Binion Continues His Important Work on Group Process

Review of Rudolph Binion, Past Impersonal: Group Process in Human History. DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. ISBN 0875803458, 218 pages.

Rudolph Binion’s latest book revisits and synthesizes some of his earlier psychohistorical work. Much of this previous work, going back to the 1970’s, has been published in the Journal of Psychohistory and its predecessor The History of Childhood Quarterly.

In the preface, Binion sets out his basic approach and assumptions, starting with the claim that “Whatever we do, we tend to act out of our past. . . Most of what we do is accordingly what we have already done and even redone . . .” (p. viii). Binion suggests that there are three main ways that groups can function. The first he calls the adaptive mode, which might also be called the healthy mode, in which the group acts in a rational manner to promote its vital interests be they material or moral. He implies that this is the most common mode of group functioning.

The second mode he calls maladaptive and it is here that Binion, as well as most psychohistorians, have focused their attention. Binion sees collective trauma as one of the main components in the formation of group identity. As he says: “Deep-felt group identities come alive only slowly and never quite die, cohering most tightly around common wounds that fester instead of healing” (p. viii). This is the realm of trauma and repetitive reliving.

The third mode of group expression is what he calls the symbolic, essentially the realm of art, broadly defined.

The bulk of the book consists of seven chapters. These are erudite and scholarly studies spanning the history of Western Civilization from early Christian Times to the era of the Third Reich. The topics covered include Christian art, the Black Death, the American and French revolutions, Romanticism, and the Nazi era. They are organized and presented as examples of his tripartite classification system, two each illustrating the adaptive mode of group functioning, the maladaptive repetition of previous trauma, and the symbolic mode of group functioning. The seventh chapter explores Europe’s reaction to the trauma of the Black Death. Binion argues that a full understanding of this reaction illustrates all three of his types of group functioning.

The chapters on traumatic reliving, particularly the third chapter, A Community of Fate, which deals with material covered in Binion’s 1976 book Hitler Among the Germans are fascinating and illustrate the major principles of psychohistorical analysis. However, what I found most interesting was his chapters exploring adaptive group functioning.

The examples he chooses center on the issue of population control. The historical event he is seeking to understand is the reduction in fertility rates in nineteenth century France and the United States. This fertility decrease occurred because, for the first time in history, families voluntarily limited the number of children they had by using birth control. Bin-

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ion suggests that the egalitarian and anti-patriarchal ideology of the French and American revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century transferred from the public to the private sphere. The result was that women began to take control of their reproductive lives.

At the end of the chapter Binion makes a plea for applying psychohistorical methods to questions of demography; to look for psychological and psychohistorical explanations that identify the mechanisms that account for shifts in human reproductive behavior and population growth or decline. We know from animal studies (mainly rats), that when a geographically confined population grows too big, self-destructive violence can occur. The mechanism that is responsible for this behavior is not well understood in the animal world, let alone for humans. But we do see that the huge population increase in Europe during the late eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries was followed by the slaughter and accompanying population decrease due to WWI, the influenza pandemic, and WWII.

Binion doesn’t give us any specific answers as to what these mechanisms might be. Nor does he explore the broader ramifications of this issue. For example, rates of infanticide and severe child abuse, subjects which have been a central concern to many psychohistorians, can be seen, among other perspectives, as population control mechanisms. Similarly, wars, disease epidemics, and disasters both natural and man-made – events that throughout the history of our species, have been the sources of severe group trauma, can also be viewed as ways in which population growth is limited.

Psychohistorians, and others who study large group trauma, have explored and come to understand a great deal about the short and long-term sequelae of such trauma. Binion, Beisel, and Volkan, among others, have written extensively on the mechanisms and variety of ways in which such trauma is kept alive, transmitted to future generations, and re-enacted.

When the trauma is wholly or largely the consequence of human actions as opposed to natural disasters, psychohistorians look for psychohistorical causes. Perhaps we should be expanding our focus to include an awareness of the demographic dimension of these large scale group events in addition to the other factors that psychohistorians have come to understand as being implicated in the genesis of war and other man-made catastrophes.

The population of our world has increased fourfold, from under two billion to over six and a half billion souls’ in the last hundred years, even after the devastation wrought by two world wars, the Holocaust, the Armenian and Rwandan genocides, the influenza epidemic, the AIDS pandemic, and all the other wars, massacres, disease and catastrophes that have transpired over this one hundred year epoch. It is hard to imagine that this growth in population has not had some effect on the lethality of some of these events. This raises the question of whether, using Binion’s tripartite nomenclature, such population reducing events might be considered as adaptive when viewed from the perspective of the species as a whole. The more usually emphasized maladaptive aspect, the reliving, via the repetition compulsion, of the original trauma experienced by the group is still quite clearly maladaptive or dysfunctional when considered from the perspective of the traumatized group.

Binion addresses, although far too briefly, the deeper sources of what he calls unsuccessful reliving— the repetitive attempts that groups make to master their previous trauma. As Binion points out, the outcome of such relivings is most often spectacularly unsuccessful, usually only succeeding in recreating the conditions of the original trauma, including the traumatic outcome. He implies that guilt may play a crucial role. As he says, “At the deepest level, those who relive trauma already feel that they had it coming, that it served them right, that they brought it on themselves” (p. 145).

It was also somewhat disappointing that Binion didn’t say more about the mechanisms by which this traumatic reliving is perpetuated and how it is transmitted from generation to generation, as, for example, Vamik Volkan has in connection with a number of historical re-enactments of traumatic events that various ethnic groups have undergone.

The book is only 148 pages of text but has some 600 footnotes and twenty-one pages of bibliography and references. The material within each of the seven substantive chapters is both extremely rich, detailed and integrated coherently. For this reader there was a sense of disappointment that Binion didn’t step back from the wealth of detail in order to explore in greater depth the broader psychohistorical issues raised by his studies.

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