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Psychohistory is no new fad if we consider Plato, Greek tragedy, Thucydides, and Shakespeare's histories. Psychoanalysis does provide the basis for a more systematic present-day study of history starting with Freud's daring, though at times speculative pursuits into historical figures, civilization, and war. Increasingly refined analytic applications to history have been subsequently made through the works of Reich. Fromm, Glover, Erikson, Langer, Feldman, Lifton, and a host of others.
Jay Y. Gonen, born in Haifa, is Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Rochester and Consultant to the Task Force on Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs of the American Psychiatric Association. He is well qualified to attempt the enormous task of applying psychoanalytic models traditionally used in clinical practice with individual persons, to the Jewish people as a group. This, of course, depends on whether we can accept the basic premise that cultural developments of people can bear some similarities to the developmental history of individuals. For example, can we accept Gonen's contention that the Zionist endeavor could be veiewed as a magnificent obsession containing the idea that the sons of Israel ought to return and rescue their abandoned mother Zion from whom they had been forcibly parted two millennia past? Gonen is not so naive. He carefully documents three vital contemporary factors that entered into play with the rise of modern Zionism in the 1890's: (1) the persistence of anti-Semitism throughout Europe in a modern world of “enlightenment,” most notably the pogroms in Russia following the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881; (2) the need to find a secular and political substitute for religious faith and morality as orthodox Judaism began to lose its widespread religious footing in a scientific world; (3) the rise of nationalism throughout the world as many peoples were trying to reclaim their fair share of fatherlands and motherlands. These factors g