Organizing International Psychohistory

On the eighth of June in 1978, there was extraordinary excitement at the first International Psychohistorical Association (IPA) convention held at Manhattan’s Coliseum Holiday Inn. There was a sense of history in the making as a mostly youthful group of scholars met to apply psychoanalysis and other varieties of psychology to history and society. My recollection is that Harvard professor emeritus William Langer, who had called for psychohistory in his 1957 American Historical Association Presidential Address, wrote to give his blessing to our endeavor. Some attendees were veteran psychohistorians but most were fairly new to the field.

My own introduction to psychoanalysis and psychohistory had occurred while I was a faculty member at Temple University in 1968 even before I finished my doctoral degree. I felt close to the planners of the conference as a Contributing Editor of the Journal of Psychohistory and Co-chair of the Saturday Workshop Program of the Institute for Psychohistory.

Lloyd deMause, chairman of the organizing committee, inaugurated our first meeting early in the morning. His credentials to be the founding IPA president were impressive: he was a veteran psychohistorian who had authored the path-breaking essay, “The Evolution of Childhood,” and founded the Institute for Psychohistory, the Psychohistory Press, and the Journal of Psychohistory. Many listened with rapt attention to his every word and welcomed his ideas, such as the IPA becoming a self-analytic group.

The idea of Group Process Analytic sessions at the end of each day seemed brilliant and worked quite well at the inaugural meetings of our group. It was in the hands of John Hartman, a most serious scholar of group processes. He had already published on the subject and had taught group process at Harvard and then the University of Michigan. As co-leader he wisely chose Alice Eichholz for reasons beyond two heads being better than one: amidst female conversation in the ladies’ room and elsewhere Alice could pick up seemingly throw-away comments expressing fantasies and feelings. (It is noteworthy that women were only two of the 35 listed presenters.)

In those early years of my own psychoanalytic training and personal and group analysis, I was learning about the difference between my conscious thoughts and my unconscious fantasies and feelings. At the Institute for Psychohistory we had carefully read Bion, et al., learning that there is plenty of craziness within groups and that groups often choose their most disturbed member as leader. Yet, in those first meetings, I saw little evidence of this. Overwhelmingly, we were just so happy to be there, soaking up psychohistorical knowledge and comradeship. At the time I was learning new things in almost every session, as well as finding lots to disagree with—further enlarging my knowledge. (I assiduously took notes

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so that I could bring new knowledge back to my classroom since I had been teaching psychohistory courses since 1972.)

David Beisel, with some of his students from SUNY as helpers, organized the conference with great efficiency and energy. At the final Group Process session John Hartman’s analysis was that the colleagues at the first IPA were behaving in the manner of a “Bar-Mitzvah-Boy” dressed in his best holiday clothes with his motorcycle jacket hidden in the closet. Participants were so appreciative of wonderful new materials and exciting people they were encountering that there seemed no reason to act otherwise. Even Howard Stein’s thought provoking and controversial presentation, “Judaism as a Group Fantasy,” was accepted without the outcry it produced when it was published in the Journal of Psychohistory (Vol. 6, No. 2) when some colleagues dropped out of the IPA and had their names removed as Contributing Editors of the Journal.

The “Bar-Mitzvah-Boy” analogy and the focus on Stein’s presentation on Judaism brings up the issue of the question of psychohistory’s relationship to Jews and Judaism. Though the IPA’s founding president, convention chair, and one out of two group process analysts were Christians, Jewish issues were on the minds of some attendees, many of whom were Jewish. This was partly because the model of Freud’s establishment of psychoanalysis concerned various planners and participants. In an intensely anti-Semitic world Sigmund Freud had to struggle with the resistance to psychoanalysis as a “Jewish science.” On the other hand, respect for the intellectual contributions of Jews was so intense that at least one early leader wondered if his ideas would be taken more seriously if he were Jewish.

The IPA presenters overwhelmingly came from universities in North America or abroad. Though the largest number came from East Coast (NY-7, PA-3, CT-2, NJ-2, MA-2, M-1, and MD-1), they also came from the Midwest (OH-2, MI-2, MN-1, WI-1), FL, KS, Texas, California (3), and abroad (Germany-2, Israel, and New Zealand). (Note that the geography of one presenter could not be established.) There were far more women among the audience than among the presenters. Since approximately ten of the presenters did not attend after the first year, this is one indication that the positive feelings were not universally held. For example, Lawrence J. Friedman, who became an outstanding psychobiographer of Karl Menninger and Erik Erikson, was among those not returning. (Robert Coles, the famous scholar of childhood, was briefly present at an early IPA meeting, never to return.) My realization of a growing sense of “us” versus “them” occurred the week after our convention when I attended, also in Manhattan, the inaugural International Society for Political Psychology (ISPP) meetings at a large hotel. There I felt I was somehow being disloyal to our IPA and Institute group, and left after an hour or so. In subsequent years I have enjoyed the ISPP meetings, especially because they were reasons to travel around the country and the world (Amsterdam; Barcelona; Copenhagen; Tel Aviv, Toronto) and see colleagues who, for whatever reason, had dropped out of the IPA. Fortunately, I have been able to get several to return. A further reason for appreciating this group, as well as the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, is that my expectations of these groups were much less, thus I was subject to far fewer disappointments.

