Free Associations on Beisel’s Article

Although I served as International Psychohistorical Association (IPA) convention chair in the early 1980s and instituted the publication of conference proceedings, it is so long since I have been active in any organized psychohistory group that I approach this assignment with a touch of Kierkegaardian “fear and trembling.” After all, I have not attended a single session of IPA since 1988. At that time I left feeling frustrated with the extent to which unproven ideas such as “poisonous placentas” were being discussed by some of the attendees. My IPA experience left me concerned about the intellectual basis of some people’s psychohistory. This will be the primary focus of my comment below.

Clearly, David Beisel’s “Teaching About Groups” offers more insights into the mind of a fine professor than into the paradigms of Bion and deMause. Professor Beisel brings to the table a variety of meaty morsels spiced with clarity, humility, and empathy. It is little wonder that SUNY-Rockland has seen fit to bestow many honors on this learned pedagogue for exemplary teaching as well as the publications without which we academics perish—despite the failure of Moses, Jesus, Socrates, Confucius, and Gautama (the Buddha) to publish. A minimalist with maximum effectiveness, Professor Beisel lays out his methodology with little breast-beating and fanfare. To his credit he has absorbed the salient literature in this fertile field. He is honest to a fault, acknowledging oversimplification in the process of teaching and citing Bion, Tavistock, and Hartman as seminal sources. These pioneers carry him to the far country of group fantasies as they play out in the real

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world of political history, the subject of a recent resurgence for those, like this commentator, who travel in academic circles.

“To provide a working theoretical framework,” Beisel employs Lloyd deMause’s dubious group fantasy theory. Though often brilliant in his earlier analysis, especially of the history of childhood, deMause’s flight into a “systematic analysis of shared images” in major national periodicals invites a skeptical response. Since there is patently no empirical evidence for the de Mausian four-stage cycle, I find it problematic that he even attempts to teach this material.

Unlike deMause, who sees things in black and white terms, Beisel teaches his students about the possibility of and speaks of the need to apply Erik Erikson’s construct of “disciplined subjectivity.” As we follow Beisel’s journey into what Conrad aptly called “the heart of darkness,” he beams bright light along with critical commentary of deMause’s penchant for “poisonous placentas” and “fighting fetuses.” Clearly, he has separated himself from the untenable formulation of “immutable laws” put forth by the founder of the IPA and the editor of the Journal of Psychohistory.

David Beisel gathers his materials from a variety of sources. He incorporates a documentary film by Sam Keen based on Keen’s book featuring Robert Jay Lifton, whose monumental studies have contributed to the legitimization of psychohistory as much as any other practitioner with the possible exception of Bruce Mazlish. While acknowledging that to experienced teachers some of what he presents may be “mundane, tedious, and obvious” formulations, Beisel deftly explores the options concerning the history of childhood. Then, he tackles the media on group options: selecting option four as the most germane, to wit, that both media and society interact as both catalysts and reflectors of our collective fantasies. Again, Beisel differs from deMause who insists that media simply select and replay our collective unconscious desires.

In dealing with violence, Beisel initially occupies solid ground. He cites the American consensus that media violence promotes actual violence: as we grow more desensitized, the media becomes more violent. I am troubled, however, by his citation of Martin Scorsese to the effect that movie violence is therapeutic because it comes from an auteur whose bread is buttered by unbridled aggression and gratuitous bloodbaths. Also, Beisel’s selection of prototypal films—Godfathers, Rock, Star Wars, Jaws, et al.—seem arbitrary to this commentator. Are these films definitive, informative, representative? In probing the American experience, I prefer Casablanca, Cabin on the Sky, Citizen Kane, The Grapes of Wrath, Modern Times, The Best Years of Our Lives, and The Home of the Brave.

As a professor, I also do group work in my classroom. Together, students and instructor ponder the arenas of sports and the culture of comedy for clues to core values, conflicts in class, race, and gender as well as the once vital center eroded by the current administration and its allies.

Beisel’s coda brings Rudolph Binion to center stage. He is cited as an authority on group traumas and readers are exhorted to tackle Binion’s new book, Past Impersonal. To this wise counsel, let me tout a book that impressed my students—Arthur G. Neal’s National Trauma and Collective Memory (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998). At Columbia University, where I learned the historian’s trade and where Binion taught briefly, psychohistory had little or no favor. Perhaps with intellectual heavyweights like Binion and Beisel, scholars can now weave a richer, more eclectic tapestry with psychology as a vital strand in the house of Clio: one endowed with many mansions and bereft of arbitrary borders.

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