The Evidential Basis of Psychohistory in Group Process (symposium article)

The application of depth psychology to history—psychohistory—has evolved along three distinct, not always integrated or compatible paths: psychobiography, the history of childhood, and the dynamics of large group interactive processes. The purpose of this paper is to take the last approach, large group process, and review an aspect of the empirical, systematic research on small groups, which has informed our current understanding of psychohistory. It is my contention that small group empirical research may form an empirical evidential

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base for this aspect of psychohistory, and I wish to demonstrate this by taking one small aspect of my own research as representative. I then wish to describe some methodological pitfalls about the implications of this research for speculations in psychohistory. The first of these caveats concerns the relation between small group psychology, large group psychology, and historical change. The second involves small and large group psychology and developmental changes and conflicts from human childhood.

I wish to begin with a reminder about the methodology of small group observation which began with the simple noting of who talked to whom in groups and how much. From this simple beginning complex-scoring systems of group interaction arose. There was Ted Mills’ sign process analysis, Freed Bales’ interaction process analysis, Timothy Leary’s circle technique, Dick Mann’s member-to-leader- scoring system, Gibbard and Hartman’s process analysis scoring system, and Bales’ SYMLOG system for multiple level observation of groups. Each of these systems employed a systematic scoring system of group interactions, which could then be subjected to complex statistical treatment to discover trends in individual and group performance.

Mann’s system was unique because it sought to integrate psycho-dynamically-derived categories with systematic group observation bringing an in-depth richness to what was being said and how this could be understood at multiple levels. These categories involved aspects of hostility, affection, authority relations, and ego-state distress, thus bringing also a conceptual integration of interpersonal and intrapsychic issues to the study of groups, a very current psychoanalytic approach. Mann’s system focused first on the relationship with the leader of unstructured self-analytic groups which lent another psychodynamic aspect to the task as this approach very much resembled the analysis of transference in psychodynamic therapy. Gibbard and I retained the same scoring categories but allowed for both member to leader and member to member interactions to be recorded.

The number of interactions scored in each of these studies was huge. Mann studied four twenty-session groups and Gibbard and I studied two 40 session groups. Gibbard and Hartman’s data consisted of forty boxes of IBM cards, each holding 2,000. This constituted 80,000 group interactive scores. We were the second largest computer user at the University of Michigan in 1969. The entire Physics Department, including researchers at the cyclotron, was first!

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These large numbers of observations were reduced by methods like Factor Analysis in the case of individual role assessment and by complex graphing and moving averages in the case of group development.

Two psychohistorical principles, empirically demonstrated in this initial research are: Proposition I: groups develop in ways that can be measured as reactions to emotional distress. Proposition II: groups develop solutions to reduce distress and return the group to homeostasis in adaptive and defensive ways. These solutions involve the exercise and distribution of power, decisions about social closeness and intimacy, and the accomplishment of work to sustain the group’s stated conscious mission. This model is, of course compatible with the basic propositions of the modern Freudian psychoanalytic conflict model, General Systems theory, as well as a homeostatic model in diverse fields like physiology and the history of revolutions.

I wish to focus on empirical findings to highlight the idea that the group process aspect of psychohistory rests on an empirical evidential base. My desire is to show that the development of small groups can be demonstrated to follow a course dictated by solutions to the expressions of distress experienced and expressed by group members. Psychohistory takes the next inferential step and concludes that large groups follow a similar but not necessarily identical functional path and finally that what we call history progresses in the same way for similar reasons.

With Mann and Gibbard in 1975, I studied the development of small (25 member face-to-face) time-limited groups. Percentage profiles for each category for the sum of all speakers to all members for each session were derived from the raw data. A session was designated as above or below the median for that category (medium splits). Statistical analysis yielded four major phases in each of the two groups. Both groups taken together had three peaks of expressed distress that coincided with four phases of each group independently arrived at by another statistical treatment, factor analysis.

Quoting from our previously published work, “Briefly the first phase marks the group’s reaction to a leader who does not lead in the customary manner [of a teacher in a classroom]. This reaction leads to a revolt against the authority of the leader and the structure of the course.” We go on to say, “The next phase involves an attempt to create … new values of closeness and honesty not ordinarily associated with a classroom. …Competition, sexuality, and rivalry and emerging disappointment at the breakdown of the new order appear in the third phase.” Finally, “the last phase is concerned with the end of the group and the evaluation of previous performance, as well as the sadness associated with termination. These issues were common to both groups, although the ways in which they were handled and the reactions to them were different” (Gibbard Hartman, and Mann [1975], pp. 165-66).

This kind of study demonstrates empirically what anyone who attends any kind of mass event experiences, emotions, including distress, may be shared communally. The adaptive and defensive solutions to this distress make up an important part of the history of that group. We can call these solutions shared unconscious fantasies, shared myths, group fantasies, etc. This is how groups move. Conditions, external and internal to the group, create distress and

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various adaptive and defensive, pathological and healthy, solutions are sought to deal with this distress in order to reach some kind of homeostasis. Leadership and group norms are crucially important as to what forms these reactions to distress will take. Different groups with different leaders in different eras in different cultures may have different manifest histories. But our conclusion was and is that groups produce distress, which is shared and shared solutions are found to reduce the stress of the majority of the members. Politics, the way in which power is distributed and exercised, deals with distress caused by the absence of leadership as well as causes distress by the inevitable inequalities of power. Economics, the way in which wealth is produced, distributed, and consumed causes distress in much the same way. Thus, the so-called forces associated with politics and economics can be seen easily in the psychological frame of reference demonstrated by our small group studies.

