Countering Student Objections To Psychohistory

Teaching undergraduate students about the psychohistory of groups presents special challenges, as illustrated by David Beisel’s wonderful essay, “Teaching About Groups.” Getting the student acclimated to psychohistorical thinking is a significant challenge and Dr. Beisel is up to this formidable task. He structures the course as a series of building blocks; he starts with ego defenses and psychobiography and then builds up to the study of groups before later examining Hitler and Nazi Germany. He not only familiarizes the students with some of the foundational writings in the field, but demonstrates how and why psychohistorians differ. The variety of interpretations sets up lively class discussions and raises important epistemological questions, to which we will return. Beisel teaches psychohistory by stimulating a dialogue between the students and him.

To engage and challenge the students, Dr. Beisel brings in subjects for psychohistorical examination that are close to the student’s everyday experience: video games, films and television. When he proposes “popular films can be used as a way of identifying a group’s unconscious fantasy (or fantasies)” the “topic usually generates much heat.” Indeed, suggesting “that films may provide possible roadmaps to their unconscious….often produces angry denials” from the students. One of the recurring themes in Beisel’s article is the dialogue between the professor and the students about the validity of the psychohistorical approach. Having taught psychohistory for twenty-seven years, Beisel anticipates “student resistance” and has developed “ways of handling it.” In his essay, he discusses more how students resist psychohistory than embrace it.

What then are the student objections to psychohistory, how does Beisel counter them and what issues do they raise? Students, Beisel writes, sometimes say that my “perception reveals little about the external world, but everything about myself, that like ‘all’ psychological historians, I’m merely projecting my own stuff into the world, which I call ‘history.’” This student observation is reminiscent of when Freud’s friend, Wilhelm Fliess, tells Sigmund in 1901 “that ‘the reader of thoughts merely reads his own thoughts into other people.’” To Freud, this “renders all my efforts valueless” (Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985], p. 447). The sense that psychoanalysis and psychohistory are merely projections and not really perceptions is one side of a perennial critique of the therapeutic professions.

The student concern about projection can easily be extended from psychohistory to history, psychology, and all knowledge, as psychological and theoretical assumptions are widespread in many fields. This student concern with projection is a primitive postmodernism, a questioning of the foundation of all knowledge. It fits in well with the popular notion that everything is a matter of opinion or point of view.

Beisel advises that it “is better to acknowl-

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edge that the student’s statement contains at least a kernel of truth,” and that “one cannot ignore subjectivity as part of the social sciences.” As Beisel reports, students regularly bring up the critique of psychohistorical findings as subjective. This becomes an impediment to convincing students of the merits of psychohistory.

It is worth reviewing how to respond to these criticisms. I would tell the student that whether the objection is restricted to psychohistory or extended further, there are problems inherent in this position. In fields other than psychohistory, the researcher’s perspective impacts on the findings. It is a commonplace that all data is value laden, that is why the old dichotomy between fact and value has been abandoned. Many recognize that data alone may not lead to valid conclusions. In physics, there is a phenomenon known as underdetermination; in which there can be two incompatible theories consistent with all current and future evidence, and the evidence itself cannot determine that one theory is correct. In addition to underdetermination, as biologist Ernst Mayr declares: in certain circumstances “different underling ideologies” in science make consensus “hard to achieve” (Ernst Mayr, This Is Biology [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997], p. 103).

A belief prominent in the natural sciences is physicalism, the belief that most properties can be reduced to physical ones. This conviction may help explain many inanimate phenomenon, but it is not as successful in explaining intentionality or the twists and turns of human feeling.

Once intentionality rears its ugly head, the notions of the human mind and subjectivity trail along with it. As John Searle writes: “the existence of subjectivity is an objective scientific fact like any other….any domain of facts whatever is a subject of scientific investigation….if the fact of subjectivity runs counter to a certain definition of ‘science,’ then it is the definition and not the fact which we will have to abandon” (John Searle, Minds, Brains and Sciences [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984], p. 25). Any adequate investigation of subjectivity must then understand the nature of both conscious and unconscious factors. Many cognitive psychologists have shown how unconscious processes impact on human thought and behavior.

