James M. Glass: Listener, Teacher, and Scholar of Psychosis

James M. Glass was born on May 1, 1940 in Los Angeles, California, where his father was in the jewelry business while his mother kept house. He has an older half-brother and half-sister, now deceased, from his mother’s previous marriage.

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He was a reformed Jew who grew up in Beverly Hills at a time when it was considered a middle class suburb. He “escaped” Los Angeles by attending the University of California, Berkeley and received his BA in 1961. After a year attending the London School of Economics and hitchhiking around Europe, and then an unenthusiastic year at Stanford Law School, he returned to Berkeley in 1963 where he wanted to study political philosophy in the Department of Political Science. In 1964 he earned his MA and in 1970 his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1970 after some teaching in Berkeley, Professor Glass moved to the East Coast where he has since taught at the University of Maryland, College Park. There he is a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and was recently awarded its Kerwin Prize for Outstanding Teaching – granted yearly to only one faculty member. In 2004 Glass was named Outstanding Faculty Member of the Year by the State of Maryland.

As a scholar James Glass has been quite prolific, publishing nine book chapters, thirty-six articles, ten review essays, and eighteen book reviews. He is the author of six books, the first four stemming from his almost twenty-year-long research project at the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, interviewing patients and then writing about their internal worlds. These are Delusion: Internal Dimensions of Political Life (University of Chicago Press, 1985), Private Terror/Public Space: Psychosis and the Politics of Community (Cornell University Press, 1989), Shattered Selves: Multiple Personality in a Post-Modern World (Cornell University Press, 1993), Psychosis and Power: Threats to Democracy in the Self and the Group (Cornell University Press, 1995), Life Unworthy of Life: Race Phobia and Mass Murder in Hitler’s Germany (Basic Books, 1997), and Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust: Moral Uses of Violence and Will (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004).

C. Fred Alford (CFA) interviewed James Glass (JMG) in the spring. Together they edit the Psychoanalysis and Social Theory series of Cornell University Press, which thus far has published six books. Professor Glass may be contacted at jglass@ gvpt.umd.edu. He lives in Maryland with his wife Cyndi, a social worker in private practice; they have two teenaged sons.

CFA: What brought you to political psychology?

JMG: I had a long-standing interest in the psychological dimensions of political and social theory. In 1977, I established a research relationship with the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Baltimore, interviewing patients and then writing about their internal worlds in relation to political and theoretical issues at the heart of the Western tradition of political philosophy. I studied madness, its languages and symbolizations, and wrote about the relation of madness in individuals to madness in political societies and groups. That work preoccupied me for well over a decade. I studied various psychotic and borderline conditions in patients and then interpreted the data (language) in the context of moral, political, and philosophical issues central to the canon of political philosophy.

CFA: Of which of your works are you most proud?

JMG: That’s hard to say. I have been enormously influenced by my work at Sheppard Pratt, an experience that I wrote about in my books about the hospital and its patients. But I also was profoundly moved by my research into the Holocaust, and the interviews with survivors, including those in the resistance, whose stories and narratives affected me deeply.

CFA: What are you working on now; what is its importance; and when do you expect to have it published?

JMG: Now I’m looking at different ways of interpreting the civil society of mass murder, with particular reference to the Holocaust. I find the kind of research and values developed in civil society to be as critical in forging the state of mind behind the “final solution” as the Nazi party and apparatus of state. In fact, it seems to me that often civil society led the

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party and the state into the commitment to mass murder. Science, medicine, and psychiatry had a huge role in the thinking behind mass murder. In addition, this most recent project takes a critical look at the central interpretive pillars regarding genocide and the Holocaust: Hannah Arendt’s theory of “totalitari-anism” and mass society; Theodor Adorno’s concept of the authoritarian personality and the rise of fascism; and Stanley Milgram’s experiments in obedience to authority. Each of these theoretical approaches needs to be modified and rethought in light of recent research into the role of civil society in Nazi Germany and group theoretical concepts stemming from the work of Wilfred Bion. I expect the project to be finished within the next couple of years.