One of my regrets regarding the IPA is that our national and international standing has been limited by virtue of our being a New York City centered group. While it is true that my two-year presidency began in the nation’s capital in 1988, this was our only excursion outside of the nation’s most populous city. Without success I tried to change the geography of our group by sponsoring an amendment to our constitution requiring alternate year meetings in another location. My proposal was accepted, with a clause vitiating its meeting by adding something along the lines of “when practical.” My personal schedule has certainly benefited from this arrangement since I have been able to attend all thirty of our meetings while still teaching summer school, seeing patients, and sleeping in my own bed rather than that of an expensive hotel. In fact, those few colleagues who have never missed a convention are all residents of metropolitan New York.

Despite the enormous pride I feel in the IPA achievements of the last 30 years, as I reflect back on why the IPA did not achieve its full potential several reasons predominate. Many talented psychosocial colleagues were resistant or ambivalent, as was Erik Erikson, to the use of the term psychohistory and even the very idea of psychohistorical associations. Rivalries were already developing between those as-

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sociated with GUPH and the Psychohistory Review and those associated with the Institute for Psychohistory, the IPA, and the Journal of Psychohistory. The IPA became associated with the scientific study of society and fantasy analysis, which were anathema to most historians and psychoanalysts. Indeed, even Lloyd deMause has often spoken about the resistance within the IPA to these ideas. This internal resistance is part of the reason why after six of the first seven IPA presidents had doctoral degrees in history, the subsequent presidents have come from other fields.

Next, there is the issue of Group Process sessions. Though for the first dozen years I keenly advocated and even led the Group Process Analysis sessions, I increasingly came to view them as destructive to the group. At them newcomers from afar often felt that their needs were ignored, they were walking into old family fights, or that they were in the middle of a group therapy session where there were no rules or safeguards for the participants. Consequently, some never returned. (For the pros and cons of group process read the articles by David Beisel, Lloyd deMause, John Hartman, Henry Lawton, and me in the “IPA Group Process Symposium” in Clio’s Psyche Vol. 11, No. 3 [December 2004], pp. 77-87).

In reading these reasons explaining the failure of our group to grow, the reader should not lose sight of its enormous accomplishments and value. The International Psychohistorical Convention empowered many colleagues. In our minds, and to a lesser extent in reality, it transformed psychohistory from a regional East and West Coast movement to a national and international movement. It created a vital network of colleagues with common interests. Personally, it helped me withstand the assaults on psychohistory that I faced within academia, including at my college, which was designed to be interdisciplinary but where combining psychoanalysis with history was (and is) suspect in the eyes of many. (My reaction to Ramapo’s partial retreat from interdisciplinarity was not to flow with the disciplinary tide, but rather in 2002 to proudly have my title changed to “Associate Professor of History, Psychohistory, and Interdisciplinary Studies” and to continue to write Pioneers of Insight: The Makers and Making of Psychohistory.)

In the 1970s psychohistory created two international organizations (the ISPP and the IPA), and two smaller organizations: the Group for the Use of Psychology in History (GUPH) within the American Historical Association and the Institute for Psychohistory. It also had and has the Wellfleet Group still meeting at Robert Jay Lifton’s summer home on Cape Cod as an invitation-only organization. For publication it had the Psychohistory Press and four publications: The History of Childhood Quarterly (now The Journal of Psychohistory), Psychohistory Review, and Psychohistory (formerly The Newsletter of the IPA and now Psychohistory News) (which I once co-edited with Henry Lawton), and Political Psychology. These and other scholarly journals and organizations have empowered many to enrich the psychohistorical paradigm. Helping to grow this fie-ld has been a mind-altering experience.

[Editor’s Note: In anticipation of the thirtieth annual meeting of the International Psychohistorical Association, I suggested that there be a session devoted to reminiscences of our inaugural gathering with discussion of the future prospects of psychohistory. It turned out to be difficult to locate colleagues who were at the initial meeting in 1978 and, regrettably, those who were not regular IPAers that I could make contact with had conflicting obligations. In the end those present were Lloyd deMause, Henry Lawton, and me. (David Beisel was scheduled to attend but an unanticipated medical issue, from which he is completely recovered, prevented his attendance. His full-length article was distributed at the meeting.) Soon after the announcement of the session, Bill Hewitt, the editor of Psychohistory News: The Quarterly Newsletter of the IPA, invited us to write on the issue which we did, along with Howard Stein who this year could not make the trip from Oklahoma (Volume 25, Issue 4 [Winter 2007], pp. 7-9). However, space restrictions necessitated that he cut down the two long articles to approximately 500 words each. Though Hewitt generously was willing to have David Beisel and I reprint the third of our articles published earlier this year under his auspices, in keeping with the policy of this journal we rewrote those sections. We encourage letters to the editor and articles on these subjects by additional colleagues. Also, reminiscences of the Psychohistory Forum would also be of interest.]

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