Applied Poetry and the Nature of Truth in Psychohistory (symposium article)

Introduction

In my study of applied poetry—a term that I define as poet-

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ry that directly engages the world through an intersubjective use of countertransference—I have asked: What does applied poetry contribute to knowledge in psychohistory? This paper questions and explores knowledge, interpretations, and explanations of historical and cultural processes. It also argues that applied poetry gives us access to unconscious depth while deepening psychohistorical interpretations and explanations.

Let me begin to answer these questions by identifying some of the contrasts or polarities (binaries) between ways of knowing that applied poetry offers and those that other psychohistorical approaches provide: direct (lineal) vs. indirect contact with the world; concrete language vs. allusion; description vs. evocation; part vs. whole; concrete vs. abstraction; narrative explanation vs. brief, condensed suggestion; and stay at the surface vs. provide access to the unconscious and intersubjective.

Applied and “Pure” Poetry

I have classified what I call formalism or “pure” poetry through a constellation of meanings that include clever, non-practical language: words for their own sake, not addressed to the pain of the world but to the ever-more complex use of language. Although exceptions exist, such as objectivism, beat poetry, and anti-war poetry, modernism sets the self-referential tenets.

By contrast, applied poetry, like other “applied” disciplines, is about the writing of poetry that engages the world, the human spirit and heart, and the human condition; bears witness to suffering; offers courage and reflection; and evokes readers’ and listeners’ similar lived experiences. The experience of reading pure and applied poetry is often akin to the distinction between lifelessness and vital aliveness.

Applied Poetry and the Data of Psychohistory

If all observations are intersubjective, to say the data are entirely “out there,” external to the observer, no longer suffices. All observations and the data that emerge from them result from a conscious and unconscious relationship between observer and observed. Applied psychohistorical poetry, written by a psychohistorian immersed in an era or culture, can be considered bona fide research data along with conventional narrative qualitative and quantitative scholarly data. While poetry is thought to be non-factual, emotive, and imaginative, applied poetry gives us data about what and how people respond to their life experiences.

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How do psychohistorians draw upon their countertransferences in composing and interpreting their own poetry based upon immersion in a psychohistorical subject, theme, era, individual, etc.? That is, intrapsychically, how does the processing of countertransference into applied poetry become data?

Psychohistorical data provided through countertransference is indirect. Poetry contributes indirect data to psychohistorical methods, research, interpretations, and explanations by giving access to conscious and unconscious dimensions of lived historical experience that narrative forms cannot. Psychohistorians’ applied poetry is a valid way of knowing that can complement other psychohistorical methods and perspectives—much like a team of surveyors who look at the same point in space from different perspectives and have different viewpoints.

For example, it is one matter for a scholar of 19^th century Polish nationalism to study Adam Mickiewicz’ poetry as a window into the ideology and emotions of the movement. It is another matter for a psychohistorian who is steeped for years, if not decades, in the study of Polish nationalism to write a poem inspired by immersion in these topics that exist ostensibly external to the scholar. So, then, who and what is the poem about? The poem is not only about the psychohistorian but also about the largely unconscious relationship between the psychohistorian and his or her “subjects,” as well as Polish nationalism itself. The poem itself becomes “raw material” as psychohistorical data. For example, I wrote the following poem in the early 1990s, as both an employee of an organization in which downsizings occurred and in which I was under the constant threat of being made redundant (fired):

Downsizing

What is happening
Has not happened,
And if it has,
We do not want to know.
People I worked with yesterday,
Today are suddenly whisked away;
No one asks where they go –
Or even really wants to know.

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There is no blood to show
For all their disappearance;
They just are
Not around anymore.
The signs all
Read the same –
On the highways, in the stores,
On the elevators, in the halls:
What is happening
Has not happened,
And if it has,
We do not want to know. (Stein, 2018, p. 111)

A word association that forms a constellation of familiar words in psychohistory can serve as a starting point for situating applied poetry in relation to traditional ways of research, interpretation, and explanation. Among these are research, data, poetry as data, interpretation, explanation, intersubjective data, and what/where to situate psychohistorical data (inside, outside, between, intersubjective, and complementarity).

To take this constellation further, psychohistorical poetry constitutes the search for psychohistorical truth. Beginning with methodological and theoretical considerations, psychohistorians might write poems about contemporary apocalyptic thinking and social movements or previous ones, such as 19^th and 20^th century nationalism, which can be used for cross-historical and cross-cultural comparisons. For example, is human history’s current terrifying sense of the “earth at the edge” (the end of life, the abyss of oblivion) utterly unique? In much of my own recent applied poetry, I have grappled with describing what this “edge,” or the end, might feel like, allowing for the experience, conscious and unconscious, to mark the moment as part of history itself.

The data of applied poetry (in fact, all data in every discipline) are thus not entirely external to the observer/poet, that is, “out there,” but are inseparable from the relationship between the psychohistorical poet and the ostensible subject or topic of inquiry. Applied poetry is not entirely the internal property of the poet but is

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a result of what I view as a dance between self and other, inside and outside. The data of psychohistorical poetry take shape as psychohistorians draw upon their countertransference in composing and interpreting the experience of immersion in a psychohistorical subject or theme. The poem comes into being and exists between us, not altogether inside me, even though I write the poem!

