward to learning much more about the man through Professor Barry's interview and to finding out the details of his feelings towards psychohistory. Did he want to develop a Darwinian psychohistory?

Sulloway gave generously of his time, close to four hours for the interview on April 5, 1997, plus time for follow-up questions and checking over the transcript in a timely manner. Professor Barry came away from it with mostly positive attitudes as reflected in the book review he wrote for this journal.17 Nevertheless, some of the results were disappointing to me. This was primarily because he said little that was not covered in his previous interviews and that his answer to the question of a Darwinian psychohistory was abstract and wordy.

Sulloway's Main Points and Some
Strengths of Born to Rebel

Let me turn to some of Sulloway's major ideas. He begins with the considerable differences among siblings brought up together. He believes that the first born, and older children generally, identify closely with their parents and "employ their superior size and strength to defend their spatial status" against newcomers. This leaves younger siblings as "underdog[s] within the family" who identify less closely with their parents' values and search for alternate roads to success which sometimes leads to their bringing about revolutionary change in society.18 He thinks "birth order contributes substantially more to revolutionary personality than does parent-offspring conflict."19 These are not new ideas, but no previous writer on birth order has built so powerful a case with such a wide array of evidence from a large number of fields. Furthermore, his book is informative, engaging, finely crafted, and much more carefully written than most which claim to be scientific and bring together a vast body of information.

Sulloway recognizes the enormous importance of "openness to experience," which rather than knowledge per se, makes possible revolutionary innovation. In his discussion of family niches the four rules on diversification and specification are most interesting.20 He gets readers to think about their own familial strategies. More than one cartoon in the book put a smile on my face.

Born to Rebel inclines to overwhelm the reader with data of many types and the author proudly boasts that "I have computerized more than half a million biographical data points, culled from tens of thousands of biographies."21 The actual biographical materials he cites tend to be a pleasure to read about; after all they are tantalizing bits of information about the great authors, innovators, leaders, and scientists of the Western World. At moments I shared the feelings of the author of a lengthy New Yorker article on the book who, after spending considerable time with Sulloway, wondered if the argument could be "a hoax" and "felt as if I [he] were drowning in a sea of numbers."22

The book can be especially pleasurable reading for later borns who like to think of themselves as more creative and innovative than their older siblings. Despite his claims to even handedness as a "scientific historian," Sulloway takes ever opportunity to present the early born negatively and the latter born in a most positive light. Given this strong bias his book would be easy to dismiss were it not for all the enormous evidence he has marshalled and the publicity he has received.23 It is no accident that he gives no information on his own birth order (the third of four children) in the volume, because he is hoping the readers will not see his younger sibling bias. The success of the volume represents a triumph of careful marketing.

Let me now focus on what I liked most about this important book, starting with another standard of judgment I use as a reviewer: What did I learn about myself and those I most care about from it? As someone who, as a young child, was shy, I found his discussion of shyness to be of interest. As a later-born son I fit Sulloway's pattern of being more open to new experiences, more creative and innovative than my older brother, who was the first born in our family as had been our father. But my brother was far more openly rebellious than I was, partly because he identified with our father's youthful rebelliousness and partly because he couldn't wait to do the things our father was doing or had done. In short, his rebelliousness followed from his intense identification with this parent.24 I also identified more with my mother's values than did my brother. Overall, I would say that our family scenario contradicts Sulloway's central hypothesis more than it confirms it.

The publication of Born to Rebel happened to come at a time I was preparing to launch a major research project on the pioneers of the psychosocial paradigm. After reading the book, despite its many faults, I'm much more attuned to using birth order and statistics than I was before reading it. After talking about his data with Sulloway, my colleague, Herbert Barry, made some significant changes to a conference paper he was preparing on U.S. presidents.25

Critique and the Controversy

There is much that is troubling in this book otherwise so richly endowed with fascinating materials. For example, the reference to Jews as a racial group.26 Jews do not pass anthropological tests to classify them as a race and the Nazis' horrendous deeds in the name of race were sparked by such a claim. Furthermore, whatever common genetic characteristics Jews have are being rapidly diluted by the high rate of intermarriage with non Jews. His failure to consider the impact of siblings who die in early childhood or infancy in his coding of birth order is a fundamental error. As scholars have shown in the case of Hitler and many others,27 the death of siblings can have a profound impact on the mother and the child.

