|
Introduction to Henry Ebel
Oh, he’s brilliant. No question about it. But when I asked him to write about something psychohistorical, he never did. What am I to do just with statements that Jesus Christ was the most profound person in history? I want to know why Hitler and Saddam and others start wars (and such motivational research). E-mail message from Lloyd deMause, August 12, 2003
He didn’t crash into the auditorium on top of a Harley- Davidson. He didn’t pour gasoline on top of our heads, nor demonstrate his primal screams. Actually, there was little rock ’n’ roll, rebellion or revolution in his behavior, nor in his physical appearance. On the contrary. He was wearing an impeccable grey suit and tie. With that boyishly cut silver hair and his impressive, Darth Vader voice that gave him such authority and power as he began his lecture, Dr Henry Ebel would have qualified for anchoring a conservative or major American TV channel. For what shocked us that Friday afternoon at the International Psychohistorical Association’s 10th annual convention in New York City on June 5, 1987 was all in his message. He explained how 5000 years of overwhelming disasters, endless sacrificial rituals and outstanding achievements make complete and perfect sense. As I remember, his point was that civilization arose as a group-psychological defense against people’s chronic fear of death. Just look at the gigantic monuments those early citizens built “in quest for eternity!” Understanding history is the key to understanding ourselves and the world we live in. And now Henry Ebel basically proposed that the fear of death is the key motivating force behind all of humanity’s endeavors throughout recorded time. No matter how we rationalize them, our social institutions – whether they be the government, our jails, banks, the news industry or “entertainment” – are essentially the collective ways we have found to defend against our private, innermost terror before the idea of annihilation. And, he added as an afterthought, “universities” are no exception. The educational system, at the root of it, is as defensive as everything else. Which incidentally explains why psychohistory , as the conscious effort to understand these underlying motivations, has run into such solid resistance. I guess he never got the chance to develop his argument much further before his audience had already transformed from self-professed psychoradicals – who in the sympathetic, cocktail-party atmosphere between lectures had just proclaimed how “stimulated” they had always felt by Dr Ebel’s “thought-provoking perspectives” and how much they were looking forward to his upcoming appearance – into a pack of wolves who wanted to tear him to shreds. And yet Henry Ebel had been one of the most frequent contributors in The Journal of Psychohistory since its start in 1973. His chosen field of specialization had always been to attack the defensive armors of his audience by looking for the things they didn’t want to know, or would at least prefer to keep taking for granted, and then finding the most effective way to throw it in their faces. He was widely recognized in these circles as “psychohistory’s enfant terrible.” Henry Ebel himself referred to the role that he was performing as “the mad prophet,” which he fueled by a selfconducted, psychedelically-enhanced primal therapy that had been occupying him since 1973. He had also made a rather impressive career as a professor in English literature and several other disciplines, as well as a professional journalist , and he was presently an internal advisor and the director of the professional education programs at the University of Hartford, Connecticut. As much as I shuddered at the implications of what he had just declared, I was equally puzzled that rest of the crowd had not been prepared for what they would encounter going to a Henry Ebel lecture. As far as I could tell, they were after all his fellow psychohistorians,– the middle-aged men, mostly, whose names also appeared in The Journal of Psychohistory , along with titles like Professor, Ph.D., psychotherapist and college teacher. Whereas I, who seemed to be more in tune with the promises of challenging one’s habitual thinking, was an 18 year-old high school-student from Sweden. I had learned about the revolutionizing psychohistorical research through a Swedish newspaper. Psychohistory’s leading genius was named Lloyd deMause. I had purchased all of his books – and, as I found in them the answers I needed to most of my adolescent broodings, had underlined, and underlined again, just about their entire content. Basically, whereas the pillars of our intellectual establishment generally seem to pretend that psychology only applies within the safe confines of psychotherapist’s offices, confidential conversations or inside of people’s heads, deMause tears down these limitations and shows, exactly, how our whole world , whether its aspects be labeled politics, economics, culture or by any other category, is an expression of our, largely unconscious, psyches. I had then, incidentally, come to the United States for an exchange year at a high school outside of New York City. I soon detected a neighboring college library, where I could sneak in and spend a considerable amount of my spare time reading the entire publication of The Journal of Psychohistory since its first