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HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDING AS SENSE OF HISTORY: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry (click the title to read the complete paper)
By Howard F. Stein, Ph.D.
Any sociogenic theory of history without an underlying psychogenic explanation is stagecraft without dramaturgy. Among the behavioral and social sciences, psychoanalysis is unique in its “preoccupation … with the purposes and symbolic content of thought” (La Barre, 1951, p. 85), which makes it an essential tool by which to understand the historic mode of thinking. Moreover, because of the close tie between fantasy and act (even the inhibition of action), psychoanalysis can establish the elusive link between historical thinking and historical action.
The psychic function of history is to avoid time, to replace time with substitute memories, screen memories onto which the real past is displaced and by which it is symbolized—to re-present a fantasized reality more compelling than reality.
History as Dreamwork
History itself, or more accurately, the myth of history, is the archetypal great dream of the Culture Hero whose articulation corresponds to the barely conscious, inchoate wish of those whom he addresses and who appoint him to speak for them. His symptom is their original cure, just as their confirmation of his symptom cures him of his isolation by making his defenses valuable public property. Shaman-hero and commoner are addicted to one another. They are made for each other, paranoid authoritarian adult and child, omnipotence and helplessness. The authority of the hero lies in the wish of the communicant. As La Barre (1966) writes:
Charisma is the emotionally déjà vu. The “charisma” of the culture-hero is the measure of the appetizingness and appositeness of his dream message to the unconscious minds of his fellows. The culture-hero does the dreamwork for his society (p. 233).
When the hero dies he is immortalized, for he cannot, he must not be allowed to die, for were he to die, those left behind would of necessity be on their own. The legacy of the hero, then, is a permanent transitional object, myth, the very culture which sees him in itself, and the very history which he now comes to personify. The charisma of history is the emotional rightness of an abstracted phylogenesis in resonance with a wished-for ontogenesis.
As La Barre (1966) notes:
“Just as the dream preserves sleep in the individual and holds the real world at arm's length, so also sacred culture preserves the intellectual sleep of the society”(p. 235).
History is not a sense of the past only passively perceived. It is, let us say, a process of continuous revelation in the ritual-myth cycle and on the stage of reality, yet whose fundamental premises go unchanged despite endless ptolemism, revisionism, and revolutionism in thought. The present and future are coerced to conform with the arrow of history so as to realize dream-time in mortal-time. History does not merely happen, it is bidden. Reality is enlisted in the service of making dreams—pleasant and horrific—come true.
Reality: History as Sacred or Secular
We are immediately confronted with the issue of the reality of history. Certainly it is experienced as real—indeed, more real than rational argument or disconfirming data is likely to persuade the True Believer otherwise.
What is at once so revolutionary, and therefore, so vehemently denounced or deafeningly ignored, about the psychoanalytic perspective is the unreality it discloses about historical reality. In the beginning was fantasy, which led to a cognitive set and thence to an acting-out which confirms inner reality on the social and natural stage.
Behind the very origin and function of culture is the denial of painful reality and substitution of a group-defense against inner phantasms. Much, if not most, of human culture-history has been governed by what must be called an unreality, that is, fantasy, principle. This does not imply that reality plays an unimportant role in history, but rather specifies how that role is performed. It is not, as we would commonsensically (that is, countercathexis) expect, reality which causes the sense of history, but instead the inner sense which weaves outer events into an ongoing, self-consistent grand scheme of meaning. Reality is selectively distorted and is thus perceived as confirming the inner sense of what history must be.
Psychologically stated, those events and sequences in natural and social reality which correspond to dominant themes in the shared unconscious group-fantasy are subsequently adopted into that group's official (sacred) history.
One can perform a simple test to determine whether or not an item of history is sacred: challenge it or offer an alternative interpretation. If one is met with deadly silence, fierce rebuttal, calumny, or disbelief then one can be sure he or she has tapped into a sacred fact that symbolizes something which to the believer must not be allowed to be doubted, let alone proven false. History, one might say, is the sanctification of human time that is meant to compel persistent belief, not dispassionate debate. History is final, never provisional—even when it is forever revised.