More than anything else, Sulloway's aggressive Darwinism is unsettling. He overestimates the role of conflict in society and among siblings while underestimating the role of cooperation. This tendency is reminiscent of the Social Darwinians before him. Siblings, families, and societies thrive more because of cooperation than because of competition, though both play a role. When in doubt he falls back on Darwinian principles, for example his claim that the differences of siblings is an exemplification of Darwin's "principle of divergence."28 A troubling element of Darwinism applied to society is its tendency to reduce humans to biological organisms. The fascists followed this logic when they pinned medals on mothers who had borne the most children. By this logic, Darwin, who had ten children, helped the species and Sulloway, who has never married, has not. Darwin is properly remembered, except within his family, for his openness to new ideas and intellectual contributions, not the number of his offspring. Though this birth order advocate is often quite sophisticated in his use of Darwinism, I am concerned about the direction others will take such "scientific Darwinism."

Furthermore, Sulloway makes erroneous generalizations throughout the book. He sometimes adjusts his "scientific categories" to make his case, as illustrated below, especially when it comes to first borns and Freud. In Born to Rebel, it becomes predictable that the first born will automatically be portrayed in a less favorable light than the later born.29 For example, such first born innovators of new theories as Newton, Lavoisier, Freud, and Einstein are dismissed by quickly noting that "the supporters of innovation are still predominantly laterborn." Of course they are; most people are later born, especially prior to the current low birth rate in Western culture. Sir Humphry Davy (1779Ð1829) is an example of another negatively portrayed first born innovator on whom I happen to have published some articles.30 Some inconvenient first borns, like J.S. Mill, are simply not mentioned. There is some evidence that two decades ago, when Sulloway was more open to Freud, he considered the father of psychoanalysis to be a functional later born. This was on the basis of being brought up with John, the son of his much older half brother Emmanuel.31 (This is one of a number of indications that his supposedly scientific categories are rather malleable.) It is questionable if his thesis holds up when applied to psychohistory. At first glance, first borns seem as likely as later borns to be the creators of this field. For example, Lloyd deMause, the most radical of the contemporary leaders of psychohistory, is a first rather than last born child.

As will be illustrated later in this essay, the book overgeneralizes and presents Darwinism, birth order, and especially Freudianism in a reductionistic fashion. There is thoughtful, though insufficient, information on gender and birth order. And the author's devotion to birth order and sibling conflict as overwhelmingly important factors in human affairs is so intense it leads him to declare that even only children are greatly influenced by the mere possibility of having siblings.32

Born to Rebel has properly evoked some harsh criticisms. One of the most notable critiques is by Alan Wolfe in the New Republic. It sparked an author's response and reviewer's rejoinder.33 In an interesting critique, this Boston University sociologist uses terms like "careful," "detailed," and "ingenious" to describe aspects of Sulloway's work, but feels he fails the ultimate test of science, which is to have a scientific attitude of openness "to explanations more parsimonious than one's own." Instead he finds Sulloway to be "immodest, bombastic, ambitious, combative, [and] defensive" while pursuing his neo-Darwinist agenda.34 In the end, Wolfe labels Born to Rebel "deeply reactionary."35

Sulloway's reaction revealed him to be a hard hitting defender of his viewpoint and an excellent polemicist. To quote his milder rejoinders, Wolfe makes "numerous mistakes," "entirely muddles," and "misunderstands." He also denounces Wolfe's "most absurd critiques," reflecting either "simple dishonesty or stunning ignorance," and concludes with "unscrupulous and ill-informed efforts...in the name of anti-science."36