issue in 1973. Lloyd deMause was its editor and gave his office phone number in it, so I called him up and asked him about the implications of his ideas. He was very accomodating. I then learned that there were regular psychohistorical seminars in New York City, and soon thereafter, I found myself shaking hands and talking with the legend deMause and other great minds, and then spent the fall of 1986 and the spring of 1987 – beside doing my school homework – comparing the impressive achievements that I witnessed by reading The Journal to the personalities and behaviors of their real-life, flesh-and-blood authors. The psychohistorical community was at this point trying to establish deMause’s challenging, new paradigm inside of the academical world, and had some success at it too. But then there was also the naughty little rebel Henry Ebel, who kept scouting for taboos to violate and naked emperors to expose, as if this was still the roaring 1970’s. Ebel accepted no compromise and refused to keep his mouth shut. Rather than playing the game of academic research by the book, he played with – mocked – the “scientific” rules, and had published all sorts of free-form insights in The Journal of Psychohistory. This was a man, I decided, that I had to meet. I took three days off school right before my graduation to go to the convention, and here we were. – So universities are bunk ? retorted an enraged Professor David Beisel, who had once, in his radical youth, written a most admiring presentation of Henry Ebel’s work, but who at this very moment looked as if the vein on the side of his muscle-flexing neck was about to burst any second. Professor Beisel had probably done more than anyone else to establish psychohistory as a regular discipline inside of the academical world, by giving introductory psychohistory courses to thousands of students. Now he was concerned that Henry Ebel’s irresponsible flow of “outrageous statements” was destroying his efforts. Not that Beisel was challenging the validity of Ebel’s observations. The point Beisel was making – and he got increasing control of his fury as he developed his argument – was that, as long as one wants to achieve anything in real life, one must also consider the political implications of one’s thinking before giving it public expression. Which, I realized, was the exact opposite of what Henry Ebel was proposing as the point, and the essential method, of psychohistory. His scholarship was all about removing the self-censorship that keeps us in a state of stupidity about the world we live in. Psychohistory, in his view, is essentially revealing the things that we already know deep down inside, but repress out of consciousness. There were also other prominent scholars in the auditorium who, as the post-lecture discussion unfolded, snarled with contempt at Ebel’s ramblings, although I cannot remember their actual arguments. From where I was sitting, it looked as if the whole event had turned into a surrealistic psychodrama before my eyes, perfectly demonstrating the range of defense mechanisms that the same psychohistorians were theorizing about in their writings. Henry Ebel didn’t really fight back, but said something to the effect of thanking his critics for sharing their feelings. He had a faint, triumphant smile on his face, like the child who had only told the truth about some family secret. The hostility of his colleagues gave obvious proof of exactly the kind of anxieties and defensive maneuvers that he had just lectured about, like scapegoating, projection, denial, fantasy, regression, etcetera. This was what he wanted to point out, so in that sense, his performance was a perfect success. As I curiously scanned the audience, I then spotted Lloyd deMause, seated in one of the back rows. By that secret smile on his face I gathered that he, too, felt intellectually stimulated by this interesting outburst of uninhibited group-dynamics. I also saw a few of the selfprofessed admirers of Henry Ebel that I had talked to during the three-day convention, but now they only seemed depressed about the confrontation they were witnessing. Soon enough, Henry Ebel closed the “discussion” and left. Half an hour later, I ran into him on my way out of the conference building. I approached him and told him I was as stunned by his ideas as by the bizarre reaction they provoked in his colleagues. He said he was heading downtown, so I decided to go in the same direction and then we had a long conversation walking past some 30 blocks along New York’s 5th Avenue before parting at the traffic junction at 42nd Street. It seemed to me that Henry Ebel and Lloyd deMause were the only two people I knew who were really awake, while everybody else was living in a dream. I didn’t know what to do about this state of affairs, but these two gentlemen had done everything they could, approaching their fellow human beings both individually and collectively, pointing out the delusions that had hypnotized them so that they could wake up. DeMause did it in his precise and effective analytical way, while Ebel tried out more dramatic approaches that would reach people’s emotions. They were both absolutely brilliant in what they were doing. But no matter what they said, every single one they approached only defended – and quite aggressively too – his right to keep sleepwalking. I felt sincerely