151 - Re-Imaging Psycho-History

"In the writing of history, the discipline required is that of constantly guarding against the temptation of treating the datum at hand, whether it be a document, an artifact, a statistical chart, a tombstone epitaph, or whatever, in its literal givenness as if it exhausted that in which the historian is most deeply interested ... With very few exceptions, such as Charles Williams' The Descent of the Dove, a truly imaginative history of Christianity is yet to be written. "

Re-Imaging Psycho-History
By James B. Wiggins

HISTORY shares a signally important common denominator with myth-both are expressed in stories, both manifest narrative thinking. It may, therefore, be fruitful in reflecting on both myth and history to explore the originating impulse in consciousness which expresses itself in telling stories. James Hillman has observed: "History may be taken as one of the ways the soul muses, one of the ways in which it psychologically reflects life."¹ Hillman's comment is a challenge, in the midst of his own explorations of myth in its psychological dimensions, to explore history from that vantage point. Myth and history are not the same inasmuch as they reflect different fantasies. Both, however, spontaneously find expression as narratives.

I

Insufficient attention has been given to narrative in the historian's work. To be sure, there have been exceptions. One thinks of Trevelyan writing in 1913: "History is, in its unchangeable essence, 'a tale' . . . the art of history remains always the art of narrative."² And so the lucid expositions of the contemporary historian, H. Stuart Hughes: "Historical prose has always consisted primarily of narrative. Whether we try to bring history closer to social science or to give greater scope to the wanderings of its artistic fancy ... The main business, we are reminded, is narrative ... As its

James B. Wiggins is Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. The original, and longer, version of this paper was presented to the "Myth Seminar" at the 1974 meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), Washington, D. C.. under the title: "Myth as Narrative: Remembering Creatively. " Dr. Wiggins is the author (with J. Bruce Burke) of Foundations of Christianity (1970).
¹ James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 126.
² Fritz Stern (ed.), Varieties of History. Pt. II, I "Clio Rediscovered" (New York: World Publishing Co., 1956), p. 236.

152 - Re-Imaging Psycho-History

very name keeps recalling to our minds, history is story."³ Finally, an exemplary philosopher of history plumbs the point:

I find it astonishing that no critical philosopher of history has yet offered us a clear account of what it is to follow or to construct an historical narrative. And yet such an account is plainly essential to any successful answers to more complicated questions regarding either the nature or the vindication of historical thinking.⁴

But from few quarters does one find more hopeful signs of a recovery of narrative in relation to history than from the direction of "psycho-history." Even there, however, some modifications are in order. Might it be possible to re-image psycho-history in order to underscore the centrality of story in historiography? And in so doing might not the alternative modes of historiography be challenged to rethink this crucial matter? Consequently might not the "historical" religions (and in this case they are not historical) require a somewhat different exploration than critical history has often allowed?

William L. Langer, at the American Historical Association, gave official sanction to the courtship in his presidential address in 1957, titled "The Next Assignment." He called upon historians to be more aware of the potential in conjoining psychoanalysis and historiography. Since then Bruce Mazlish, Hans Meyerhoff, Erik Erikson, Robert J. Lifton, Norman O. Brown, et al., have demonstrated in various ways how fruitful a wedding may be. H. Stuart Hughes has distilled from the conversation the following:

[Psychoanalysis] has shown us that we historians have been right all along in stressing individuality and the unique quality of personal experience ... The individual consciousness is our final datum, the bedrock of what we know ... Both [psychoanalysis and history] believe in the radical subjectivity of human understanding ... Both yearn to escape from the ... double confinement of the investigator's mind and of that other mind (whether of the historical actor or analysand) with which he is trying to bring his own consciousness into sympathetic response.⁵

In both processes, psychoanalysis and historical accounting, the primary data are those experience expressions which are constituitive of life stories. When the historian writes, a narrative emerges; when the psychoanalytic process is terminated there remains a case history, that is, a narrative of the process. What we need to explore, then, is what sort of understanding emerges through prose which is primarily narrative and what processes in thinking give rise to narrative.

II

Memory is the crux of the matter, I believe. History is sometimes described as an attempt at giving expression to a composite memory,

³ H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and as Science (New York: Harper, 1964), pp. 68f.
⁴ W. B. Gaillie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), p. 9. Emphasis added.
⁵ Hughes, op. cit., p. 63, passim.

