John Hartman’s Road to Group Psychohistory

In high school, I became interested in the French Revolution and revolutions in general primarily through the historian Crane Brinton’s book, The Anatomy of Revolution (1938). I was especially struck by his idea that revolutions go through stages and phases that can be delineated and described. When I went to Harvard College in 1960, I wanted to take one of Professor Brinton’s courses offered that fall. As a freshman, I needed his written permission. I tracked him down in his cubicle in the Widener Library; he immediately gave me permission. I was thrilled.

Other formative experiences came that fall as well. I was also enrolled in a seminar on Racial Housing Discrimination in Urban Areas led by Professor Richard Mann, a social psychologist and also president of the Boston chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The seminar was run like a self-analytic group in which we explored our own racial attitudes. We also canvassed the Boston area for instances of racial housing discrimination. Out of this seminar grew three things: involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, a scholarly collaboration with Mann and Graham Gibbard (who was also a student in the seminar), and first-hand immersion in the work of Erik Erikson.

As for the Civil Rights Movement involvement, I joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Congress of Racial Equality, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Northern Student Movement. I was a member of the Freedom Riders in Monroe, North Carolina, was arrested in Easton, Maryland, attended the March on Washington, met Malcolm X, and marched with John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama.

The close personal and academic relationship with Graham Gibbard and Richard Mann yielded a collaboration on a book about small groups called Interpersonal Styles and Group Development (1967) and later, when we were all reunited at the University of Michigan, another book called Analysis of Groups (1975), a product of Gibbard’s and my dissertations in psychology. My dissertation was on two self-analytic groups whose individual interactions were scored on a psychoanalytically-inspired interaction system called the Process Analysis Scoring System. I was able to delineate

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specific phases in each of the groups that seemed to be identified in changing ways of dealing with shared distress in the group. I named these phases with a nod toward Brinton’s study of revolutions.

That same fall, as part of the seminar series, we met Erik Erikson, who told us his story of how he became a psychoanalyst. I think I read everything Erikson ever wrote while in college and looked forward to his new studies. These included his book on Gandhi, two lectures on Jefferson and American identity published as a book, and works on adolescent development. By the end of college I knew much more Erikson than Sigmund Freud. For that matter, I knew much more Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion than I knew Freud owing to my immersion in the literature of psychoanalytic groups.

After graduate school, my work with Mann and Gibbard came to the attention of independent scholar Lloyd de Mause. In the early 70s as he was working on his book, The History of Childhood (1973), Lloyd was able to acquaint himself with a vast and esoteric literature from disparate fields and somehow ran across our work. I think our work interested him because it was an empirically-based developmental scheme for small groups, something he was working on for the study of childhood. In any case, this led to trips to New York and a piece in Lloyd’s book on Jimmy Carter (1977). Historians David Beisel and Paul Elovitz contributed to this volume as well.

My contributions in the psychohistorical realm focus more on the large group process and the role of shared fantasy in this process. I was influenced in this view by the group-as-a-whole approach to small group analysis and the work of Wilfred Bion (Experiences in Groups, 1959) as well as by Jacob Arlow’s notion of shared unconscious fantasy. I believe these are the building blocks for an in-depth understanding of social and historical processes. At this point I stayed away from psychobiography as I was more interested in applying a psychoanalytic social psychology to historical trends. This was compatible with Lloyd’s concepts of group fantasy, fantasy analysis, and his historical developmental outlook. So far so good.

I participated in the first couple of meetings of the newly formed International Psychohistory Association. Lloyd asked Alice Eichholtz and me to serve as group consultants to the first meeting.

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The idea was to make the meeting itself and the participants’ subjects of self-analysis. I thought this was quite a novel idea and might forestall organizational problems in the future as well as practicing what was preached. I made an interpretation at this first meeting that our group was like a bar mitzvah boy who had temporarily put away his motorcycle jacket in the closet. I was trying to get at the idea that there was a good deal of rebellious aggression beneath the idealistic veneer of the meeting.