What are the personal reasons why Frank J. Sulloway chooses to denigrate Freud and any psychohistory rooted in Freudian thought? There are many possibilities. One is his denial of certain emotions. To quote him in one of the hundreds of interviews he has given, "my book aspires to be the kind of history that Mr. Spock on "Star Trek" might have liked."37 Writing about the family for a half-human, fictional character who claims to have no human feelings (though they periodically break through), is an emotionally sterile ideal. When he tells a friendly interviewer that "I am emotionally stable - I don't get jealous," my curiosity is aroused even more.38 After all, one of the bases of his whole theory is that jealousy is quite powerful and normal, yet he claims to have no jealousy. However, acknowledging feelings of jealousy would be a sign of acceptance of his own humanity, not of emotional instability, as he seems to think it. Acknowledging these feelings could also be a step towards relinquishing them. Upon looking more closely at Sulloway's references to jealousy, however, it is noteworthy that he links it closely to "neuroticism" and associates it with elder born children.

There are certainly indications of Sulloway's jealousy as well as envy. He is a jealous protector of Darwin and the scientific history he sees as a science. There is a resentful, almost bitter quality to the way in which he defends his book against its critics. He has made almost gratuitous comments indicating that he is the only pure defender of Darwinism and the scientific method. When he says psychoanalysts earn $150,000 a year and cannot be bothered to do research, it is my sense that there is envy and jealousy lurking about.

Frank Sulloway had many reasons for jealousy while growing up. His birth in 1947 did not seem to please his two older brothers and he refers to their being "not a particularly friendly sibling group." Shortly after his birth, his mother was hospitalized for psychiatric problems and for three years his primary caretaker was the housekeeper. Upon her return she found him to be uncontrollable. A divorce occurred when Frank was approximately five and he was raised by his stepmother and father. A younger half brother was born into the household four years later, thus lessening the attention available to him. When he had his father as his English teacher in prep school, he remembers being discriminated against in the name of even handedness.39

This childhood with an absent mother, a stepmother and two "not particularly friendly" brothers certainly seemed to test, and hone, the survival skills of Frank Sulloway. This reminds me of how fiercely devoted he is to Darwinian principles. He feels that psychobiography should be based on Darwinian principles even if "many lower-level theories [presumably Freudian, non-scientific psychology] need to be included among the basic tools of psychohistory."40 Conflict is such a powerful part of his Darwinian world of conflict, that he declares "the mother and the fetus are in warfare with one another because their genetic interests differ." He concludes a discussion of his ideas for a future book on the Darwinian family with "life starts out in pregnancy as a Darwinian struggle, followed by the Darwinian struggle of family dynamics" in which "siblings compete for parental genetic interests and for their investment," with the consequence that "a great deal is illuminated by an evolutionary understanding of the family."

Sulloway has made his reputation attacking the alleged "psychoanalytic myths" and "legends" of Freud,41 but he has been working on his own myth as the starving scholar sacrificing family, home, a car, income and the possibility of a stable professorial job to pursue the unpopular truth. He declares, "my income has been a negative twenty thousand dollars a year for the last five years and I have lived like a graduate student for as long as I can remember," and says: "Every penny has gone to support my research."42 In contrast to this picture, it should be remembered that he not only won a large MacArthur "genius award" for 1984 - 89, but he also negotiated, without sharing it with an agent, a $500,000 advance on his book.43 It is interesting that much of Sulloway's talk supporting the picture of him as a starving scientist in the garret came after he signed the lucrative publishing contract.

