Psychohistory

The Making of Psychohistory is the first volume dedicated to the history of psychohistory, an amalgam of psychology, history, and related social sciences. Dr. Paul Elovitz, a participant since the early days of the organized field, recounts the origins and development of this interdisciplinary area of study, as well as the contributions of influential individuals working within the intersection of historical and psychological thinking and methodologies. This is an essential, thorough reflection on the rich and varied scholarship within psychohistory’s subfields of applied psychoanalysis, political psychology, and psychobiography.

Introduction: Religion as an object of empirical research - Psychohistory as exemplary interdisciplinary approach / Jacob A. Belzen 7 Changing figures and the importance of demonic possession / Antoon Vergote 21 Sunden's role-taking theory - The case of John Henry Newman and his mentors / Donald Capps 41 Belief in non-belief - The case of Vincent van Gogh / William W. Meissner 65 Freud's disrupted idealizations, religious unbelief, and his collection of antiquities / Ana-Maria Rizzuto 91 Beyond the reach of a miracle - Hitler, Stalin, and the "great man" / Richard A. Hutch 113 To be or not to be ... human - On the psychological history of religious and existential attitudes towards suicide / Arne Jarrick 137 The Penitentes of New Mexico and the meaning of discipline / Michael P. Carroll 173 Religion and the social order - Psychological factors in Dutch pillarization, especially among the Calvinists / Jacob A. Belzen 205 Folk religiosity or psychopathology? The case of the apparitions of the Virgin in Beauraing, Belgium, 1932-1933 / Jozef Corveleyn 239 Notes on contributors 261 Author index.

PETER GAY The syllabus of errors rehearsing the offenses of psychohistory looks devastating and seems irrefutable: crimes against the English language, crimes against sdentific procedures, crimes against common sense itself. These objects are real enough, but their contours-and their gravity mysteriously change with the perspective of the critic. From the outside, psychohistorians are to academic history what psychoanalysts are to academic psychology: a monolithic band of fanatics, making the same errors, committing the same offenses, aH in the same way. But seen close up, psychohistorians (just like psychoanalysts) turn out to be a highly differentiated, even a cheerfuHy contentious, lot. Disciples of Hartmann jostle discoverers of Kohut, imperialists claiming the whole domain of the past debate with modest isolationists, orthodox Freudians who insist that psychoanalysis engrosses the arsenal of psychohistorical method find themselves beleaguered by sociological revisionists. The charges that confound some psychohistorians glance off the armor of others. Yet there are three potent objections, aimed at the heart of psy chohistory, however it is conceived, that the psychohistorian ignores at his periI. It would be a convenient, but it is a whoHy unacceptable, defense to dismiss them as forms of resistance. The days are gone when the advocates of psychoanalysis could checkmate reasoned critidsms by psychoanalyzing the critic. To summarize these objections, psychohistory is Utopian, vulgar, ix x FOREWORD and trivial.

Some may be surprised to see a work on psychoanalysis coming out of the US Merchant Marine Academy. In this outgrowth of his 1987 La Psychohistoire, Academy historian Szaluta overviews the issues and growth in psychohistory; the fundamentals of psychoanalytic theory and post-Freudian developments; the case for, and critics of, psychohistory; and the genre's methods of interpreting the past. With the resurgence of psychoanalysis in Russia and Eastern Europe, the author concludes optimistically about the interdisciplinary field's future. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

What kind of psychology should be used in historical interpretation? How should it be used, and on what range of historical problems? These are some of the basic questions addressed by the distinguished contributors.

There is an ongoing debate as to whether African American Studies is a discipline, or multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary field. Some scholars assert that African American Studies use a well-defined common approach in examining history, politics, and the family in the same way as scholars in the disciplines of economics, sociology, and political science. Other scholars consider African American Studies multidisciplinary, a field somewhat comparable to the field of education in which scholars employ a variety of disciplinary lenses-be they anthropological, psychological, historical, etc., --to study the African world experience. In this model the boundaries between traditional disciplines are accepted, and researches in African American Studies simply conduct discipline based an analysis of particular topics. Finally, another group of scholars insists that African American Studies is interdisciplinary, an enterprise that generates distinctive analyses by combining perspectives from d