Psychology and Metaphor in History

Here are some further, but still preliminary, thoughts about how the psychology of coming of age might relate to a historical explanation of the Federalist movement in the 1780s. Clearly, people are going to be pretty skeptical about this as an approach. To be accommodated it has to be carefully defined.

To begin with, I agree with Peter Hoffer that "the strongest justification for psychohistory is that it can unravel riddles of motivation and expression which have resisted (or escaped notice in) conventional treatments." [Revolution and Regeneration, 1983, p.13] The unsolved problem of the Federalist movement, in my view, is its ambivalence towards power. Conventional histories either assume basically power-seeking or altruistic motives, without accounting for what seems to be an inner conflict. That is why I think psychology is relevant. (Such an inner conflict would need to be demonstrated, but it can already by inferred from historians' disagreements with each other, and their use of paradox and irony.)

Some historians have drawn on psychology to help explain the revolution itself, and I find their ideas interesting and fruitful. However, in some ways I think the Federalist movement is a more appropriate field for this type of analysis, because it is more closely tied (it seems to me) with a few individuals' thoughts and actions. That does raise a question: is the 'conspiratorial' or 'reform caucus' interpretation of the consitution movement correct, and if so how should we explain the constitution at a popular level? That question, though interesting, is outside the main scope of my concern.

In the 1780s, American elites (and presumably others!) reflected on the experience of revolution and the next steps for the nation and themselves. There is less question here of 'the heat of the moment' or the press of events than there is in the revolutionary crisis of the 1770s: we can give even more concern to thought, and therefore to psychology. The real problem is, how do we access the psychology of proto-Federalists, even those who wrote a lot?

In "The American Revolution: the ideology and psychology of national liberation," (1972) Edwin Burrows and Michael Wallace stress "symbolic collective identity" [p.274]: they find such an identity in the language of parent and child that was common in the rhetoric of the revolutionary period. Drawing that point out, we can say that the metaphor of child/adult relations, with its long period of development in the American political vocabulary, had the power to shape thought in the 1780s. It is all the more powerful for being a deep metaphor, acting primarily on the unconscious, rather than an element of rational or ideological thought. As literary scholars and now scientists tell us, metaphors indeed have power over us. It is the implications of this metaphor, and its workings in the Federalist mind, that I want to explore.