Introduction to Psychohistorical and Psychoanalytic Teaching

This Special Issue is the latest of numerous efforts to further psychohistorical pedagogy, which has a rich history in the pages of Clio’s Psyche and at the Psychohistory Forum, the International Psychohistorical Association (IPA), the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, and the International Society for Political Psychology (ISPP). The Forum published eight editions of the Special Clio’s Psyche Student Edition between 1997-2005, which was then enlarged to provide even more valuable sources to both students and colleagues alike. For over 20 years, we gave presentations on teaching and sponsored special pedagogy workshops at the IPA. Currently, we keep some relevant syllabi on our cliospsyche.org website. Psychohistory has been taught at many colleges and universities, although it is not usually present in history curricula. The various courses discussed in the September 1997, December 2005, March 2006, and other issues of this journal are available at cliospsyche.org/archives (aka “Back Issues”). The insights in David R. Beisel’s “Teaching About Groups Symposium” are so profound that 21 colleagues wrote commentaries on them and his teaching. Although Professor Beisel has retired, psychohistory is still being taught at the State University of New York (SUNY)—Rockland, where approximately 9,000 students are
currently registered for its two courses in our field.

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Regrettably, most of the other courses discussed in our earlier issues have been discontinued with the changing interests, retirements, and deaths of colleagues who introduced them primarily in the 1970-1990s. In recent years at my liberal arts college, I’ve consistently taught only one explicitly psychohistorical course a year as opposed to the two to four I was previously able to offer. Fortunately, psychoanalytic and psychohistorical ideas are being taught extensively in academia; however, they are not usually
labeled as such in course titles.

The degree of explicit psychohistorical courses contrasts with applied psychoanalytic studies of literature, which is what Dr. Judith Harris is especially knowledgeable about as reflected in her writing “Psychoanalytic Pedagogy in the Works of Bracher, Berman, and Alcorn” and in her introduction to the forthcoming Part II of our current focus on teaching. She solicited a couple of fine articles. The first is “Engaged, Not Curious: Teaching Therapeutic Writing Online” from Reinekke Lengelle, a literary scholar who can teach introspection quite effectively even virtually. The second is “Writing through Trauma in the First-Year Composition Classroom” from Katy D’Angelo, which presents her success in teaching students to write introspectively and then her frustration when her college moved to a less personal, rhetorical approach.

Associate Editor Harris inspired colleagues such as Claude Barbre and Mark Bracher to write for us as well as edited their impressive articles. It is heartening to know that from 1984-2007, Bracher led and then headed a psychoanalytic literary program at Kent State University. An indirect literary approach to applying psychoanalysis to teaching can be helpful as I discovered years ago in a course on the psychology of creativity. A student became incredibly enthusiastic about psychoanalytic concepts and then panicked when she felt she was becoming too self-revealing before the class and her professor. Because she did not give me the opportunity to help her work through her feelings of being psychologically naked in front of her classmates and self, I thought it made sense when she eventually switched her major to literature. In “lit” she could more safely probe her own psychodynamics through literary characters with psychologically informed literature faculty. Both consciously and unconsciously, psychoanalytic insights permeate pedagogy in virtually all fields because they help to deepen students’ knowledge.

The pandemic has transformed the lives of students and

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teachers alike. This is clearly the case for three of our authors as reflected in Thomas Cook’s “How the Talking Cure Reduced COVID-19 Anxiety in a University Classroom,” Marcia Anne Newton’s “Teaching At-Risk Students in a Pandemic,” and my “Virtually Teaching the Election and a Survey of Civilization.” Whatever the label of the course being taught, college students benefited from the psychological perspective and the empathy of the authors. Careful listening to students and expressing empathy for them in the educational process have been mainstays of those influenced by psychoanalysis and psychohistory before empathy became part of the consciousness and jargon of educated society. Two of the three authors mentioned above have analytic training, as do others such as Burton Norman Seitler, Arnold and Arlene Kramer Richards, Richard Samuels, Barbre, and Bracher. Note that Barbre, Bracher, and Seitler’s second articles are in the more theoretical part of our current pedagogy exploration that appears in the Fall issue. The reader will also have to wait for the erudition of the Finnish psychologist Juhani Ihanus, who has a great interest in psychoanalysis and psychohistory. His “Education and Learning: Strangers to Psychoanalysis? A Historical Overview” is mostly a detailed description and analysis of the early relationship between teaching and psychoanalysis.

Seitler plays an important role as a psychoanalytic leader at the New Jersey Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis as a psychohistorian, psychohistorical editor, and professor. For our teaching issue, he has offered “Psychoanalysis and Education: A Developmental Proposition,” in which he makes a strong case for early education being organized around developmental stages rather than chronology, focusing especially on the developmental differential between girls and boys. His second, more personal submission is “Teaching Psychoanalysis at Adelphi: A Dream Come True,” which is about his joy in becoming a college professor and how he overcomes the resistance of postdoctoral psychology students to do quantitative analyses of clinical materials. In teaching, he loves to introduce new materials, help students find their voices, and overcome their resistance to learning. Denis J. O’Keefe is a talented therapist and psychohistorian who came to our field as a very young community college student and now teaches doctoral and other graduate students at New York University. In “Relational Pathways to a Critical Pedagogy,” he delves into the transferential basis of education and much more.

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“Teaching Psychotherapy in Wuhan in the Era of COVID-19” is a dialogue between the husband-and-wife team of Arnold and Arlene Kramer Richards on their decades-long experience teaching psychoanalytic psychotherapy in China. The communist authorities of China certainly have no love for psychoanalysis per se and probably dread the thought of the publication of psychohistorical studies about their society. However, they know they need help when their children, especially after the parents adhered to the one-child policy, are psychologically suffering and even committing suicide. This has led several American analysts to teach psychotherapy to the Chinese. Arnold Richards reports that they are treated like rock stars in Wuhan. He plays a unique role as a disseminator of analytic literature in his capacity as founder and head of InternationalPsychoanalysis.net and IP Books (International Psychoanalytic Books).

The richness of the pedagogy of these and other colleagues is noteworthy. Academia and postgraduate education are the beneficiaries of the specialness of our field. As political psychological/psychoanalytic/psychohistorical concepts and terminology have permeated our society, there is more understanding of human motivation, even though there are fewer specific psychohistorical courses being offered. In Part II (Fall 2021) of this overflowingly large 2021 teaching issue, the papers will focus somewhat more on psychoanalytic theory and literature than they do in this Spring 2021 issue.

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