Applying History and Psychohistory as a Business Consultant

Peter Loewenberg’s University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) 1966 graduate seminar course taught me how psychology could be used to enhance the historical understanding of both individual and collective behavior. It opened my eyes to material that I had merely dabbled in as an undergraduate. I was hooked on psychohistory. The seminar was exciting as I learned some rudimentary psychoanalytic theory along with European and American history. Peter encouraged us to continually probe for the underlying motivations of the historical actors and events we studied. His teaching was provocative, challenging, and exciting.

I received my master’s degree in history at UCLA and was accepted into the doctoral program at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. Loewenberg supported my leaving and admonished me to continue to learn more about how psychoanalysis could inform my future studies. He encouraged me to contact the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute and become a control case for an aspiring psychoanalyst. I began a personal analysis while at Berkeley and also participated in a seminar that the San Francisco Institute taught for area academics. The content of the seminar was a novel analytic method being developed at the Institute. My colleagues were academics in the humanities and social scientists who were teaching in the California system or independent scholars.

Page 143

While I was pursuing my doctorate in history at UC Berkeley, I was contacted by Chuck Strozier about working with him and Bill Gilmore on a newsletter devoted to research, teaching, and other areas of psychohistory. Thus began the Group for the Use of Psychology in History Newsletter. We published the newsletter quarterly and it drew interest from a wide group of historians. The newsletter subsequently became The Psychohistory Review and actively competed with The History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory for readership.

When I moved to New England for my first teaching job, Loewenberg introduced me to Bruce Mazlish, who invited me to join a psychosocial study group that met monthly at Harvard during the academic year to discuss members’ works in progress. Some of its members included Stanley Huffman, Doris Kearns, Abraham Zaleznik, John Demos, and John Mack. The papers we discussed ranged from Demos’ work on witchcraft, to Kearns’ biography of Lyndon Johnson, to Zaleznik’s study of executive leadership.

Earlier, while in graduate school, I had assumed that I would teach history as a career. I accepted an invitation to teach history in New Hampshire; but after a semester, I began to think I would like to explore more systematically the use of psychology to more adequately explain both individual and group behavior in history. The study group in Cambridge was a very important intellectual experience for me. I was impressed by the intellectual commitment of the participants and their efforts to meld psychoanalytic thinking into their own disciplines. I began to look for an opportunity to spend a year studying psychoanalysis. Peter Loewenberg suggested that I contact the Menninger Clinic in Topeka. I did and the Clinic was receptive to my coming to Topeka to study.

I moved to Topeka in the summer of 1974 and began studying at the School of Psychiatry and the Topeka Institute of Psychoanalysis. Menninger had recently received a grant from the Spencer Foundation to foster interdisciplinary studies for psychiatrists. I received a three year stipend from Spencer to study, receive supervision in psychotherapy, and teach a course each year to psychiatrists and one to psychoanalytic candidates. In addition, I organized a study group for selected members of the Menninger staff to meet with academicians from Kansas State University, the University of Kansas, and Washburn University, who were interested in psychohistory. The format of the group was modeled after my experiences in Cambridge. George Kren, Leon Rappoport, Ray Hiner, and Jo-

Page 144

seph Hawes were the historians who attended. The meetings and discussions were lively and stimulating to the members. We also were able to invite guests from outside that included Peter Loewenberg, John Demos, Bruce Mazlish, Rudy Binion, Lloyd deMause, and Paul Roazen. Each of them also gave lectures that were open to the public. And Peter edited the psychological profiled I wrote for New West magazine on California Governor Jerry Brown.

During my first year at Menninger, I was accepted into the clinical training program of the Psychoanalytic Institute. I also received training in individual and group psychotherapy and family therapy. I was enthralled and hooked. When I completed my analytic training, I was a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association and I was hired as a staff member of the Menninger Clinic. Menninger liked the intellectual stimulation provided by academicians and encouraged others to study for a year. One of these fellows was Larry Friedman, who later wrote a history of the Menninger family and Clinic. This was a very exciting milieu to be a part of. I was able to write, teach, and work. One of my articles was a psychological portrait of California’s Governor, Jerry Brown; another was a critique of Erik Erikson’s psychobiographical work.

Menninger, however, was primarily a long term psychiatric hospital and was slow to adjust to the vagaries of managed care. Its financial troubles mounted during the 1980’s and 90’s and it eventually was sold to a hospital in Houston, Texas. Larry Friedman and I wrote an article outlining the demise of Menninger for the Times Literary Supplement (“Clinic with the Human Touch,” June 29, 2001). In the meantime, I was doing clinical work and consultations for the Menninger Leadership Center (MLC) as a full-time position. My work at MLC evolved into providing executive development for executives and working with family-owned businesses. I enjoyed this work a great deal but could see that the institution was in serious financial trouble. At this juncture, in early 1989, I left to open my own business that provides consultations to executives, organizations, and family businesses with my wife as my partner. I continued to do psychotherapy in the early years of my practice but slowly needed to give that up because of the travel requirements of my consulting work.

Working with family businesses provided my wife Anne Francis and I an opportunity to utilize our knowledge of psychodynamics, family systems theory, the life cycle, intergenerational conflict, conflict resolution, and history. My wife published The

Page 145

Daughter Also Rises: How Women Overcome Obstacles and Advance in the Family-Owned Business (2012). Much of our work has been centered on helping families in business effectively navigate the inevitable transitions of moving the ownership and leadership of their firms from one generation to the next. While this work may seem like a far cry from being a psychohistorian or a psychoanalyst, it isn’t. I have not written a major biography of a historically significant person. However, I have been able to utilize everything I learned as a historian and a psychoanalyst to help our clients be successful, enlightened, and relatively happy working in their own businesses.

William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t ever dead. It isn’t even past.” Of course, he is correct about our past. It remains with us always and forever. This isn’t solely a legacy for historians, psychohistorians, or psychoanalysts; it belongs to all of us.

One of the first, and most important, lessons I learned as an analyst and a historian is to listen carefully. I learned to listen rather than be thinking about what to say next. I learned to listen to both what is being said and what is not; I have learned to listen to whole stories seeking to understand the other person. This skill parallels learning to read carefully in order to understand. People want to be understood and my task is to understand whether I am being a therapist, a historian, or a business consultant.

Another lesson that I’d like to emphasize is to think carefully. This is a tall order, because we often fool ourselves with what we think we already know. We have been educated and trained to understand others based on what we have already learned. But everyone is unique in specific ways and thinking carefully can help us appreciate this fact. For example, when working with a patient with borderline personality disorder we can hear all the symptoms of that disease in our patient and know what our communication to the patient might be. However, the most important information we need to discern is how his disease helps him/her navigate life and then respond to that issue. All of our symptoms have an incontrovertible adaptive purpose; we can be helpful only when we appreciate this fact.

It is at this juncture that we need to know how to speak carefully. What we say to our patients or clients and how we say it is very important. They place a great deal of weight on our words, often feeling that our interpretations are a personal and deeply felt

Page 146

insult to their own incomplete or faulty understanding of themselves. I remember my first clinical supervisor in psychotherapy repeating to me what I did not fully appreciate: ‘‘put yourself in his/her shoes for a moment and try to imagine how you would respond to what you are saying.’’ This has been an invaluable lesson for me as a historian, therapist, and consultant.

Regardless of clinical persuasion, theoretical preferences, or the therapeutic fad of the moment, these few lessons should be the hallmark of good work. Listening, thinking, and speaking carefully not only is the hallmark of a good analyst but reading carefully, thinking carefully, and writing inclusively and accurately about our subjects is the hallmark of a good historian, psychohistorian, and business consultant.

Page 147