On Teaching Psychohistory: A Precarious Enterprise

Learning takes place on an affective screen. The learning of which we speak is not to be found in courses which share with people methods and skills, information and knowledge. It is the kind that reaches to an understanding of the internal self and the self in the world. Such learning expands a student’s perceptual system in such a way that his or her inner being is stirred into a sense of what it is to have some insights and ideas about what makes the world go round the way it does. The goal in a course in psychohistory is achieved through a respect and perhaps love for the teacher whose introduction to the materials and methods of the discipline develops in the student a respect and love for some of the basic concepts which strike his fancy. Whatever the books selected to be read, the core text becomes the teacher who from the start is evaluated as genuine and authentic or not. Our observations in this missive are based on some not such successful teaching excursions. We share what we have learned about teaching psychohistory over a period of more than 20 years, having made all of the errors to which we alert the reader.

Though for the initiated of psychohistory, and especially for those who become votaries and then priests, the discipline may become a religion, it is not such. It is essentially a way of thinking about a body of literature speculative, exciting, stimulating, imaginative, and creative that the student is asked to master. He or she doesn’t have to believe in the theories and their applications as they are expounded. They are simply to be learned. To impose beliefs is to lose one’s audience almost immediately.

When we introduce students to some of the concepts of psychohistory we take them on a strange and fascinating journey filled with disquieting and perilous episodes. Affecting mutual indifference to material that students regard as weird to outrageous and defend against with a fierce kind of stubbornness, we respond by allowing them to keep a merciful distance from those materials which ignite them. The meal we offer up is capable of poisoning them at the very moment we introduce the image of the poison container of the family. “That’s me, in my family!” comes the cry from a student. Startled that she shouted out this secret, she falls back into her chair, stunned into silence as is the class.

As teachers we learn insufficiently soon not to undermine students’ beliefs at a frenetic pace, if at all. Wild analysis, as Freud warns in his essay by that title, is capable of eliciting violent responses which injure beyond amelioration. The under-appreciated father, Polonius, teaches that we can find direction by indirection. This is why film and fiction help buffer messages that are capable of causing minor disruptions in the nervous system. Sometimes to bring to the surface the unconscious messages in these media can result in earthquake-like responses that leave faults dangerously open. For example, remembering Oedipus, Paris, and Hamlet, as well as the protagonists in Virgil’s Aeneid, Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset, and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, we are reinformed that too sudden an eruption of one’s stability-of-beliefs is liable to destroy the optic system and cause deformities of personality, blindness, suicide and other death in its various guises. Numerous psychology majors have read repeatedly about the Oedipus Complex. Some have read Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. But a positive and gutsy response comes semester after semester from a showing of Howard Hawks’ Red River, in which John Wayne and taken-under-his-wing son Montgomery Clift (who is an orphan) vie for the same woman. To a student they declare, “For the first time I understand what the Oedipus Complex is all about.” We have now softened up the class sufficiently to take them through the expanses of the myth that psychohistory urges on us.

Student interest is easily grabbed with the following, but the responses are not similar. When they read that Stanislav Grof, the Czech psychiatrist, conducted over 3,000 LSD therapy sessions since 1956, they are ready to flee the

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classroom for a trip to their travel agent. But when they find that the purpose of the therapy is to relive birth experiences, they become a bit leery of both the theory and the practice. Interest is there in Lloyd deMause’s theories on leadership, especially as a leader relates to a group. The predictable progress that moves the group from the honeymoon stage of idealizing the leader through to the phase of collapse, despite the accomplishments of the leader, piques their curiosity about a host of political events in the world. However, the ideas regarding group-fantasy as it is examined in numerous cartoons, on covers of magazines, and in radio and television talks does not convince them that there is much validity to the conclusions derived from the material. We believe that as important as these topics are they do not engage the students because the material remains on the level of the intellect there is not much affect in their responses.

Sharing with a class deMause’s brilliant schema of the six psychogenic modes of parenting of the infant-child brings with it a desire for a more enlightened understanding of the six stages: infanticidal, abandoning, ambivalent, intrusive, socializing, and helping. This is not only because all of us have experienced “Mother.” The schema catches the students because it resonates to the demotic [popular] and enchorial [domestic] experiences of the entire group. We move from advanced to primitive: we begin with a discussion of the helping mode. By the time we have gotten to the intrusive mode, we are laughing and sharing our experiences with the stereotypical Jewish mother (even though she need not be Jewish), noting that 80% of American comedians are Jewish and that much of their material centers about Mother.

As we move further down the list a certain air of discomfort blankets us all. Numerous examples come from the class; the sources are from literature, film, and history. The abandoning parent, surprisingly at first, gets the most play there appear to be an infinite number of ways in which mothers and fathers are capable of abandoning their children. And, finally, the infanticidal parent. The quandaries after viewing Pier Paolo Pasolini’s stunning film, Medea (and, if possible, his Iphigenia), is: Is it necessary in a matriarchal society for young, virgin men to be sacrificed? Is it necessary in a patriarchal society for young, virgin women to be sacrificed? And what of the 500 burial urns found in Carthage just a few years ago by a Harvard anthropologist? All 500 urns contained the bodies of infant children similarly roasted on a grill like Cornish hens.

A final caveat: There is implicit, and sometimes explicit, in too many essays and in larger works of psychohistory a pejorative view of the world and of human beings in general. Harsh judgments are made of leaders of goodwill and good faith for reminding us how little control we have over our unconscious needs which sometimes lead to compulsive acts of destruction. As teachers, we repeat in our presentations throughout the semester that psychohistory is an optimistic science as well as an art. We conclude that though not all of the world has ascended to the highest psychogenic level of parenting, many have evolved into other relatively higher levels allowing for more advanced more benign and nurturing parenting.

Growth comes about through the dual process of regression-progression. We cheerfully remind ourselves that once a certain level is achieved, the return to that level after slippage is less difficult than the initial ascent. Cynicism is an all too rampant virus among all too many discouraged students. Psychohistory views humans as capable of becoming menschen and closer to the realm of the angels than we had previously thought and hoped as children.

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