sad about it. There was a sense of mutual recognition between Henry Ebel and myself as we said good-bye. He gave me his card and invited me to write him a letter. Before leaving the States, I managed to get into my regular college library once more and spent fifty or sixty dollars worth of quarters photocopying twenty-seven essays and article that he had published in The Journal of Psychohistory and in The Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology . I then spent several months figuring out something intelligent to say and, eventually, sent him a letter. A week later, I received to my small Stockholm apartment a large package, containing a book and a manuscript. The book was a 247 page collection of aphorisms called Leaves from a Notebook in Progress – his last attempt, in 1978, at selfpublication. The second item, he wrote in the accompanying letter, was his only copy of a 185 page unreleased manuscript titled Anticipations of Apocalypse, a collection of his most important – although most of them still unpublished – writings from 1975 to 1980. In the letter, Ebel complimented my “energy, honesty and good will” and explained that if the manuscript got lost in the mail, he would take it to mean that it was rightfully doomed. He went on to express that he “was even less impressed than usual by the deliberations of the International Psychohistorical Association. I won’t be appearing there again, nor publish any further articles, reviews, aphorisms or primal screams in the Journal of Psychohistory .” These texts turned out the be some of the most intense that I had ever read. With stunning clarity Henry Ebel explains the most urgent – and anxiety-provoking – lessons from history, including why the Old Testament keeps telling us not to sacrifice our babies into the flaming mouth of Moloch, and how come the Holocaust happened. He also looks with a sense of chronic astonishment at contemporary society and the things that most of us take completely for granted. He is consistently taking seriously the things that we normally overlook, while also not taking seriously those things that we normally hold onto. In my view, Henry Ebel is acting simultaneously as a know-it-all professor and as a fuck-it-all rebel or joker in the spirit of Lenny Bruce, Robert Crumb or, if you will, Bart Simpson, all in one person. Where Lloyd deMause gave me a systematic explanation for why the world has turned into what it is, Henry Ebel gave me an intelligence, that keeps expanding my insights as I go along. During the course of our sporadic correspondence that has now been going on for seventeen years, I eventually realized – in Henry Ebel, too – inevitable inconsistencies between his life and work and the extent to which he is primarily preaching the lessons that he is trying to learn himself. For instance, knowing his troubled personal biography that started at the Jewish Hospital in Berlin in 1938, his provocative title for this book, Jews, Germans and Other Disasters , strikes me as “Me, Myself and I.” The real person Henry Ebel turned out to be not quite the liberated, life-savoring, rocking Übermensch that I saw in him (and that he, no doubt, wanted to project) back in 1987. I have also come to understand the relationship between Henry Ebel and Lloyd deMause as a Lennon- McCartney-like creative rivalry of mutual influence, inspiration and envy between two great and complementary minds. DeMause is as sharp and systematic in charting the extent and the effects of cruelty and neglect toward children through history as Ebel is passionate and inventive in extending this thinking to its furthermost potential. Henry Ebel seems to have been the first, back in 1973, to realize the importance of deMause’s achievement. Ebel quickly caught up with him and then took psychohistory in new and unexpected directions. He also gives deMause credit for having given him the crucial encouragement he needed to “let go, be personal, to not write in the preposterous academic mode.” While Ebel, in turn, gave deMause the impulses to trace adult grouplife to fetal and birth experiences, an area which has since dominated much of deMause’s thinking. Some of Lloyd deMause’s most inspired texts are his comments, in The Journal of Psychohistory, – originally titled The History of Childhood Quarterly – on Henry Ebel’s contributions, and deMause has given me his permission to quote them at length in this introduction. Apparently pretending that he was unaware of the identity of the pseudonym William Batstein, that Ebel used for his first book of aphorisms in 1973, titled “ The First Part of the Revelations of Moses the Son of Jehoshar,” deMause gave it this review a year later:
Last winter, this anonymous book arrived at the editorial offices of the Quarterly . On its opening page, it proclaimed what it called
THE SIMPLE TRUTH 1. The “human race” consists of three species, not one. 2. The first of these consists of beings who are only superficially human. In fact, their human occupants have been evicted. 3. The place of the original occupant has been taken by a demon. 4. The second species is occupied humanity. The original inhabitant is still present, but so to speak, confined to a dungeon in the castle keep. 5. The third species is de-demonized humanity. It is very rare. Its representatives are called prophets. They are customarily crucified.
