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The End of Psychohistory?

The Authoritarian Specter, Bob Altemayer. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996, 371pp. $39.95 (cloth)
The Politics of Denial, Michael Milburn and Sheree Conrad. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1996, 292pp. $24.95 (cloth)

R.W. Godwin
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 25, N. 3, Winter 1998

Did you know that many ordinary Americans are psychologically disposed to embrace anti-democratic policies, even many American lawmakers?! This unprecedented book, The Authoritarian Specter, presents the latest results from a prize-winning program on the authoritarian personality - a victory for the scientific method in the struggle to understand the worst aspects of ourselves!!!

Well, so says the publicity department blurb that comes with the book.

After completing the book, here are some additional bulletins I am able to pass along:

Authoritarianism probably has genetic roots.

Our "best model" for how people become authoritarian is that they learn it by observing others.

Authoritarianism seems to have little connection to child rearing.

In fact, the critical period for the development of adult authoritarianism is probably adolescence, in part because "children's cognitive abilities are simply too limited..."

Oh, and yes: Don't even bother looking, because there are no authoritarians on the left. No, I don't want to hear about them - you heard me, there are no authoritarians on the left!

Not to be authoritarian about it, but this book pretty much renders you, the psychohistorian, superfluous. You, with your limp-wristed, tender-minded, namby-pamby "mommy-didn't-love-me-so-I-killed-six-million-Jews," you have been displaced by rigorous, unforgiving, "empirical science!"

In truth, we shouldn't be at all surprised that academic psychology is so... well, academic. Or should we? After all, it has now been over two centuries since Kant forever proved the futility of using the "it" language of objective naturalism or pure reason to describe or capture the "I" domain of the subjective self. Nevertheless, the "physics envy" of most university psychologists leads them to commit the category error of studying the interior self like an exterior object, leading them to become either connoisseurs of the obvious (i.e., behaviorists) or champions of the preposterous (feminist "anti-attachment" theorists). If your only tool is a hammer you'll treat everything like a nail, and if your only method is "empirical science," your conclusions are hidden in your method: the self is reduced to just another objective fact, no different than rocks or planets.

Projection, internalization, splitting, persecutory anxiety, identification with the aggressor - none of these well-established psychological functions can be disclosed, much less understood, by the research methods employed by Altemayer in studying the phenomenon of authoritarianism. Although Altemayer, after having now published three books on the subject, obviously considers himself an authority on the subject, he seems bereft of any acquaintance with the groundbreaking ideas discovered by deMause and developed in this journal. If the domain of psychohistory is, as I believe, the "interior of history," it can only be disclosed by methods completely dissimilar to Altemayer's. Group-fantasy, poison container, psychoclass, fantasy leader, the evolution of childrearing - trying to understand authoritarianism without these concepts is like trying to understand the Black Death without the germ theory.

In many ways, one could argue the point that the Holocaust forced psychohistory upon us, because the unspeakable reality of this enormity simply would not yield to any "conventional" analysis. The Holocaust demanded a psychohistory to explain it. But for Altemayer, the Holocaust essentially comes down to an impressionistic group of people (the "German people") being duped by Adolph Hitler's highly effective hate literature. Indeed, Altemayer wonders if the Holocaust might even have been avoided if the German people had only "seen through Hitler's Big Lie." But you don't have to be a psychohistorian to know that this is absurd. It is absurd to make a distinction between "Nazis" and "ordinary Germans," because Germany was not only steeped in anti-Semitism, but the vast majority of the killing was carried out by those "ordinary Germans" who became "Hitler's willing executioners."1 The reason why they could not "see through" the lie is that on a deeply pathological level, what Hitler was saying about Jews was self-evidently "true" for them. What Altemayer fails to realize is that this is a developmentally earlier type of thinking that relies upon projection rather than objective, formal operations thinking to apprehend the world. And projection is not something acquired through imitation of others; it is a psychological defense mechanism rooted in early childhood, when the emotional boundaries between self and world are quite blurred.

With no recourse to unconscious mechanisms or developmental psychology, Altemayer is beholden to a two-dimensional, flatland psychology in which behavior simply is what it is; there is no symbolic meaning or deep structure that is generating the outward forms - the authoritarian attitudes - that he has spent a lifetime studying. People become authoritarian because they imitate other people who are authoritarian. As for why...who knows? And why did people start becoming authoritarian in the first place? Just saying it is genetic is saying nothing at all, because a gene can only express itself in a given environmental context, and there is a very wide range of ways a gene may express itself based upon the environment. For example, I have a pet pit bull that I could have easily trained into an aggressive attack dog. The gene was there but the environment wasn't; yes, the dog is still aggressive, but aggressively friendly, aggressively playful, aggressively curious, etc.

To suggest that there are no authoritarians on the left - Altemayer has found "not a single one" - now that is a sentiment so myopic that it could only come out of a university strangled by academic correctness. Altemayer basically employs a semantic evasion to define the authoritarian left out of existence; perhaps because it is the very water in which the university swims, he does not see it. Since Altemayer seems to believe nothing unless it is "proven" by a study, I suggest that he teach the following items in his introductory psychology classes and document the emotional reactions that ensue:

Women and men are really quite different, which is one of the reasons why a child needs a mother and a father.

Poverty is not the primary cause of antisocial behavior.