CFA: What is your primary affiliation?

JMG: My primary affiliation is with political science and political philosophy. At the University of Maryland, political psychology is a subfield of government and politics.

CFA: What special training turned out to be most helpful to you?

JMG: I can honestly say that the training I received in listening to patients and staff (psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, nurses, and mental health workers) at Sheppard Pratt Hospital was vital in informing my work. It was like an extended post doctorate resembling nothing of what I experienced in graduate school. At Sheppard I was fortunate to be around tolerant, open-minded, and curious staff, who found listening to patients as important, if not more important, than medicating them. The psychological study of psychosis (which I would argue underlay residency training under Clarence Schulz and informed many of the formal and informal discussions about patients) focused on the self, its internality, and the varied forms of linguistic expression.

One of the greatest tragedies of the modern treatment of psychosis is the loss of that attention to language and its symbolizations along with its informal study in the mental hospital. My work was much different than that of Erving Goffman, Alfred Stanton, and Morris Schwartz in the 1950s, than even that of Michel Foucault when he spent time in a mental hospital researching his dissertation. Foucault went in and out while I hung around for years and began to make some headway in understanding message systems and epistemologies that many psychiatrists tend to dismiss as “word salad,” or as lunatic ravings. I found in many of these expressions of the internal world, complex theories of knowledge, self-referential and hermetic, but very real and critical to the patients/persons articulating them.

CFA: What led you to do your most important work of listening, really listening, to patients at the Sheppard and Pratt Hospital?

JMG: I will explain, giving some more background. I became involved in clinical research at Sheppard Pratt around 1977, right after receiving tenure at Maryland. For years I had been influenced by the theories of Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and R.D. Laing, particularly their views toward transgressive states of mind, and moving beyond “normal” reality into madness. For these philosophers madness becomes a form of communication, a refraction of contradictions in the so-called “normal” world of politics and values. Furthermore, in the 1960s at Berkeley, where I completed my graduate degrees in political science, the inclination to explore psychological and aesthetic states that moved against conventional or conforming reality was a powerful social and cultural dynamic. The common intellectual currency included the poetry of Rimbaud, Beaudelaire, and Artaud; the Expressionist painters of the 20th century; the fiction of Kafka; and art that broke reality into fragments, requiring a powerful emotional identification. With the almost surrealistic politics of protest in Berkeley, the idea that it was a “good” to see beyond the normal, what might be called the psychedelics of knowledge – philosophers like Nietzsche and Foucault, poets like Artaud, filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman and later James Toback – raised important questions about madness, its language, and its transformative experiential dimension.

By the late 1970s, after writing in a variety of forums about these ideas, it seemed to me I could go no further. If I was to continue exploring the nature of madness, I needed to speak with people who society designated as “mad.” It was almost as if I wanted to empirically “test” the hypotheses of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Laing in the clinical setting. Otherwise, I had to leave the topic; since I had reached my intellectual dead end in thinking about madness; now it was essential to listen to it or I should just leave the topic altogether.

At the time Sheppard Pratt had an extraordinary reputation for the psychotherapeutic treatment

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of schizophrenia; in addition, it was situated in an environment in Towson that, at least on my initial reaction to the hospital, gave some credence to the idea that indeed if one were “ill,” the hospital environment, the grounds, could or might indeed provide something akin to the classical concept of “asylum,” an escape or retreat from the prevailing forms of psychological pain found in society and the family. Laing wrote a great deal about the concept of asylum as a psychological escape and it certainly had an impact on some of his work with Joseph Berke in London on the treatment of madness.

