Responses to Group Process Symposium (response article)

David Beisel’s Response to Binion

As in earlier essays—“My Life With Frau Lou” and “Doing Psychohistory,” for example—Professor Binion has once again offered some challenging observations on the philosophy and methodology of psychohistory. His essay points us in several directions at once.

He is strategically on target when his argument invokes the inadequate ethological model. Today, media coverage of the human genome project, coupled with what seems to be almost daily announcements of new genetic discovery, have strengthened socio-biological arguments against the argument of environmental causes, traditionally favored by historians. The current biological fashion has, of course, further reinforced the denial defense against unconscious process, itself a constant of group behavior.

Ethology is a tricky business. Psychohistorians above all know how often the discoveries in animal behavior have turned out to be the scientist’s own projections. Since people are neither rats, geese, nor ants, prudent scholarship suggests that animal behavior is best approached poetically, as suggestive metaphor.

Still, Binion’s attempt to prove that “biological theory at its present pass has little to teach historians” (one agrees in general) had a curiously counterproductive impact on me. His strategic detour into ethology made me think that—projections aside—we are indeed animals, share attributes with other species, and cannot divorce ourselves from nature. The trick (as he implies) is disentangling the bio-logical from the psycho-logical, and then seeing where and how they intersect, when they do. However, it is unfair to ask his short essay to deliver more elaborate delineation.

He rightly reminds us that instinct is unconscious, and there’s more to instinct than meets the eye. It’s not only “slippery,” it’s mysterious; while unconscious on individual and collective levels, it is somehow bound up, at least in part, with biology. This means the unknown does “cry out to be explored.”

How is it to be explored—as psychology, biology, or psychohistory? These categories are something of a false start, since there is nothing inherently contradictory in biological/psycho-logical causality, even though last night (August 22, 2000) on the Health Channel, a psychiatrist dogmatically declared: “Bipolar disorder and unipolar depression are entirely chemical.” Both psychiatry and history—including psychohistory—need to look to current scholarly findings. The New York Times recently reported: “A study, show-

Page 144

ing that pain administered in infancy can permanently rewire the nervous system in rats, may have implications for human infants” (July 26, 2000, p. A17). A few days later, it reported a study confirming a physiological connection between childhood trauma, depression, and anxiety.

Women … who suffered from depression and had a history of child abuse showed levels of ACTH, a hormone secreted by the pituitary gland in response to stress, six times as high as those in women without such histories. They also had higher levels of cortisol, another stress hormone, and higher heart rates than women who had not been abused” (August 2, 2000, p. A22).

Thus, we move from trauma to biology and back. (It is evidence like this, rooted in physical reality, which helps convince students that there may be something to unconscious processes.)

It is in the area of trauma that Binion is at his usual best. As he moves the discussion to individual and collective trauma, and to traumatic reliving in history, I find his essay hints at a newer, richer perspective which organically emerges from his earlier pioneering scholarship. As he puts it with characteristic economy: “human groups … need to invite or contrive an intensified renewal of devastating disasters that they prove unable to handle by instinct or reflex.” The definition has never been better expressed. Even evolutionary biologists will sooner or later have to take account of the evidence.

Here, of course, the critical focus is on groups. Even scholars, physicians, and therapists who think about, respond to, and treat collective traumatic disasters do so most often by treating individuals as individuals, who just happen to be part of a shared experience. An example is the members of the International Society for the Study of Traumatic Stress at the San Francisco earthquake in the late 1980s. Beyond “bonding” (what Binion calls “tighten group ties”), little or no thought has been given to what the consequences might be for the traumatized cohort as a whole. Still less have historians, who regularly describe group trauma and its consequences, applied a systematic model to these processes. Binion’s call for more “empirical inquiry” is appropriate, even as it echoes earlier calls which, up until now, have been little heeded.

Perhaps the essay’s emphasis on ideas shifts attention away from human actions; one gets the sense that behavioral outcomes may be less important in the essay than the ideas driving them. Here the message to historians of ideas is clear: since humans can and do “relive a trauma figuratively,” intellectual historians need convincing that part of what they are studying is the “mentalization of traumatic reliving,” separate and apart from “crisis-free intellectual and cultural developments.” The message is clear; for a deeper, richer, more accurate history of ideas, traumatic “mentalizations” need to be studied and integrated into mainstream intellectual history.

