Freudian Application to Progressive Era in the U.S.

There is today a widely felt sense that the study of history has become fragmented. Well into this century, historiography had a certain stately unity; it dealt with the public wellsprings of public events. But in the last two generations, that unity has broken up. There are psychological historians, social historians, historians of the poor, of women, of minority groups. In the view of critics this is a loss; academic fashion and political correctness have intruded upon history and reduced much of it to a kind of special pleading.

The following discussion will test these critics' proposition by considering one such specialized approach to history, the Freudian psychoanalytic approach, in its applicability to the Progressive Era in the United States. It will be suggested that whether or not Freudianism is in itself a valid tool, the effort to explore its use is an appropriate way to expand our understanding of history.

Peter Gay's Freud for Historians (1985) is not, as the title might suggest, an introductory textbook of Freudian psychoanalysis intended for the use of historians. Nor is it a summarization of a Freudian interpretation of history, either of the Progressive Era or any other period. Rather, it is primarily an apologia, a presentation of the arguments for accepting Freudian thought into the armoury of acceptable tools of historiography.

Gay is acutely aware of the challenge he faces. He likens his task to a besieger, breaking down six successive l

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grasped, understood, and explained by the scholar at his or her desk. The Progressive Era was not one of those lurid episodes in history that makes us shudder at, or be vicariously thrilled by, the mysterious depths of human nature. The Progressives were, in both their policies and their own self-image, on the whole a rather cool, rational lot. Richard Hofstadter, in The Age of Reform (1955) cites a contemporary who found the Bull Moose movement of 1906 to be In the main and in its heart of hearts petit bourgeois ... a movement of little businessmen, professional men, well-to-do farmers, skilled artisans from the upper brackets of organized labor ... the successful middle-class country-town citizens, the farmer whose barn was painted, the well-paid railroad engineer, and the country editor (Hofstadter, 1955, p. 132). The Progressive movement, to be sure, grew indirectly out of the Populists, who had been of rather a different stripe; to the same observer Those agrarian movements too often appealed to the ne'er-do- wells, the misfits--farmers who had failed, lawyers and doctors who were not orthodox, teachers who could not make the grade, and neurotics full of hates and ebullient, evanescent enthusiasms (Hofstadter

Category: Psychology - F