His struggle against Freud runs throughout the volume.44 For example, "Freud's disregard for Darwinian principles doomed his developmental claims from the start. The failures of psychoanalysis," he continues, " - both theoretical and therapeutic - are largely footnotes to this fundamental misreading of the family experience."45 He has little need for the unconscious, as indicated by his statements, that "for a young child to kill a parent is tantamount to committing evolutionary suicide" and "to wish to kill a parent if one never acts on the wish, is a blatant waste of time."46 Statements such as this seem to me to be more revealing of Sulloway than of his subject matter. They strengthen my interest in the author's complexities and motivations.

The Four Frank J. Sulloways

The laudatory reviewer of Born to Rebel in the New York Review of Books finds four books in one.47 This reviewer finds an opinionated, frustrating and quirky book and four Frank Sulloways.48 The four Sulloways are the scientific historian; the Darwinian champion; the debunker of Freud in the name of Darwin and "hard science"; and the long-suffering scholar forced to live perpetually as a graduate student because of his commitment to his ideals.

Sulloway, the rationalist historical scientist, wants to prove everything statistically and overwhelms the general reader with correlation coefficients, ingenious statistical tabulations and "a million data points." These he struggles to present in a "reader friendly manner." Throughout the book there is careful attention paid to issues of sample selection bias and certain data which disagrees with his conclusions. (Many aspects of the Sulloway who gives statistics lessons in his appendix, and even to visiting interviewers, have already been illustrated.)

The crusader for Darwinism is Sulloway's idealized self, who never gives up. Perhaps the origins of it can be found in the three-year-old Frank Sulloway who wandered the neighborhood streets knocking on the doors of strangers to get what he could not get at home. Like the crusaders, he was a younger son who was fighting for his own place in the sun. This crusader has incredible powers of mobilization of resources, as illustrated by his fundraising in college for a summer spent retracing Darwin's Galapagos trip, the receipt of a MacArthur "Genius" Award, negotiation of a half million dollar advance for a scholarly book, public lectures, and the giving of over 300 interviews to the press as part of the selling of the book. Like the crusaders surviving in hostile, foreign lands, he survived by creating his own support system. Unlike the Medieval Christian crusaders, he created his own intellectual land - using Darwinian theory, the personal computer, statistics and grant applications. Without ever having a permanent position, he has been an academic wanderer at Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, several European universities and other prestigious institutions. His positions have mostly been funded by grants - institutions gave him an office and library card and he brought in the money to live on and pay his research expenses. Thus his high risk strategy has paid off and he writes knowingly of younger sons as risk takers. A question implicit in one of his interviews is will he turn his fifteen minutes of fame into a permanent, tenured job so he can settle down and marry as he says he wants to do now that he is fifty years old.

The crusading Sulloway traces his family origins to a 1652 landing in Massachusetts. He is one of the most recent of a long line of crusaders who have come out of Quaker schools. The Quakers were crusaders against the slave trade (in which some of their ancestors had made a fortune), slavery, religious intolerance and the arbitrary government of dictators. Combating these evils is central to Dr. Sulloway's values. Indeed, he revels in describing younger sons leading the struggle for religious tolerance and freedom, against slavery and the slave trade and for freedom.

Sulloway, always proud of his Darwinian, highly adaptable, "survivor self," never stops heralding Darwin the man and the advantages of Darwinism. For example, he declares that "Darwinian theory illuminates the ultimate causes of behavior."49 The editor of the American Scholar catches the spirit of the presentation of Darwin when he writes Sulloway's "protagonist, the genius of geniuses, is Charles Darwin."50 Unfortunately, the disciple's devotion is such that this leads him to be seen by some as "an idea-logue, a single-causer, a man with an extraordinarily large bee in rather a small bonnet."51

Frank Sulloway's commitment to Darwin and Darwinism is lifelong. Family lore has his mother reading The Voyage of the Beagle to him when he was five years old, and in college at Harvard he raised the funds and retraced the voyage of the Beagle through South America. He says a lot about the emotional origins of this identification. Like him, Darwin was a later-born son (the fifth of six children as opposed to the third of three), shy as a child, and a slow starter who accomplished more than men of much greater, early promise by hard work and openness to new ideas. He focuses on Bowlby's study of Darwin's loss of his mother at a young age with considerable interest: I wonder, as I read it, to what extent he is trying to learn about the impact of his own maternal separation.