When it comes to our own enterprise, Binion is right: “psychohistory is on its own.” The evidence for and the consequences of collective trauma have to emerge from our own empirical studies. Research and reflection over the last quarter century have not only tempered some of my earlier enthusiasms, but have further convinced me of the centrality of traumatic reliving in history. One agrees, reluctantly, with Binion’s tragic observation that “the evidence from human groups is inconclusive as to whether they are ever done with any trauma.” (One thinks of the Holocaust, of the English genocide of the Irish, and of American slavery—on both sides—and of countless other intergenerational transmissions as examples to add to that of the German generation of 1918.) Can we ever get over group trauma? What kind of history will we be writing if this perspective is ever fully acknowledged?

Despite an impressive body of research over more than three decades, work that has conclusively demonstrated trauma’s central historical role, Binion’s kind of psychohistory has been greatly admired, but rarely emulated. His kind of scholarship demands erudition, immersion in the sources, and the ability to make unexpected connections, none of which disqualifies serious scholars from following his lead. What has inhibited psychohistorians from a more serious exploration of collective trauma in the past, I think, has been an over-reliance on the group-fantasy model. Binion is right; if psychohistory is to begin to fulfill its promise, “empirical inquiry is long overdue.”

Page 145

Norman F. Cantor’s Response to Binion

Rudy Binion’s paper focuses programmatic statements about group unconsciousness. My paper will make some empirical comments on the three examples he gives. The first concerns itself with the leveling off of Western European population growth (birthrate) around 1870. The second deals with the German collective wish to fight WWI again to make up for 1918. The final statement made by Binion deals with William Langer, the psychohistory of the post-Black Death era, and the Dance of Death motif.

The biggest cause of the leveling off of Western European population growth (birthrate) around 1870 was the availability of rubber condoms, eliminating the need for the practice of coitus interruptus. Condoms became available first in France, where the phenomenon of lower birthrate was initially noticed. Since ancient times, Europeans had wanted to control the birthrate. The upper class Romans had some success, possibly with condom sheaths made from lambskin.

In the early Middle Ages, the problem was underpopulation. There was no need to control the birthrate until the big population boom of 1180-1280. Europeans then had no means of contraception, the population tripled in that century, and all sorts of economic problems followed. These problems were resolved only with the Black Death of 1347-1350.

Binion’s second example deals with the German collective wish to fight World War I once again to make up for the defeat of 1918. While this may have some validity, it is my belief that the majority of Germans didn’t want to go to war in 1939. Only Hitler and his crew did—if you believe A.J.P. Taylor. According to Taylor, Hitler blundered into war by inept diplomacy. Because of Taylor, I doubt the value of this example.

The third and final example has to do with William Langer, the psychohistory of the post-Black Death era, and the Dance of Death motif. That the motif appears prominently in art is obvious. However, what is intriguing is how little mention is made in literature. The only detailed reference (about 10 lines of poetry) appears in William Langland’s Piers Plowman (ca. 1830). Geoffrey Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales (1395) never mentions the Plague, even though his journalistic human-interest genre would seem to make him focus heavily on it. We have here a negative reaction: forget about the Black Death; concentrate on living. The group unconsciousness wants healing, not gloom. Boccaccio’s Decameron (1375) uses the Black Death just as a framing device to get the book going. Once Boccaccio gets into his soft-core porn, no more plague. Boccaccio’s young Florentines, having fled from the plague-ridden city, are just a bunch of slackers telling sex stories. There is no Dance of Death here. Why so much use of the Death motif in art then? Once medieval artists found a motif that had a market, they mined it forever.

The group unconscious at work during the Black Death is one of bewilderment. This is because of the pandemic after Europe had seen no widespread disease for half a millennium. Where did it come from and why?

There were three contemporary answers to this two-part question. The first is God’s punishment for sin, of course! The second answer lies in the weird environmental events involving earthquakes or serpents, and moving from East Asia to Europe. The final answer lies in the realm of astrology—Saturn in the house of Jupiter. What I see in these three responses is collective anxiety, and that supports Binion’s paradigm.

It is good to see my old friend and colleague Rudy Binion carrying the torch for psychohistory and developing its structure. It is too bad he doesn’t have the Ivy League chair he deserved for his study of Frau Lou, one of the dozen best history books ever written. If he had, psychohistory would be further developed now.

