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Norman Simms
Waikato University
> History: Science versus Art.
>
>
>1.0 Introduction to the Argument
> Having discussed these four separate aspects that constitute the
>dynamic version of History of Mentalities, I will turn my attention to a
>recent attempt to provide a scientific grounding for history. It is an
>endeavour which derives from a debate that is usually focused on
>Psychoanalysis, and the question of whether or not Freud's work should be
>considered an art or a science, or more precisely, whether Psychoanalysis
>can stand up to the rules of falsification, repeatability, and
>predictability that supposedly define modern science or if it is only a
>form of creative interpretation which at best offers elegant descriptions
>of particular individual case histories. Lurking not too far in the
>background, as well, is an agenda of debunking the idea of the
>unconsciousness as anything more than lack of attention or a momentary
>slippage of awareness. This is certainly related to a current trend in
>exposing case histories of Multiple-Personality Disorder as trickery or
>self-delusion. The example we shall look out has been presented by a
>German doctoral student whose thesis claims to provide statistical proof
>for Lloyd deMause's psychogenetic theory of history.
>
>1.1. Falsifiability
> The question of falsifiability is often given as the backbone of
>hard science, in that real science seeks to disprove its own evidence and
>keep testing its own premises, rather than to bolster up existing paradigms
>"by connecting the dots and filling in the blanks". A scientific theory
>must be able to be stated in such a way that it can be disproved by either
>the lack of evidence or the production of contrary evidence; it should
>never close off discussion, experimentation, or more parsimonious
>explanations for the phenomena it is concerned with. Insofar as the
>History of Mentalities is based on Psychohistory and the psychogenetic
>theory of human development falsifiable because it turns on the hard
>evidence of neuroanatomy and developmental psychology; it also draws on
>clinical experience and thus can generate a multiplicity of data from case
>studies by social workers, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists and
>psychoanalysts. However, it is conceded-and even asserted-that the
>information gained in these ways cannot be applied directly to historical
>persons, institutions, events, and artefacts.
>
>1.2. Repeatability
> The History of Mentalities is in its fullness a robust set of
>techniques of analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of persons,
>situations, and things which cannot be subject to repeatability precisely
>because they are unique historical data. Addition to being beyond any
>kind of scientific control or open to experimental variations, the primary
>data are both incomplete and embedded in resistant matrices. Thus, on the
>one hand, there is no way to construct or discover sufficiently close
>situations for the sake of comparison or contrast under varying conditions
>to test alternative explanations for motivations and consequences of
>specific actions, thoughts, feelings or perceptions.
> On the other hand, any description of the specific historical
>instance cannot stand on its own terms because, as we argued in the first
>part of this paper, "its own terms" are (a) part of a fluid continuum of
>change and development, (b) inadequate to the full contextual circumstances
>of both micro- and macro-history, including the histoire de longue dur�e
>and the subjective history of individuals, and (c) already always involved
>in conscious or unconscious tensions with hegemonic/counter-hegemonic
>forces in its own time and progressive/conservative forces in the times in
>the process of emerging. Moreover, the documents, imagery, artefacts and
>institutions of any particular group are almost always wilfully or
>inadvertently masking their true intentions, constituent elements, and both
>feared and desired outcomes.
>
>1.3 Predictability
> Nonetheless, there is a certain degree of predictability
>possible within the History of Mentalities which arises out of its
>interpretative methods of analogy and analysis. In the first instance,
>drawing from the anatomical, cognitive, and clinical evidence of
>Psychohistory and the psychogenetic theory of history, there are a series
>of possible developments predicted for the kinds of trauma experienced by
>individuals and groups under consideration and, once alerted to these
>possibilities, the historian of mentalities can then search for the
>hitherto missing, overlooked, or undervalued data. This new data may in
>itself require intense analysis and scrutiny under various perspectives of
>analysis before it yields sufficient probability as both a relevant portion
>of the missing picture that has been sketched out as a possible scenario
>consequent to the facts of individual or group abuse, for example, or be
>shown to be likely and apt for the historical circumstances otherwise
>verifiable. Only rarely will the data create a good enough match to close
>off other possible scenarios, but in many cases will sufficiently reduce
>the number of alternatives to present as a legitimate theory. It will then
>have to be further tested through its ability to explain prior and
>subsequent, as well as contextual acts, decisions, and cultural products.