Examining the various aspects of human mentality can not only rely on methods dominant in the physical sciences. The student concern that projection undermines psychohistorical findings should to be met with the recognition that subjective methods are needed to understand the different forms taken by human thought and feeling. Imagination and fantasy are central elements in human mentality. Human consciousness has an evocative, associative component. One thought may lead to another in free flight. Human thought and feeling can take a variety of forms from joy to depression, from sanity to madness, from impulse to reflection. Human thought can be associative, on one hand, or denotative, on the other. The more evocative element in human subjectivity is best understood by methods different from the methods needed to understand the more precise denotations of logic or science.

Individuals who understand imaginative flights and the depth of human emotions will be able to illuminate those aspects of human reality. A way of obtaining this understanding is through the scientific findings in cognition and emotionality. Another way of gaining this knowledge is through personal experience and reflection. In other words, the depth of one’s subjective understandings can be a positive contribution to understanding the darker places of the human mind and the course of history. Subjective explorations need not be a block to psychohistorical understanding, but, in certain ways, can be a positive contribution to it. There is the danger of projection in any discipline, but in psychohistory rigorous self-understanding combined with a critical evaluation of the evidence may lead to important insights. The deeper one’s understandings the more illuminating one’s psychohistorical conceptions can be.

This rigorous self-understanding is earned not only by experience and reflection, but by training and education. Historians learn about standards of evaluating evidence and how to develop cogent historical arguments. Psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and other mental health professions go through formal coursework and practical training.

Still in many human investigations, there are evidentiary grounds for difference. In physics

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there is underdetermination, in history, for example, there are often strong evidentiary grounds for divergent accounts. Historian Hayden White notes: “any historical object can sustain a number of equally plausible description or narrative of its processes” (Hayden White, The Content of the Form [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 1987], p. 76). Similarly, there are a variety of approaches in psychology, many schools of psychotherapy, and in psychoanalysis divergent conceptions have emerged with no single standard of evaluating competing findings.

This prevalence of a variety of interpretations with divergent standards of evaluation lends some support to the critic of psychohistory. For is not the worry of the objecting student that there is little validity to the rival claims of psychohistorians? Agreement and certainty as well as uncertainty and controversy can emerge in any form of human inquiry. Nevertheless, there are general criteria for evaluating findings. (1) There is a real problem to investigate. (2) The conceptions used are sufficient to address and investigate the issue. (3) All the necessary and available evidence is gathered from all the relevant academic disciplines. (4) The evidence is thoroughly examined for reliability and validity. (5) A coherent account of all the pertinent evidence and concepts is presented that shows how alternative explanations are not adequate. Following these criteria may assist in solving certain problems and can advance intellectual and academic inquiry. Resolution will occur in many but not all cases. Underdetermination and competing ideologies will still be present.

In addition, given that human understanding may be, in certain circumstances, a double-edged sword; what reveals may also conceal, what illuminates can also distort. Most explanations have limits and are partial. The conscientious investigator must work to be comprehensive, to incorporate a variety of perspectives and findings in his or her synthesis. Breadth, precision and depth are helpful in psychohistorical studies.

Ultimately, to the students who object that psychohistory is really projection of the historian, I would say this criticism verges on an ad hominem argument. You are turning the argument to the person rather than discussing the issues at hand and the standards for evaluating particular claims. As David Beisel says, “simply because something is ‘in here’ does not mean it’s not ‘out there.’” The argument for projection, for all the worth of its warnings, is an easy way out of the hard work of investigation and evaluation. This criticism of psychohistory is a way of avoiding the psychological within the historical. David Beisel’s classroom approach can help students begin to understand why the study of subjectivity through psychohistory is important for the field of history and the conduct of life.

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