Samuel Kline Cohn’s Response to Binion

Samuel Kline Cohn

Rudolph Binion’s “Group Process” forces historians to rethink the dynamics of group behaviour. I wish to begin where Binion ends, with William Langer’s “The Next Assignment” of 1958, its call to seek the underlying psychology of group behaviour, and, in particular, the supposed mass hysteria following the Black Death (1347-1351). One question not clearly delineated by Langer or Binion is what constitutes a group within human societies, or the possibility that different groups, or even the same group within a society, might re-

Page 146

spond to the same external stimuli in radically different ways. Indeed, as much of Binion’s work has illustrated, psychohistory demands a comparative approach.

The psychohistory of the Black Death shows a multiplicity of reactions within the same societies, across political and linguistic boundaries, and over time. As Giovanni Boccaccio and contemporary chroniclers, such as the Florentine Matteo Villani, observed, the pestilence in 1348 caused two reactions within Florentine society. While a minority saw in the plague the wrath of God, and thus became more pious and ascetic, others were spurred on to enjoy life while they could. According to chroniclers and preachers across Europe, the new abundance occasioned by the mass mortalities led many who survived to lust after the pleasures of the world, from new indecent fashions in clothing to illicit sex.

Such charges were commonplace across Europe; other differences cut geographically. Despite the impressions given by Langer and others, the Black Death did not unleash, “universally,” waves of Jewish pogroms and hysterical marches of flagellants across Europe. Instead, these reactions were specific to certain German- and Slavic-speaking regions, parts of Spain, and southwestern France. It did not occur in Britain, most of Flanders, northern France, or Italy. Interestingly, the German chroniclers spent much more space describing the cremation of Jews, and the bloodletting of flagellants, than the plague itself. Further, in German regions, invariably, the burning of Jews and the mass marches of flagellants preceded the plague. For many towns, there is no evidence of plague before the 1360s or later.

Meanwhile in Tuscany, Umbria, and other parts of Italy, instead of mass hysteria, communes reacted with control. They set up commissions to regulate and record burials, suppressing mass meetings and funeral processions that would lead to further contagion. They also hired doctors to perform autopsies and to suggest measures for containing the plague. In other areas of Europe, such as Flanders, flagellant movements arrived, but failed to arouse a following. Instead, locals viewed them with bemusement or disgust.

Reactions to the plague changed after its first outbreak in 1348. I have studied the plague’s psychological consequences for burial, funerals, and notions of the afterlife, arguing that the first time around little changed. However, with the second onslaught in the 1360s (a relived trauma), men and women in Tuscany and Umbria became obsessed with stockpiling their worldly belongings to insure well-marked, even monumental graves. This included post-mortem masses, and works of art, for their lasting remembrance both on earth and in heaven. I have recently seen similar trends in the north of Europe in places such as Douai, Tournai, and London. However, in these locations, the group to be remembered alongside the dying testator was the nuclear family, instead of the male lineage of dead ancestors. (See my The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy, 1992; revised ed. 1997.)

Finally, unique to the first outbreak of plague, was the close connection among the Black Death, persecution of the Jews, and mass religious hysteria. In over 200 chronicles that I have read, I found that this was not a repeat performance. Only in Poland did the 1360 plague unleash a wave of terror against the Jews, but it appears to have happened in places that had not experienced the plague of 1348-1350. Furthermore, the utter despondency and futility of any human response to the pestilence’s carnage found in chronicles and medical tracts after the first wave of plague changed thereafter. Doctors, in particular, gained a new confidence about their science. They claimed to have cured hundreds of plague victims, and, because of the plague, to have eclipsed the ancients, Hippocrates and Galen included. As a consequence, the plague tractates became a new literary genre of the second half of the 14th century, which exploded in number and significance through the early modern period.

Here, the character of the disease more than a sub-soil of the unconscious appears to have fuelled doctors’ confidence in their plague recipes and techniques of curing, from herbal regimes to lancing boils and bloodletting. As the burial records, last wills and testaments of the laity, and necrologies of religious communities chronicle, the fatalities caused by plague declined steeply over its first century. They declined much more steeply than with smallpox and other infectious diseases. The decline also eclipsed the one seen in late medieval and early modern Europe. It was also far greater than the unfurling of these diseases on virgin-soil populations in the New World.

