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[TBC: Excerpts from a keynote address given at a conference entitled "Asclepius At Syracuse: Thomas Szasz, Libertarian Humanist," 17-19 April, 1980 in the Alumni House Conference Center, The Institute for Humanistic Studies, State University of New York at Albany. It is instructive to consider the history of psychology and its impact on individuals and groups.]
 
Psycho-history has most often been used as a weapon against radical groups in the past. Any radical group that challenged the status quo is assumed ipso facto to be crazy or neurotic, people whose ideas and behavior have to be "explained." The "explanation" of course is never that they had perceived what they considered to be a grave injustice in society and were trying to set it right. Whether their theory of justice is correct or not is really beside the point. The point is that the psycho-historian has always implicitly assumed that the status quo, whatever it is, is normal, so that opposition to it is neurotic and abnormal and needs "explanation."
 
The leading example of this smear of radicals through psychologizing has been the conventional historians' treatment of abolitionists, a treatment that has only been modified in recent years. In setting themselves squarely and openly against what they considered the monstrous injustice of slavery, the abolitionists, especially the militant Garrisonian wing, let themselves in for psycho-historical abuse as well as vilification during their lifetime. Thus, the popular textbook by Hofstadter, Miller, and Aaron refers to William Lloyd Garrison as "wayward" and "neurotic." Hazel C. Wolf, in her revealingly titled work, "On Freedom's Altar, the Martyr Complex in the Abolition Movement," describes the abolitionist Theodore Weld as someone who "gloried in the persecution he suffered," and who "lovingly wore the martyr's crown of thorns." As for poor Garrison, "he had a mania for uniqueness and attention." Perhaps the basest rhetoric to use Szasz's stirring term was David Donald's outrageous and patently untrue assertion that the abolitionists were dismayed at the freeing of the slaves because it ended a crusade which had brought them "purpose and joy"; Lincoln as emancipator was for them "the killer of the dream." To wrap it up, Professor Donald manages to smear the abolitionist and laissez-faire Senator Charles Sumner as impotent and latently homosexual, and to conclude that "This holy blissful martyr thrived upon his torments." [1]
 
The base message in all this is clear. Radicals who see injustice in the status quo are neurotic; if they are persecuted, who cares, for after all that's what they really wanted; and whether or not they achieved their goals doesn't matter because they cared not about the goal but only about the trouble-making struggle itself. [2]
 
Footnotes:
 
[1] Richard Hofstadter, William Miller, and Daniel Aaron, The American Republic (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1959), I, 463; Hazel C. Wolf, "On Freedom's Altar, the Martyr Complex in the Abolition Movement" (Madison Wisc., 1952), pp. 3-4; David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered (New York, 1956), pp. 36,61; David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1961), pp. 176, 290, 295, 336. In particular, see the discussion in Fawn M. Brodie, "Who Defends the Abolitionist?" in M. Duberman, ed., The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton: Princeton university Press, 1965), pp. 63-67; and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "William Lloyd Garrison and Antislavery Unity: A Reappraisal," in R. Swierenga, ed., Beyond the Civil War Synthesis: Political Essays of the Civil War Era (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975), pp. 309-310.
 
[2] In trying to defend the abolitionists from the smear of psycho-historians, Professor Duberman, himself a radical but psychoanalytically-oriented historian, gets entangled in reductive psychologizing of his own against the abolitionists. Thus, see Martin Duberman, "The Northern Response to Slavery," in Duberman, Anti-Slavery Vanguard, pp. 407ff.