My Formative Experiences in Academia and Psychoanalysis

As a psychohistorian, my most important academic influences have been the Social Relations Department at Harvard and the Psychology Department at the University of Michigan. I signed up for a freshman seminar at Harvard in 1960 entitled Racial Housing Discrimination in Large Urban Areas. It was taught by Richard D. Mann, a social psychologist. In this seminar we did some work in conjunction with the Boston chapter of the Congress on Racial Equality, identifying housing discrimination in several neighborhoods. However, our group of nine students devoted most of its time to examining our own racial attitudes, our family lives growing up, and our here-and-now feelings about each other and our seminar. This was my introduction to the self-analytic group format. Mann had been analyzed while in graduate school and so brought this perspective both to our group and to the issues of ethnic conflict we were exploring. Most of my current professional and academic interests, including psychohistory, stem from that seminar experience. It is noteworthy that, perhaps with one exception, all of the participants have become mental health professionals.

The Social Relations Department at that time was organized around combining cultural anthropology, sociology, and psychology with a psychodynamic point of view. Henry A. Murray, the founder of the Harvard Psychological Clinic and a student of both Freud and Jung, had retired by this time but his influence was still felt. Sociologists Talcott Parsons and Robert Bales had been trained as academic associates at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and anthropologists like John and Beatrice Whiting studied personality cross-culturally, testing psychoanalytic hypotheses. Erik H. Erikson had recently arrived at Harvard and was teaching his undergraduate course on human development and writing his books on Luther and Gandhi. So the application of psychoanalytic notions to groups, to history, and to social issues was a common thread in this interdisciplinary department. Most of the influential professors and their students regarded psychoanalysis as a worthy and useful social science discipline, and many had been analyzed themselves.

When I came to the University of Michigan in 1964, Richard Mann came also and we eventually collaborated on two books on groups. The clinical psychology program was heavily psychoanalytic with most students going into analysis or psychoanalytic therapy. But there was also a psychoanalytic influence in social and personality psychology as well. In addition to Mann, Daniel Miller, who had been analyzed in England, taught the large personality course that many graduate students took. His research involved testing psychoanalytic concepts empirically.

The first thing I wanted to do when I came to Ann Arbor was to go into analysis. I was referred to a local analyst by another analyst in Boston, and due to my father’s generosity was able to start analysis immediately and to continue it until I finished graduate school in 1969. My analysis was crucially important to me personally and led to my finishing graduate work in clinical psychology although I had begun in the social psychology program.

Mann eventually took over the teaching of the large and popular Psychology as a Social Science (101) undergraduate beginning course. The teaching fellows who taught the sections met in a self-analytic group with Mann to share personal as well as teaching experiences. Psychoanalytic group dynamics was the theoretical approach and heavily influenced the teaching of the sections. Mann also started a self-analytic group course similar to the one Bales taught at Harvard and it became popular and was taught for many years. Currently, the interest in groups on

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the undergraduate level may be less than in the 1960s and 1970s. However, applications of this method to the training experience of psychiatric residents has been very positive; I have run weekend workshops for psychiatric residents for over ten years with much success. The self-analytic approach also influenced the original Saturday workshop seminars of the Institute for Psychohistory and the International Psychohistorical Association which still maintains a type of group analysis.

Those academic experiences have deeply influenced my professional, academic, and personal life. That was a time and those were places where psychoanalysis was seen as capable of making significant contributions to the vexing problems of social science as well as of society as a whole. I still believe in this goal and have tried in my own small ways to uphold this tradition of the blend of psychoanalysis and social science in my work on ethnic prejudice and propaganda. The reception I have had to this recent work on integrating individual and group perspectives to understand ethnic prejudice has been very positive since it seems not to have been taught that way before.

The current climate in the United States is certainly anti-psychoanalytic in many respects. The current influence of psychoanalysis on undergraduate education at both Harvard and Michigan is far less than that I have described from my own education. Clinical psychology is now proudly eclectic at Michigan.

However, in organized psychoanalysis the interest in group and organizational psychology is growing. I participated in a several-year workshop on anti-Semitism sponsored by the Research Fund for Psychoanalysis and presented my thoughts about anti-Semitism from a psychoanalytic group perspective. This spring I will teach the first course in our psychoanalytic institute on group and organizational psychology; I doubt that many other psychoanalytic institutes have such a course. The work of psychoanalysts like Otto Kernberg and Vamik Volkan on groups has acquired greater currency among psychoanalysts worldwide.

While an ideal relationship between psychoanalysis and academia does not exist, and the current one is in many ways much impoverished over my experience in the 1960s, the effort to understand humankind’s irrationality in groups continues. For many of us, we have little choice but to keep on with this quest to find out what makes it so difficult for us just to get along with each other.

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