As the massive numbers recorded of surviving plague tracts attest, doctors as well as other members of society across Europe misinterpreted this success as the result of human intervention. In reality, it was no doubt brought on by natural se-

Page 147

lection, and perhaps in part by acquired immunity; not by legislative controls or anti-plague recipes. Here, so different from the plague’s initial onslaught, when chroniclers and doctors saw prayer and Godly obedience as the only answers, a new strand of optimism and confidence in human intervention emerged. It became associated with Renaissance thought and psychology at the beginning of the 15th century. This conscious reading or misreading of the perceived surroundings changed the psychohistory of Europe, from its art and religious history to its medicine.

For the Middle East, however, the same disease and horrific levels of mortality set off a wholly different historical trajectory—one of political and economic decline, urban decay, and pessimism. Why the difference? What was the mix of material and psychological factors? The time is ripe for the comparative historian to respond.

Lloyd deMause’s Response to Binion

As is well known in psychohistory circles, my good friend Rudy Binion’s views on group process are the opposite of mine. While he adopts something close to the traditional Durkheimian “collective consciousness” methodology, I reject the idea that groups have motives. Instead, I insist on examining the historical record of individuals’ motives to explain their behavior. Only if the motivations of enough individuals collude to produce viable collective behavior can they be used to explain history. Motives for suicide are always individual, even if historical events trigger them.

Durkheim is wrong to imagine that statistical predictability indicates social causes. Suicide or homicide varies by psychoclass, or childrearing mode. It changes through the centuries, far more than it does by singular socio-historical conditions. (See my chart of suicide, homicide, and war death rates in “War as Righteous Rape and Purification” on <www.psychohistory.com>.)

What I mainly object to when ascribing “instinct” to something like a decline of birth rates is that it simply bypasses the hard work of looking at the motives and behaviors of the human couples involved in making contraception effective. I examine these in an upcoming article in the Journal of Psychohistory. As explained in the article, I found that the decline in birth rates was limited to the most evolved parents, who first began to value the kind of childcare they could afford to give. They also began using contraceptive techniques more effectively. Through my historical sources, I have yet to come across a man who withdrew during intercourse because he was worried about France becoming overcrowded. To posit this as the motivation of millions of parents, none of who were aware of their motivation, is simply an argumentum ex silentio.

It may be that one war, fought by one generation, is a “traumatic reliving” of an earlier war, fought by their parents. However, a psychohistorian cannot assume the method of transmission between generations. Historians often imagine that children are told about the earlier war by their parents, who rant about a “stab in the back,” and “the shame of Versailles,” and then go to war. I doubt this. Instead, these appear to me as group-fantasies hiding deeper traumas (“stab in the back” = enemas; “shame of Versailles” = shaming little children). I could be wrong in these conclusions. One can only disprove me by showing different individual motives in the sources, not by theoretical assumption.

Rudy has done a great deal of wonderful research examining individual motives, and making historical conclusions based on them. However, in principle, he avoids childhood as an input to causality of behavior. I think he is mistaken. His psychohistorical methodology remains parallel to mine, as long as he concentrates on decoding individuals’ motives, rather than positing long-distance causality between generations.

I am yet to encounter a single person who truly went to war because their parents or grandparents were insulted or mistreated by someone long ago, even if that was their conscious claim. I have always found sufficient reason to mistrust it, and look to more recent events as causes. I must prove my case person by person. Psychohistorians cannot assume one war produces another, simply because they follow one another.

Paul H. Elovitz’ Response to Binion

Sir Isaiah Berlin, inspired by an idea of Tolstoy’s, wrote a brilliant essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox” (1977), dividing intellectuals into foxes and hedgehogs (groundhogs). Foxes sniff

Page 148

around to know many separate things, but not one big thing. In contrast, hedgehogs sit on mounds surveying the prairie in all directions where this panoramic vision results in knowing one big thing. Thus, Berlin found Karl Marx to be a hedgehog, while he himself was much more like a fox.

In examining my own intellectual history, predilections, and style, I find that I am a fox. I delight in knowing many specific things, while maintaining caution about the grand vision of hedgehogs such as Marx.

