Psychohistory in My Introductory World Religions Course

David Beisel’s “Teaching about Groups” must certainly be a welcome contribution to anyone who faces the task of helping students, whether as undergraduates or graduates, come to grips with using psychoanalytic thought to understand history. By carefully demarcating different sizes of groups to be examined on their own terms, and by bringing in a variety of theoretical and empirical approaches to each, Beisel articulates what many of us in this forum probably have done somewhat intuitively, surely less precisely: overcome the inherent difficulty in applying an hermeneutical model designed to flesh out individual motivations and behaviors that are otherwise not observable, and apply them to masses of individuals, which lack certain important elements at the center of psychoanalytic interpretation, such as an unconscious or a childhood.

However, my classroom duties do not call for me to be a psychohistorian in an explicit manner. While I do regularly teach a course on the psychology of religion, most of my time is spent on the 100-level introductory survey course on world religions. Does Beisel’s essay speak to this set of information? Indeed it does. The goals for the course, in fact, emphasize my desire “to convey the sense of religions as part of the lived experience of the day-to-day life of individuals and their communities, and involved in world history, politics, economics, conflict, stability, social order, artistic expression, etc.” Moreover, I state as I cover these goals at the start of the course, like the people that make them up, religions are born, grow up, fight with others, fall in love, break up, make mistakes, are creative, and die. There is, therefore, a clear psychohistorical framework underlying the class (echoed by my choice of textbook, Mary Pat Fisher’s Living Religions). Given this assumption, then, several of the subjects that Beisel lays out for his students are particularly relevant for a class such as mine. To give one example, trauma is a key concept for discussing Jewish history—in presenting the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem to the Babylonians, and then in discussing the cultural dynamics that have given rise to anti-Semitism and the Shoah.

The trauma of the Babylonian exile, at the largest level of Judean culture, could have led to a kind of post-traumatic paralysis, wherein the distinctive culture, like so many others, would have failed to cope with the blow and simply disappeared. On an individual level, we see this very response in the early chapters of the Prophet Ezekiel. But the Book of Ezekiel points to something else: recovery, from the trauma, of the future. So too, on a small group level, the exiled Judeans—now the Jews—found ways to reconnect as a community, through synagogues and texts. On a large group level, the Jews as a whole were able to rework their past and reframe traditions as a new “memory” of their history, one which made sense of their experience, and hence made it less traumatic and anomic. These three levels are indubitably related, both historically and theoretically. Yet it is illuminating to see which dynamics are at work in each, yielding very different real-world results, all of which tell us something about the Jews’ experience in Exile and afterward.

The fantasy issue that Beisel also develops

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in his paper coincides with the conceptualization of trauma as well, especially in discussing anti-Semitism, the Shoah, and the recurrent projection of attitudes that, in a psychohistorical model, explain the irrational animosity toward powerless groups in society. As I point out in the classroom, we are all different in that very room in many of the ways that have led to genocide and mass persecution at various times and places throughout history—racially, economically, sexually—and yet, somehow, we are not at each others’ throats! So mere difference or social weakness is not explanatory for violent action of one group or individual against another. In either case, the difference must somehow become a threat. Invariably, the threat by the different, weaker party is a projection, a fantasy, by the group in power, or by an individual from that group; but what brings it about? Once again, Beisel’s paper, on many counts, could profitably guide discussion about any number of actual groups, large and small, who have faced traumas such as war, economic downturn, famine, disease, or change in social structure and thus lashed out at their own invented enemies—and do so in a way that seeks specificity (Why this group and not that? Why here and not there?) that too often eludes the more grandiose endeavors into psychoanalytic theorizing.

Many other examples could be brought to bear from this introductory class in religion, not to mention my upper-level undergraduate courses in Psychology and Religion; Judaism; Religion, Health, and Healing; and the Millennium and the Apocalypse. Suffice to say, David Beisel has developed some extraordinary tools to do some of the difficult conceptual work in his courses in psychohistory, and I for one am thankful that he has generously made them available to the readership of this journal.

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