Charles B. Strozier

Freud and His Followers

It is said that Freud and his circle put so much emphasis on understanding history, art, literature, religion, and culture generally because, in that early period, they lacked sufficient numbers of patients to discuss psychoanalytic issues among themselves with any degree of scientific rigor. Their real interests were clinical and theoretical, but the only “cases” at hand lay in history, politics, and art and literature.1 While true, the early Freudians were deeply committed to gaining an understanding of the hidden motives and deeper meanings of everything human. The world of the consulting room mattered in special ways (it was the laboratory), but the data it yielded lacked broad theoretical significance unless also applied to culture in the broadest sense. Applied psychoanalysis for the early Freudians was not the frosting on the cake it that it became in later years; everything hung on it.

Youth Violence and the Apocalyptic

This paper is a discussion of the apocalyptic themes in contemporary forms of youth violence, especially its totalism and end-of-the-world imagery. At Columbine High, in April 1999, two students chose the apocalyptic date of April 20, Hitlers birthday, to carry out their rampage. That violence connects with a long history of American fascination with the gun, and images of regeneration through violence itself grows out of an urban landscape of despair. The apocalyptic, however, is not simply the result of social crisis. We live with imagery of extinction and cannot fully trust a human future. The apocalyptic, in other words, itself evokes youth violence. These intersecting themes are illustrated with the case of Cliff.

Reflections on Leadership

This final chapter presents the authors’ reflections on leadership made during the four years of writing and editing this book. Some of the topics to be discussed are the question of psychological evidence, the ethical questions concerning psychohistorical studies of leadership, and the methodology of the behavioral and social sciences as it affects the nature of the evidence. We also consider the psychological qualities which enable a “good” leader to carry out his functions. Finally, we comment on the problems which leaders encounter in the nuclear age.

Leaders in Ancient Times

The story of Joseph is one of the most fascinating, detailed, and complex stories in the Bible. Although no direct archaeological evidence relates the Israelites to Egypt, it is assumed that the Israelites who emmigrated from Canaan (Palestine) to Egypt in search of a more fruitful land were the Hyksos, Semitic tribes who invaded Egypt in 1730 B.C. and ruled Egypt for 150 years.

Sigmund Freud and History

Freud’s own formal efforts at applied psychoanalytic work covered an enormous range after the early period of incubation. Only music did not interest him. Just two of his books touched directly on questions of leadership: Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) and, with William Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study (1966 [1932]).1 Leadership, if somewhat more broadly considered, however, was a major concern of Freud. His extensive theoretical writings on the Oedipus complex in a sense describe the psychological process of leading and following in a family. A study like that of Leonardo da Vinci in 1910 focuses on a major leader in the world of art. Totem and Taboo (1913) argues that the origins of civilization lay in the struggle with the clan leader of primitive cultures. Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) explores the complex mechanisms of guilt and repression in modern life that fuel the dynamics of mass behavior. And, finally, in his grand study of Moses, Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud returned at the end of his own life to a leader who helped shape the beginnings of western civilization.

The Growth of Psychohistory

Erikson’s Young Man Luther opened a whole new phase in psychohistory. It became a highly controversial and visible endeavor for the literate public: one New Yorker cartoon in the mid-1970s pictured the locked door of a psychiatric unit with the label “Psychohistorian” above a small window. Among professional historians, profound skepticism developed along with ambivalent curiosity. No convention program after about 1970 was worth its salt without one or more avowedly psychohistorical sessions. The leading historical journals began publishing articles that made clear their dependence on psychoanalytic theory. Interest in psychohistory among psychiatrists and psychoanalysts was less dramatic or intense and also less ambivalent. Psychoanalytic applications to history had had a longer established and more secure place; such applications now simply increased. In 1962, Bruce Mazlish published the first collection of psychohistorical essays, an approach to publishing in the field that has since become quite popular.1 Periodic reviews of the literature and assessments of the “state of the art” became de rigeur for anyone who claimed to be “in” psychohistory.2 Nearly everyone had studied the field to as far back as 1958, when Erikson published Young Man Luther and William Langer summoned historians to their “next assignment.” Some, however, especially psychoanalysts such as Heinz Kohut and Robert Lifton, took a broader perspective, and gradually historians, too, began to place psychohistory in a longer time frame.

Leaders in Ancient Times: Joseph, Plato, and Alcibiades

The story of Joseph is one of the most fascinating, detailed, and complex stories in the Bible. Although there is no direct archeological evidence that relates the Israelites to Egypt, it is assumed that the Israelites who emigrated from Canaan (Palestine) to Egypt in search of a more fruitful land were the Hyksos, Semitic tribes who invaded Egypt in 1730 BC and ruled Egypt for 150 years.

From Erik H. Erikson to Heinz Kohut: Expanding Theories of Leadership

Of all the people influenced by Freud, Erik Erikson most creatively bridged psychoanalysis and history. He began as an artist, but in the 1920s was drawn into analysis with Anna Freud and eventually graduated from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in the portentous year of 1933. On the boat coming to America shortly afterwards, Erikson shared an essay on Hitler with the diplomat and historian George Kennan, who helped him to translate it into English. In America, Erikson soon established his reputation as a child analyst and became acquainted with people like Margaret Mead. In the late 1930s and 1940s, he conducted a series of studies that culminated in his first book, Childhood and Society (1950). After that, his interests have always included both the clinical and the historical.

Lincoln and the Crisis of the 1850s: Thoughts on the Group Self

In 1858, Lincoln was a political figure little known outside of Illinois. For 4 years, he had vigorously opposed the prospect of slavery’s extension into the territories, which was made politically feasible with Stephen A. Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty that was introduced in the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854). Lincoln believed strongly by 1858 that Stephen Douglas was the principal spokesman for a disastrous set of policies dealing with issues that the country faced. The country’s founders, in Lincoln’s view, had reluctantly accepted slavery as a Southern institution. They recognized its existence and even validated its perpetuation with the three-fifths compromise. Such constitutional protection had justified federal laws governing the return of fugitive slaves for over half a century. It was thus illegal and unconstitutional to talk of abolition and the mobilization of a national effort to end the South’s peculiar institution.

Erik H. Erikson, Ego Psychology, and the Great Man Theory

Of all the people influenced by Freud, Erik Erikson most creatively bridged psychoanalysis and history. He began as an artist, but in the 1920s was drawn into analysis with Anna Freud and eventually graduated from the last class of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1933. On the boat coming to America shortly afterwards, Erikson shared his essay on Hitler with the diplomat and historian George Kennan, who helped him to translate it into English. In America, Erikson soon established his reputation as a child analyst and became acquainted with people like Margaret Mead. In the late 1930s and 1940s he conducted a series of studies that culminated in his first book, Childhood and Society (1950). Since then, his interests have always included both the clinical and the historical.1