What followed this opening was like no other book I had ever read: searing, historical aphorisms, brilliant psychological formulations, demonic scripts, dark dialogues and Nietzschean thunderbolts of prophecy, all written in a language that ranged from multilingual literary allusion to scatological blank verse, and which, through the clarity of the author’s anger, managed to achieve a style beyond anger, beyond pretension, even beyond irony. In short, the book gave me so much pleasure and was so full of psychohistorical material that I arranged to have selections from it published in last Winter’s issue of the Quarterly , hoping to demonstrate to our readers yet another facet of our “new psychohistory.” The response to this publication in the journal was like nothing that could have been imagined: hundreds of cancellations poured in from furious subscribers, contributing editors resigned, literally thousands of subscribers refused to pay for their volumes received, and a flood of mail had to be answered as to why insulting, worthless, pornographic material was ever printed in a scholarly journal. So many readers demanded to be guaranteed protection from a repetition of such an upsetting experience before they would renew their subscription that I purchased several boxes of single-edged razor blades which I sent out with an explanatory letter saying they should slice out any offending material from future issues of the journal and read only what they considered safe to their mental health. Not that other issues of the Quarterly have been immune from similar shocked outrage. Eminent historians have circulated letters of protest complaining that putting pictures of masturbating girls and articles on Hitler in the same journal “demeaned the Holocaust.” Others wrote in saying any explanation of Hitler’s motives was tantamount to excusing his actions. The legal section of the Anti-Defamation League even began an investigation of us, claiming our material was anti-Semitic, while several American Nazis wrote claiming the opposite. Nor have recent issues escaped similar response. My own piece on “The Evolution of Childhood” brought another flood of letters and cancellations of subscriptions, most of them questioning my own childhood, or claiming “you talk of empathy for children – how about a little empathy for parents for a change!” One historian, when using my piece in a class of college seniors, experienced the most extreme reactions to it by the entire class, ranging from violent disbelief that human beings could act in such a fashion to one student who got up in the middle of the reading of one section of the paper and had to leave the class because she was so beside herself she “couldn’t stand listening any longer.” It appears that psychohistory is extremely upsetting. Historians and social scientists have for so long avoided the emotional causes of large-scale events that when we connect the personal with the social it is bound to be terribly anxiety-releasing. But the release of anxiety is, of course, necessary for all growth. Only those whose desire to grow – and whose tolerance for anxiety – has reached the intensity of a desire for exorcism should read this book. Others had best stay with the usual scholarly fare. As the author puts it: In the graduate school, one learns vigilance. “A feeling! Kill it before it reproduces!” Can I have some thick-porridge FEELING, kind Sir? No, brat. Only thin-gruel symbolism.
Lloyd deMause, beside his psychohistorical efforts, once ran a profitable newsletter business in New York City called Atcom Inc.. Henry Ebel had upheld a position as associate Professor in English literature at the City University of New York since 1969, but in 1976 he took the job as the director of Atcom’s Today newsletters and the editor of Behavior Today , for which he, during the next four years, wrote six to eight pages of news articles every week following America’s booming and wildly experimental psychotherapy scene from front row, besides producing some of the most radical material ever published in The Journal of Psychohistory . The psychology of Jewish ethnicity and the Holocaust were obviously the most taboo-infested subjects available, and so Henry Ebel, following one of the few Jewish traditions which he, apparently, did not object to, made sure he had rubbed every sensitive spot before finishing his treatment of the tender subject. In 1978, he proposed to deMause that he would put together a special issue of The Journal on the topic “Judaism as a Group-Fantasy.” As deMause would recall in a 1985 commentary:
Unwittingly, I said yes. He gathered a distinguished group of scholars, all Jewish, and we published a heavily footnoted psychohistory of Judaism in antiquity, during the Middle Ages and today. Like all psychohistories, the issue analyzed human strengths and weaknesses, and tried to relate them to childrearing, past and present. When the issue hit our readers, all hell broke loose. Catholics, Protestants, Arabs and Chinese may have group-fantasies... but Jews don’t. All the Jews on our editorial board promptly quit. Readers sent in cancellations by the hundreds. The Jewish Forward ran an article calling us anti-semitic. One of those on our board who quit, Peter Lowenberg, became such a vocal spokes-man against our Institute for Psychohistory that just last week I had a letter from the head of our Los Angeles branch saying that a workshop I was about to give at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute was in danger of being cancelled because Lowenberg claimed we were “neo-nazis.” This, of course, is in itself part of a group-fantasy which has been widespread in the West since World War II. One can fairly safely publish analyses of any religious group and even hint that their religious content might have irrational sources, but the Jews have become the final repository of our fantasies of sacredness, and even to speculate that Israel’s foreign policy might contain elements of self-destructiveness is to court very real danger of one’s scholarly reputation – from Jews and gentiles alike.