Such has not always been the case. In my early days of reading Freud, my imagination was captured by grand concepts such as the repetition compulsion and the return of the repressed. Perhaps, I thought, by probing the unconscious, we can understand its full workings, and be able to take steps to better the lives of individuals and society. I was inspired by Lloyd deMause’s “The Evolution of Childhood,” and also by his concept of fantasy analysis.

Separate decades of training as a historian and as a psychoanalyst have moderated my inclinations to explain things mono-causally. As a profession, historians tend to be quite wary of theory; sweeping theories incline to make most historians even more uncomfortable. While training as a psychoanalyst for a decade, I paid a fortune to control (supervising) analysts who taught me how to understand the needs of my fellow human beings in the most effective manner. Central to this learning is that theories and other grand schemes must be put aside to listen effectively, lest I create a theoretical procrustean bed for my patients to be fitted into at the cost of their amputated limbs. Years of reclining on the couch in my own analysis taught me that I inclined to reach for theory when I felt weak, vulnerable, self-absorbed, or grandiose.

Am I saying I distrust theory, or that I am not the man to write about theories because of my special training? I am not sure what the answer is to my question. I am sure that theories to me are like scents to a fox. They are leads, which might result in a nice juicy, intellectual meal. It makes sense to only follow one at a time to avoid total confusion. I am sure that too many people who do theoretical work do not seem to look at people, and that the people who look and see separate people, like myself, do not usually work in the realm of theory.

I find Rudy Binion’s paper to be thought-provoking, but unconvincing. I doubt that the European population decline he refers to after 1870 was to “defend against an imminent, and unprecedentedly massive, threat of overpopulation.” Rather, I incline to see it as a function of the changing role of children in urban society. The biblical injunction to be “fruitful and multiply” made far better sense on the farm than in the city. For example, after their catastrophic defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the French feared domination by the more numerous Germans far more than they feared overpopulation.

The example of population brings to mind the comment by my demography professor at the University of Connecticut, that you could always spot the demographers at sociology conferences because they were the ones blushing as a result of embarrassment over previous predictions. Our textbook focused on America’s problem with depopulation at a point when the country seemed to be bursting at the seams with new babies and growth. In the short run, these demographers were certainly wrong. This experience helped confirm my inclination to avoid the temptations of prediction.

Binion’s references to instinct worry me, though I must acknowledge being intrigued by his ethological examples. Animal populations, such as the chipmunks living in my garden walls, incline to ebb and flow according to the food supply, the environment, and the existence of predators. The chipmunks thrive on the seed falling from our birdfeeders, do not worry much about our fat old cat, and certainly find the local environment very hospitable. Like our chipmunks, why didn’t the human population of France and Western Europe increase with the greater agricultural productivity of the late 19th and early 20th centuries? I suspect the failure to do what had been done so often in the past, when the food supply allowed, reflected a change in humankind’s sense of itself, as well as a conscious decision based upon the changing role of children in the modern world and family.

Though I do not know the answers to these and many questions raised by Binion’s pathbreaking essay, I welcome publishing exchanges about them as a step in the process of further developing group psychohistory.

Page 149

Jay Y. Gonen’s Response to Binion

Binion’s questions concerning group process go to the heart of group psychohistory. Would it be that I only could provide a set of razor-sharp answers to all these questions and triumphantly declare, à la Fukuyama, the end of group psychohistory. Here are a few tentative thoughts.

Individuals are born into a group that shapes them, just as it was able to shape their parents before them. Because of this actual priority in time and history the group culture is a major factor in the psychological formation of individuals. Even though a good deal of this formative work is carried on by the parents, the primary determinants of the shaping of identity reside nevertheless in the group heritage and culture, be it old sacred lore or newly sanctified myths. Parental conduct and childrearing modes still count but not as much as the historically overriding cultural factor of group belongingness. This is why Jews from Yemen, Poland, and other diverse countries, and largely regardless of child rearing modes, used to share in common the deeply traumatizing conviction that “it is for our sins that we have been exiled from our land.”

The domain where group processes occur is the public arena of ideas that contents-wise includes art and politics and form-wise includes the media, public places, and homes. This is where dynamic collective developments take place. Here a myriad of concepts, images, symbols, and slogans float together with powerful prototypical ideas which acquired major historical importance in the life of the group. The group mind, so to speak, is the percolation of an idea or a combination of notions and images to the point of mobilizing group action. When this happens we sometimes talk of the zeitgeist or “spirit of the time.”