"I identified very strongly with him [Darwin]," Sulloway says, "because he proved that we all have a chance. I thought Darwin would make a fascinating case study of how a modest, hardworking guy with terrible spelling," presumably like him, "but lots of heart became one of the most famous scientists in five hundred years."52

He says "a lot of Darwin has rubbed off on my own style of thinking and research." Like his hero he is bookish and quite persistent. He likes to quote Darwin's favorite expression, "It's dogged is [working like a dog] as does it" that makes for scientific success.53 He credits much of his own success to being "insanely persistent" in pursuing his goals.54

Sulloway is no Darwin. Darwin was in awe of, and a wonderful observer of nature, while Sulloway is usually so focused on proving his points that he misses much that does not fit into his preconceived notions. Darwin was such a gentleman that he offered to step aside in favor of Wallace's claim of priority in the publication of the theory of evolution rather than be ungentlemanly. Sulloway has no trouble dismissing the work of Adler on birth order as only hypothetical, as opposed to his own scientific research.55

There are some useful elements to Sulloway's Darwinism. It does open the reader to making connections to our biological forerunners and early human ancestors: the hunter-gathering cave men whose influence on us we sometimes too easily dismiss as part of our idealized belief in the rationality of man. He shows the role of survival, of conflict. But to Sulloway, before Darwin can be enthroned, Freud must be dethroned.

The third Sulloway is the debunker of Freud, traditional history and other "lower level theories." Throughout Born to Rebel he takes any and every opportunity to make critiques of Freud and to compare Freud with Darwin to the disadvantage of the latter. He does the same in interviews. Why is there always this dualism?56 Why is his book loaded with "heroes and villains...for all his scientific pretension?" Why this fascination with Freud? Why the fascination with birth order, child development, creativity, family dynamics, history, and psychology? Most historians and history students don't have a great interest in these things. Perhaps the answer, in Sulloway's case, relates to his growing up with a mother who was in the midst of a "nervous breakdown." In my clinical experience, in upper middle class families when the mother is hospitalized and then has trouble controlling a child, the child is taken to therapy. When Frank Sulloway complained of psychoanalysts getting "some poor bastard on the couch"57 could he be talking from his own experience or an experience he is still warding off? The intensity of Sulloway's anti-Freudianism brings to mind a mature student in a course in nineteenth century European history, who upon hearing the name Freud, denounced "Fraud" vociferously as a fraud. After class, when I inquired about the intensity of his anti-Freudian feelings, he explained that in the treatment of an institutionalized daughter he had been defrauded by a variety of therapists, all of whom he associated with the name Freud, which he pronounced as "Fraud" even when he seemed unaware of doing so.

Sulloway's animosity is such that for all of his reading of Freud's twenty-four volumes, partly in German, his knowledge of Freud is incredibly uneven and quirky. More than most scholars, Frank J. Sulloway sees what he wants to see. This is hardly the scientific approach.

The fourth Sulloway is the self-pitying, perpetually poor graduate student without a regular job, permanent home, car, wife or children. In this mood, he feels justified in his contempt for and not so thinly veiled envy of the psychoanalytic and academic establishment. He thinks they have taken the easy paths to success because they fail to be open and hardworking enough to be truly scientific in their approach. His sense of entitlement breaks through and the veneer of scientific objectivity falls away. But underneath there seems to be a lonely man who plants morning glory vines on street signs on the way to work because he goes there so early in the morning and "wanted something beautiful to look at on my way to and from the office."58

