Eli Sagan (1927–2015)

This resembles nothing so much as the crackpot work of Immanuel Velikovsky, who like Sagan began as a psychoanalyst, then let his suppositions run amok. Woe to anyone who comes to cosmology through Velikovsky, and woe to anyone who comes to classical Athens through Sagan. He is neither a classicist, nor an historian, nor a political philosopher, and yet he claims insights that specialists in all three fields have missed. Sagan’s treatment of Plato and Aristotle is superficial, his view of democracy sentimental and reductionist. He begins with a questionable hypothesis, then arranges his material to support it. The Honey and the Hemlock smells all the way through.

One of the great insights of psychoanalytic theory, writes Sagan, is the developmental view that the psyche progresses in highly differentiated stages toward maturity and health. But, like Velikovsky’s thesis of planetary comets, shifting poles, and raining hydrocarbons, psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience, since there is no way to test it without relying on its own bogus assumptions.

From a wobbly platform of unfounded assumptions, then, Sagan takes a leap toward the nonsensical. He attributes to society a collective psyche, the ‘normal’ development of which ‘progresses’ through various stages. The purpose of History, Sagan claims, is to improve the mental health of society. Society is sick because it is paranoid. The term paranoia captures for Sagan all manner of social tensions and political malfunctions (here he dramatically misunderstands Hofstadter’s “paranoid style”). The process by which society overcomes 'neurosis' and 'psychopathology'—the bogey paranoia—is democratization (p. 65).

Sagan’s failure is threefold. First, in translating psychological concepts into sociology: there is no collective mind, ill or otherwise. Second, the teleological view of history, the belief that history has a purpose and a goal and so inevitably will arrive at a foregone conclusion, is a form of superstitious wish-fulfillment. Third, the idea that democracy is a cure for socio-psychological illness is buncombe.

If crackpottery is for you a form of entertainment, then you might enjoy The Honey and Hemlock. If you skip it, though, you will not have missed anything.… (más)

I am not particularly interested in psychoanalytic theory, yet, I was intrigued by the overlap with anthropological and political insights that Sagan might develop. I found the descriptions of complex societies fascinating. In fact, only specific, complex societies offer a possibility of eliminating tyranny. Eli Sagan, in his At the Dawn of Tyranny, draws from what he describes as "complex societies," i.e., pre-literate states, such as the Buganda of what is today Uganda, and pre-Europeanized Polynesian societies. No matter what advances were made by Greece or Mohammed, or any number of states from countless places and periods, Sagan states: "It is only with the emergence of democratic political forms that the eradication of various forms of oppression has become an ideal and a possibility of society. . . . Somehow, in only one part of the world--in Western Europe--deep within tyrannical society, the forms developed that made democratic life possible" (p. 297).… (más)

Refuting Freud's viewpoint of women as sexist, Sagan also contends that conscience, formed during the time a child is under the guardianship of a mother or some other caretaker, has primacy over the superego. "This brilliant study is a sweeping reappraisal of psychoanalysis and the way we think about morals,".

Sagan challenges Freudian psychoanalytic belief in the superego the harsh, parental male authority functioning as man's moral watchdog. According to the author, Freud's ambivalence toward women prevented him from recognizing the mother-infant relationship as the birthing ground of conscience. In support of this new interpretation, Sagan draws not only on Freud but on other researchers, including Spitz, Mahler, and Klein.… (más)