Is Psychohistory Feasible in the Classroom?

Paul Elovitz could not have chosen a better time to ask me to comment on David R. Beisel’s article on “Teaching about Groups.” I have taught my own “Psychohistory” course at Boston University successfully for several years and had no reason to question my teaching methods—until this semester the seminar has revealed some rough edges. Our students—like our children—have low tolerance for complacency. A degree of confusion in the classroom and students’ tentative and sometimes resistant reaction to various discussion topics caused me to reconsider the idea of teaching psychohistory to the undergraduates. David Beisel’s reflections on explaining group psychology provided the framework and additional motivation for the reconsideration.

Professor Beisel asserts that having been introduced to such concepts as the ego defenses and the history of childhood, toward the middle of a semester his students are “more comfortable with thinking psychologically.” Based upon my recent experience I am a bit less optimistic. In fact, I have found that it is not always easy for them “to add psychological ways of seeing,” if only because most of them have little or no idea of what psy-

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chology is about. I do my best to refrain from psycho-jargon and even strict, professionally-accepted definitions. On the other hand, I find it useful to begin the seminar with having students read selected excerpts from Freud—simply to introduce the basic concepts and traditional frame of reference. At the same time, I state from the outset that the course is not based on a dogma or a strictly-followed psychological approach, and students do appreciate a taste of Jung, Horney, or Adler because this brief acquaintance with the classics gives them the awareness of a big “world of psychology out there.” Here, of course, I concur with Beisel: the first task of any psychohistory teacher is to make it clear that the unconscious exists and motivates behavior. The idea is not as trivial as it may seem because initially some students strongly suspect that the unconscious exists only in their teacher’s imagination.

I also agree that the best way to introduce group psychology is to find its roots in individual behavior patterns. Students, however, do resist the notion that like individuals, national cultures have characters and fantasies. It seems that their resistance is partly due to mechanical application of political-correctness-as-precondition-to-thinking. Several times in a row I’ve assigned Daniel Rancour-Laferriere’s provocative Slave Soul of Russia, and students’ response was anything but apathy. While Beisel found it useful to remind his students that “indifference to the topic may be defensive,” I repeatedly had to defend myself against passionate accusations of “cultural bias” against the Russians. (As a first-generation émigré from St. Petersburg, I feel vulnerable about my own sentimentality toward “the old country” to a much greater extent than about any allegation of bigotry. The good news is that being confronted by the students on this point provides a number of opportunities to experience my ambivalence to the country with which my family has severed ties years ago.) For their part, students appreciate the paradox when I point out that to deny a national culture its unique inner tendencies and behavior patterns is to debase it. This may be no less “politically incorrect” than an attempt to deprive an individual of his personal history for the sake of generic “equality.”

Here is where it is especially helpful to introduce Jung’s “collective unconscious.” The example which seems to impress students particularly has to do with dreams shared by many East European Jews born decades after the end of WWII: in their nightmares, they see themselves in the Nazi death camps or escaping from the SS. The ensuing discussion allows us to debate the relevance of dreams as psychohistorical tools and to identify the Holocaust as a new archetype.

One would assume that the influence of childhood and childhood traumas on adult thinking and actions are a given, but I have found this hardly to be the case and, again, largely due to the diktat of our mainstream cultural preconceptions. Since the “correct” way of thinking is that one can overcome any obstacle to personal success, students often resent the very idea that detrimental circumstances in early years create life-long problems. Time and again they remind me that one can always forget about childhood abuse, the trauma of abandonment, or emotional neglect and simply choose a life free from effects of the earlier patterns. Time and again I remind them that traumatized individuals often have trouble remembering, let alone forgetting, and frequently have no notion that the choice to become free is open to them. One must own something before he is capable of disowning it, and perhaps it’s best to tactfully alert students to their resistance as a possible defense against delving deeply into their own childhood, traumatized or not. But, as Beisel said, “denial runs deep since psychohistory goes to the very heart of the matter.”

I too, always acknowledge when a topic is important for me personally, and this brings us to the ever-present issue of projection—including the author’s unavoidable presence in his creation, even if this happens to be an honest work of academic history. When discussing the concept of “social sciences,” students invariably emphasize the latter and I the former. Perhaps I go even further than Beisel in insisting that “one cannot ignore subjectivity as part of social sciences.” I sense serious tension—not to say a neurotic conflict—in a situation when one wishes to enjoy the book’s authorship and simultaneously denies ever having approached “the final product” closer than allowed by the conventions of “objective distance.”

I have found that some students latch on to the principle of scholarly detachment and fight the

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notion of subjectivity to the last intellectual bullet. Often, they are anxious about losing the comfort of the supposedly dependable grasp of “objective scholarly material,” should it lose its stylized quality and absorb the unpredictability of the genuine human participation. It is a bewildering necessity to come to terms with the multifaceted and erratic “I” that permeates historical sources—and, to a large degree, historical studies. Sometimes students just want to know exactly how many projections they need to discover to earn an “A.”

Perhaps what they defend against is uncertainty; yet the old “don’t confuse me with facts” seems to be no longer an issue. Like all of us, undergraduates are drowning in the sea of information, but in seminars students often resist every attempt to organize material according to psychological patterns, preferring to “go under” the familiar way. Having found this paradox particularly glaring in psychohistory courses, I do discuss it in class, hoping to get this point across: anxiety-provoking though it may be, confusion is not necessarily a state detrimental to knowledge. It could be not such a bad thing after all to put up with all the baffling nuances of the human life or the life of a group—for a while at least, until out of the mystifying emotional chaos some blueprint, or outline, of an order began to emerge, like the contours of Life from the archetypal Chaos.

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