If You Hired a Historian as Your Therapist

As I argued in the previous post, historians have a far superior method of analyzing human motivation than psychoanalysts do. The obvious conclusion from this is that historians should step in and offer themselves as professional psychologists. There are millions of people out there not achieving their personal goals in life, whether in business, love, or in just being happy. Many of these people are at present spending thousands of dollars lying on the couches of psychoanalytic therapists, as they try to pierce the veil of their own subconscious to explain their failings. Considering the poor job market for historians, I am sure many of my fellow graduate students would jump at the chance to apply their skills in dealing with historical figures to help real live present-day people with their problems. Of course, the psychiatric board would object, demand that we receive licenses from them, and refuse to give them to us, but that is just a matter of them being a special interest group.

So what might it be like to have a historian as one's personal therapist? The goals of such therapy would be different from traditional psychoanalysis. For our historian therapist, the purpose of treating his patient would be to rationally examine their goals in life, the actions they have taken to achieve them, the rational reasons why such actions might have failed, and how better to rationally pursue their goals in the future. Since we are applying the historical method, there would be a radical de-emphasis on talking to the patient. As historians, we value written documents over personal memory. So, after an initial consultation with the patient to discuss their specific goals in therapy, the patient would turn over all relevant documents such as letters, e-mails, and text messages (living in the twenty-first century is going to be a big help with this) over to the historian therapist for study. Our historian therapist would then proceed by himself to analyze these documents to get a sense of the patient and their motivation while keeping in contact with the patient to receive biographic info to help place everything in its right context. Once our historian therapist is satisfied with the information he has he can bring in the patient for the actual therapy. Proceeding on the assumption that the patient has acted from consistent rational motivations, our historian therapist will discuss the logical possibilities over with his patient. The starting point is going to be the patient's motives as he understands them, considering that he is the one with the best knowledge of his own mind. Our historian therapist will challenge his patient by pointing out contradictions between what the patient claims and his actions as they appear from the documentary evidence and suggest other possible motives more consistent with the evidence at hand.

It is here that our historian therapist is likely to get into trouble. Therapists, as employees of their own patients, are dependent upon the goodwill of their patients and therefore need to create "safe" environments and offer flattering explanations that will appeal to the patient so that the patient will continue to employ them. This is one more reason why this whole psychoanalytic field is invalid as a means of gaining actual knowledge. Historians usually have the advantage of dealing with dead people and therefore we have the luxury to be as critical as we wish. Like psychoanalysts, we do not judge our subjects but attack and demonstrate that the subject was not as virtuous as they claimed is a basic part of the historian's task. You identify your source's agenda and ignore anything it tells you that supports this agenda; on the flip side, you accept as absolute truth anything that goes against the agenda. This creates a relationship between historians and their sources more akin to that of police interrogating a subject than a therapist with a patient.

Sigmund Freud argued that, since there is much in psychoanalysis that a patient would be loathe to accept, it is necessary to create a process in which the patient comes to the proper conclusions on their own and not as the opinion of the therapist. Our historian therapist might be able to do something similar. He can teach the patient about the historical method and invite him to apply it to the events of his own life through the analysis of documents that he wrote. If nothing else, a commitment to reason and using it as a tool of self-analysis should do wonders for any patient's mental well-being.         

The Historical Method Versus Psychoanalysis

Founded in the nineteenth century, psychoanalysis has proven to be one of the most dominant fields in modern life. Far beyond a means of treating mentally troubled individuals, psychoanalysis today is critical for modern philosophy, literature, and even law. Put broadly psychoanalysis is the belief that human beings are dominated by an irrational subconscious and that by becoming aware of this subconscious, usually by engaging in a dialogue with a professional psychoanalytical therapist, one can put a stop to many of the undesirable results of this subconscious. In the public mind, psychoanalysis will forever be associated with the specific theories of Sigmund Freud such as the subconscious Oedipus complex, the ego, and the id, even if in practice the field has moved on to other theories of the subconscious.

This may sound radical but I reject psychoanalysis. If people feel they benefit from it they are certainly free to spend their own money on therapy. If there is historical evidence that a writer made use of psychoanalysis then a literary analysis should take that into account. But under no circumstance should psychoanalysis be used to form the basis of any public policy or law. Now, what basis do I have for taking such a stance? I have no formal training in psychology. What I do have is my training as a historian. History like psychoanalysis is a theory of human motivation. As a historian, I try to figure out the who, what, when, and where of human events, but most importantly I consider why people do things. That being said, the historical method is quite different from psychoanalysis both in its methodology and in the sorts of conclusions it is liable to come to. 

The historical method starts with the assumption of rationality in the sense that it is assumed that people act at a given moment according to set rules. This is not to say that all or even most people act rationally, just that the only type of motivation that can be explored is the rational. Everything else quickly descends into a laundry list of actions that can only be explained by capricious whim. (If historians and psychoanalysts agree on anything it is that anyone who says they did something "just because" is not being honest and is hiding something.) At its heart, psychoanalysis comes from the assumption that human beings are fundamentally irrational and that rational action is a pretense to cover up the irrational desires, which, through the controlling power of the subconscious, are the true driving force behind the person. Sticking to reason would not in of itself eliminate psychoanalysis. In a sense, psychoanalysis does in the end bind itself to a form of rationality in the sense that we can expect the person to act consistently according to the parameters set by the subconscious.

