A Sociologist’s Perspective on Teaching Psychohistory (response article)

David Beisel’s title, “Teaching About Groups,” surprised me because I know him as the author of The Suicidal Embrace: Hitler, the Allies and the Origins of the Second World War. His book is a fascinating study of leadership and mass psychology, but there is little about the groups within the societies involved. As a sociologist, my teaching focuses on the social movements, political parties, social classes, and interest groups within each society. Beisel teaches a psychohistory class which begins with the psychology of individual leaders, then moves to the psychology of nation states, largely skipping the intermediate levels of social organization. Instead of talking about small groups, as the title suggests, Beisel uses Bion’s theory of small groups to analyze “large groups” or what we sociologists call “societies”.

Once I got beyond the terminological confusion and the disciplinary differences, however, I found that Beisel and I have often ended up at surprisingly similar places. I discuss Lloyd deMause’s theory of the emotional life of nations in my course, Methods and Techniques of Social Research, and I share Beisel’s doubts about its empirical validity. I share with my students a content analysis study I did testing deMause’s theory which is available on my website. I use Bion’s theory of group dynamics in my social movements course, where I discuss Jim Bishop’s New Jewel Movement in Grenada and Jim Jones’ People’s Temple Movement that led to mass suicide in Guyana. Focusing on groups that were so clearly irrational and self-defeating makes it easy to point out the psychological dynamics, something I also do in my book, Turncoats and True Believers.

In my teaching, I use a full range of theories and perspectives, focusing on the contribution each can make to understanding the problem at hand. If I were to do a course on the rise of Hitler, I would give as much time to economic and sociological factors as to the leadership and the mass psychology. In my course on social movements, I treat emotional factors as one of the elements to be

Page 211

considered along with rational calculation and the mobilization of resources. In my course on political sociology, I include the usual sections on Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, then add a section on Freud.

Of course, covering a wide range of perspectives in each course means that none can be covered in great depth, and students may come away with a hodgepodge of facts and theories instead of a coherent understanding. I can see the pedagogical advantage of immersing the students in a single perspective for a semester. On the other hand, I may run into less student resistance than Beisel reports because most students find at least some of my views acceptable. Students are generally receptive to psychological analyses of terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, Timothy McVeigh, Velupillai Prabhakaran, Abimael Guzmán, and Bommi Baumann in the essay on “Terrorist Beliefs and Terrorist Lives” on my website. Many students are quite ready to tear George W. Bush’s psyche apart. But they are resistant to considering any possible psychological functions of their own beliefs, a trait I have also found among intellectuals in various groups, including psychological ones.

My approach does not give students as firm a grounding in psychohistory as Beisel’s does. But there may be other instructors who would be willing to add a unit of psychohistory to their courses, although they would not teach an entire course from that perspective. Perhaps students, also, will find it easier to absorb psychohistorical insights when they learn how to combine them with other perspectives.

Page 212