153 - Re-Imaging Psycho-History

a transcending of the limitations of discrete memories as preserved in documents which provide accounts of the event or period under consideration by cross reference to other such documentary memory deposits. But the assumptions regarding memory and its functions in such reports are often naive in the extreme. The workings of memory have been better exposited by thinkers familiar with the psychoanalytical process. Hillman puts it succinctly:

Freud began his talking cure by asking patients to follow one basic rule: to let their souls speak without inhibition.... When they thus abandoned voluntary control and the intelligibility of understanding, their association led them into memoria. Analysis begins with memory and its expression in speech.⁶

Beginning in this way, Freud made a momentous discovery.

Memory seemed plainly to be a repository of past events ... but on closer scrutiny these events turned out to be not actualities but fantasies. In the world they had not happened at all, yet they happened in the memory. Memory ... was not only a storehouse of what had happened. It also had a fantasy aspect that affected present and future. To things that had never existed and events that had never happened, memory could give the quality of remembrance, the feeling that they had existed, had happened. Thus memory was truly not bound by time or place.⁷

Freud was not happy about his discoveries regarding memory, Nor, we suspect, are historians. Invoking the texts of Plato in the Meno dialogue or Augustine in his Confessions will not likely make this uncontrolled aspect of memory more palatable. For modern historians have methodologically supposed it to be the case that they should and could bring memory under rational and volitional control. As a corollary, the controlled rationality of the authors of documents upon which historians depend is often assumed. Historians are applauded for the degree to which they "have command" of their data. Patients in analysis are often criticized and categorized as neurotic when they apparently do not have their memories under control. But, of course, willing the memory to be purged does not make it so. And historians, similar to patients in analysis, are unable-thank goodness-to prevent the flashes of intuitive insight, welling up from memoria, from enlivening their narrative accounts. Of course historians "remember" more than the so-called "objective data" will support in their narrative accounts. For, as John Lukacs happily put the point, the memory is not a camera, it is a darkroom.

Hillman writes that "Memoria has the reality of a fundamental power of the soul. It needs no empirical proof."⁸ But this observation, which Plato and Augustine would have regarded as self-evident, was very recently lost sight of. In the nineteenth century, Hillman asserts, "we lost our imaginal ego, the ego which speaks for this aspect of the

⁶ Hillman, op. cit., p. 169.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ Ibid., p. 172.

154 - Re-Imaging Psycho-History

soul [memoria]. Instead, we identified wholly with the rational, volitional ego. Memoria became unconscious."⁹ The implication is clear for modern historiography. The empirically verifiable memory traces-data of whatever sort-to which historians typically give greatest credence are methodologically confined to the expressions of a radically truncated memory. They leave much of what matters most in human experience unexplored, and even such materials as do surface from that deep memory are frequently treated as evidence of neuroses, rather than treasured as sources of insight. History, like many forms of psychology, is in danger of losing soul for want of an adequate acknowledgment of and openness to memoria. The saving vestige, however, may lie in the narrative form in which history finds expression.

Why? Narrative implicitly aims at wholeness. This holistic impulse could never be fulfilled in quantitative terms, by assembling every last datum which could conceivably be relevant to account for any particular event or series of events. Rather, its holistic impulse comes to expression in the rich over-determination of its language, which narrative not only permits but evokes from a story-teller. It is not simply that they tell stories that potentially give import to historians; rather, it is how they tell them. And the "how" is not primarily a matter of rhetorical technique, regardless of the importance of technique. It is a question of the openness of the historian to memoria, the foundation of which is imagination. Indeed, when imagination is given its due, even the question of how a story is told is superseded. It becomes rather a question of "where," where one imaginatively places one's images and symbolic utterances. In which configuration of associations and resonances does one's accounts of events become transformed? It is not even, finally, a question of accuracy with regard to "when" that marks the great historian. The establishment of chronology, regardless of its importance, is preliminary to the deeper responsibilities and opportunities of the historian, just as is the "how." By giving voice to narrative historians transcend the "how" of fact gathering and the "when" of establishing chronology and enter into the realm of their art proper.

This observation regarding the artistic function of historians has tended to be underestimated ever since Aristotle contrasted poetry with history. But it must be mentioned at the outset of discussing narrative in relationship to memory and imagination precisely because, in a tradition older than Aristotle, Plato had argued in behalf of the divine origin of the soul. If memoria and imaginatio are seen as proper functions of the soul, then through them we have traffic with the gods inasmuch as soul (psyche) is one of them. Such an assertion seems to accord well with the narrative form of myths which are, even in popular views, held to include stories of the doings of the gods. But

⁹ Ibid., p. 173.

155 - Re-Imaging Psycho-History

what, it may be asked, has such an assertion to do with historical narrative?