It is perhaps these contradictory impulses in Sulloway's personality that led some reviewers to call his book "quirky."59 The scientific Sulloway declares birth order to be "a fallible indicator," while the Darwinian enthusiast seeks to fit his million "data points" into a Procrustean bed that matches his theories.60 The know-it-all-Sulloway, in the name of "history as a science," considers most traditional historians as mere purveyors of anecdotes and is ready to make the case "for considering Charles Darwin the greatest historian of all time."61

Frank Sulloway argued in his first book that the founder of psychoanalysis built a whole system around his own needs. Likewise one might argue that Sulloway has built a whole system around his life experience and personality traits: he acknowledged to a friendly interviewer that his life embodied his own theory.62 Growing up with, and without, a mother suffering a "nervous breakdown," he became interested in family dynamics. Amidst "a not particularly friendly sibling group," which was more present than his mother and even his father, he came to believe in Darwinian struggle and to feel that siblings were quite important. Weaker and less knowledgeable than his big brothers, he came to feel that the later borns are more creative, innovative and original than the first born.

Faced with the prospect of a younger half brother born nine years after him, in his mind and theory he never relinquishes his position as the special youngest son. He does this by setting up the category of the "functional laterborn," six or more years younger than older siblings. Rather than focus on his abandonment (where were his caretakers when he was knocking on the doors of strangers as a three year old?) he establishes a persona as a Darwinian explorer. He felt himself to be shy and writes extensively about shyness as a significant factor in personality development.

Sulloway has the world split into good Darwin and bad Freud. Perhaps, as in the case of my former student who took every opportunity to denounce "Fraud," there is not a failed therapeutic experience in his background. Something had to be driving him to spend seven years studying Freud, primarily for the purpose of destroying "Freudian myths."

Born to Rebel says much about Sulloway, as well as about birth order, and it may help the author to understand himself better if he becomes more open to this element of his work. Only Frank Sulloway can know if my thoughts about his motivation are correct, but his scientific self will need to accept the explorations of the unconscious to achieve this self knowledge. His acknowledgement to my colleague that his lack of therapy affects his scholarly work is at least an indication of awareness of the possible value of psychotherapy. As he now faces the hard earned benefits and pitfalls of success, Sulloway will be better off, as are we all, if he can better understand his own unconscious motivations.

It is easy for Sulloway to perceive himself among the top five percent of people in terms of openness to experience,63 but it is a very different thing to be open. Two examples stemming from our indirect contact - note that we have never had direct contact - should suffice. When asked to recommend people who have done outstanding work in psychohistory, a field to which he claims to have no objections, for the Makers of the Psychosocial Paradigm Research Project, he recommended David Stannard who concluded his attack on the field with the declaration that "psychohistory does not work and cannot work" and then urges the reader to move on.64 This is a contemptuous response! As reflected by some of my comments above, I read his book with openness and appreciation, at least before coming across his reference to psychohistory on page 122, and he should approach contemporary psychohistory in the same way.

When asked for a definition of psychohistory, the sibling conflict specialist limited the field to those researchers psychologically "explaining human behavior in a historical context where people are no longer alive" as opposed to the psychologist who studies the living. When one of many respected scholars who writes psychobiographies of living individuals was pointed out to him, he simply ignored the fact. This is not openness to experience. Listening to a research subject or patient, psychohistorians and psychoanalysts are gathering valuable data by their openness to conscious and unconscious communications. Psychodynamically inclined scholars are looking for leads (that is, hypotheses to be tested) for psychobiographical or personal insight; he is looking for irrefutable fact, and I think our prospects of success are better than his. Yet we can also do better work by sometimes using statistics and large group studies.

Conclusion

Frank Sulloway knows a great deal about statistics and how to present them to the general public, but nothing about the therapeutic technique and process. His excessive advocacy of quantification rather than traditional historical approaches to materials on biography and family history can be detrimental to the study of history because he claims too much for his evidence and obfuscates the issues. It would be unfortunate if psychoanalysts and psychohistorians, who have done so much to develop and popularize pathbreaking research on childhood and family history, would see these subjects dominated by emotionally sterile approaches such as Sulloway's.