This brings us to a second major difference in methodology, the attitude toward the subconscious. The historian, unlike the psychoanalyst, focuses his attention on the conscious. We assume that people, as rational beings, have clearly thought out rational motives and will consciously act to carry out their goals in the best way their reason can conceive for them. To be clear, being rational does not mean being moral. People may very well steal out of greed or murder to gain revenge (a demonstration to others that it is not in their rational interest to wrong them). This approach to human behavior is founded upon Occam's Razor, that we look for the simplest explanation and do not bring assumptions into play unless they solve something specific that cannot be solved with the assumptions at hand. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is based on a willingness to ignore Occam's Razor. Instead of starting with the conscious rational motives openly at hand and only turning to consider the possibility that something else might be at play when a conscious rational motive cannot be discovered, the psychoanalyst starts with the assumption that the motivation in question is irrational and subconscious. He then seeks, much in the same way as the religious fundamentalist, to support his conclusions by lining up only the evidence that works in his favor and insist that there can be no other interpretation. 

Now the supporter of psychoanalysis might respond to this that it is all well and good for the historian to talk about rational motivation when it comes to leading statesmen, but the psychoanalyst, almost by definition, with people who are not well and who clearly are not behaving rationally. My response is that if reason is a good enough causal explanation for people who are heads of states then it is good enough for people whose only claim to insanity is to seek help from a psychoanalyst.

If I believe in the validity of the historical method as a means of analyzing human behavior then I need to support it all the way. If this method is valid for understanding early modern European heads of state then it must be valid for stressed-out depressed graduate students. If I would not accept psychoanalysis as a means of analyzing historical figures (and historians above any group involved in the humanities are resistant to psychoanalysis) then I must reject psychoanalysis as well when it comes to people living today.                  

Female Spirituality in the Late Middle Ages and the Search for a Feminine Christianity (Part II)

Rudolph Bell: Holy Anorexia

In Holy Anorexia Rudolph Bell offers a psychoanalytical analysis of the phenomenon of extreme fasting in the vita of Christian holy women. This work is based on the case studies of 170 women recognized as saints, blessed, venerables or servants of God who lived from 1200 to the present in Italy. More than half of them displayed what Bell would classify as anorexia. Bell makes the highly provocative comparison between medieval women fasting, holy anorexia, and the relatively modern phenomenon of anorexia nervosa.[1] Anorexia nervosa is a psychological disorder disproportionally affecting upper class teenage and young adult white women. Its chief symptoms are that the affected person takes an extreme interest in dieting and losing weight. This results in the person abhorring food and refusing to eat. When forced to eat the person will simply regurgitate what they ate. If not treated, the person is likely to starve to death.

While Bell makes use of Freud, who understood anorexia nervosa as a food/sex oral fixation, Bell’s understanding of anorexia is based primarily on the work of Hilde Bruch. According to Bruch, anorexia nervosa gives women autonomy and a sense of identity. The act of engaging in anorexic behavior can be seen as a dialectic between the desire for control and the meekness in which the girl was raised. The girl has a desire for control but feels guilty about it. The result is that she acts out her desire for control through the construction of meekness and obedience:

Now she will excel, in an intensely personal contest of her choice, over her feelings and drives. She will be an individual, not a daughter or a pupil. She does not seek to goad her parents into opposing her and resorts to silence, deception, secretiveness, and outright lying to avoid having them enter her contest, her world. Good girl that she is, she goes willingly to the doctor, very calmly explains that nothing is wrong, and dutifully agrees to do just as he says. She refuses rewards for eating heartily and willingly accepts punishments for leaving too much on her plate. In the bathroom she practices sticking her fingers down her throat and regurgitating quietly, so that no one will be disturbed.[2]

Bell wishes to draw certain parallels to female ascetics. He portrays Catherine of Siena as a young virginal anorectic whose behavior eventually killed her. Veronica Giuliani is the recovered anorectic and Angela of Foligno is the anorectic who married and had children:

In both instances [holy anorexia and anorexia nervosa] anorexia begins as the girl fastens onto a highly valued societal goal (bodily health, thinness, self-control in the twentieth century/spiritual health, fasting, and self-denial in medieval Christendom). Her peers, and especially her parents, pursue this goal with only marginal success, more often than not honoring it only in the breach. She, by contrast, emerges from a frightened, insecure, psychic world superficially veiled by her outwardly pleasant disposition to become a champion in the race for (bodily/spiritual) perfection. Her newly won self-esteem and confidence initially receive the approbation of those she depends upon – parents, teachers, counselors – causing her to deepen her self-denial pattern until it takes over as the only source of her sense of self. Anorexia becomes her identity, and ultimately the self-starvation pattern continues beyond her conscious control.[3]

For Bell the moral, in the cases of both medieval holy anorexics and modern suffers of anorexia nervosa, is that ultimately these women are not in control of their lives. The very act of fasting is itself a submission to the demands of the outside world. For modern anorexics that outside world is that of a secular middle class. For medieval women that outside world was the Christian patriarchy of the Church.

One could argue that several of the people that Bell refers to were older than the usual age for anorexics. For example, Angela of Foligno was nearly forty when she began her career as a visionary. Also Bell seems to automatically assume that whenever any of these women died young it was because of anorexia. It was quite common for people, during the Middle Ages, to die young. There were lots of ways for this to happen without the recourse to anorexia. My real problem with Bell is that his work is built on the assumption that it is possible to understand extreme asceticism amongst European women in the later Middle Ages outside of the context of late medieval Catholicism. If these women really were no different than modern day anorexics then the fact that they, or the men who wrote their vitas, chose to formulate their situation within the context of late medieval Catholic theology is of incidental interest at best. In this sense Bell’s work is highly ahistorical.

Despite the basic flaws inherent within the very premise of the book, Bell manages to produce a credible work of scholarship. This is a line of scholarship that probably had to be pursued, if for no other reason then so it could be put to rest. I do not believe that anyone could have framed this issue in a better way than how Bell did it.

[1] The first recording case is from late the seventeenth century.
[2] Bell, Holy Anorexia pg. 18.
[3] Ibid pg. 20.