The clue is to be found in the memory of history's having a muse. The Muses were nine lovely sisters, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, Memory. According to Hesiod's account of the Muses: "They were all of one mind, their hearts are set upon song and their spirit is free from care. He is happy whom the Muses love." Each of the nine, as their activities became differentiated, was in the service of one of the arts, which, along with dance, epic poetry, love-poetry, lyric poetry, etc., included astronomy and history, the Muse of which was Clio. It is recorded by Hesiod that one day the nine Muses appeared to him and they said, "We know how to speak false things that seem true, but we know how, when we will, to utter true things." In the estimate of the Greeks, to be touched by the Muses, any or all, was to be counted sacred beyond the attainment of any priest-so highly were the Muses regarded. The art of history is no lowly aspiration. This glance at the story of the Muses was a necessary detour before our next step in exploring historical narrative.

III

The appearance of narrative in historical accounts, more and more checkered as they have recently become by all sorts of "authenticating data" ranging from statistical charts, to maps, to demographic tables (that is, the trappings of quanto-history), is typically regarded as a shift to the mode of interpretative expression. Such an estimate misses the point that narrative is the form, and even in some very deep sense the substance in which the historian's presentation is offered. In taking recourse to, or, better, in allowing narrative to express itself, historians remain within their heritage and deserve their birthright-as artists whose medium is language and whose expression is literature. To forget or to overlook this is to miss a crucial point.

The historian is not unique in this. The psychologist, who, it might be allowed, sometimes encounters Psyche, often begins analysis with the words: "Tell me about it." What is required is an eat attuned to hearing one snatch of a patient's memory and then another as all figuring into some story or another. Hillman puts it as having the ears to hear "case material" as a tale.¹⁰ By an almost precise analogy I believe that historians must have sensibilities so attuned as to be able to hear and envision the data they collect as a tale or a story. But such sensibility training is difficult to come by. The strategy proposed by many among the current spate of psychohistory theorists is one which almost invariably turns upon or to Freudian assumptions. Perhaps a more promising direction is to be found in the works of Jung and certain Jungian inspired thinkers such as James Hillman and David L. Miller. In these instances the psyche's inextricable involvement with

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 193.

156 - Re-Imaging Psycho-History

mythology is presupposed. Historians who have caught a vision of the possibilities inherent in a collusion between psychology and history may find it fruitful to start with a study of Jung's writings rather than Freud's. But this bias needs amplification.

In his autobiography, Jung time and again reiterates the importance of "story" to his thought and work. Even though it is the case that de facto historians have consistently told stories as their mode of expression, what one detects in many a reflection on historiography by historians is a sense of inferiority for telling stories, often coupled with a longing for some way of being less vulnerable to criticism from their more empirically inclined colleagues in other disciplines. What some depth psychologists have had to fight their way through to, namely, the legitimacy of telling tales as expressions of their creative work, historians have often been embarrassed by. This essay expresses the conviction that historians, in-so-far as they have been the instruments of narrative expression, should celebrate that and imaginatively reflect upon the inherent opportunity presented by this narrative heritage.

Mircea Eliade has given currency to the phrase "the terror of history" in his rigorous distinction between myth and history. His position presupposes that the fall into historical consciousness out of mythic modes of perception inevitably leads to the impasse of experiencing events in time as meaningless. The one safeguard he offers is his conviction that:

It is only by presupposing the existence of God that he [the modern man and/or the Christian] conquers, on the one hand, freedom (which grants him autonomy in a universe governed by laws ... ) and, on the other hand, the certainty that historical tragedies have a transhistorical meaning, even if that meaning is not always visible for humanity in its present condition. Any other situation of modern man leads, in the end, to despair.¹¹

This view is predicated upon his view that modern man has abandoned "the paradise of archetypes and repetitions."¹² The thrust of my insistence upon the importance of narrative in the thought of the historian, not to mention other groups of major practitioners of narrative, such as novelists and certain depth psychologists, indicates that it may be a premature judgment to hold that modern man has abandoned mythic consciousness.

In fact, Eliade has himself noted that many people today, though chronologically living in modernity, have hardly abandoned modes of mythic consciousness. This observation underscores a recurrent historiographical problem, that chronology and psychology are by no means concurrent, thus such assertions as "they were 'throwbacks,' " and "he was ahead of his time." But even more to the point, in a little noticed article published fourteen years after the original ap-

¹¹ Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959), p. 162.
¹² Ibid.