As many of the actual creators of psychohistory, readers of this journal would be well served to speak out against reductionistic studies of birth order, children, childrearing, personality and psychobiography. In conclusion, Born to Rebel has major flaws. In the pages of the most read of the eight publications devoted to psychohistory, it is especially important to draw attention to Sulloway's poor representation of our field and the need for all authors to examine their own motivations.

Paul H. Elovitz, an historian, psychohistorian, and psychotherapist, is Founder and Director of the Psychohistory Forum in addition to being the founder and editor of Clio's Psyche. After teaching at Temple, Rutgers, and Fairleigh Dickinson universities, he became a founding faculty member at Ramapo College of New Jersey. His current research is on the makers of the psychosocial paradigm and the effects of psychoanalytic training on historians and other academics. He is a founding member and a past president of the IPA and a Contributing Editor of this publication. He is also the editor of Historical and Psychological Inquiry (1990), co-editor of Immigrant Experiences: Personal Narrative and Psychological Analysis (1997), and the author of numerous articles and chapters of books.

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1. I wish to thank a number of Psychohistory Forum researchers for their assistance. Professor Herbert Barry and Bob Lentz, Associate Editor of Clio's Psyche, did a fine job with the interview of Sulloway while Professors David Beisel and David James Fisher critically read an earlier version of this paper. Also, my appreciation to Pamela Dong, formerly a Ramapo College librarian, for bibliographic assistance. Thanks to Michele O'Donnell and Gary Schmidt for proof reading.
2. Frank J. Sulloway, Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 122.
3. In 1976 I attended the first national psychohistorical meeting at Stockton State College in New Jersey and in 1977 the founding meetings of the International Psychohistorical Association (IPA) and the International Society for Political Psychology (ISPP). Annually since 1977, I have attended one or more psychohistory conferences without ever hearing of the Oedipal complex being part of the definition of psychohistory.
4. As founding co-chair and then chair of the Saturday Workshop Seminars of the Institute for Psychohistory from 1977 to 1983 and then as founder and director of the Psychohistory Forum from 1983 to the present.
5. Sulloway, Born to Rebel, 486 n. 8 and David Stannard, Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
6. Sulloway, Born to Rebel, 467 n. 2.
7. Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (New York: Basic Books, 1987 [1979]).
8. Sigmund Freud, "Fragments of An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud VII (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 38.
9. Sigmund Freud, "Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis," in Strachey, X, 11.
10. Freud, Standard Edition, XVII, 24.
11. Ibid, XVII, 187.
12. Ibid, XVII, 21.
13. Sulloway, Biologist.
14. Sarah Boxer, "Flogging Freud," New York Times Book Review (August 10, 1997): 12, 14.
15. Sigmund Freud,"The Psychopathology of Everyday Life," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud VI (London: Hogarth Press, 1960[1901]), 148. See also, Lucille B. Ritvo, Darwin's Influence on Freud: A Tale of Two Sciences (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
16. Michael Shermer, "Rebel With a Cause: An Interview With Frank Sulloway," Skeptic IV, 4 (1996), 68.
17. Herbert Barry, "Book Review of Born to Rebel" Journal of Psychohistory (Fall, 1997) 213Ð215.
18. Sulloway, Born to Rebel, xiv.
19. Ibid, 122.
20. Ibid, 105-109.
21. Ibid, xvi.
22. Robert S. Boynton, "The Birth of an Idea," New Yorker. (October 7, 1996), 81.