> A second aspect of predictability works from the other side. It is
>not just that manifest evidence of a traumatic event predicts a series of
>possible psychogenetic consequences, but that a pattern of bizarre,
>irrational, self-destructive or otherwise inexplicable acts, decisions, or
>statements may be read symptomatically as the effect of some hitherto
>unperceived or inadequately appreciated event. Recognising the pattern of
>strange historical data as possibly analogous to the development of
>post-traumatic psychic disturbances in clinical studies, for instance, may
>alert the historian of mentalities to postulate-to predict-the existence of
>a number of causes in the life of the individuals or groups concerned. The
>prediction is not an automatic fit, of course, but only a tool of inquiry
>which then needs to be followed through by both re-examining the available
>primary documents, images, and artefacts for previously missing or misread
>facts, normally more clues and hints or traces of the predicted event; and
>then by new analyses and decoding of that material from new perspectives
>opened up by the suggested aetiology of those symptoms which first alerted
>the historian to some possible traumatic causation.
>
>1.4 Robust and Elegant Interpretations
> The History of Mentalities that is thus evolved by these methods
>will be valid insofar as it produces interpretations of persons, events,
>cultural achievements and individual biographies that are both robust and
>elegant. The explanations will be robust when they can attach themselves
>to the richness of already existing documentation, enhance that body of
>facts by bringing in new relevant data from materials contemporary and
>nearly contemporary with the subject being investigated, and provide
>sufficiently consistent and coherent analogies and connections to other
>circumstances in the same historical matrix. The robust explanation must
>prove itself in this way as factual, probable, and relevant as existing
>explanations generated by other modalities of historiography.
>It will be an elegant explanation moreover when it is capable of at once
>fulfilling the above robust conditions of historical probability and at the
>same time drawing together more diverse, apparently contradictory, or
>seemingly inexplicable other events, decisions, and articulations of
>cultural expression than available by other means. The elegant explanation
>should also point to probable lines of development from prior conditions
>and show how the evidence now woven together leads towards future evolution
>in social, political, artistic and other aspects of the historical group
>and its institutions.
>
>2.0 Testing the Case
> Rather than proving Lloyd deMause's psychogenetic theory of childhood by
>statistical analysis of a sampling of nineteen extant German-language
>autobiographies from the fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, Ralph
>Frenken's study itself can be disproved, not merely by questioning the
>sample taken for such analysis, but by psychohistorical technique and by
>the evidence of History of Mentalities. By assuming that the statistics
>prove the predictability of individual and group personality types, this
>German scholar seems to disclose the inadequacies of constructing
>statistical generalisations to explain complicated historical phenomena.
>Inadvertently, Frenken, in citing from the primary documents of the period
>in question, makes it more certain that the psychogenetic theory does not
>work as a grid of predictable progress from one mode of childrearing to the
>next, but instead as an optic that clarifies difficult problematics in the
>History of Mentalities.
> In other words, not only is the theory of psychogenetic history,
>which we have argued plays a major part in the formation of History of
>Mentalities, stronger than the methodology in this resum� of Frenken's
>doctoral dissertation, but the strengths of Psychohistory would be weakened
>by submission to the narrow, positivistic notion of "science" that is
>demonstrated here. As in the problem of the scientific proofs of Freud
>himself, the restrictive equation of science and statistics reveals itself
>as a form of denial and rejection of dynamic depth psychology. The
>strength of Freudian psychoanalysis comes from the intensity and acuteness
>of perceptions that occur from the examination of a few key case studies,
>with Freud's own self-scrutiny in works such as The Analysis of Dreams
>being of primary importance. As Freud and his immediate circle of
>followers had already demonstrated, the findings of the "science" were
>constantly being re-examined, redefined, and developed into new areas of
>human experience, providing a self-correcting and re-evaluating mechanism.
>In its latest phases, of course, Psychoanalysis has linked itself to
>Developmental Psychology and Neuroanatomy (e.g., Schore) and Cognitive
>Philosophy (e.g. Ey).
> From a different angle, the applicability of the psychogenetic
>insights to historical research arises, not from its paradigmatic charts
>and plotted date-lines, but from its aptness to explain contradictions,
>gaps, and deformations in the historical narrative of particular times,
>places, and groups of individuals. For this reason, History of
>Mentalities, as it also draws in the theories, methods, and insights of
>mentalities research, cultural anthropology and discourse analysis, becomes
>the over-arching science of history.