What determines when an idea’s time has come is not unlike what can be observed in clinical practice with individuals. When an unconscious idea becomes conscious, or when ideas are acted upon, depends on different factors. The forcefulness of the impulses which the ideas represent is one such factor. Concurrent reinforcements from associated ideas or events that historically happen to take place is another factor. The strength or weakness of behavior controls—depending on being healthy or worn out either physically or emotionally—is also very important in either individuals or groups. Finally, a perception of an existential or a narcissistic threat in the form of an impending or repetitious trauma either physical or symbolic is very likely to compel action or impose paralysis.

But unlike the case with individuals, this dynamic interplay within the group domain plays itself out as a shared activity of the collectivity at large. The individual level of participation in this give-and-take activity at the overlapping public domain of ideas and images varies. Yet, in intricate maneuvers, followers and leaders negotiate and manipulate what is to be prioritized in the zeitgeist. In these negotiations some of the messages are quite manifest but many others are delivered through symbolism, associations and reading between the lines. Consequently it is possible for the participants to dance their way toward group consensus and collective action without full awareness of it.

All this raises also the methodological issue of how adequate any sampling of the historical cultural repository of the group with its zeitgeist changes can be. When is a sample comprehensive enough to satisfy even the more rigorous methodologists that it does indeed represent its population fairly adequately? My impression is that different scholars may sample differently and come out with different results but that, as long as they do not a priori have an ideological axe to grind, it is quite fine. The validity of the results of each work should be judged by whether they manage to come up with novelties which ring true. Of course the criterion of “it rings a bell” (a combination of “face” validity and “construct” validity) is never going to satisfy the adherents of rigorous methodology. But I heard Heinz Kohut once exhorting the audience of psychohistorians “to throw caution to the wind.” I took it to mean that if you believe that group psychohistory is a mingling of science and art you can afford to be daring.

Page 150

John J. Hartman’s Response to Binion

It has been my hope for many years that historians would discover the concept of group process in order to expand the understanding of human motivation in large groups. Historical accounts have too often lacked a sophisticated understanding of human psychology. The concept of group process began in the context of small face-to-face groups, and its application to large groups constitutes one of the basic challenges for psychohistory. Professor Binion’s paper provides an important step in the meeting of that challenge.

Binion’s focus is stated directly—people acting in concert toward a given end of which they are unaware. It gets more complicated from there. I would like to call the reader’s attention to the distinction between phenotype and genotype, the outward appearance of a phenomenon and the origin of its causality. I do so because this distinction constitutes the basis of my discussion of Binion’s examples.

His first example, the decline of fertility across Europe beginning in the 1870s, is a most interesting illustration of group process. It is one that, because of my more narrow interest in psychoanalysis and small groups, I would not have thought of as a prime example of group process. It certainly is, and an interesting one at that. Birth rates, suicide rates, and crime rates do involve a group process of which the individual participant is unaware. However, the understanding of these “mega” events is in a different frame of reference from his later examples, and thus may call for different investigative methods and explanatory concepts. Specifically, I am unconvinced that this example lends itself to psychological or psychohistorical explanation. This week there was a published account of how groups of people react in a panic situation in an enclosed space. According to this study, the laws of physics better predict this behavior than those found in psychology.

Freud made two observations, and both seem relevant here. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), he cryptically remarked that group psychology is older than individual psychology, a remark based on his own ideas about evolution. Then in his paper, “The Unconscious” (1915), he made a distinction between the dynamic unconscious (based then on repression) and those processes which are unconscious for other reasons and conditions. The dynamic unconscious is made possible by the evolutionarily later capacity in human beings to mentalize.

The mega trends of Professor Binion’s first example are certainly historical, and certainly the product of group process as he defines it, but not mentalized in the way he describes his next two examples. The major use of the first example is to demonstrate the inadequacy of the historian’s attempt to explain group action by a concurrence of individual conscious motives. However, the methodology of psychohistory to this point does not lend itself to explanation of an example of this type. This better fits into the frame of reference of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, or perhaps even physics. Binion points to “a group reflex” as an explanatory concept, and he may be right. While phenotypically unconscious, the genesis of this phenomenon cannot be understood as a product of defense, shared fantasy, or a communal dynamic unconscious. I submit that Binion’s “instinctive unconscious” is less amenable to understanding by psychohistorical methods just as Freud’s instinct is more refractory to understanding by the psychoanalytic method.

