Psychological History

Psychological History

Far less well known than the sociology of knowledge is the field of psychological history by which I do not mean either the history of psychology (a fascinating field in itself) or so-called “psychohistory,” which is the application of a modern (and discredited) psychological theory (psychoanalysis) to the past.

“Psychological history,” which is also indebted to the social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, requires that the historian recreate the social and individual psychology of an era from the standpoint of the evidence concerning its historical “actors.” That is to say that the evidence comes first, and the social and individual psychology of the era is then constructed from it, not the other way around in which a modern psychological “theory” (Freudianism, Jungianism, Adlerianism, etc.) is imposed on the evidence, which is then manipulated to fit the theory.

Unfortunately, “psychological history” has never caught on, perhaps because one of its founders, J.H. Van Den Berg, unfortunately decided to call it “metabletics.” For examples of “psychological history,” some better than others, see Van Den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man: Introduction to an Historical Psychology (1956), Things: Four Metabletic Reflections (1970), and Divided Existence and Complex Society: An Historical Approach (1974). Also see Donald M. Lowe, History Of Bourgeois Perception (1982) and The Body in Late-Capitalist USA (1995) and the numerous works of Michel Foucault.

It is my position that a combination of the sociology of knowledge and psychological history creates a unified methodology for the history of perception that is ideally suited to avoid the historical sins of anachronism and reductionism.

Success in reconstructing the intersubjective reality of past cultures can only be judged by the results. Here is an example from Lowe's Bourgeois Society:

"Newspapers had a different perceptual impact on the reader than the printed book. Unlike the linear development of a plot or an argument in the book, the concurrent reporting of news from different parts of the world made newspapers a mosaic of unrelated events. Newspapers contracted time to the instantaneous and the sensational, expanded space to include anything from everywhere. The present became much more diverse and complex, no longer containable within a single chronological framework. And the reader had to provide the connection between the different news items."

Another example from Vandenberg's Changing Nature, more relevant to the present inquiry:

"Anyone who believes that the miracle is a nonhuman, extrahuman, sacred affair has placed it such a distance that he need not worry about its untimely return – a return, moreover, which he would think highly unlawful. He has made the miracle an attribute of God – although it is obviously an attribute of man. God does not believe. To believe is our affair; we believe, and it is by our belief that the world becomes a creation, it is by our belief that God becomes present, present in the only place where we can rightly speak of His presence or His absence: in the world of substantial things, in our world. When these things give evidence of His presence, then a miracle is taking place.

"It will not happen at random. One can hardly imagine God, in a playful mood, to step on earth occasionally, to do a few things against the laws of nature, and then, just as unpredictably, return to his own domain (which cannot be anything but an as yet unexplored corner of the Universe). God’s absence or presence cannot be compared with the absence or presence of a meteor, which comes from an undefined infinity, becomes visible for a few moments, and disappears again into infinity. There must be sense in God’s becoming visible. His visibility is the nearness between man and man. There is no other nearness. When God is with us, He does not appear as a transparent ghost in the realm of the dead. He stands face to face with us as an acquaintance, a friend, a wife, a husband, or a child.

"One cannot think too 'naturally' about miracles. . . . And one cannot think too humanly about [them] either. When Jesus Christ came to Nazareth, He 'could there do no mighty work.' Jesus was not surprised by His lack of power, which, like a modern landscape, left Him no opening for his supernatural interference; but “He marveled because of their unbelief.” Our belief is the condition of the miracle. Without our belief, apparently no miracle can happen; the miracle is present in our belief, it is the habitual state of things."