My Learning Journey as a Psychologist: From Behaviorism to Psychohistory

I was introduced to psychology by my uncle and aunt, Nathan and Eleanor Maccoby, both behavioristic psychologists. In my sophomore year at Harvard, I took B. F. Skinner’s course and worked in his laboratory, conditioning behavior rats by starving them and giving them food pellets when they behaved “correctly.” Skinner believed his method of operant conditioning was key to conditioning humans to behave better, but it seemed to me it required starving and imprisoning people. I wrote an article for the Harvard Crimson stating Skinner’s methods seemed best employed by animal trainers in a circus. Skinner didn’t appreciate the article and asked whether I wanted to be a scientist or just a journalist.

Jerome S. Bruner, a pioneer in cognitive psychology, liked my article and invited me to take his course. He became a mentor and advisor for my undergraduate thesis that showed how anxiety influences thinking when there are different incentives for solving problems. Anxious people do best with no rewards or punishments while non-anxious people do best when subjected to these incentives. I took a course with Robert Sears on child development where Anna Freud gave guest lectures. I interviewed her for The Crimson, coming away with the view that Freudian psychology was not based on scientific studies.

I also studied anthropology with Clyde Kluckhohn and wrote a research paper, “Culture and Cognition,” that described how different cultures categorized and named things based on their emotional attitudes toward those things. I was beginning to understand that most behavior can best be understood in its cultural context.

After graduating Harvard with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship, I read analytic philosophy for a year at New College Oxford. I started reading Freud’s collected works. Applying Freud’s insights to my dreams, I changed my previous view about psychoanalysis and became convinced that it was a valuable method for understanding human motivation.

The summer before leaving Harvard for Oxford, I worked at the Russian Research Center, then led by Kluckhohn, where I analyzed interviews by factory managers who had defected from the Soviet Union. They testified to the irrationality of the Soviet system. That summer, I met David Riesman, who was teaching at the

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summer school. We quickly became good friends, a friendship that lasted for almost 50 years. While I was at Oxford, Riesman sent me an invitation to be an instructor in his course on character and society at the College of the University of Chicago.

The syllabus included classics of the social sciences, from Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim to Frederick W. Taylor, Elton Mayo, Freud, Margaret Mead, and more recent studies on industrial work. I wrote Riesman that I hadn’t even read most of these works, so how could I teach them? Riesman wrote that he believed I would be able to read the material, discuss it with him and the other course instructors, and learn as I taught it. Throughout our relationship, Riesman was wonderfully supportive.

I accepted the offer with the condition that I would also enroll in the doctoral program on human development. During the academic year 1955-56, besides teaching, I participated in seminars with Bruno Bettelheim on Freud, anthropologists Robert Redfield and Sol Tax, and Leo Strauss on Machiavelli. I learned more in that year at the University of Chicago than I had learned at Harvard and Oxford.

What I learned was not just the classic works, but the understanding that leadership and group behavior were best understood in relation to their cultural and historical contexts. Machiavelli showed that, in Renaissance principalities, effective leaders needed to be feared while in the Roman republic they needed to be trusted. Audrey Richard’s study of the Bemba in Africa showed that a depressed people could only be understood by the history of British colonial suppression of their culture. Bettelheim deepened my understanding of Freud’s discoveries.

I returned to Harvard the next year. Bruner recruited me with a research fellowship plus room and board as a freshman proctor. A major reason for leaving Chicago was that Harvard had a clinical psychology doctoral program that was part of the Social Relations Department that combined psychology with sociology and cultural anthropology.

At Harvard, as a teaching fellow, I taught Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society (1950) to a sophomore seminar, the first that combined men and women at Harvard. I was inspired by his creative integration of psychoanalysis and culture and invited him to visit and speak at Winthrop House where I was a resident fellow. He came and we had good conversations about his biography of

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Martin Luther and his study of the Sioux culture with a psychohistory of oppression similar to that of the Bemba. I was attracted to his integrating psychoanalysis with culture and history and asked whether he might accept me for training as a psychoanalyst after I received a doctorate. He invited me to visit him at the Austen Riggs Center to be interviewed by his colleagues. I went, but the interviews were inconclusive.

When Riesman arrived at Harvard, I helped him develop his course on American character and society. We became active in the movement for arms control and detente with the Soviet Union to avoid the risk of nuclear war. At a meeting I went to with Riesman, organized by the American Friends Service Committee, I met Erich Fromm. He had analyzed Riesman and they remained friends. Fromm was living in Mexico where he founded and directed the Mexican Institute of Psychoanalysis and had begun a study on Mexican villagers and the relationship between their character and their behavior. The study asked why some villagers were productive farmers and others suffered from apathy, alcoholism, and violence. Fromm told Riesman that he wanted a research assistant who was competent in interviewing, projective testing, and statistical methods. Riesman suggested me and after interviewing me, Fromm offered me the job.

