The Psychohistorian and the Group

Psychohistory is distinguished as an interdiscipline, which has in-depth historical research that draws on psychoanalysis and psychobiography among other fields. Papers are presented and discussed annually at the International Psychohistory Association (IPA). What interests me here are the Group Process sessions convened at the close of each conference day. Having attended various academic and psychoanalytic conferences, I can testify that the IPA version is both unique and integral to our enterprise. All presenters and attendees are invited to a setting where a moderator presides over free-wheeling discussions. The only stipulation is an airing of the day’s thoughts, reactions, and issues. It isn’t quite group therapy, at least not formally; it’s more akin to a psychoanalyst exploring transference and countertransference issues with peers. For us, it’s also a continuation of psychohistorical practice. It recognizes the element of emotional involvement in our work, the possible over determinism of our thinking, and the various ways we access group dynamics.

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In effect, through the IPA’s Group Process we find ourselves performing informally as part of an assembled group. The truth may be out-there, but it may also be a bit tangled up in-here. We strive to listen to ourselves, especially as mediated through the responses of others. At times, disputes and insights may veer into therapeutic territory, and then the moderator’s role comes to the fore—guiding and protecting against personal monopolizing or grievance airing, but judiciously not closing off this specimen of group behavior.

To whatever degree our training has prepared us, we encounter through Group Process one of the ways we are embedded in psychohistory. As instruments we may play the field only to find the field is also playing us: as nominal subjects, we may become others’ objects. However, fortified as a Group Process of one, we soon return to our unfinished projects and grant that, yes, there are these objective forces affecting our endeavors along with more subjective features. Sorting out these mixes, we may look over our shoulders and admire or envy those rigorous scientific studies that speak through graphs and experimental data, through labs and algorithms. We can’t compete on their playing fields, especially once we factor in the psychic energies summoned for our tasks and discovered in our material. But we can take consolation in noticing that scientists are not immune to this inner dimension.

Einstein insisted his theory be designated “relativity” to address the day’s hot issues trumping his circle’s cool reliance on objectivity, as though one were standing apart from all the cosmic turmoil and merely observing the wonderful workings of the universe (see Dan Dervin, Creativity and Culture, 1990, 216). Scientists may have strategies for surmounting personal biases, but to be a psychohistorian is to be frankly embedded.

True, historians commit to a baseline of facts while dispersing on the next step of interpreting. The viewer may not alter the viewed, but the object in question may well alter the viewer. Like other historical phenomena, the Holocaust is grounded on a bedrock of fact. But beyond that base, approaches fan out. Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, for example, has thoroughly exposed the covert role of anti-Semitic group-fantasy over centuries of Christian orthodoxy (The Sign of the Cross, 2011). Psychohistorically, we might also probe the role of denial and the implications of its having been outlawed (for more, see Paul Elovitz’ The Making of Psychohistory, 2018, 15-16, and “Holocaust” in the Index). By their own lights,

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psychohistorians can claim relative objectivity as comprised of subjective components and deeper motives. Their verification becomes our enduring challenge.

At the risk of adding to our complexities, I’m making a special plea for recognizing and utilizing subjective factors that cross our mental horizons. This concern may in part be my aversion to the impersonal and often idealized attitudes underlying some scientific work, and in part the divisive assaults on our shared humanity in today’s political discourse. I wouldn’t urge the writer’s personal history intrude on a given subject or be interjected like an after-dinner anecdote, but rather to factor in how we are all part of a whole. This does not imply complicity in evil, but more of an awareness that enriches our work, or at least anchors it by realizing that writing or speaking comes down to one person addressing another, even though imagining a receptive target audience may facilitate the process. Along with our various skills and resources, the Group Process affirms our common humanity by voicing our felt positions and listening to others with helpful infusions of empathy. More generally, as we undertake group analyses, our jogging how we are always part of one or another group, actual or imagined, may facilitate our accessing the selected group of our research.

Two recent articles for The Journal of Psychohistory explore strategies for addressing this challenge. In one, I focus on Trump’s alarming zero tolerance policy of separating immigrant children from parents at our border and explore historical precedents. This reminded me of one day in our Omaha neighborhood when I was around eight, and the girl I played with across the street burst out crying, “Mommy! He’s trying it again!” What her dad was trying, and succeeded in shortly thereafter, was hanging himself in the basement of the house he had partly built as a carpenter. The family were Czechoslovakian, and when their kids returned years later for a quick look at their former home, we convened on our front steps. They explained that their dad had been raised by a farm family and was lashed to a stake in the yard to prevent his running off. This suggested he wasn’t blood-related or freely adopted. A plausible explanation arose from the time period of his youth when unattended, often immigrant kids were rounded up from New York streets and boarded onto “orphan trains” to be deposited along a westward route. At depots they were lined up and picked by locals, most likely to fill menial tasks. He fit the role of a former abused, indentured laborer. Thereafter, my inquiries into our cur-

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rent mishandlings of immigrant children at the border assumed a more intimate rapport.

Intrigued by the turmoil over current protests against Confederate monuments in the South and surrounded by history in Fredericksburg, I fancied myself a local tour guide on a stone mount near the town center. Over the river banks to the north rose Chatham, a former slave-supported estate hosting Washington and Jefferson and later serving in the Civil War as a military hospital. Union troops, crossing the river on pontoons, had torched sections of our town. Churches and cemeteries from Revolutionary times to that so-called War between the States checkerboard the area, all racially segregated. Among surviving buildings are the home of Mary Ball Washington, mother of the father of the country; Kenmore plantation, home of Washington’s sister and husband; the Rising Sun Tavern, where Revolutionary schemes were hatched; and Hugh Mercer’s Apothecary (himself a war casualty). A few blocks to the south is Liberty Street where runaway or freed slaves comprised an ad hoc experiment in integration. Similarly, African-American homes might be seen mixed in with white families, an instance of slave quarters once clustered around plantations being reoccupied.

When I step down from this brief survey, my perch can be revealed as the notorious Slave Auction Block. Along with orienting readers, the aim of taking this vantage point was to peer through the eyes of slaves facing a potential market of alien faces. Today, the Slave Block focuses heated debates over the proper disposition of Southern memorials, the topic of my article. Our Town Council has been holding public meetings, and our local paper has been printing letters to the editor. The debates pivot on whether to leave the Block in place for all to see or trip over, including our prized tourists, or to remove it to a more obscure venue, like a museum, ostensibly to preserve it from vandalism. The community was conducting its own group process. Conflicts over painful memory versus benign forgetting usher us into the subjective/objective interfaces of psychohistory.

My former perch may thus remind us that we’re all embedded for good or ill in a collective past of diverse groups as history has a way of repeating itself before our eyes, with a difference. Taking stock of our own groups (professional or parish, club or gym, neighborhood or community) may point up similarities or contrasts and, if nothing more, keep us in touch with our mix of

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common humanity. Our commitments to psychohistory and our associations with all the farflung people thus allied invite us to encounter groups, both familiar and fresh, promising both outward and inward perspectives.

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