Gibbard and I took two further speculative steps, which have important but potentially problematic implications for the methodology of psychohistory. We first made an analogy between the stages of group development and the stages of revolution described by Crane Brinton (1898-1968), my former teacher. Professor Brinton had himself compared the conditions which made for revolutionary times to a fever in an infected individual and the political consequences attempts to relieve that fever (The Anatomy of Revolution [NY: Vintage, 1952], p. 17). This was essentially the homeostatic model we utilized in our empirical research. I meant this comparison to historical stages to be a colorful analogy. In our later work we began actively looking for historical and political solutions as analogies, which would describe the conditions we were observing in the groups studied. Thus, we characterized the phase of the group, which sought for sweetness and light without class or gender distinctions devoid of competition, Utopian Fantasies. Following Slater we characterized the assault on and the overthrow of the teacher’s authority as Revolutionary Fantasies (Slater, 1966). In the hands of bolder and more creative psychohistorians, this list has been extended and elaborated. In the large group certainly the Apocalyptic Fantasy seems much more important today than in the small groups of the 60’s. This type of analogizing can be seen as a hypothesis as well as a conclusion. Proposition IIIA: groups develop a shared utopian political ideology based on a shared fantasy in order to deal with intra-group distress.

From a methodological point of view the stages of group development tied to shared fantasies is a conclusion based on a different kind of evidence than the recording of consciously stated expressions of distress. I think we demonstrated empirically that group development follows peaks and valleys of distress. The next step, the labeling of those periods of development as utopian, revolutionary, or apocalyptic based on shared fantasies calls for a different kind of methodology. This is because we have entered the realm of interpretation of meaning and have changed our level of abstraction. It may not be impossible to do this, but it is not yet a part of a systematic methodology of evidence in psychohistory any more than this kind of inference is an integral part of psychoanalysis itself. Dale Boesky and I have been interested for more than a decade in this question with regard to the evidential base of assertions within the clinical psychoanalytic situation (Dale Boesky, “Why Don’t Our Institutes Teach the Methodology of Clinical Evidence?” Psychoanalytic Quarterly. [2002] 71:445-476). There is no such methodology for the evaluation of clinical evidence in psychoanalysis. We have taught a seminar in which we ask psychoanalytic candidates to make a self-evident psychoanalytic assertion and back that assertion up with data from clinical case material. Out of this exercise we both try to establish the actual criteria that are being used to assess the fit between the assertion and evidence as well as to evaluate the fit itself.

It is important to remind ourselves that in psychohistorical research the jump from the small group to the large group to historical change is argument by analogy. This is not bad in of itself but it is not in the same range of evidential certainty as the propositions I described earlier.

The second speculative leap we took in our later research was to relate by analogy certain aspects of group development to certain phases of childhood. This could be characterized as Proposition IIIB. Utopian fantasies in groups derive from shared pre-oedipal symbiotic merger fantasies with the “Good Mother” in individuals. Psychohistorians have followed in this path and have greatly elaborated this and other childhood analogies with historical processes. The problem with this kind of reasoning is that there is a lack of a coherent methodology of evi-

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dence to assert the truth claims of what began as analogies and have increasingly taken on the aspect of causal links. I am not saying that there are not causal links, particularly when we take into consideration the historical record of childhood itself. I am saying though that there has been scant attention to the evaluation of evidence to support particularly causal claims of childhood origins of historical events. People make history. People have childhoods. Childhoods, however, do not exclusively and directly make history along an easy to see linear path.

I wish to take this example to illustrate my larger assertion. People in large groups often express ideas and fantasies, which we call paranoid. These ideas may be shared by significant numbers of group members but usually not by all. Enough people may share these paranoid fantasies to justify calling a particular group of people a paranoid group. However, the individual members of the group holding paranoid ideas under the sway of the group process, if examined by a mental health professional outside of the group, may or may not be considered clinically paranoid. Therefore, the childhood determinants of clinical paranoia cannot be held causal for the paranoid manifestations in the group. The paranoid manifest content may be the same but the latent causal determinants cannot. Other factors have to be taken into consideration which are a product of the group frame of reference—leadership, group norms, role diffusion, social trauma, threats to identity, etc. let alone “real” environmental factors of threat. Repressed homosexuality from childhood would be way down on the list of causal factors although manifestations of this may be found in certain individuals or even sub-groups.

The reason for this caveat is that when the observer of human nature moves from the one frame of reference to the next, causal links change as the complexity of the system increases. The dynamics of the individual are not exactly the same as those of the small group and those of the small group not the same as the large group, and those of the large group not exactly the same as what we call history. The fascinating thing about what psychohistory has accomplished in the last thirty years is the laying of a foundation for a possible unified general systems theory, which would show the ways in which these systems of different complexities have analogous fundamental processes as well as overlapping solutions. Unconscious fantasies of individuals can be shared and become group fantasies. At the same time, it behooves us also to be aware that arguing by analogy eventually has its limits and that as systems become more complex, explanatory power can become markedly reduced unless our conceptual powers become as complex as what we are trying to explain. Central to this quest is a greater sophistication as to what constitutes evidence in psychohistory and a closer attention to the criteria required for such a methodology.

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