> Looking more closely at Frenken's study, it is possible to note
>other key weaknesses in his study which can help us assess the need to
>treat history-both Psychohistory and History of Mentalities-as scientific
>in a wider, more dynamic, and more dialectical sense. The first deficit
>discovered by the dissertation's attempt to prove deMause's central
>premises that follows notice of the small sample group of texts-even if it
>were widened to include the seventy-odd other Germanic autobiographies
>alluded to-the statistical play seems a form of special-pleading. That the
>autobiographies are not all uniform-there are Catholic, Protestant and
>converted individuals who write in different places for different
>reasons-also undermines the positivistic attempt. Without consideration of
>the conflicting mentalities-hegemonic and counter-hegemonic (to use
>Gramsci's terms)-the mental world (l'univers mental) of the age are not
>perceived, its internal mental machinery (l'outillage mental) overlooked,
>and what Eugen Cizek calls its "meta-values" (meta-valeurs) are glossed
>over as mere expressions of ideology. Moreover, the stripping down of each
>historical document to a few statistically relevant details for tabulation
>also robs the study of its robust grasp of cultural complexities and
>extenuating mental circumstances. Certainly, the statistical test confirms
>deMause in his broadest outlines, and even allows for a minor adjustment of
>dates of first appearance of intrusive modes of childrearing, but only in a
>very restricted intellectual and political zone of Europe during the
>crucial transition from medieval to Reformation mentalities.
> The second, perhaps more crucial, weakness in Frenken's work is his
>failure to pay attention to the generic nature of the documents he is
>using. He seems totally innocent of any form of Discourse Analysis.
>Particularly given that so much has already been written on the history and
>typologies of auto/biographical/confessional literature in these crucial
>centuries of transformation in European culture, it is a major
>disappointment to see no references at all to the work done by
>discourse-analysts on these different forms of self-expression and
>personal-constructions. Negative information and arguments ex silencio
>can, of course, be of great value to the psychohistorian, as can the
>hesitations, lapses, and screen-memories of individuals on the analyst's
>couch, yet only if-and this is the crucial point-there is an understanding
>of what was expected in such self-histories, what was permissible as
>evidence by different civil and legal institutions, and how language was
>felt to relate to external and internal realities.
> Bringing to bear the four aspects of the History of Mentalities, we
>can see that during the late Reformation in Western and Central Europe,
>introspective narratives were often written to patterns taught in religious
>exercises, and Puritans especially were searching in the experiences of
>daily life for both evidence of their own sinfulness and patterns of divine
>grace. But journalistic entries in the course of lived experience had
>different regulations than more formal reflective account-taking, or
>eulogistic praise or dispraise at the close of a life were not the same in
>essence. Nor were the confessions of Tridentine Catholicism the same as
>public witnessing in Calvinist churches. Much water flowed under the
>bridges of history between Augustine's self-flagellating Confessions as
>paradigm of self-witnessing and Rousseau's Confessions as masturbatory
>self-construction.
> In addition to his na�ve approach to the documents he is studying,
>Frenken also has a rather limited notion of the family unit. This is not
>just a condition of the evidence which provides little direct reference to
>the fundamental caregiver-infant dyad ("the external womb") in the vital
>first three years of life, but also the avoidance of accepting the
>non-nuclear trinity of father-mother-child as a later bourgeois invention,
>although of course, at various times, and in various constructions, it was
>idealised in the Christian concept of the Holy Family. The texts studied
>by Frenken show that families during the fourteenth, fifteenth and
>sixteenth centuries in Central European, German-speaking lands were
>fragmentary, amorphous, and unsteady, with no surety, from the child's
>point of view, that either parent would be there the next day or week or
>month or year, that siblings, older and younger, would survive the season,
>and that the home one lived in would be the place one would see tomorrow.
>Multi-generational families, with serial mothers and fathers, new and lost
>brothers and sisters, as the child was shifted about, rather than giving
>any sense of security, created a state of almost constant anxiety and
>terror.
