Note on Method and Materials

Psychohistory has always been controversial, and no one takes more delight in critical analysis of psychohistorical methods than psychohistorians. Although the trench warfare between the Freudians and their critics—witness the response to David Stannard’s Shrinking History (New York, 1981) and the reception of recent psychobiographies of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter—outguns any controversy Revolution and Regeneration might trigger, I have already been warned by one co-worker: “How can you use Erikson without mentioning the ‘unconscious.’” While no historian can turn a deaf ear to those working in his own field, I have tried to approach problems to method in a commonsense fashion. I began with my subject, not with my method, and asked whether such figures as Hamilton and Madison really passed through recognizable stages of life. It seemed safe to say that a group of young men entering a great political contest while suspended between their parents’ homes and the outside world had a good deal in common, but were these shared experiences of motivation—these experiments with personal freedom and adult responsibility—as compelling to them as they are to us? Indeed, was their sequence of maturation the same as ours? It is tempting to assume that, unless there is pathological regression to more infantile behavior (conduct rarely seen among the better-known revolutionaries, for obvious reasons), the historian may expect a progression from youthful pursuits to the self-accounting of old age. The major objection to this straightforward approach is the culture-boundedness of modern psychological concepts. Erikson concedes this danger (Childhood and Society, 122–23), but his concession does not deflect the accusation. One answer is to let the reader compare different psychohistorical approaches and decide which of them, if any, appears historical-minded, but even the most adept collection—a superb example is Robert J. Brugger, ed., Our Selves, Our Past: Psychological Approaches to American History (Baltimore, 1981)—cannot allay some readers’ doubts that twentieth-century psychology can explain eighteenth-century motivation.

Life-cycle psychohistory avoids some of this criticism by resting upon two methodological foundations: developmental psychology of motivation (which we have discussed in the introduction to this book) and life-cycle history. By tying the first to historical research in the second, we can surmount the obstacle of culture-boundedness. The following pages present a very select bibliography of works in life-cycle history, works that have critically affected the argument in Revolution and Regeneration.

The historical study of life cycle begins with investigation of family history. Over the past decade, historical demographers and students of “life course” have explored the relationship between family composition and emotional maturation. Summaries of this literature can be found in Tamara K. Hareven, “The Last Stage: Historical Adulthood and Old Age,” in Erik Erikson, ed., Adulthood (New York, 1978), 201–5; Tamara K. Hareven, ed., Transitions (New York, 1978); and Daniel Scott Smith, “The Estimates of Early American Historical Demographers: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back, What Steps in the Future?” Historical Methods 12 (Winter 1979): 24–38. Social historians, drawing upon cross-sectional studies of population and family, have fashioned longitudinal analyses of social attitudes toward the stages of life. On childhood and youth in early America, I recommend Nancy F. Cott, “Notes toward an Interpretation of Antebellum Childbearing,” Psychohistory Review 6 (Spring 1978): 4–20; John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970); John Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (New York, 1982); and Philip J. Greven, Jr., The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Childbearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York, 1977). A rapidly growing literature on attitudes toward old age is crowned by W. Andrew Aschenbaum, Old Age in the New Land (Baltimore, 1978); David H. Fischer, Growing Old in America (New York, 1978); and Daniel Scott Smith, “Old Age and the ‘Great Transformation’: A New England Case Study,” in Stuart F. Spicker et al., eds., Aging and the Elderly: Humanistic Perspectives in Gerontology (Atlanta Highlands, N.J., 1978), 285–302. A review of the literature is Matilda W. Riley, “Aging, Social Change, and the Power of Ideas,” Daedalus (Fall 1978): 39–52. All of these interpretive essays give breadth to the demographers’ data and the family historians’ insights.

A handful of intrepid scholars have ventured to explain what changes in attitudes and status toward life cycle have meant to the young and the old: life cycle from the inside. This is a more exciting and speculative form of life-cycle history than the study of attitudes toward life stages, for the former rests on the historian’s perception of human traits across a gulf of space and time. The pathbreaking work in this field was accomplished by Philippe Ariés and presented in his Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York, 1962), Western Attitudes toward Death, from the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore, 1974), and The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York, 1981). Coupling Ariés’s and others’ insights (including those of Erikson) to demographic and family history, American scholars have ventured into the subjective, internal realm of life cycle. Examples of their conclusions are found in Daniel Scott Smith, “Parental Power and Marriage Patterns: An Analysis of Historical Trends in Hingham, Massachusetts,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 35 (1973): 419–28; Daniel Scott Smith and Michael Hindus, “Premarital Pregnancy in America, 1640–1971: An Overview and Interpretation” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 5 (Spring 1975): 536–80; John Demos and Virginia Demos, “Adolescence in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 31 (November 1969): 632–54; N. Ray Hiner, “Adolescence in Eighteenth Century America,” History of Childhood Quarterly 2 (1975): 253–80; and Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present (New York, 1979).

The prospects for success of life-cycle psychohistory thus depend on the historian’s willingness and ability to adjust the psychological model to the place and time of his study. In the present case, even if general movement from one stage to the next in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America parallels that in modern America, we must concede that the emotional content and social customs surrounding the stages varied from that age to our own. The greatest variations lay in adolescence and old age. Our own century is the era of youth, in which we have come to lionize the tastes and habits of the young. There is some question whether our eighteenth-century predecessors even recognized the concept of adolescence, although by the late 1600s parents, ministers, and teachers recognized some special problems in later childhood. Childhood completed, the young man was expected to marry, enter a career, conduct his affairs and rear his children responsibly, and later to pass on his wisdom to another generation. At the other end of the scale, old age carried far more respectability and influence in the eighteenth century than it does today. The patriarch held sway in the family, the church, and the town meeting. The old had proved their power over nature by cheating death. They were repositories of oral lore, experience, and moral virtue. Their control of their children under the law and in practical matters of marriage, property settlements, and career was formidable. The nineteenth century would see erosion of these powers and the status that accompanied them, a process begun before the last of the Founding Fathers died, causing them to lament more keenly their failing powers. This shift in objective status would exacerbate the agonies of stocktaking but not change the need to reassess one’s life. Judging from the bitter self-recrimination of their final historical remarks, one can say the old revolutionaries knew they had lost much of their influence and status.

Rooted in sensible use of life-cycle research, nurtured by the periodic appearance of full-scale life-cycle biographies—most recently Carol M. Petillo, Douglas MacArthur: The Philippine Years (Bloomington, Ind., 1981)—the field of life-cycle psychohistory is growing steadily. By the time this brief notice of indebtedness appears in print some of its readers will have moved beyond my own contribution. Nevertheless, even a limited and dated essay on sources foretells a long and successful marriage of life-cycle research and psychohistorical writing.