In a letter to Sheppard’s Director of Research I explained what I wanted to do: to interview schizophrenics and use the language and imagery as clinical data for a project examining the concept of madness, as it had been articulated by philosophers in the history of political philosophy. Philosophers like Plato and Thomas Hobbes had spent a great deal of intellectual energy in conjuring up the horrors of madness and the dangers that madness presented to the public space. What could the actual language of psychosis tell us about the relation between madness and the public space, the powerful disintegrative forces that rip apart political structure and social values?

A few days later I received a phone call from the Director, Jerry Whitmarsh, inviting me up for an interview. I was obviously thrilled; in the past, it had been sociologists studying mental hospitals and their structures (for example Goffman, Stantan, and Schwartz) that constituted the approach of non-clinical professionals in doing research in mental hospitals. Never before had a political theorist or someone trained in political philosophy made such a request – at least not at Sheppard Pratt and I don’t think anywhere else. As far as I knew, the only philosopher to have had clinical contact with madness was Foucault; it was a central part of his doctoral dissertation he later published, several years before Madness and Civilization, as a short book called Mental Illness and Psychology. For the clinicians at the Hospital, my presence was something of a first, and I imagine they were curious as to how I would react to the unpredictable and unsettling world of psychosis.

The interview went terribly. I’ll never forget Clarence Schulz and Gerald Whitmarsh sat with me for an hour, while I went through my Nietsche, Laing, and Foucault dance, only on every point to be reminded by both of them that the clinical world was very much different from these theories. In their view what I argued about the philosophers, particularly Laing, could not be substantiated in the clinical universe. After leaving that interview, I thought to myself, “Wow, I flunked this one; they’ll never approve the project.” A couple of days later, I received a call saying that it was fine to speak with patients, all I needed to do was receive their consent and the consent of their therapists. That began what for me was an extraordinary collaboration with the Hospital and its staff for the next sixteen years. I should add that during the 1970s and 1980s Sheppard managed to attract a number of talented residents, interested not only in medical psychiatry but also in the phenomenology of their patients and the meaning inherent in their language. To elaborate, it was like graduate school all over again; the “professors” were the staff psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers – many of whom spent hours with me. The graduate students were the psychiatric residents, a colorful and talented bunch of persons who sought out Sheppard because of its reputation for speaking with patients and listening.

Understanding how to listen was an important element in staff meetings, in addition to seeing the links between linguistic and behavioral forms of expression. This included the role of listening to art and dance therapy. I attended a couple of dance therapy sessions with schizophrenic patients as a member of their class. In subsequent discussions with the dance therapist I learned a great deal about the nature of movement itself and its connection to images and symbols preoccupying the schizophrenic mind. The patients’ art and drawings expressed complex states of mind that told powerful stories in compressed and often distorted images and vivid, jarring colors. But it was the staff meetings, attended by all the different therapeutic modalities, that had an enormous impact on how I approached listening and how I heard the way others “listened” to this often confounding language. The staff at Sheppard continuously reflected on the inner world of psychosis as a complex synthesis of language, affect, and symbol; and under the guidance of Clarence Schulz and Roger Lewin I received what amounted to a postdoctoral education. I write about this in various places in my books about the Hospital and its patients. It was vital to the staff to try to understand the patients’ sense of self, and the power of language in reaching inside, in discover-

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ing the alternative realities and epistemologies patients used to orient themselves to the world as they saw it.

Unfortunately, presently that kind of clinical experience, much less the institutional space to explore, is all but gone. For example, psychiatric residents when I first started had to complete two years on the long-term units; when I wrapped up the project in 1993, the resident requirement on what few were left of the long-term units was less than six months.