23. A February 1997 article reported Born to Rebel to be in its fourth printing since its release in October, 1996, and indicated 56,000 copies are in circulation. A reporter for the New York Times introduced Sulloway's theories and then sought to apply them to some leaders of business and industry. Some of the early and positive response by the media has to do with much prepublication publicity occurring over a period of years. A highly paid public relations firm working for it could not have done a better job than the author has done himself. See Judith H. Dobrzynski, "Telling Birthmark For Businesses," New York Times. (February 21, 1997): D3. Some of these popularized reviews are full of errors. For example, a review in Vogue referred to the historian author as an "evolutionary psychologist" and the youngest of three children. See Vogue (October, 1996): 228, 231. The Economist gave his affiliation as Harvard University. See "Brothers and Sisters: Second Best?", Economist (December 7, 1996): 4. In fact Frank J. Sulloway's 1996Ð97 affiliation is as an MIT research historian, even if he was a lecturer at his alma mater in 1985 and does dedicate his book to the Harvard social psychologist Jerome Kagan.
24. Paul H. Elovitz, "My Motivations: Patterns and Secrets of an Immigrant Family," Clio's Psyche, 4(1997): 104-108; excerpted from Paul H. Elovitz and Charlotte Kahn, eds., Immigrant Experiences: Personal Narrative and Psychological Analysis (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997).
25. Herbert Barry III initially titled his presentation at the June 1997 International Psychohistorical Association meetings, "Political Ideology Contradicts Birth Order of Franklin Roosevelt and Subsequent Presidents," but was convinced by Sulloway that his sample was too small to generalize.
26. Sulloway, Born to Rebel, 441. Though there is a tendency among Europeans and older (pre-World War II) Americans to use race in place of ethnic or religious group, in Sulloway's age cohort this is not the case.
27. For the impact of Hitler's three siblings who died in infancy before his birth, and the younger brother who died when he was about eleven years old, see Rudolph Binion, Hitler Among the Germans (New York: Elsevier, 1976) and Helm Stierlin, Adolph Hitler: A Family Perspective (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1976).
28. Boynton, "Birth," 81.
29. Liam Hudson, "Slaying the First Born," Times Literary Supplement. (February 12, 1997): 97.
30. Paul H. Elovitz, "Sir Humphry Davy," Great Lives in History, Great Britain (Los Angeles: Salem Press, 1987).
31. Hudson, "Slaying the First Born," 97.
32. Ibid, 86; Boynton, "Birth," 76.
33. Alan Wolfe, "Up From Scientism," New Republic (December 23, 1996): 29-35.
34. Ibid, 29.
35. Ibid, 35.
36. Frank J. Sulloway, "Place Your Order," New Republic (February 3, 1997): 4-5.
37. Boynton, "Birth," 74.
38. Shermer, "Rebel With a Cause," 69.
39. Ibid, 66.
40. Herbert Barry III, "The Historian as Darwinian Scientist: Frank J. Sulloway," Clio's Psyche IV, 1 (June, 1997), 29.
41. Sulloway, Biologist of the Mind.
42. Boynton, "Birth," 80.
43. Ibid, 71.
44. Sulloway, Born to Rebel, 99.
45. Ibid, 146.
46. Ibid, 123.
47. Jared Diamond, "The Roots of Radicalism," The New York Review of Books (November 14, 1996), 6.
48. For an author who probes the personal lives of his subjects, Sulloway writes very little about himself, but he says a great deal in the course of certain interviews he has given as a part of his publicity campaign. In some of these interviews his contempt for traditional scholars also shows through more directly than in his book.
49. Sulloway, Born to Rebel, 63.
50. Joseph Epstein, "O, Brother!", Commentary (April, 1997): 52.
51. Ibid, 54.
52. Boynton, "Birth," 72.
53. Shermer, "Rebel With a Cause," 70.
54. Boynton, "Birth," 76.
55. Sulloway, Born to Rebel, 55-57.
56. Ibid, 53.
57. Boynton, "Birth," 81.
58. Ibid, 80.
59. Ibid, 72, as an example.
60. Ibid, 73; Sulloway, Born to Rebel, 202.
61. Sulloway, Born to Rebel, 365, 366.
62. Shermer, "Rebel With Cause," 73.
63. Ibid, 69.
64. Stannard, Shrinking, 156.

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