Happily, this is not at all the case in Binion’s next two examples—the German military’s surrender in 1918 and its effect on European historical group process to the current time, and Pirandello’s dysfunctional family saga. For Binion, these examples highlight a sometimes adaptive, sometimes self-destructive reliving of trauma. In these examples, the need to relive trauma can be seen in “mentalized” forms, thus providing an opportunity, if not a necessity, for psychohistorical explanation. The capacity to relive trauma places us squarely, and a bit more comfortably, in a frame of reference which includes many things. They include childhood socialization, the generation transmission of trauma and glory, ideology and propaganda and mythology, shared unconscious fantasies, shared emotions, collective memory and its distortions, and other notions which serve as the basis of a psychodynamic theory of motivation in groups.

While reliving trauma is an evolutionary “adaptive reflex,” the particular examples can be analyzed in terms of discrete cause and effect sequences, the dynamic consequence of process. History proceeds in dynamic relation to conditions and events, forming a describable pattern. Progress and regress can be identified and proposals for amelioration can be considered as in clinical psychoanalysis.

For example, the capacity for groups to effectively mourn loss, defeats, failures, and disas-

Page 151

ters I believe to be a crucial factor in overcoming group trauma. We have learned this from individual psychology, and the analogy in the context of groups seems a powerful one. In this sense, Binion’s astute observation about the development of a purely mentalized trauma is a very important one. This kind of mental activity can be analyzed and worked through in various kinds of collective ways—rituals, literature, film, and even historiography—toward a more effective adaptation to trauma and death.

Among the many ways I was inspired by this paper, was by a question which pressed itself upon me. It is a question which may only be able to be understood through psychohistory: Could there be a connection between the concomitant decline in European fertility and the increase in nationalism, and the promulgation of a “scientific” anti-Semitism? Why did these trends occur at the same time? Can Binion’s concept of a mentalized group process help us understand a possible dynamic relationship in this chronological contiguity? I think it very well might. This is the excitement of Binion’s vision.

Peter Loewenberg’s Response to Binion

As a psychological analysis of group process for historians, Rudolph Binion’s paper leaves me adrift. When he discusses demographic birth rate and population decline I look for some consideration of standards of living, generational expectations, and costs of children, including education, medical care, and housing. Despite our differences, I continue, as before, to admire Rudy’s intellectual and personal grace.

Jacques Lacan said philosophy has been overtaken by psychoanalysis. We would like to add that positivistic history has been replaced by the sensibilities of psychohistory. The bridge we seek between clinical psychoanalysis and the “hard” social sciences, represented by number-crunching historians, lies in the demographic precision of generational history. This is coupled with the historical time specificity of trauma, and our new understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder. Such clinical diagnostic features as “intense fear, helplessness, or horror” (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth ed., 1994, p. 424) are also historical data to be interpreted. While individuals respond to traumatic crises in different ways, wars, famines, genocide, epidemics, economic cycles, revolutions, natural disasters, and changes in political and social structures are the stuff of history that decisively mark, in specific ways, for the rest of their lives those who have lived through them (see my “The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort,” 1971, Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach, 1996, pp. 240-283).

Theodor Adorno once said: “In psychoanalysis only the exaggerations are true.” A classic psychoanalytical approach to group functioning is based on analyzing leaders and followers. Freud’s model has two axes: the followers to the leader, in which he serves as an ego ideal and they give over to him important areas of their volition and control, and the group who identify with each other (Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego,” 1921, James Strachey, et al, eds., Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 1955, 18, pp. 67-143). The Freud model is paternal and based, as was Max Weber’s model of bureaucracy, on the army and the church. I think, however, that Weber’s model of charisma, which describes but does not analyze the emotions of internalized object relationships between a leader and his followers, would have been a stronger case for Freud. (See Max Weber, “Bureaucracy” and “The Sociology of Charismatic Authority,” 1920, H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills, eds., From Max Weber, 1958, pp. 196-252).