After Delusion (1980), which explored the clinical reality of psychosis in the context of political philosophy and some of its central preoccupations, my second book studied the nature of asylum itself in Private Terror/Public Life (1989). I looked at how this worked in Gheel in Belgium with a centuries-long history of sheltering the mad in the town itself; in Israel on the Kibbutzim; at a therapeutic community in Vermont called Spring Lake Ranch; and at Sheppard Pratt. The third book, Shattered Selves (1993), looked at what was then called Multiple Personality Disorder, now generally understood as Dissociative Disorder. I was curious about the postmodern notion of the multiple self and the way postmodern philosophers like Baudrillard and Foucault celebrated and valorized this notion of psychological fragmentation. I wanted to see how it actually played out in a clinical setting; so I interviewed a number of women at the hospital with that diagnosis and wrote about it in the context of the postmodern notion of multiplicity and its central role in postmodern philosophy. The fourth and final book growing out of my experience at Sheppard, Psychosis and Power (1995), looked more generally at the concept of psychosis and its association with concepts of political power. In that study I examined how the languages of madness appear in modern political and group life, and what it means to think about political life from the point of view of psychotic unraveling.

It’s hard to convey the excitement of discovery that was the atmosphere at Sheppard Pratt “back in the day.” If there ever was a golden age for thinking about the phenomenology of psychosis, for exploring the condition as a profound disorder of meaning and logic, for an extraordinary collaboration into its cause, epistemology, and expression from a variety of psychological, medical, and social perspectives, and for an open atmosphere where no one held the “right” answer, where all points of view were welcomed in the efforts to treat seriously disturbed human beings, it was at Sheppard Pratt.

CFA: Do you plan to publish an autobiography?

JMG: I would have a very difficult time writing an autobiography; I think I’m too self-conscious and awkward about talking about myself, although this interview has pushed me to seriously consider it.

CFA: What special training do you think would be most helpful for someone entering the field of psychohistory and political psychology?

JMG: That’s a tough question because qualitative and quantitative political psychology each has its place. I would like to see students become aware of the psychoanalytic tradition, Freud, and modern psychoanalytic theory; to spend some time, if possible, in a clinical setting; and to read as much political philosophy as possible.

CFA: How do you see political psychology developing over the next decade?

JMG: I see political psychology developing in the next decade in ways that will strike a balance between the neurosciences (that now seem all the rage) and more traditional approaches based on an understanding of the self and the group. Specifically I hope that psychoanalytically informed analysis of both individuals and groups is not lost in the de rigueur methodologies of the day. I fear we are in a period where scientizing the self, and more specifically consciousness, seems to be on the rise, so eventually all that will be of importance to political psychology is what is ”rational” or what can be counted. If that happens, it will be a significant loss, since the major philosophers in the history of political philosophy assumed a self that was extremely complicated both in terms of affect and language. It should be kept in mind that Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, among others, were terrific psychologists, long before philosophy and psychology developed into radically different disciplines. Language seems to be disappearing from the modern forms of cognitive science; or rather, the language of affect, the concept of the unconscious, possess little reality for a scientific approach that almost does away with the notion of “self.”

CFA: What could we do as political psychologists and psychohistorians to strengthen our work?

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JMG: I would want to see political psychologists become more familiar with and aware of psychoanalytic developments, but the institutes themselves don’t generally do a good job at outreach. In America, they have been quite insular; nothing of the impact of the French institutes and psychoanalytic teaching in academia has happened in American universities. Psychoanalytic institutes might want to partner up with the universities to offer courses that would strengthen political psychology.

CFA: Do you have any specific ideas for implementing your call for bringing psychoanalytic institutes and academia together?

JMG: It may be too late for that; the initiative had to come from the institutes, and with very few exceptions that has not happened. It certainly hasn’t happened, as far as I know, in the Baltimore/Washington region. Part of the problem lies in the organization of university departments and in the training focus of the institutes. For this to come from the university there would have to be something akin to a large research grant because faculties are not going to offer a tenure track line based solely on psychoanalytic training and insight. The impetus then would have to be on the adjunct level; possibly the institutes could offer to fund a line and a department could hire a person on that basis. Or a group of departmental faculty could make a proposal to the department that so-and-so be offered adjunct status to teach psychoanalytic or applied psychoanalytic theory in some given semester. That would certainly be a feasible avenue of participation; but given the specific ideologies now pervading departments of psychology and political science it would be highly unlikely that one could hire a tenure track faculty with some specialty in psychoanalytic theory. It would be far more likely to happen in departments of comparative literature.

