A “Master Teacher” Reflects on Being a Beisel Student

David Beisel is an extraordinary psychohistory teacher at the State University of New York (SUNY). While his essay describes what he teaches in his psychohistory course at RCC, what no article can really convey in words is just how he does so. I have had a hundred teachers in my life and worked with a thousand more. Yet, none of them could teach the psychohistory course and make it live, breathe and motivate as does David R. Beisel. Below I convey, as best it can be described, just how he does it.

Beisel is so real—what my students call “for real.” He is in touch with his emotions: never afraid to express what he feels and let you know it. In class, there have been disagreements and denial but I have never heard it suggested that “Doctor B” is conjuring things up or doesn’t believe what he states. This “Beisel Effect” fills his classrooms and brings droves of students to his evening psychohistory lectures: after a hard day of work or school they turned up to hear guest psychohistorians give totally optional, non-credit lecture/discussions. His students can feel just how much he loves teaching and bringing psychohistory to them.

In my four semesters of sabbatical study, I have taken nearly every course he offers: attending even his basic European history class where I gained numerous new insights into my major field of study. The first insight I gained decades ago was that I am a teacher of psychohistory. Before I ever heard of Clio’s Psyche, The Journal of Psychohistory, Binion, and deMause, I was trying to get my students into the heads of the world’s leaders to attempt to figure out just why they did what they did. Kids have feelings. I used that to try to have them understand how similar feelings could create similar behavior in adult figures in history. Political and economic causation just didn’t answer the perplexities of human behavior. An example I used was a situation involving Germany obtaining two unique French guns, the ammunition for which were only made in France. During the war, French manufacturers supplied this ammunition through Switzerland, knowing full well that its only use was to be fired back at French soldiers. Why they might do that elicited a large number of psychological insights from untrained high schoolers.

Upon completing the sabbatical, which allowed me to attend Beisel’s classes, I returned to the high school classroom, where I worked to further integrate psychohistory into my courses. The impact of childhood experiences and abuse became a frequent component of my teaching. A lesson on Renaissance art, showing a stele of a swaddled infant led to a discussion of child-

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rearing practices. Student experiences in groups from Boy Scouts to gangs led to discussions of groups in society and how that impacted history. Their fascination with “evil” figures in history led to examinations of how personal history can create “monsters” and why they are allowed power.

With the arrival of the Internet and the surge in “cribbed” papers, I moved to psychobiography as the topic of required outside reading. Selecting an individual from a list of figures pertinent to the course, students had to answer an assortment of questions regarding a leader’s childhood, influences, challenges and behavior—subjects not readily available in online biographies. In advanced classes, they “became” (role played) the person and faced the class in a mock press conference.

In recent years, psychohistory served an additional purpose. Students appeared increasingly more interested in the social aspects of school over the intellectual content. Consequently, getting their minds from the “hall” to the class became a chore. To counteract this, I used materials from everyday student lives, what they called the “real world,” to motivate a lesson on history. Everything they discussed became fair game—television, movies, relationships, etc.—to serve my educational purpose, as the following examples illustrate: a girl’s breakup with her boyfriend segued into a lesson on “Munich.” An incident on a “dating” show prompted a discussion of Italian attitudes after WWI and the rise of Mussolini. The arrest of an arsonist, watching a fire he set, introduced the concept of traumatic reliving. A murder mystery led to an analysis of the differences between fundamental and immediate causes of war. Competition in sports was a frequent transition to national and international competition.

Since my students are three to four years younger than Dave’s and are not yet eligible for our school’s popular senior elective psychology course, I could not even begin to deal with many of the myriad concepts he discusses in his article. Group fantasies, projection, and poisonous placentas would fall on glazed eyes, but hopefully these eyes would open once these “primed” students graduated and arrived in Beisel 101.

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