“Group-fantasy” was a term that deMause had coined and defined as a shared defense against repressed childhood anxieties, whereby individuals use groups, leaders and delegates to relieve their private feelings by displacing them onto the public stage (deMause: Foundations of Psychohistory . New York: Creative Roots, 1982). Sticking to his methodological individualism, deMause sees all political and social entities – nations, families, organizations, religions, etcetera – as, essentially, fantasies that individuals share for their own psychological purposes. Henry Ebel, in his short essay The Psychohistory of History , gave this idea a deeper dimension as he proposed that our sense of history is itself a kind of fantasy, whereby we – putting ourselves in a safe, spectatorial position – get our piece of the action without having to expose ourselves to any of the risks of real life. Not that this thought, I have since learned, prevented its author from spending most of his own available time at libraries and bookstores, reading for at least five or six hours every day. Which is, of course, how he could know so much. The Psychohistory of History, which was originally published in The Journal of Psychohistory in 1981 and is included in this volume , inspired Lloyd deMause to make this comment:
As usual, Henry Ebel has uncovered an unpleasant little attitude of ours that ends up by giving the whole show away. What he has done is simply describe the motivations for being historians and for reading history . We all want to return again and again to that wax museum of history because we want to relive again all those traumas – history's traumas and our own – but now safely. Now psychoanalysis has a technical term for the process of endlessly reliving our life traumas safely: perversion. A pervert is someone who takes a childhood trauma and, by slightly rearranging its content, now triumphs over it: by masturbating with a woman’s shoe, the pervert both affirms and denies the woman’s lack of a penis, triumphing over what was once an unpleasant discovery by concentrating on the phallic heel or toe of the shoe. The psychoanalyst Robert Stoller tells us that much of the excitement present in our sexual fantasies comes from this mechanism of perversion, constantly rearranging our traumas into triumphs. But if this is true, then the writing and reading of history has to date been a perverse activity! That historians get perverse sexual pleasure out of handling, playing with, rearranging and triumphing over the historical traumas to which they choose to devote their lives becomes evident when psychohistorians do the same thing but overtly describe the historical group-fantasies being acted out. Then they get accused, as one critic of mine so well put it, of “indulging in their own sexual fantasies.” Of course! How can I (or you) write of the abuses of children without evoking our own childhoods, including all the fantasies we still carry with us to help us master our earliest terrors? How can I (or you) write about war, without evoking our own sadism, our own fantasies of revenge and triumph? We all initially go to that vast psychodrama called history for the same reason we indulge in any perverse activity: to triumph over our past. The only difference is that the historian acts out and enjoys this perversion while the psychohistorian, when successful, reveals it by describing the historical group-fantasies present in the material and in its viewer. The unconscious of every one of us has the same material inside it. Psychohistory differs from history in not just acting out and secretly enjoying the endless perverse ritual of playing with our historical shoe-fetish but in finally overcoming the past by revealing and then understanding it. We will remain trapped in the wax museum of history only as long as we continue to deny the thrill we get from being there.
As fascinating as I found, and still find, psychohistory, after my personal encounters with a dozen of its leading proponents in 1987, I soon moved on to other pursuits and found new sources for inspiration and insight. Graduating at Stockholm University, I became a news reporter, much as I struggled against the obvious psychopathology of this profession. I only caught occasional glimpses of the progress of psychohistorical research by leafing through The Journal once every few years. No more often did Henry Ebel and I exchange letters with each other. But then it disturbed me immensely that as soon as he left psychohistory in 1987, he seems to have been forgotten. Or, as he would propose, repressed. To my amazement, I found that he never managed to get any of his wild, passionate, uproarious stuff published outside of The Journal of Psychohistory. Eventually, I persuaded him to act as his publisher myself, or else the bulk of his work might never reach an audience at all. The present Henry Ebel anthology is the result of that decision. The titles of its three volumes were originally the three parts of the unpublished Anticipations of Apocalypse , while its contents are collected from several sources listed in the final section of each book . Volume I, Jews, Germans and Other Disasters , demonstrates Dr Ebel’s understanding of history, seen from the unique vantage point of his own life. His observations about current society are collected in the anthology’s second volume, Our Major Institutions Are Killing Us , while the third volume, Death and Birth, features his explorations, through the principles of his psychohistorical thinking, into the forbidden domain of spirituality. A generation has passed since psychohistory’s pioneering days. As a psychohistorical rule, the things that seem the most upsetting to one generation will usually appear as perfectly natural a generation or two later. Modern art, rock ‘n’ roll or the sexual revolution are only the most obvious examples. Understanding the world through personal insight just recently seemed unscientific, destroyed people’s academic careers and caused general outrage. Today, it is already what every other newspaper columnist is doing on a regular basis. Psychohistory, in practice though not by name, has become the obvious, intuitive way we understand things. But intuition still only gives you a hunch. Henry Ebel shows you how to put the pieces together for the big picture. If you are ready for an intellectual and emotional roller-coaster ride and you are not intimidated by finding yourself outraged by some of his ideas, I recommend you to fasten your seat-belt. It’s going to be a bumpy night!
Bernhard Grünewald, editor and publisher This text is an excerpt from Henry Ebel: Jews, Germans and Other Disasters, Bias Bok, 2004. |