A Welcome Contribution on Teaching

David Beisel’s refreshingly candid account of his approach to teaching psychohistory is a most welcome contribution. At the outset he tunes into both the difficult tenets of our field and the world of his students. He hopes they have at least partly been convinced “that the unconscious exists, that what’s in the unconscious can motivate behavior, that what’s in a person’s childhood can influence their adult actions, and that psychobiography, especially on U.S. presidents living and dead, can enrich our understanding of history.” That pretty well captures our shared aspirations in a nutshell.

On groups, he takes a page from Bion, noting that small groups operate on two levels simultaneously: ostensibly working “cooperatively to achieve a common attainable work task,” while on another level “acting-out the unconscious fantasies” that undermine the group’s avowed aims. In my current take on large groups, we are seemingly fighting in Iraq to introduce freedom and democracy, while what is actually happening is the sacrificial shedding of blood and the endangerment of democratic freedoms at home. By way of explaining why groups are irrational and often counterproductive, Professor Beisel notes that the “acting-out group members are usually the delegates of others, expressing what many” in the group are feeling. Thus subjective elements are manifested in baffling and contradictory ways.

What emphatically comes across throughout is Professor Beisel’s willingness to test the premises of psychohistory along with an openness to accept up to a point where his students are coming from, and then to build on common bases. This brand of teaching is productive but emotionally demanding, requiring a great deal of give-and-take and careful balancing. He has to think on his feet while maintaining inclusive discussions. It also juggles not only a mastery of the field and an ability to sort out subjective from objective factors but also candor, modesty, and a superabundance of good will.

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In view of these unusual demands, it is not difficult to grasp why psychohistory is shunned by mainstream historians. Oh, to stand at the podium and pontificate to huddled masses of silent note-takers.

Here are some further hurdles likely to arise. When I ran psychohistory courses in an interdisciplinary slot at a liberal arts college, I found that students who had already declared a major would most readily accept propositions that reinforced their discipline’s assumptions. They either disparaged non-congruent ideas or simply imposed the rational assumptions of their chosen major onto the new and more unsettling material. For example, psychology majors in accord with standard behaviorism viewed Germans in the 1930s as being massively conditioned and in effect brainwashed by Hitler, thereby avoiding the disturbing role of anti-Semitism, not to mention lurking omnipotent fantasies about Herr Führer. A philosophy student once privately corrected my strictures about Heidegger’s implication in Nazism because we all knew he was a great philosopher and beyond our mundane nitpicking. I in turn was grappling with the anti-Semitic strain in T.S. Eliot—a poet I would have liked to be kept immune from racist contamination. As Dr. Beisel remarks, psychohistory is a two-way street.

These anecdotes touch on the ways in which new information is processed and, as Beisel shows, is often resisted and denied. My above examples might suggest a defensive tactic familiar to us as Anna Freud’s seminal “identification with the aggressor.” In other words, students affiliate with a given department at least in part for membership in a strong protective, quasi-familial group and guard against that identification being jeopardized. Other students told me frankly they wanted the certitude of multiple-choice questions and are not likely to cotton to the uncertainties of psychohistory. Clear-cut answers are equivalent to the happy endings rarely afforded in life; that is, containing wishful components. It’s true that there are many high-profile transgressive and subversive discourses currently swirling around academia, but these are highly intellectualized and supply handy scapegoat groups as compensation for rocking the boat.

I should note that identification-with-the-aggressor is clinical short-hand for elusive processes. It could be rephrased as identification or affiliation with powerful figures of authority starting with one’s parents and later reconfigured in more benign terms for mastery or survival. As such, the term is useful to describe various unconscious mechanisms because a form of it has acquired great cultural legitimacy as the “Stockholm Syndrome.” To further appreciate its operations, we might recall Stanley Milgram’s experiments in getting student guinea pigs to inflict pain under the auspices of seemingly benevolent scientific authorities. However, what may look like operant conditioning and positive reinforcement—those buzzwords of behaviorism—only work under coercion or when inner needs are engaged. We can avoid such responses in classroom situations as this fine teacher does by being honest and interactive.

I also found that students process unwelcome ideas by means of negation, or negatively-affirming, explored in one of Freud’s most astute papers. Thus the telling preface: “I know this couldn’t apply to me, but….” Similar variation on the covering, self-exempting syntax can raise red flags. I learned to ignore the No and to hear the Yes. The classroom, we may recall, is a busy intersection of fluctuating identities, of old identifications being shed and new ones tried on, of flagrant and often fleeting transferences, wherein as teachers we perform not unlike traffic cops. We maintain the flow with an eye on the signals.

In discussing the important role of media, especially for student participation, Beisel mentions Martin Scorsese’s claiming a therapeutic benefit for cinematic violence. Here he is drawing on one of Western Civilization’s oldest debates. Aristotle’s Catharsis Theory, conceived to justify violent tragedies, was a rebuttal to Plato’s banishing poets from his commonwealth lest their art stir insurrectional passions. This classical model has the advantage of enlarging the debate and allowing students a safe place to grapple with their feelings in a context of enduring issues. Stephen King also justified his meal-tickets of horror fiction and films as offering harmless outlets which turn us into law-abiding citizens. Which proves, I suppose, even the devil can quote scripture for his purposes.

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I’m intrigued by David Beisel’s reference to recurring media images during the D.C. Sniper panic in the fall of 2002, especially since I felt myself a potential target then. He refers to a tree stump in Washington State juxtaposed with a service station in Virginia, as galvanizing group interest and apparently stirring group-fantasy. The tree-stump, I believe, indicates the locale of the tree the sniper had earlier used for target practice and since removed for forensic analysis; the service station was the scene of the sniper’s killing at random. What these dots mean when associated on an unconscious level is tantalizing, but I haven’t been able to connect them.

Finally, it is impossible for me to read Beisel’s account without searching today’s social and political climate for insights and applications, as I started doing above. Bush’s clueless response to Hurricane Katrina, for example, suggests he was firmly and—evidently believed—securely wrapped inside his heroic savior role in the Iraq war. Mother Nature then performed as the return of the repressed, or anyway as a reality-check. However, another dimension of the catastrophe seems to have stemmed from secondhand news accounts and evidently baseless rumors about the numerous rapes and murders inside the crowded Superdome that projected a vision of primitive racial anarchy. Through this apparent disparity, we can witness group-fantasy exposed in all its subjective and lethal dynamics. In addition, it may have been these fears of uncontrolled violence that prohibited the school bus drivers from operating the 200 buses in nearby parking lots, thus adding to the helpless conditions.

Group-fantasy does not always eventuate in historical action, but sometimes it does. Historical action does not always arise from group-fantasy, but sometimes it does. This sorting out is psychohistory’s task. Professor Beisel’s work makes this arduous challenge a little more possible, and for that we are indeed grateful.

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