It is best for the child if one of the parents stays at home during her first five years.

Homosexuality is neither genetic nor a "normal" development, but this has nothing to do with the homosexuals' fundamental worth as a human being.

People should demonstrate the emotional maturity of holding a stable and rewarding marriage together before even thinking about having children.

None of these are political statements, but rather, child-centered statements rooted in developmental psychology. And if such teachings result in no politicized attack from his academic fellows, then Altemayer will have gone a long way toward proving his point that authoritarianism and even "dogmatism is largely a right-wing mind-lock." But my sense is that, ironically, Altemayer has a free reign to mock a boobocracy of the right which, unlike the left, has little actual authority over his day-to-day affairs.

Readers of this journal will probably be more congenial to the approach taken by Milburn and Conrad, which begins with the premise that "childhood experiences are a critical influence on an individual's political orientation." Moreover, the authors take it for granted that nations operate on the basis of collective fantasies that may vary widely in their attunement with reality. And they have an implicit psychogenic theory of history, affirming that the older generation utilizes the subsequent one as a projective receptacle to work through the emotions and dilemmas originating in their own childhood. One of the primary virtues of the book is that it is written in such a way that, while it has a "preaching to the converted" quality for psychohistorians, the ideas are presented in a relatively sober, understated way that might attract a more general audience to the fold. The average person hasn't even given much thought to how their own childhood has shaped them, so it is important to remember how startlingly novel psychohistory can be for the uninitiated.

A condensed version of the pivotal chapter of this book, "The Politics of Denial," previously appeared in this journal and was discussed by me (and others) in that same issue.2 Considering the fact that Milburn and Conrad are dealing solely with issues and concepts that have been discussed and fleshed out in considerably more detail by deMause and others, it is somewhat disingenuous, even deceptive, for the authors to write that "No political scientist we know of has yet described how residual childhood emotion is displaced onto the political world to create the social and political beliefs and structures that will dictate what are considered acceptable emotions for the next generation." Perhaps in smuggling a watered-down version of psychohistory past the mainstream censors, the authors felt it necessary to bury every track that leads back to 140 Riverside Drive. However, serious academics should at least acknowledge that they are dealing with ideas that have been earlier articulated by others.

After defining the nature of denial, Milburn and Conrad travel over familiar turf, discussing its role in the rise of the Religious Right, punitive attitudes toward children and criminals, anti-abortion violence, military power and environmental destruction. However, I would like to focus on their chapter on racism in order to demonstrate how a little psychohistorical knowledge, combined with ideological blinders, can be a dangerous thing, leading to incorrect conclusions and policy recommendations.

Milburn and Conrad describe an unusually harsh mode of parenting in black families that extends further back than the onset of the slave trade: "Slavery did not itself create parental cruelty to children in black families. This treatment was also a characteristic of West African families." Later they discuss how this parental cruelty was amplified by the slave experience: "Slave parents punished their children harshly.... Anger was a forbidden emotion. Both parents and owners demanded that slave children suppress their anger when being beaten." They then discuss a prototypical case, describing a violent criminal who started with "childhood hatred of his mother. Then, as the years passed, he identified it as a hatred of the American system [emphasis mine]."

In this same chapter, the authors ponder why there was so great a disparity between black and white opinion on the question of O.J. Simpson's guilt (seventy percent of blacks believe him innocent): "The reason, simply put, is racism and the denial of racism." The academically correct presumption here is that there is some logical basis for concluding that Simpson did not murder two people, but that one apparently must be a victim of racism in order to see it. This view comes dangerously close to suggesting that the experience of racism has given blacks a special insight into reality that transcends the rules of ordinary logic - no better or worse than logical, "formal operations" thinking, just different.

But this is cultural relativism at its worst, legitimizing a paranoid mode of thinking that is the destructive outcome of a variety of adverse psychohistorical forces. Milburn and Conrad rightfully wish for us to acknowledge the legacy of racism, but stop short of chronicling its destructive effect on the ability to think. If parental abuse and punishment damage the thinking of the right-wing authoritarian, how are blacks exempt from this process? Nowhere do Milburn and Conrad suggest that perhaps religious fanatics have a point about abortion being murder, since they had such a rotten childhood; why even suggest that blacks may have a point about Simpson's innocence? More to the point, is it possible that some of the current (not historical) racism perceived by blacks is a projection of their own abusive parents, not an apprehension of the true state of affairs? And if true, isn't it ultimately self-defeating to hold an ideology that avoids this unpleasant truth, thus preventing psychological integration?

In all dysfunctional families (and larger groups as well), there are sanctions against breaking through denial and thinking independently. A niece of Simpson's appeared on "Larry King Live" (September 10, 1997) and recalled a private conversation during which she expressed the sentiment to her mother (Simpson's sister) that the overwhelming DNA evidence gave her some cause to wonder if "Uncle O.J." may have had something to do with the murders. In a response bursting with metaphor and poetic irony, her mother physically assaulted her.

Dr. Godwin, a contributing editor to this journal, is a psychologist in private practice, P.O. Box 8962, Calabasas, CA 91372-8962.

1. Goldhagen, D., Hitler's Willing Executioners. New York: Random House, 1996.

2. R. Godwin, "The Exo-psychic Structure of Politics." The Journal of Psychohistory 23:3, pp. 252Ð59, 1996.

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