Achieving a Psychohistorical World View

The question of how one comes to psychohistory seems, on the surface, an unassuming one. Yet in attempting to answer, I’ve come to a distinctly psychohistorical predicament. The question is inherently one of motivation, and therefore psychohistorical in all its dimensions. Where to start? Personal, familial, cultural history, or even chance? Below I offer just a short narrative.

My chance meeting with psychohistory occurred at SUNY Rockland while I was a directionless and reluctant business student that found myself sitting in David Beisel’s Psychohistory course. I don’t recall the decision to take the course. It was a bit of a hazy period. My then girlfriend, now wife Christine, described me as “Nowhere Man” à la the Beatles. I was certainly in search for something but did not know what. Christine and I signed up for the class together, which suggests we discussed it at some length. She indicated that it was required for her honors program and I was along for the ride. She is usually right. What is clear to me is the result. I was immediately enthralled with the material. Beisel has a remarkable ability to take complicated psychodynamic processes and constructs and make them sensical to undergraduates with zero

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background in psychology and immediately applicable to daily life and history. He introduced and made sense of Sigmund Freud, Wilfred Bion, Robert Jay Lifton, Lloyd deMause, object relations, ego psychology, and family dynamics, among many other theories and theorists. Personally, this is all the more impressive as I’ve been teaching his psychohistory course for six years now, trying to fill his shoes and realizing what level of mastery is required.

With psychohistory, my lack of direction and generalized apathy soon ended. I felt inspired. My curiosity was reawakened. I wanted to know the underlying “why?” of everything happening around me. Things were never what they seemed. What I and others said was not always what we meant. There were so many unthought knowns. Beisel woke my curiosity, a love of learning, and an acute awareness of injustice in the world, to which I had become numb. I started reading psychoanalytic, applied psychoanalytic, and psychohistorical literature voraciously. I went on to finish a psychology undergraduate degree but found little space for humanistic psychodynamic approaches in a program dominated by behavioral, experimental psychology.

Taking social work electives, I discovered openness to psychohistorical approaches, which I was now applying to every subject, especially injustice. I found my way to the New York University social work graduate program. The program was a nice fit for my developing values and psychohistorical world view. As a social work program, social justice values were dominant, but as a clinical program, it was highly psychodynamic with most instructors being practicing psychoanalysts with heavy doses of ego psychology, object relations theory, self psychology, and intersubjectivity. My views on the integration of the psychological and the social would only be reinforced.

I started attending International Psychohistorical Association (IPA) conferences in 1997 while still an undergraduate and having just finished Beisel’s Psychohistory II course. That I’ve attended every conference since might be telling. Henry Lawton became a welcoming sight at the registration table. The conference always left me completely intellectually stimulated. I presented my first conference paper at the IPA as a graduate student: a psychohistorically inspired look at the effects of organizational breakdown of a clinical agency on a client’s psychosis. Henry had provided mentorship during my early years entering the lunacy of the social work field, encouragement to stay involved in psychohistory, and

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guidance with that first paper. That same year, 2001, Paul Elovitz encouraged my writing for Clio’s Psyche and published my first short article on the paradoxical effect of accountability in child welfare, dissociating workers from client’s experiences resulting in poorer outcomes and facilitating social workers’ role as agents of social control. Both papers integrated psychohistory, psychoanalysis, organizational dynamics, and social policy. Without Henry and Paul’s encouragement and mentorship, neither paper would have happened.

My active participation in psychohistory waned for a number of years as I sought to establish myself professionally in social work, always maintaining two or three different jobs at a time, primarily out of economic necessity with a young family. I continued to attend IPA conferences, presenting a paper all but one year since 2001, usually at Lloyd deMause’s personal invite as he likely did for most presenters. I subscribed to the Journal of Psychohistory and Clio’s Psyche, and maintained a presence on the numerous, ever-changing psychohistory email listservs. But, I had little time or confidence to fully engage in research. Despite this, my developing psychohistorical world view was integrated into my practice and all my writing might best be described as applied psychohistory directly related to my practice.

After several years of post-graduate clinical work, I decided to delay formal analytic training to pursue a doctorate at the NYU School of Social Work. This opened teaching opportunities in their graduate program in 2005 where I taught in both the policy and practice areas to date including a doctoral level course on social theory and clinical practice; a class I inherited from Theresa Aiello and teach as a form of applied psychohistory. In fact, all of my classes integrate psychohistorical literature, especially on policy analysis, most often Howard Stein’s applied psychohistory, but also the fourth contextual dimension of treatment. Rudolf Binion once argued psychohistory is psychoanalysis matured. In this way, understanding unconscious motivation, as it informs treatment, is more than intrapsychic or interpersonal, but also wrapped within the cultural-historical. The same can be said for the analysis of policy development as we seek to understand the meaning systems that inform any given policy approach and the function of systems of violence dictated by said policies.