Influenced by Bettelheim and Erikson, I had been critical of Fromm’s Neo-Freudian interpretation of psychoanalysis, but re-reading Escape from Freedom (1941) and sharing Fromm’s political engagement, I changed my view of his work. Like Erikson, Fromm integrated psychoanalysis with social and historical factors, but what appealed to me was that Fromm was also directly engaged in the existential issues of the time, especially the threat of nuclear war. I agreed to be his research assistant with the condition that he would train me as a psychoanalyst and that I was able to gain a research and training fellowship. I didn’t want to be in analysis with Fromm while dependent on him for a salary. I did receive a post-doctoral research and training fellowship from the National Institute for Mental Health. My pregnant wife and I drove three thousand miles from Cambridge to Cuernavaca, Mexico where I began eight years of research and analysis with Fromm.

I graduated from the Mexican Institute in 1964 and became a training and supervising analyst. My practice benefitted from being a foreigner. Mexican analysts didn’t want family members to pour out family secrets to their colleagues. They felt safer with me.

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Although I didn’t know the term, in retrospect we were doing psychohistory. Our study showed that campesinos who came from families of independent farmers before the Mexican revolution tended to have productive character that adapted to their work. Those who came from families of peons that suffered as semi slaves in the haciendas had internalized their oppression. Even though the government had given them land, they were vulnerable to exploitation, and their submissiveness and fatalism were factors in their alcoholism and violent behavior.

During the summer of 1968 I worked for Senator Eugene McCarthy’s anti-Vietnam war presidential campaign. In the fall, at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science, I finished writing the Mexican study and began a study of the motivation and values of high-tech managers and technicians who were starting to create the IT projects that I believed would eventually change the way we work and live. I received funding from the Harvard Program on Technology and Society. The study lasted seven years and resulted in The Gamesman (1976), which became a bestseller and launched me on a new career as a lecturer and organizational consultant. In The Gamesman, I described how the personalities of successful business leaders fit their roles. I contrasted the psychology of high-tech managers—gamesmen—with historical entrepreneurs such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who were narcissistic jungle fighters.

After the book was published, Erikson said I would be invited to a meeting to discuss psychohistory at Robert Lifton’s Wellfleet, Massachusetts summer house. A few weeks later, Erickson called to say I had been disinvited. He didn’t say why, but I suspected it was Lifton’s decision. Years before at Harvard, we were close friends, but the last time I met him I had criticized his theory of the protean self, the individual who changes the self to fit different situations. I argued that the behavior Lifton described is better understood by Fromm’s marketing orientation, a social character adapted to the service mode of production.

In the fall of 1969, our family moved to Washington, DC where I had a tenured fellowship at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). At IPS, I continued The Gamesman study and joined other opponents of the Vietnam War. I established a clinical practice and taught psychoanalysis at the Washington School of Psychiatry.

My research on work and character led to meeting other re-

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searchers who were studying new projects to improve the quality of working life in the U.S. and Scandinavia. I was not satisfied with being a researcher, teacher, and clinician. I wanted to help change dehumanizing workplaces so that work would stimulate individual development. I organized the first joint union, United Automobile Workers (UAW) management (Harman Industries), in the U.S. The success of this program led Sidney Harman to endow the Program on Technology, Public Policy, and Human Development at Harvard’s Kennedy School, which I directed from 1978-90. It also led to an invitation to work with Volvo in Sweden.

In Sweden, I was invited to lead a study of Sweden’s leaders in government and business and to recommend the kind of leadership Sweden needed. To summarize a long story, I became a student of leadership, convinced that good leadership was essential for progress in both organizations and government. My article on narcissistic leaders in the Harvard Business Review, “Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons” (first published in 2000) won a McKinsey Award. I found that the effectiveness of leaders depends not only on their competence, but also on the fit between their personality and the social or historical context. Their impact, for good or evil, depends on their philosophy.

Because of my publications and projects to improve work, I was asked to coach leaders in business, health care organizations, the State Department, and the World Bank, and I taught leadership in graduate programs at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School and Sciences Po.

Now in my mid-80s, I teach a seminar on Fromm at the Washington School of Psychiatry and advise leaders of Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos (Our Little Brothers and Sisters), homes, schools, and clinics for abandoned and at-risk children in nine countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. As I write this in 2019, I am co-editing with Ken Fuchsman a collection of psychoanalytic and historical essays on Donald Trump’s leadership.

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