Wilfred Bion gave us a model for understanding “leaderless” groups as functioning on unconscious group fantasies or “basic assumptions,” or modes of coping with anxiety, which include dependency, the quest for a leader (Kleinian projective identification), pairing (oedipal/amatory, messianic), and fight-flight (paranoid, aggressive) (W. Bion, Experiences in Groups, 1959).

Among the richest and most useful model for historians, and one related to the current interest in “deep description” single case studies, is the one using a prominent cultural artifact as a per-

Page 152

spective to understand a culture. Erik Erikson chose themes from the American folk ballad “John Henry,” Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences to, in each case, dilate on the historical identity, national myths, cultural fantasies, introjects and projections, and family patterns of the American, German, and Russian cultures (Childhood and Society, 1950, pp. 285-402].

There also remains to be culled and psychohistorically operationalized the middle range of theory and applications to communities, small groups, and families, as was done by the anthropologists of Culture and Personality and the Frankfurt School.

Howard F. Stein’s Response to Binion

“Seek simplicity and mistrust it,” urged philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. That is the (or a) challenge of Professor Binion’s rich essay, which takes us to the heart of group formation—what groups are and what they are for. How does one understand the several kinds of group processes Binion identifies, for example, biologically adaptive group identifications, traumatic group reflexes (historic repetitions, madness, suicide), normal group process, rationalization in human (mal-)adaptation? He asks at the outset, “How can a group of people act in concert to a given end of which they are unaware as individuals?”

There are even different ways of acting in concert. When people began to reduce fertility in the 1870s, they likely did not think of themselves as a group (entity) in the same way that hyper-nationalists did after a humiliating military defeat. If I understand Binion correctly, the former could be retrospectively deduced as a non-self-conscious group based on their similar adaptive behavior, while the latter were an ideationally (ideologically) self-defined, highly self-conscious group. In the former instance, the “group” comes after the fact; in the latter, it is the central fact. The threat of overpopulation (that is, group consciousness of its danger), and altruism in behalf of reducing the danger, cannot be the driving force(s) for fertility reduction, since the same motivation does not occur everywhere. This brings us to psychohistory. Could family life and parent-child relations have contributed to the change from the emphasis on plentiful progeny to a greater focus on personal individuality?

Even fertility (and its opposite) can and does perform symbolic (ideational, rationalizing) as well as adaptive biological functions or ends. Ethnic, national, and religious groups, for instance, can have ideologies of reproduction to revitalize the present and future, in order magically to undo past losses. Just as human ingenuity can wonderfully address survival, if not flourishing, in the real world, the same ingenuity, drawn from dependent, regressed sources, can develop a policy of “circling the wagons” of group life. It can declare its members to be the human beings (Erik Erikson’s felicitous term, pseudospecies), and spurn reality testing outside the group.

The human symbol-maker who brachiates from limb to limb with visions of sugar plums dancing in his (or her) head may miss the branch in front of him (or her): group life. The functioning of person-in-group (psychodynamically speaking) can heighten or diminish reality testing. Anxiety-free spheres of group life can create; anxiety-driven realms (such as traumatic reliving) can only repeat. Further, traumatic lack of closure directs us to the role of mourning in history. It also leads us to scrutinize notions of trauma and of group causality. How much of historic “trauma” is property of the event, and how much is the detritus of expectations and feelings brought (transferred) to the event from childhood? We are here in the realm of over-determinism rather than strict physicalistic determinism. If we are not careful, Occam’s Razor may cut us on the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (Whitehead)! It is often hard to know when “simplicity” is not “simplification” instead. If repetition is remembering in action, what all is being so dramatically remembered, condensed into an historic event and its symbolic eventfulness?

Traumatic group reliving is likely one of the driven-by-emergency responses to anxiety (regression, reorganization via splitting and projection, etc.). To use Binion’s evocative image, it sometimes (when?) “hijacks” reality (including historicality) to confirm symbol. It becomes a matter of careful empirical study, mediated by countertransference, to determine how and how much a calamity is event, and how and how much it is symbol (as in Vamik Volkan’s concept of “chosen trauma”) that “hijacks” the past to quell anxiety more present in origin.

In sum, there are many forms that group

Page 153

identification can take, which points to the possibility of typology, so long as the psychodynamic complexity of group process (for instance, Binion’s notions of “work” and “basic assumptions” as operating simultaneously at differing levels) is recognized.

Page 154