The History of Psychology (and Rock and Roll)

History and Systems of Psychology is a class that I am prepping to teach for the first time in the fall.  History is not my strong suit.  I was not an undergraduate psychology major – I went to a school where we read the great books.  The two historians we read, Thucydides and Herodotus, an Ancient Greek and Roman respectively, were not my favorite authors.  I would have liked to have known more about the history – the context – of the great books that we read.  I would have liked to have known about the Reformation when we read Luther, and to have known more about Elizabethan England when we read Shakespeare, but the ethos of the school was to read and discuss the great authors’ books and to struggle to make as much sense of them as we could.  Perhaps an exception to this was a music class that was offered sophomore year.  In this, we visited the great musical works (we spent a great deal of time on Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion – parsing it much as we parsed Greek and later French writings), and it was the only class other than language classes in which there was a text book (in math we read Euclid for Geometry, Descartes for Algebra and Newton for calculus) – and this text taught us about how classical music developed from monotonic forms – the Gregorian Chants were examples of these – through simple harmonies into more and more complex musical forms that were more and more capable of articulating the human experience – especially the affective components of that experience.

Last Sunday, the New York Times Magazine published an article about the imagined history of Rock and Roll – the article asked the question: how will Rock and Roll be remembered in 300 years?  The focal way that it asked this question was who among the Rock and Rollers will be remembered?  This is, of course, also the question that is asked by the film Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure set in 1988.  In that film and its sequel, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Adventure, Bill and Ted (one or the other – they are essentially interchangeable – is played by Keanu Reeves in his first screen appearance) are exceedingly poor high school students who travel through time to bring back historical luminaries (Socrates (whose name they pronounce Soh – Krates) and Freud (whom they pronounce Frood) among them), to their high school in San Dimas, California.  They are able to do this because the citizens of a Utopian state in the year 2688, founded on the principles of the rock music Bill and Ted will create only if they pass their high school history class (so that Ted or Bill doesn’t get sent to a military academy, breaking up the band), send an emissary (Rufus played by George Carlin) with a time machine to help them out.

The New York Times view of the future of Rock and Roll is much more jaded.  Chuck Klosterman, the author of the article, proposes that, just as is the case with Marching Music, where Sousa has become synonymous with a genre written by many, Jazz, where Louis Armstrong is the remembered and highlighted figure, and I would add Waltz and nominate Strauss as the exemplar, Rock and Roll will eventually be remembered and associated with one key figure.  Klosterman reviews a number of candidates starting with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones but, through a very interesting process of elimination (including the possibility of a two poled system with Elvis and Bob Dylan as the emissaries) he lands on Chuck Berry as the quintessential rock and roller.  One of his songs, Johnny B. Goode, is nominated as the single tune that will be played by professors of the history of music in classes three centuries from now, and he proposes that the students will be no more moved by this music than the representation of music from ancient Sumeria.

As a lover of music – including Rock and Roll – I am much more powerfully drawn towards Bill and Ted’s version of the future, even though I find Klosterman’s argument, at least on the surface, to be more compelling.  My wish for the music of my youth to live forever probably doesn’t distinguish me from most of my baby boomer cohort.  As perhaps one of the most self-absorbed groups in history, we would like to believe that we were (and are) onto something special and would like to keep it (and ourselves) alive and young forever.  As a member of a particular subset of that cohort – we used to be called generation X, I think – the group that witnessed the summer of love as recent history (I turned nine in 1968) rather than as lived experience, we tended to romanticize a period that was much grittier as lived than remembered.  Overdosing on acid at Woodstock with, at best, primitive medical response was just no fun – and skinny dipping in the muddy lake may look neat in the film, and while it likely was in person – having no place to shower afterwards followed by a long bus ride home probably raised the stink level to a new notch.  Visiting my sister in California a few years ago and seeing aged hippies hanging out in vegetarian restaurants made what once seemed like a new and idyllic cultural shift seem shopworn at best (and a more recent trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame also made rock seem less hip and current and more musty and old timey - especially as seen through the eyes of my kids).

How can we, like Bill and Ted, produce something that lasts?  Something that will live long beyond us and not be bottled or, worse, dried and hung up to be looked at?  I think that we do that by producing something that is living, breathing and contemporary.  Something that resonates with people and that helps them articulate themselves and feel themselves more deeply and more authentically.  I blog about psychoanalysis in the hope that, by applying it to current art and issues, I will demonstrate that it is a powerful tool for living our contemporary lives more fully.  I think, for instance, that we will always dream, and if we have a tool to understand how those dreams can become allies in our efforts to understand ourselves and our place in the universe, the tool will not be put in a museum, but sharpened and adjusted so that it can more artfully shape our visions.

Teaching the history of psychology, then, should not be what the ghosts at Hogwarts do – for it is only ghosts who teach the history of magic there – while the students slumber unnoticed by the incredibly boring drones.  History should not simply be a recitation of what happened then, but it should be a portal into what is happening here and now – an opportunity to catch some of the excitement, in the case of psychology, of discovering what it means to be human at this very moment – and a sense of how those who have gone before us can contribute to our deeper appreciation of this moment. 

Too often psychoanalysts have retreated behind the content of what the psychoanalytic method reveals to us – they have tried to jam material into an Oedipal configuration because that is a frequently observed familial structure that becomes a dominant psychic structure – particularly of middle and upper class western folks.  All of us, however, have conscious and unconscious lives – or lives that we are unwilling to acknowledge to others and frequently to ourselves (Mark Solms asserts that our darkest secrets are more known to us than we are willing to admit), that they, when we learn to embrace them rather than shun them, can enhance our lived experience.  The process of engaging in a deeply felt conversation with another human to access these experiences, to help them come to our lived current awareness, is one that others, Freud especially, but many others as well, have helped us learn how to do.  They have also described the apparatus that must underlie our ability to engage in this process – sometimes accurately, sometimes fancifully, and it is our task to sort the actual from the imaginary.

I won’t, in the fall, be teaching the history of psychoanalysis – or that will occupy only a corner of the class.  But I will be teaching something that I hope is more like the history of music that I learned in college and that Bill and Ted would have us learn – that what we play today can move us in the ways it does because of what those before us were able to articulate.  Our palettes have broadened as we have woven together the classical repertory with the “slave” repertory; the highbrow understanding of how tonal patterns work with the urgency of our wish to love and be loved – in both “mature” and “primitive” forms; and the craftsmanship of fine musical instruments with the electronic marvels of recording, reproduction and amplification.  We should stand on the shoulders of the giants that have come before us so that we can more fully articulate what it means to be human. 

Postscript:  Having now taught the course, I fear that I failed to live up to all of my hopes and dreams, but it was clear that the students responded to much of the material.  It helped a lot that we were studying during what increasingly became clear to me was an historical moment - the fall when Trump was elected President.  I think this made the issues of history feel more relevant, alive and pregnant than they otherwise might have been as we related what was going on in the there and then to what was going on currently.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.     For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...