“Religion,” wrote the philosopher Whitehead (1965), “is the longing of the spirit that the facts of existence should find their justification in the nature of existence” (p. 83). The same is true for all group ideologies and institutions. “The facts” are of course inseparable from “the nature” of which they are adduced to be proof. Data are gathered in accordance with a hypothesis that cannot be disconfirmed, since one's very method (or methodology) is governed by a worldview whose very unconscious purpose is to provide the means of finding what one seeks.
The shared delusional character of ideological commitment must be admitted. It is not a matter of playful illusion (iludio: to play), for play possesses a carefree, open-ended quality that is the opposite of systematized, inexpugnable delusion which is too deadly earnest to allow room for novelty or nonsense.
History, Repetition Compulsion, and Ritual
Devereux (1953) writes that “in mythology, as in dream-work, we seem to be confronted with the basic fact that plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”4 (p. 140). It is no different for history, which obeys the same rule of repetition compulsion. History is the fantasied and lived out cycle of myth and ritual in mortal, natural time; likewise, religion is the fantasied and lived out cycle of myth and ritual in immortal, supernatural time. To paraphrase Hocart (1970), what myth describes, ritual exacts. The myth cannot exist apart from its recitation. Narrative and narration are text and dramatization. Ritual is the compulsory side of myth, while myth is the obsessional side of ritual.
No wonder, then, that history in the flesh, like ritual dramaturgy, possesses déjà vu uncanniness, confirming wish with sensate fact. What La Barre (1975) writes of ritual-dance describes precisely the function of history in the making: “Dancing by ritual participants kinesthetically ‘confirms’ the reality of myth: compulsive act coerces obsessive belief. That belief is the wished-for, and that others join in mutual support of belief, together make ritual a hypnotic-hallucinatory social substitute for reality” (p. 18). Unremarkably, reality is generously compliant (and pliable), for what one wishes to find he need only to seek.
History thus faces time Janus-faced: the shared screen memory of the past, and the template for its recurrent confirmation in the future. The present is pivotal, for it must lead to that future that so resembles the past. History is thus not merely a cognitive schema, or a narrative and narration which re-present shared fantasy in time-past; it is as well an enactment, an acting-out of the representation in social reality such that behavior and perception of that behavior confirm the group basic assumptions which led to the act and the perception of the act.
In this context, if history is cognitively and perceptually a screen memory of the past, that is, a compromise formation that balances wish and prohibition in remembrance of things past, history is also, to use a much neglected concept of Gadpaille (1967), a screen action. In the analytic context, a screen action represents both the inhibited activity or change of behavior and the phantasies responsible for its inhibition. I propose that the term “screen action” be used for this specific class of behavior. By analogy with screen memory, the action which preoccupies the patient carries all the emotional intensity of the unconscious phantasies, but it is a displaced, attenuated and innocuous representation of the phantasy content (p. 166).
History cannot be, by this definition, therapeutic, since therapy requires a change in premises, an unmasking of cathexes behind well-worn defenses, a working through of conflict such that history does not need to repeat itself. Yet it is of the essence of history to repeat itself, not in the mere Toynbeean or Spenglerian descriptivist sense of cycles, but in the dynamic sense which bespeaks the inability to let go of particular cycles of anxiety and acting-out.
History is a repetition-compulsion writ large. The dynamic is the same as the individual neurotic; only the social scale differs. And when history recurs, it is met as much with surprise as with déjà vu of relief or horror. Indeed, “history is the movement by which society reveals itself as what it is.”
Psychoanalysis cannot be faulted for noting the fact that societies, like neurotics, are trapped by their own history in a Sartrean “No Exit” from which they do not leave even when the door is opened. It is the very need to continue making the same mistakes that makes historical groups (cultures) immune to self-corrective feedback. The tiresome assertion that psychoanalysis ignores history or treats people as though they were in an historical vacuum is itself a symptom of scholars' resistance to acknowledging the locus of history.
Ritual is closed-system thought and action. It ipso facto cannot be adaptive to reality, since the mythic thought and its performance replace reality with itself. Ritual is thus not only distortive, but delusional thought put into deed. Ritual is thus a behavioral system of actions of reference that confirm the belief about the nature of reality (ideas of reference) by acting it out. A crucial dynamic factor in ritual is its need for constant repetition, whether idiosyncratic or in regularized group enactments. Whatever it is that has been alleviated symbolically can never be resolved so long as it is managed exclusively at the symbolic-ritual level rather than at the deeper level of its unconscious meaning to the communicant.