How, then, would you situate the applied poetry written by scholars and researchers in imaginary space in relation to what is usually counted as legitimate research data? For over a century and a half, anthropology has been a leading edge in the study of nativistic movements, retribalization, ethnic resurgence, revitalization movements, millenarian movements, chiliastic movements, rissorgimento (the 19^th century Italian national awakening that resulted in the 1861 establishment of the Kingdom of Italy), crisis cults, cargo cults, nationalism, etc. The rapid spread of the Ghost Dance among Great Basin Northern Paiute and related Shoshonean tribes is the locus classicus (“classical source”) of these inquiries. Anthropologists such as James Mooney, Ralph Linton, Anthony F. C. Wallace, Weston LaBarre, George Devereux, Robert F. Hill, and I have long studied movements based on massive traumatic culture change and loss, followed by cultural death and the quest for rebirth.

My most recent contributions to the conversation take place in the form of applied poetry as well as scholarly narrative (see my book with Seth Allcorn, The Toxic Life of Organizations: Poetry, Stories, and Analysis, 2020). In contrast to the earlier mentioned studies of cultural catastrophe, my own applied poetry is about the psychological brutality, degradation, and dehumanization of millions of employees between the early 1980s and the present. In the social revolution, it was euphemized by such words as downsizing, reduction in force, reengineering, restructuring, outsourcing, offshoring, deskilling, and managed health care (see my book, Nothing Personal, Just Business, 2001). That is, my applied poetry is simultaneously about me, them, and our intersubjective relationship.

What Kind of New “Facts” Does Applied Poetry Offer to Historical Truth?

The question of what psychohistorians’ own applied poetry might contribute to psychohistory takes us to the heart of a theoretical and clinical conflict at the heart of psychoanalytic history. Throughout his enormous body of scholarly publications, Vamık

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Volkan has explored the frequent opposition between what-events-and-processes-really–happened-in-history and the mythologization, amplification, distortion, and use of the past by present needs (including leader-group relationships in group identity). His work has led to concepts such as “chosen trauma,” “chosen glory,” and the unconscious “fit” between leader and follower. The either/or side-taking and polarization of positions (ideologies) have often become rancorous. In parallel fashion, psychoanalytic anthropologist Weston LaBarre encyclopedically studied “crisis cults” that arose in the wake of social cataclysm and the ensuing effort at restitution and reversal of the narcissistic injury in his book The Ghost Dance (1972). The relationship between “What happened to us?” (massive psychic trauma, as enumerated above) and “What do we do with what happened to us?” (e.g., adaptation, mourning loss, leadership’s vow to avenge and reverse loss, regression, violence to undo shame and guilt) lies at the heart of much of psychohistorians’ search to make sense of “the why of history.” What really happened (the reality), remembering, revision, and unconscious group selective reconstruction of the past to meet contemporary unconscious needs offer widely different accounts of group history. They are all different kinds of data.

The unsettling question arises: Does what really happened in the past even matter since it has undergone intrapsychic and group-dynamic change? For example, the emotionally charged shadow of genocide by Whites of American Indians, the enslavement of African Blacks by Whites in the U.S., the Armenian slaughter by Turks during World War I, and the industrialized annihilation of European Jews by the Nazis in World War II haunt all scholarly inquiry. Put conceptually, is shared participatory, phenomenological reality, authentic reality? How can applied poetry help in sorting these out? Can applied poetry somehow help bridge the chasm between imagination and reality, symbol and symbolized, story (narrative) and empirical fact, etc.?

Applied psychohistorical poetry offers researchers a lived experience, access to depths of the mind, to a world prior to symbols (representation) together with the process of becoming real-ized into symbols. Applied poetry is the journey and path toward sense-making through metaphor, simile, condensation, imagination, deep emotion, alliteration, personification, rhythm, rhyme, and the like that condense and distill entire worlds into few words. It is a kind of metadata that attempts to make sense of and organize all the

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“shreds and patches” from scholarly studies. Narrative interpretation tries to spell out, make explicit, directly, sequentially, and dissect everything. By contrast, applied poetry hints at, alludes to, approximates, suggests, and intimates historical moments, events, and people. Perhaps the words “direct” and “indirect” distinguish these distinct ways of experiencing and understanding the experiential world.

How Does Psychohistorical Poetry Provide Access to Unconscious Processes in History?

Using the self as a way of knowing and making sense of the world through one’s self-experience is a shift from prior orthodoxies in which subjectivity was viewed with some skepticism if not outright contempt. By becoming aware of one’s countertransference, one can dispel sources of distortion and defense. What does “using” one-self (countertransference) mean, and how does it “work”? One’s self can be used as a source of curiosity, wonder, subtle hints, open-endedness, and discovering unexpected answers. Such an attitude relies upon non-defensive, non-lineal knowing, not-knowing, and tolerating the anxiety of ambiguity. The action of a human hand and hammer with a nail and piece of wood is not how applied poetry works; this is not useful to psychohistorians!