> As Frenken shows, too, it was often the father who oversaw the
>early education and disciplining of the child, not the mother, a fact which
>puts the absence of descriptions of earlier periods of relationship to the
>nurse-whether birth-mother, servant, or more distant relative-highly
>problematic, not subject to easy categorisation on the vital scale of
>progressive emergence of more infant-centred practices. Indications show,
>from the kind of material Frenken does not examine, that care of the child
>from about three years old, was the charge of the father in Jewish
>households, and that this occurred from at least the twelfth century in
>European culture. If that is so, then, further, we have perhaps to back
>off from assuming that all people in a given social, political and
>geographical area share essential patterns of childhood, at the same time
>as it is important to recognise that proximity in time and space, mediated
>by asymmetrical power relations, does cause some overlapping and indeed, at
>times, similarity of external appearance. But the specifics of historical
>"facts" will be found only when we turn from a statistical analysis of
>superficial analogies and similar appearances to the inner dimensions of
>reality. Thus, it is more probable, that the various child-rearing
>modalities, like the consequent psychoclasses, can stand in a variety of
>relationships to one another, not just hegemonic-to-counter-hegemonic, but
>also in regressive-progressive developments, as would seem to have occurred
>at several times between Jewish and Christian communities during the course
>of the religious wars, persecutions, and civic revolutions of this
>historical period. For the Jewish communities in German-speaking lands,
>many other factors came into play, such as the immigration of significant
>numbers of Sephardic refugees from the Iberian expulsion or the
>restrictions on trade and areas of habitation during the strife of the
>Reformation. The Jewish situation is not dominant: it puts into question,
>however, easy generalisations, and forces the historian to look beyond
>surfaces and statistics to specifics.
> Finally, Frenken's categorisation of these few German-language
>autobiographies simply elides too many other major factors. For instance,
>Frenken mentions the fact that, as highly articulate middle class writers,
>despite some spread of social origins, may not be typical and the evidence
>displayed in setting out a time-scale that generally proves the
>psychogenetic sense of progress does not hold in itself, but is rather
>supported by the theory. By this I mean, that Frenken's charts and
>timelines are constructed to prove deMause and therefore his evidence has
>been selected because the student has been alerted to the very kinds of
>details psychogenetic theory considers significant, with the literary
>genre, the other details of the mental climate, and the psychological
>contexts of the works put aside as irrelevant for this statistical test.
>On the other hand, turning to a study which takes a more philosophical look
>at the same problematic period in European history, we find the
>psychoanalyst's insights alerting the writer to the inner dimensions of the
>individuals and groups involved, but then lacking in a way to explain why
>particular personality types seem to become dominant and influential during
>the late Reformation. Thus, in reading Erich Fromm's The Fear of Freedom
>(1942), I am struck by how much it cries out for-indeed, seems to open the
>textual space for the insertion of--deMause's psychogenetic theory:
> The rules for confessors showed a great understanding of the
>concrete situation of the individual and gave recognition to subjective
>individual differences. They did not treat sin as the weight by which the
>individual should be weighted down and humiliated, but as the human frailty
>for which one should have understanding and respect. (p. 62).
> What Fromm says of Luther's Protestantism requires more than the
>addition of those insights which Erik Erikson's psychobiography seems to
>have made available by illuminating the private, inner experiences of the
>great theologian:
>By not only accepting his own insignificance but by humiliating himself to
>the utmost, by giving up every vestige of individual will, by renouncing
>and denouncing his individual strength, the individual could hope to be
>acceptable to God�. if you completely submit, if your accept your
>individual insignificance, then the all-powerful God may be willing to love
>you and save you. (p. 69)
> This is a state of mind collectively felt and not due to the
>singular effects of one man's upbringing, and therefore asks that the
>historian seek out evidence for shifts in childrearing practice that were
>exacerbated by and in many ways constructed in response to the bitter
>uncertainties of the break up of the Christian-Latin synthesis we know as
>the Middle Ages.
>Even more so, for Calvin and his followers, Fromm's comments require the
>elucidation of not just psychogenetic data but the whole repertoire of the
>History of Mentalities:
>There are two kinds of people-those who are saved and those who are
>destined to eternal damnation�.This principle implies that there is no
>solidarity between me, since the one factor which is the strongest basis
>for human solidarity is denied: the quality of man's fate. (p. 76)
> Put in to this study of the sixteenth century in German-speaking
>lands the changes in the way people felt about their parents, their
>siblings and themselves, and their anxieties about the integrity of the
>body and the parameters of the emotional environment, and perhaps the
>philosophical essay gives you a more solid proof of the psychogenetic
>theory than Freken's statistics. But neither a general philosophical
>argument's such as Fromm's, nor a positivistic set of statistics such as
>Frenken's, can on their own or even interleaved with one another properly
>lead to understanding of the transformations in mentalities during the
>break-up of Catholic feudalism and the emergence of Protestant capitalism,
>though obviously they would provide a complementary text/countertext. Each
>on its own is reductive, Fromm dealing with broad generalisations, Frenken
>presenting denuded and decontextualized facts. Together they suggest a
>deeper, more psychohistorical dimension to the history of the Reformation,
>but that suggestion has to be followed through many other layers and
>dimensions of discursive and anthropological analysis.
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