Of course, to the participant, the meaning is the ritual—just as, to the snake phobic, the snake is the adversary. To the participant, the symbol is not a symbol, it is reality. Likewise, the enactment of the ritual is absolutely essential so that the belief be confirmed by sensate experience—a day-dream in which one is the central character.
Childhood: An Inner Source of History
Through history the ontogenetic past is preserved yet mystified, and projected onto the social plane where, like the paranoiac looking for his ubiquitous enemy, it is—mistakenly—discovered, and its reality confirmed by the matching of perception with motivation.
To the naive tribalist of any type of group, history is not the folklore about the past, but an objective, almost tangible fact independent of oneself: one need only the consensus-based wits to perceive. Only to the outsider is history a subjective narrative. History is revealed, recorded, preserved, and hypercathected precisely to the extent that it passes the internal censor and can thus be experienced symbolically as anxiety-free, since the locus of the nondisplaced history is both onto a suprapersonal collectivity and exists with a force of its own. The very social reality that is the stage for the discharge of shared unconscious fantasy is perceived by members of the group as the source of objective history.
The group-fantasy is the secret editor which utilizes aspects of physical and social reality to symbolize inner reality, to re-present to it what it needs to see. Group reality testing is consensus in the service of allaying anxiety, not dispassionate search for truth independent of wish.
Customarily, transference phenomena have been regarded as virtually unique to the experience in psychoanalytic treatment. However, as Nunberg (1951) points out the tendency to “transfer” infantile experiences into reality and to act them out can be observed not only in the transference situation but also independently of it. An urge to establish identity of perceptions through repetition of past experiences is thus, in conformity with Freud's ideas, undeniable (p. 3).
The past is seen as active, even incarnate, in the present, even when it is not. The necessary connection of logic and perception is affective. Without the affective valence, the present situation would be only itself, not a re-presentation, a re-living of the past. Transference thereby becomes a key to the nature of history itself. To quote Nunberg again:
Repetition compulsion points to the past…. Repetition compulsion tries to fixate, to “freeze,” the old psychic reality, hence it becomes a regressive force…. Through transference the patient lives the present in the past and the past in the present. In his speech he betrays a lack of feeling for the sequence of events, which is conceived of as time (p. 5).
Why should human groups, which must collectively cope with unconscious human material, and which form in large part to supplement inadequate private defenses, not be subject to the same law of historic timelessness and for the same reasons that individuals bend reality in transference?z
Culture, Group Fantasy and History
One must conclude that man creates historical reality in the image of his shared inner fantasy, not the reverse, and discovers externally what he blithely externalizes, that is, projects.
Regressively, one seeks from the group an undifferentiated Oneness, beneath and beyond ambivalence. Yet, motherlove is inevitably imperfect, no match for infantile need. Separation-individuation is a painful, never completed process of relinquishing fusion for uncertain autonomy. Fear of engulfment vies with the wish for dependency. In the group, one relives the ambivalence he would escape—only now symbolically. Ambivalence undermines idealization, as it heightens defensive maneuvers to shore up what threatens to return from repression. However, if one must maintain the delusion of perfect goodness within the group, then any badness must be group-alien, projected on some available Other(s) who, for unconscious reasons of their own splitting, are willing to be engaged.
We are in a position now to account for those collective realities such as give rise to collective representations from religion to history (Durkheim, 1961). As Koenigsberg (1975) writes, “Cultural ideas, beliefs and values may be viewed … as an institutionalization and social embodiment of primal human phantasies” (p. viii). He proposes that we carefully comb the cultural texts themselves for primary process imagery embedded in official culture, for those parapraxes, metaphors, and the like that make their incursion into conscious ordinary language. For instance, in his content analyses of the unconscious component of Hitler's ideology as expressed in published works, speeches, and secret writings, Koenigsberg states as his methodological premise that “the frequency with which a given idea or association appears … [reflects] the centrality of such an element within the framework of [the] belief-system” (p. ix).