CFA: What is the importance of childhood in your work?

JMG: While I regard childhood as critical in understanding psychoanalytic issues, I do not use it in my work. Rather I rely mostly on narrative and historical sources, although the history of self is a vital aspect of what history means – at least in a psychoanalytic sense. In my book on Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, however, many of the resistance survivors I interviewed spoke at great length about their childhoods – but these were “childhoods” of horrifying trauma and dislocation.

CFA: In your experience in life, are high achievers more identified with their fathers?

JMG: I don’t have much to say about high achievement and identification with the father. I’m not sure there is a correlation and besides, I would not want to speculate absent empirical data.

CFA: Following up on an issue raised by Freud, what is the impact of parental loss on your level of achievement and those of subjects you have studied?

JMG: I wouldn’t say the issue of parental loss is significant in my work; it rarely came up in my discussions with patients at Sheppard Pratt, and if it did, it did not figure in their diagnoses or in the narrative reality they were describing. It was of course significant with the Holocaust survivors I interviewed and with the resistance fighters. The rage and sorrow of losing their parents or having witnessed the death of one or both parents played a significant role in the intensity of violence with which they waged resistance and in their initial decisions to join resistance groups.

CFA: How old were you, Jim, when your father and mother died?

JMG: I was fifty when my father died and fifty-six when my mother died.

CFA: What are your thoughts on the psychology and psychodynamics of violence in our world?

JMG: It depends on the context, the environment, and both public and private issues that play into any significant political conflict. Violence, aggression, hate, rage: all the passions Freud studied play into political forms of violence. There are some pretty good group psychoanalytic theorists that may help explain the nature of public forms of political violence: Bion, Anzieu, Volkan, Claudio Neri, Eigen, Ogden, and others. I think it’s difficult to draw too literal a connection between a violent leader and the willingness of the masses to follow. That Freudian model (see Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego) I think has been overemphasized, especially in political science, in the sense that proponents of this theory overlook the fact that often it is the audience that propels the leadership. I tend to follow Bion: the group writes the script unconsciously and then “chooses” someone who will enact it. That certainly was the case in Nazi Germany where civil society – notably the sectors of medicine, science, the social sciences, the universities, and scientific institutes –

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were instrumental players in developing the state of mind propelling the genocide. Germany’s euthanasia program, which preceded the Holocaust, had as much to do with the forces in civil society, in groups within society, as it did with party leadership. There’s an interesting study of the Gestapo that repeatedly argues that because of the willingness of the German population to be rid of their Jews, the Gestapo had to devote few resources to policing the German population. Consistently when the Gestapo came to round up Jews, there was no resistance from neighbors or friends. Jan Gross speaks about this in his book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001).

CFA: How do you understand the psychology of terrorism?

JMG: Terrorism involves both politics and psychology; the willingness to die for a cause involves not so much an alienated, unhappy individual, but a person who firmly believes in principles and ideas. To me, terrorism is a belief-driven or ideologically defined activity, and to argue that terrorists are simply sick individuals misses the intricate connection between politics and psychology. In the documentary Jesus Camp, a twelve-year-old is speaking about how he would consider it an honor to “die for Jesus.” The kid is not crazy or demented or alienated – he believes. However, we tend to dismiss as aberrant the complex psychological factors that push individuals into radical action.

CFA: How can psychologically oriented scholars have a greater impact on academia and society generally?