157 - Re-Imaging Psycho-History

pearance of Le Mythe de l'eternel retour, Eliade wrote:

Modern man, fallen under the domination of Time and obsessed by his own historicity, should try to "open himself" to the World by acquiring a new dimension in the limitless realm of Time. Unconsciously he defends himself against the pressures of contemporary history by a historiographic anamnesis that opens perspectives he could not possibly suspect if, following Hegel's example, he had confined himself to "communing with the Universal Spirit" while reading his newspaper every morning ... This historiographical anamnesis continues the religious valorization of memory and forgetfulness¹³ (emphasis added).

Only a few paragraphs prior to the passage just cited, Eliade, referring to the rise of so-called "universal history," observed that the "vertiginous widening of the historical horizon" is one of the few encouraging syndromes in the modern world. In his words, "But that is not all: through this historiographic anamnesis man enters deep into himself ... A true historiographic anamnesis finds expression in the discovery of our solidarity with vanished or peripheral people."¹⁴ This observation is startling enough, but when it is recognized that, à la Hillman, some of those "peripheral people" are other selves within us as well as chronologically previous persons, the project of psycho-history becomes even more exciting.

IV

Isaak Dinesen's oft-quoted remark that "any sorrow can be borne if a story can be told about it" can be paraphrased to suggest that any terror history can impose can be borne if a story can be told. The movement will be one, á la Goethe, of turning life into art, and transforming art into life. Historians have the opportunity and obligation to release active imagination¹⁵ within collective memoria. Then, trusting the process, it may sometimes happen that the lives of those who hear or read the historian's tale will be able to bear the terror of history in a fashion which transforms the terror. The promise beckons, as Jung puts it, not that we will see different things, but rather that, in this case through the historian's story, we may see the same things differently.

The reference to active imagination must be underscored. In attempts at narrative which turn out to be failures, one suspects that often the failure lies in a very specific error. It is the failure to recognize the need for imagination in ordering a story. What is substituted for Clio's touch are acts of forced reason or will. The results are often contrivances and cuteness, which pale beside instances of the genuine

¹³ Mircea Eliade, "Mythologies of Memory and Forgetting," History of Religions, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Chicago: Winter, 1963), p. 344. Republished as a chapter in Myth and Reality(New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 114-138.
¹⁴ Ibid., p. 343.
¹⁵ No strict Jungian meaning of the phrase "active imagination" is intended here. This is a notion which has excited a great deal of provocative thinking in Jungian circles. See Spring (1971), especially the article by Henry Corbin.

158 - Re-Imaging Psycho-History

article. What is lacking is an openness to the richness of memoria which provides depth and substance for active imagination.

In the writing of history, the discipline required is that of constantly guarding against the temptation of treating the datum at hand, whether it be a document, an artifact, a statistical chart, a tombstone epitaph, or whatever, in its literal givenness as if it exhausted that in which the historian is most deeply interested. What one may probe for, alternatively, is the mode of consciousness, the fantasy which was operating in the agent which expressed itself in such a precise fashion. To write, for example, a history of Christianity, a vexing and taxing undertaking as I can testify, requires giving attention to a wide variety of resources-ecclesiology, ecclesiastical organization, liturgy, ethics, behavioral patterns, theological treatises, prayer books, etc., almost ad nauseum. The temptation to which many have succumbed is the forced imposition of a rational and willful ordering upon the data. With very few exceptions, such as Charles Williams' The Descent Of the Dove, a truly imaginative history of Christianity is yet to be written. What one finds more examples of, however, are some notable instances of autobiography-one thinks immediately of The Confessions-and biography.

When and if the imaginative history of Christianity, or any religious tradition, is written, one must suppose that many of the data cited will be the same as in the standard histories. Further, the same passion for precision will be there inasmuch as the imagination is no less precise in its differentiations than are reason and will. What will be qualitatively different, however, I suspect, will be the artful communication of the realization that the author has moved beyond the bondage of literalism.

What will be gained in such a narrative for those who still regard themselves as Christian, Buddhist, Muslim or whatever, will not be freedom from the past in any simplistic fashion, but rather distance. The judgment upon such narratives will become aesthetic rather than primarily Moral or logical. Thereby, potentially, a revitalization of what has become literalized and reified may occur, that is, a connection with what I can only call the archetypal substance of the data (the givens) may be experienced both as true and as made-as Vico taught us long ago. Concepts may become metaphors; life in the terror of history may be transformed into soul-making. But for that to happen, of course, Clio will have to be erotically cherished, rather than willfully avoided or coerced. And, if it happens, the warfare between myth and history will be an unmourned casualty; their complementarity will become more apparent.