This was to become clearer in the ensuing years as the notion of self-analysis was abused, including by Lloyd; people were hurt and the group was weakened, not enhanced, by this experience. At the same time, Lloyd’s views became more doctrinaire and outlandish. For example, his fetal theory of history and his claim to be able to predict war and assassination by means of fantasy analysis was put forward as gospel. As mentioned, I feel that shared unconscious fantasy is a very real and useful way to understand the irrational underpinnings of many aspects of groups. Exploring shared fantasy in movies, works of art, political propaganda, cartoons, magazine covers, etc. is certainly a worthwhile endeavor, but it has major methodological problems.

Lloyd, however, had become not just bold but grandiose and reckless in his truth claims for his brand of psychohistory, and it lost him many colleagues, including myself. By the time of the fetal theory of history, I had begun my formal psychoanalytic training and became interested in the methodology of evidence in clinical psychoanalysis, which I felt also applied to psychohistory. The methodological problem in applied psychoanalysis, including psychohistory, is that there is no live patient or group members to respond to an interpretation in order to evaluate its truth claim. The criteria for assessing truth claims, even when there is a live patient or group members, has not been agreed upon in clinical psychoanalysis, meaning the problem is only magnified in applied areas like psychohistory. In any case, I felt that it was preferable to be modest, cautious, and tentative when making truth claims about assessing unconscious factors in human nature. I presented a paper on this topic at a later meeting of the International Psychohistory Association. It was scheduled at the same time as a paper of Lloyd’s and he actively solicited members to come to his talk. So, that became my last psychohistory meeting.

I did, however, continue to work in areas that would be considered psychohistory. I explored anti-Semitic propaganda films in

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terms of unconscious fantasy themes and the relationship between the propagandist and the audience. In three separate studies, I explored three Nazi feature films in these terms: The Triumph of the Will (1935), Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew, 1940), and Jud Süß (Süss the Jew, 1940).

Theoretically, I became acquainted with the work of Vamık Volkan and his group in Charlottesville. I published a couple of papers in his journal. One was a study of Polish-Jewish relations as a product of large-group conflict and unresolved mourning in the context of World War II and the Holocaust. I had also become interested in restoring Jewish sites in the area of Poland where my paternal grandparents were born. The most noteworthy project was the publication in Poland of a history of the Jews of Przemysl during the Holocaust. I created a non-profit foundation to foster projects that would reduce the conflict between Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians in this part of Poland as well as in the diaspora. This included the restoration of the Jewish cemetery in Przemysl and events like the first Shabbat weekend in Przemysl since World War II. I see this effort as a continuation of my civil rights activities earlier in my life as the aim is to reduce ethnic conflict.

In more recent years, at the urging of Paul Elovitz, I made a few contributions to Clio’s Psyche. In my short paper on Trump, as with my study of Carter, I tried to emphasize Trump’s role as a representative and spokesperson of the group as a whole and certain unconscious shared fantasies his presidency actualizes.

Professionally, I see myself as a psychoanalytically-informed social psychologist with intent to apply this approach to individuals, couples, as well as small and large groups for the purpose of progressive change. I do not consider myself a psychohistorian mainly because I was not trained in the methodology of history. I see my scholarly outlook in terms of the Harvard Social Relations Department. Social Relations was an attempt to integrate cultural anthropology, sociology, and social psychology with a developmental psychodynamic frame. That has always been my approach. I also consider myself an activist in that I have not been a neutral observer but have supported, worked for, and initiated social change. Dick Mann was not only a professor but also the chairman of Boston CORE and later active in the anti-Vietnam War Movement. Lloyd deMause was an independent scholar who founded a movement with the intent of improving child welfare and preventing war. And Vamık Volkan was a psychoanalyst who got

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out of the office and tried to reduce conflict between many warring ethnic groups. These were people whom I have admired and learned from as I have tried to forge my own professional path. Despite their differences, they all seem to be products of the Age of Reason with a belief in the achievement of individual rights, the promises of human progress, and democracy. They had a certain utopian outlook and a belief in human progress that I shared.

However, we are coming once again into a period where fewer and fewer people around the world share a vision of social progress. Autocracy, ethno-nationalism, and the “Us” vs. “Them” mentality are in ascendancy. Charlottesville is no longer known for Thomas Jefferson or Vamık Volkan; it is the place where Nazis marched at night with flaming torches shouting, “Jews will not replace us.”

It is not clear how things are going to turn out. But, it does seem that the combination of a scholarly depth understanding of history, politics, social movements, and leadership combined with an informed activism are needed now more than ever.

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