Applied poetry can be an instrument of historical and cross-cultural comparative research. Much valuable psychohistory takes the form of “case studies” of specific eras, specific topics and themes, and psychobiography in the study of individual lives in their culture-historical contexts. Individual case studies become the methodological foundation for developing theories of how and why culture and history take specific forms.

For instance, consider that a psychodynamic approach, complemented by other methods, is now being applied to the study of personal, group, inter-group, and climatological catastrophe and global catastrophism, the image and reality of the human and entire biological world on the edge of self-destruction if not extinction. The present Anthropocene era is characterized by widespread world destruction fantasies and realistic dangers, emergency individual and group adaptive and maladaptive responses to both inner and outer trauma, and the defense against overwhelming loss and mourning.

Comparative examples abound of the world and history on the edge, if not “over the edge,” for example, the World War I sol-

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dier-poet Wilfred Owen’s tragic poetry of unbearably keen observation and witness (see The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, 1965). William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” (1919) after the catastrophic World War I. How is Yeats’ “edge” different from ours? How is the 13th Symphony (1962) of Dmitri Shostakovich, based on Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poems and inspired by the systematic massacre of Jews by Nazi death squads at Babi Yar outside Kiev in September 1941, connected to us? These are poets making contact with their worlds and allowing the reader to experience them. To put it in a formula, the “end of time” equals the “end of the world.” Where, spatially, does the catastrophe occur? If it is external, that world can also be suffused with massive projection to protect against the internal (schizophrenic?) calamity. If world destruction is a necessary prelude to cleansing, purification, and renewal, one would conjecture that it necessarily follows from total collapse. Are a “new heaven and a new earth” assured from annihilation? Does death always result in rebirth? Wartime deaths inevitably occur even in victory. The ancient and universal Ouroboros myth ever culminates in the snake consuming itself once and for all.

Who better than psychohistorians and other scholars, steeped in the unconscious dimension of cross-cultural and pan-historic ideologies and social movements of world destruction, are positioned to write applied poetry rooted in aspects of events that seem too terrible and too familiar? Applied poetry is at once a research method, data, and interpretation for a psychohistorian. The poetry is written by the psychohistorian, not the people they study. But even that is too much of a dichotomy because the psychohistorian is always receiving, via countertransference and identification, data from both the other person or group and the psychohistorian’s resonance with these.

I offer the following “short list” of contributions to applied psychohistorical poetry: Wounded Centuries (David Beisel, Ed., 2015), Listen to Rarely Heard Voices (Peter W. Petschauer, 2022), Centre and Circumference (Howard F. Stein, 2018), and Whiteboardings: Creating Collaborative Poetry in a Third Space (Howard F. Stein & Seth Allcorn, 2023).

Conclusions: Where to From Here?

In this paper, I have approached the dovetailing of applied poetry and psychohistory from multiple descriptive, research, lived experience, phenomenological, methodological, experiential, un-

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conscious, intersubjective, and group dynamics perspectives. This overlap, resonance, and amplification occur in the ordinary Real World of doing and practicing psychohistory. Clearly, there can be no mechanistic, prescriptive protocol of “how to.” Instead, these surrender to open-ended, always surprising ways that ideas, fantasies, and emotions surface and eventually cohere. Tolerance for uncertainty and anxiety must be higher than is normal for the practitioner. I hope you have accompanied me not only by “looking over my shoulder” and watching me but by immersing yourself in my inner world of lived experience (phenomenology) and psychodynamic imagination.

I conclude by inviting you, the reader, to perform an experiment, or several, to play with and test the ideas proposed here. If even only a part of what I have written here rings true to your own experience as a psychohistorian and human being, “try on” this approach to your own work, past or current. I do not promise this experiment will directly prove the link I have suggested between a psychohistorian’s applied poetry and new truth or the validation of some psychohistorical theory. Instead, it might offer a whole new universe of understanding and experiencing the process of history as if from within. The usefulness of applied poetry as data and as an interpretive “tool” will take place in the form of inner resonance (as in tuning forks at the same pitch) between your inner experiences, made manifest through your poetry and other modes of psychohistorical knowing.

Here is my proposed experiment: Begin a poem with a few lines that emerge from and evoke a psychohistorical project or theme in which you are deeply engaged. As you write, follow the leads (associations) of your mind, memory, and feelings; see where they take you. Do not trouble yourself with trying to shape it, but instead, let it flow into and from you. Let the emerging “it” shape you and take you where it leads. Do not try consciously to take it somewhere you plan or think it “should” go. Discover your path as you journey. Perhaps take as the point of departure some facet of the project that arouses your emotions, that confuses you, even somewhere where you would rather not go. The point is to start—anywhere.

As you “listen” to historical events, people, and processes through your countertransference in the process of writing the poem, ask yourself whether your poem(s) adds another dimension and additional data to what you already have learned through your own

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and others’ scholarly research and writing. Do you understand anything more or better or more deeply about the historical project in which you are engaged than before you began writing the poem(s)? To return to the title of this paper: Has your own applied psychohistorical poetry offered you further, broader, deeper truth about what history is and why it takes place in its specific form?

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