JMG: That’s a tough question because generally academic departments like psychology and political science have little interest in psychoanalytically informed conceptual methods. Psychoanalysis has had an enormous impact in literature and English departments, in comparative literature. But there is little payoff or reward in political science or psychology for consistently maintaining a psychoanalytic position. The journals in political science and, I imagine, psychology are simply not sympathetic to psychoanalytically informed interpretation or analysis. There are of course a few; but if you’re a young political scientist striving for tenure, there is utterly no incentive to publish in psychoanalytic journals. How can this be changed? I think the psychoanalytic institutes have to step up, maybe fund a chair or a professorship, do something to have more of an impact in academic environments.

CFA: What is the impact of psychohistory on your area of expertise?

JMG: Psychohistory has little relevance to what I do, although I admire the study and have long held great respect for the work of Lloyd deMause.

CFA: How can we recruit new people to political psychology and psychohistory?

JMG: I’m not sure how to recruit new people to political psychology. I try to work with graduate students and to encourage them to think about the world psychologically. We need to be out there at conferences in political science. Presently, at the American Political Science Meetings there is very little interest in psychological, particularly psychoanalytic, papers and panels. Attendance is generally quite low on those few panels.

CFA: What books were important to your development?

JMG: I would speak more of individual philosophers, social theorists, and historians. Certainly the philosophers in the tradition of political philosophy – Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Marx, and Freud – were critical to my thinking as was the psychoanalytic tradition. These include Klein and modern psychoanalytic theorists like Bion, Winnicott, Anzieu, Ogden, and Neri. Also, historians like Christopher Browning, Robert Jay Lifton (a psychiatrist with a strong interest in history, politics and psychoanalysis), and Daniel Goldhagen – although professionally he is a political scientist. Nietzsche and Foucault have been central to my intellectual development; Hegel I feel is a neglected but important philosopher of consciousness. Max Weber, Karl Marx, Georges Sorel, Henri Bergson, William James, and Frantz Fanon were significant intellectual mentors.

CFA: Who was important in your development as a student of psychosocial development? Did Erik Erikson have an impact on you?

JMG: At one time Erikson had a big impact on my thinking but not so much anymore. Clarence Schulz at Sheppard Pratt was instrumental in my intellectual and professional development – a terrific and subtle teacher. I learned more from him in the years that I spent at Sheppard Pratt than from any other teacher. He was truly a mentor, an intellectual, and had an

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extraordinary way of examining and speaking with critically ill mental patients. His interviews with patients were works of art. Roger Lewin, also at Sheppard Pratt, guided my thinking about patients and how to listen and interpret. Also my conversations with Fred Alford over the years have been instrumental in developing my thought. When I was in graduate school Sheldon Wolin and Norman Jacobson were very important to my intellectual development, as was Judith Shklar in the few times I had the opportunity to speak with her at conferences and meetings.

CFA: How do you define political psychology or psychohistory?

JMG: I find it impossible to define political psychology. If I were to try to it might look like this: the study of the relation between internal psychodynamic process, both in the individual and the group, and the public or public world. It is of course much more than this; but since my frame of reference is psychodynamic, this is how I see it.

CFA: Jim, you’re likely the most honored teacher at the University of Maryland. What is the relationship between your teaching and research?

JMG: I find them interrelated. In teaching, particularly with graduate students, the back and forth quality of seminars and exchanges leads to developing and refining ideas that later become central to research projects and the perceptions informing the research. It would be very difficult for me to conduct research without the critical mirror teaching provides. The classroom, intellectually, is a totally free space for the generation of ideas and for feedback and interpretation. From time to time, in my undergraduate classes, students will ask questions that push me into thinking differently about a particular theorist or set of ideas and arguments. Without this mirror I would lose a certain sense of boundary that audience provides. Often I think we underestimate the importance of the concept of audience and its role in figuring out what’s important and how to think about issues. For example, one of the reasons that led me to write the book on Jewish resistance were the persistent questions raised by students concerning the extent and nature of Jewish resistance. Most questions assumed or presumed the lack of resistance; I set out to demonstrate in my book how that assumption overlooked some vital historical facts and stories.

CFA: Thanks for a valuable interview.

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