Psychohistorical Pedagogy

Once again David Beisel has led the way in psychohistory. Groups are such a complex and multi-determined entity that most of us have focused on, researched, and taught psychobiography far more than group psychohistory. David Beisel, Rudolph Binion (see the September 2005 issue of this publication), and a few other path-breaking individuals among us have been leading the way in approaching groups. Professor Beisel, who has taught more psychohistory students than anyone else in the world, has provided us with a step-by-step description and analysis of his pedagogical methods with his usual emphasis on how to overcome student resistance.

Beisel is an outstanding teacher. While some colleagues have suffered professionally as a result of teaching psychohistory, despite the doubts others harbored, Professor Beisel survived de-tenuring at his institution because his psychohistory classes were overflowing with students. Administrators may have not understood or cared about psychohistory, but they understood his overflowing classes and ability to inspire students.

My knowledge of Professor Beisel’s pedagogy is based upon a variety of sources extending over a period of three decades. I have spoken in his classes, met or taught a fair number of his students and former students, and chatted with them at conferences. I have done workshops on teaching psychohistory with him, discussed teaching at length, and been a person to whom he ventilated when student resistance was intense before and after our weekly racquetball games that extended for the greater part of two decades.

David Beisel is as passionately committed to his teaching as he is to his scholarship. For years, I called him the Stakhanovite of psychohistory and SUNY-Rockland. (For those of you unfamiliar with Soviet Russian propaganda, Aleksei Grigor’evich Stakhanov [1906-77] was a model worker whose gargantuan coal mining production was heralded as a model for all other citizens of the Soviet Union.) My racquetball partner would listen patiently and sympathetically as I complained about having to teach four preparations and fifteen credits to 135 students. However, my face reddened with embarrassment when this Stakhanovite of higher education answered my question as to how many credits he was teaching. Each semester for five years he reported teaching twenty-four credits with a total of 246 students. The last time I seriously recollect complaining to him at length was when I taught fifteen credits to 130 students with five different preparations in a semester back in the 1980s.

In higher education, there is a common prejudice against community colleges: many assume their faculty and students to be inferior to those of four-year colleges and universities. Though I have never systematically studied the issue, I personally found the students I taught at Middlesex Community College to be not very different in their abilities and willingness to work than those I instructed in the same course at Temple, Rutgers, and Fairleigh Dickinson universities, as well as at Ramapo College. The over six thousand students Beisel has taught psychohistory to at Rockland have gone on to schools as prestigious as Brandeis, Brown, Duke, Harvard, Penn, Ramapo, Rutgers, and Yale. Some have earned doctoral degrees and all who were open minded benefited from their experience with a brilliant intellectual and teacher. Denis O’Keefe, a talented young social worker/therapist who now makes yearly psychohistorical presentations, told me last summer that he was an accounting major who had never read a book that was not assigned to him when he first took Dr. B’s course. Awakened to social ills, psychology, and the life of the mind by this extraordinary teacher, he now devours books.

It has often been my thought that if Professor Beisel had entered our field during a period of growth, rather than of shrinking departments and de-tenuring, and published earlier in his career, that today he would be a star at an Ivy League college or top notch state university. The Ivy Leagues’ loss has been SUNY-Rockland’s gain.

How did he get so good? Some suggestions may be found in Clio’s Psyche’s inaugural issue (June, 1994) where Professor Beisel was our first featured scholar. But mostly you must look elsewhere for the answers. In the early days of organized psychohistory I noted his quiet eager-

Page 205

ness to soak up the new knowledge he was encountering at the Institute for Psychohistory and the International Psychohistorical Association (IPA). At the IPA, he most ably served as the first convention chair in 1978 before becoming president and then going on to edit the Journal of Psychohistory for nearly a decade. Personally, I can vouch for just how much one can learn as a psychohistorical editor.

David Beisel has always had a wonderful ability to pick up ideas that are in the air and turn them into something quite worthwhile. In 1976, while I agonized over the propriety of researching and writing about a candidate for the presidency, David spent the month of August on the beach writing a very fine piece on Jimmy Carter’s psychobiography. This helped motivate me to go down to Plains, Georgia to gather my materials for the first of many articles on candidate and presidential psychobiographies.

There have been some elements of cooperation and competition in our relationship, which would not blossom into a friendship for about a decade. David has been much more private in his psychohistorical groping whereas I have been more public. Developing pedagogic methodologies in organized psychohistory has always been enormously important to me so I sponsored the first IPA workshop on teaching psychohistory and with psychohistorical materials in traditional courses. These workshops, though not always well attended, were most enjoyable when Professor Bei -sel agreed to co-lead them.

It is a complex issue to deal with the explosive emotions that students and all humans are capable of harboring. While most colleagues who teach psychohistory appear to act as if the emotions are among the “other” safely outside of the classroom, Professor Beisel struggles to get his students to acknowledge their own emotions and fantasies. He correctly, perhaps courageously, acknowledges to the students that he may be expressing his own fantasies. I take this a step further and assert to my students that everyone’s world is created mostly out of their own histories and fantasies. Teaching even the same courses is so interesting because of the resulting variations among students.

Managing anxiety within the classroom is an important issue. First and foremost, there is the anxiety of the professor, since s/he has the most impact within this setting. Student anxiety is quite important and something the professor must address in order to be effective. Professor David Beisel is one of the few teachers of psychohistory who, to the best of my knowledge, works hard to bring the emotion within the classroom to the classes’ attention. These become teachable moments of great importance. One of his techniques for dealing with student uncertainties and anxieties is to provide very clear methodologies of knowledge. A method he wrote about in these pages in June, 1999 is to put five categories of knowing on the board that revolve around the facts, causation, consequences, judgment, and how to improve the situation. In his taxonomy they are as follows:

One, the level of description, the facts.

Two, the causal level, what produced the behavior under examination.

Three, what follows from the events, the consequences.

Four, the level of judgment, the situation’s right and wrong, good and bad.

Five, the prescriptive level of what should be done or not done to meliorate the situation.

When students came to his classes, shaken by the murders of Columbine, or the horrors of the September 11, 2001 suicide bombings, he would apply this methodology to much advantage, teaching them that even at moments of great emotionality and panic, reason rather than the wild emotionality of the talk radio host need to prevail. I have found his technique to be quite helpful.

Professor Beisel is also willing to confront head-on the issue of subjectivity. He acknowledges that there is always the possibility that anyone, including him, may be projecting his own subjectivity onto his findings, however, he insists that the existence of something “in here” [the analyst] does not mean it’s not “out there.” Based upon my own research and observations, I would take this a step further, positing that breakthroughs in knowledge come precisely because certain individuals have a profound personal need to probe a subject matter of great psychological importance to them. This minor difference aside, in most respects, I am in complete agreement with Beisel. The Suicidal Embrace: Hitler, the Allies, and the Origins of the Second World War (2003) is a brilliant book of

Page 206

great erudition that Beisel published after over two decades of painstaking work. However, it is not an easy book for undergraduate students to comprehend. Typically, this master teacher confronted this problem head-on by showing several documentary films for background and then by working out elaborate exercises involving students writing themes of different chapters and short essays. I just finished teaching the volume using his system and the results were excellent.

In conclusion, David Beisel is a master craftsman who has honed the teacher’s art to such a fine edge that he can teach the most complex of psychohistorical materials with great effectiveness. Higher education and our field are much richer for his work.

Page 207