La Barre (1962) notes the dynamic identity between culture and neurosis, if not psychosis, since the goal of both is to avoid examining those sacred premises that serve as defense-mechanisms. La Barre writes:
It is true that group fantasy confines and delimits our private psychoses, but if the culture of the group comes to resemble a psychosis itself, by a kind of folie à deux to the nth degree, then the group is worse off than when it started. In this unconscious and unwitting way, all social groups are in the long run either therapeutic, that is adaptive to a real world, or anti-adaptive. Man is like an existentialist spider who spreads out a moral net of symbolism over the void out of his own substance—and then walks upon it. But the final safety of the net depends always on the integrity and the soundness of the postulated points of reference to a real physical world (p. 67).
Historical groups, cultures, thrive on the very ambivalence they cannot rid themselves of. Paradoxically, the healthiest of groups is that which insists on less, rather than more, of ingroupiness, which demands less of the surrender of the self as the price for tenuous security. As Ebel writes, “What is personal is what, by definition, resists the ‘trends’ and ‘tendencies,’ the circumambient flow of the ‘society”’ (Ebel, 1980a). One can truly utter “we” and mean it—without that reservoir of rage and envy that would consume it—when one can truly utter “I” and mean it.
Ethnocentrism is the narcissism of the group-self, a supreme idealization of all within accompanied by a demonization of those “barbarous” tribes without. I suggest the following formula to describe the self/other boundary of group identity: If the inner space is sacred, then the outer space is profane.
Since sacred group-history is a species of shared autobiography writ large, to doubt one's history is to call into question his personal biography now displaced into an impersonal social drama. It is to uncover the mystery of group identity, a mystery whose ineffability and mystique—that is, its distortion as sacred memory—members of that group have much at stake in preserving. As Rappaport (1977) writes: “It is the group mystery that holds people together in it, and provides the basis for sustaining group fantasies of identification across generations” (p. 315).z
Conclusion: Beyond History
History is a society's temporal Rorschach about itself, one which it both designs and interprets. History is the folklore or mythology of group-time, the mythopoetic narrative of time's mystery, sung by each group's Orpheus to the tune by which it wishes to be enchanted. To understand the mystic sense of history is to understand the paradox of flow within eternal sameness. History is the flux of time within the sacred timeless truth: as it was in the beginning, is now, and forever shall be, symbiosis without end.
Novelty becomes tiresome yet prophetic expectation, as the Great Theme of history, is divined in the flow of events. One searches for the next expected and expectable variation which later can be cited as evidence for the immutability of the Theme. The great variety in history is remolded by the template of group-timelessness. Group-fantasy freezes history into ahistorical time, coercing reality into a recurrent projective scheme. History thus does indeed repeat itself, propelled by a group-fixation which is both re-presented at the level of social historical reality and acted-out.
The repetition compulsion ensures that the sine wave of projection and introjection will continue. The group-psychodrama enacted on the stage of history is not seen as a re-creation, a literal re-staging, of the inner world in the outer, but an event or an ongoing succession of events which confirm spectacularly from without one's inmost wishes and fears. History becomes the narrative of the vicious spiral of pathology experienced by the group.
Nothing of truly adaptive value is gained through group defenses against shared anxieties. Protection becomes a mutual “protection racket” from which no one must depart. The group must now protect itself from its own protection, for its defenses, like rituals, as much stimulate as allay those fears its members have about their bodies, their relationships, their childhoods, their mortality.
This paper has considered the psychological meaning of history, the function of history in the psychic economy. History has been approached as one among many ideological systems which humans have devised toward the management of ambivalence and anxiety. History has been discussed as a “super”-natural system whose source and latent subject is subconscious conflict and defense. Projective group-history is a way of avoiding personal history.
The ubiquity of historical “illusion” need not incline us to defend it. In coming to know what history is, what it is for, we come less to need its—our—self-imprisoning illusions about who and what we are. In needing less to lose ourselves in timelessness, we are able to find ourselves in the only time truly given to us. We become free enough, which is to say differentiated enough, to be critical of the legacy from the past in order to assess the requirements of the present.
In relinquishing history's enchantment, we gain greater selfhood, object love, and reality adaptation. In relinquishing the false eternity of group-immortality, we gain the real solidarity of standing together. Postoedipal man does not need mythic history.
Notes
That is, group history, myth, legend, and folklore are not merely analogous to the dream, symptom, fantasy, and screen memory of the individual (or patient). Instead they derive from the same psychogenetic source and serve the same psychodynamic function. To argue otherwise is to dichotomize between individual and group and come to the untenable conclusion that a group transcends the very people
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