My doctoral work was slow-going, taking 13 years to complete and including no less than five committee chairs, including

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Jeff Seinfeld who passed away in early 2011, and countless starts and stops on varying topics. About four or five years ago, Paul Elovitz appointed himself “my dissertation mentor,” helping me stay focused despite my very busy and distracting life. At times, he became more invested in my achieving it than I. His continued confidence and encouragement was relentless, but required. Most of my topics focused on the psychological defensive use of ideology and its effect on policy preferences and decision making, very much inspired by Beisel’s approach in his Suicidal Embrace (2003) text as well as deMause’s psychogenic model. The topic ended up being attitudes toward immigrants. The challenge was to integrate contextual, psychological, cultural, and interpersonal models into one that explained negative attitudes as well as the misperceptions that justified them.

I believe it was in 2010, with both Henry Lawton and then Lloyd deMause’s health deteriorating, that the International Psychohistorical Association began a rapid decline. Lloyd was the president at the time and appointed me to the vice-presidential position. No vote was taken. The worst attended IPA conference I ever witnessed was in 2010. Multiple presenters did not show including a plenary speaker. I assumed the role of president immediately following the conference and served from 2011-2014. I never felt I had accomplished anything to deserve the position, but no one else stepped forward and the organization was dying. Rapidly! It was fear of losing what had become my intellectual home that inspired my involvement. Why did no one else step forward? Could members, at least those who knew about the situation, have been petrified by the fear of the loss of the two pillars of the organization? It also became apparent that a number of potential leaders became alienated as a result of Lloyd’s past statements and actions allowing for the vacuum.

When I became president, the board consisted of myself, Henry as secretary, and Lloyd as treasurer. Henry passed away in 2014 and his wife Helen, who was already doing most of the work for Henry, continued functioning as secretary for a short period until her death soon afterward. It also became apparent that Lloyd could no longer function as the treasurer and those responsibilities were handed to me as the president, to which I continue, this time by vote. Joseph Reilly was appointed as vice-president and Brian D’Agostino soon joined the board of directors. I saw my role as president to help bring back many of the folks I admired but, for

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one reason or another, had limited their involvement. I contacted David Beisel, Howard Stein, and Peter Petschauer, among numerous others, to present and attend. Another was Brian D’Agostino, who was elected president in 2014. He established greater numbers and diversity in the leadership of the IPA. Ken Fuchsman was elected to the presidency in 2016. Brian and Ken both have successfully righted a ship I could barely keep afloat. I feel confident again that the IPA has a bright future with a functional board of directors and an active leadership planning team that meets monthly online. The IPA 2019 conference was the best attended conference in memory and the quality of presentations was exceptional.

My own current involvement in psychohistory occurs on multiple levels. On the administrative side, I will remain, for the foreseeable future, an active member of the International Psychohistorical Association’s board of directors and leadership team, the editorial board of the Journal of Psychohistory, and the Psychohistory Forum/Clio Psyche planning team. Reflecting on my psychohistorical journey, it is apparent that my early continued involvement was contingent on encouragement and mentorship by Henry Lawton, Paul Elovitz, Lloyd deMause, and David Beisel. Over 20 years later, I pay tribute by having mentored dozens of students to present their work at IPA conferences and helping them publish their work. This has been an extremely rewarding shared experience that I can only liken to watching my own children grow and succeed. I see this form of generativity as crucial to the life and longevity of the field and something that we must encourage our members working at universities to do as well.

Regarding my own academic work, it might be best described as applied psychohistory and integrationist seeking to understand the non-rational factors influencing the creation, maintenance, and consequences of systems of discrimination, oppression, and violence. The primary overarching project is a clearly outlined and replicable psychohistorical social policy analysis model. My advanced policy analysis course at NYU reflects such a model and a text outlining the approach is in the works.

Above, I offer a somewhat personal glimpse into a psychohistorical journey. The narrative certainly isn’t all inclusive, but the salient points have been made: a chance experience, a needed sense of purpose and involvement, the development of a worldview, integration with my clinical and academic work in the social work field, and generativity. I cannot imagine a future

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without psychohistory. I can only expect this narrative to continue for many decades to come.

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