A Master Practices His Craft

Even the casual reader of David Beisel’s “Teaching about Groups” will have no trouble understanding why Beisel has been the recipient of prestigious awards for teaching excellence. This essay has much to offer those of us involved in psychohistory, but anyone who teaches an introductory course in virtually any field will find in it a gold mine of guiding principles and practical examples.

Beisel performs an amazing balancing act in this introductory class: he requires extensive reading of his students and surveys an enormous range of topics and yet it’s clear that he under-

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stands that a course is not so much about the subject one teaches, but how one facilitates actual learning. Despite his clear eagerness to immerse his students in sophisticated thinking about psychohistory, Beisel wisely notes at the onset of his essay, and reinforces throughout, that it is helpful “to spell things out as often as possible and move through the material step by careful step.”

Beisel communicates the basics, not by “dumbing down” his curriculum, but by presenting it in ways that his students can easily grasp. His wonderful quote from Tennessee Williams (“If people behaved in the way nations do they would all be put in straightjackets”) puts a complex idea into terms student can understand. (Had Williams been trying to make the point particularly vivid to academics, perhaps he would have substituted “as they do at department meetings” for “in the way nations do.”)

Of course the argument can also be made that for all of the pitfalls of this nation in particular living out the “group-as-crazy-individual” metaphor, this may still preferable to having just plain crazy individuals in control. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, looking back on his tenure as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell puts it succinctly in a recent Los Angeles Times editorial: “I’d choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time.” Avoiding entirely the “inevitable but often frustrating dissent” that comes with working with groups may allow for “quick and painless decisions,” Wilkerson warns, “but when government agencies are confronted with decisions in which they did not participate and with which they frequently disagree, their implementation of those decisions is fractured, uncoordinated, and inefficient.”

My university, like SUNY, requires me to hone my students’ critical thinking skills. In fact, professors are evaluated by students on their success (or failure) in this area in the end-of-course forms that are required in each class, with the results reported to the department chair and the dean as well as the professor. Students are so confused about what “critical thinking” actually means that I have taken to pointing it out as it is happening when we’re involved in some especially thorny discussion or debate. Beisel’s methods of eliciting critical thinking are so successful that he, I am sure, never stoops to such pandering. Instead, he makes his subject matter so personal to his students that they are eager to think critically.

Beisel’s brief discussion of Erikson’s notion of disciplined subjectivity makes the crucial point, one brand new to many undergraduates, that in history not only is total objectivity impossible, it’s not even desirable. We want to know what happened, but also why it happened. Was it good or bad? Worthy of emulation, or to be avoided at all costs? When “the topic chooses us” because of our inner needs and conflicts, we bring not only our skills as historians, but our passion to answer those questions. In the words of environmental historian William Cronon, “Rather than evade [making personal value judgments]—which is in any event impossible—we must learn to use [them] consciously, responsibly, and self-critically. To try to escape the value judgments that come with storytelling is to miss the point of history itself.” To move students, as Beisel does, beyond “history is the study of immutable truths” and into “the study of history enables us to think critically about events and people of the past and in so doing better understand the present and ourselves,” is to facilitate a vitally important and empowering transition.

At the same time Beisel is repeating to his students’ concepts about groups about which he has taken pains to communicate in accessible language, he refuses to let things rest at the “neatly tied in a bow” stage. The study of Nazi Germany is, understandably, a favorite topic for many psychohistorians interested in group thinking. Laurence Rees’s Auschwitz: A New History (Public Affairs, 2005) is the latest, and one of the best, investigations into the thinking of regular Germans, the Nazi high command, SS camp administrators, guards, and prisoners. Beisel could easily restrict the portion of his course dedicated to the study of groups to this grim but intensely instructive period, a focus that would protect his students from any uncomfortable considerations of their own roles in groups, allowing them instead to focus their understanding of the role of groups exclusively on “the other”—people in an entirely different place and time. Beisel resists this temptation, however, in favor of a far riskier exercise: involving students in a discussion of their own participation in group behaviors, including the construction of group fan-

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tasy images. Beisel skillfully counters their resistance to overcoming the “uncomfortable reality that we may not want to see if a group we’re in is acting irrationally.” He wisely doesn’t reject out of hand his students’ resistance, their charges that he is projecting his own “stuff,” but gives their views careful and respectful consideration, granting at least “a kernel of truth” to their charges. He also doesn’t hesitate to push his students to confront ideas and topics that are not only increasingly sophisticated, but that can make students uncomfortable, even downright defensive.

For a generation immersed in television, film, and popular music, Beisel’s examples drawn from recent televised news reporting and popular film not surprisingly hit home with his students. Beisel’s talking about their favorite movie, and suggesting that it is not only that film’s artistic merit (or lack thereof—consider the huge popularity of The Blair Witch Project) that has made it so appealing to them. The concept of one’s own unconscious participation in a shared group fantasy can be anxiety-producing even in students like Beisel’s, who have been immersed in discussions of the role of the unconscious in the human condition. But it’s the personal nature of these topics that, once Beisel helps them to overcome their initial resistance, make them such a potentially profound learning experience.

Beisel’s discussion of the role group fantasy plays in what makes and stays news is fascinating. It brought to my mind the two recent media obsessions: the Lacy Peterson case (in which a young pregnant woman was murdered by her husband), and the disappearance in Aruba of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway. The unfortunate fates of these two attractive, white, middle class women were stories that refused to die, garnering far more press than significant economic and political upheavals, both domestic and international. A discussion of the group fantasy behind the insatiable appetite for more information about these two cases (and whatever current “obsession of the month”) would make for fruitful class discussion.

Beisel’s fascinating questions about the appeal of popular films seem virtually guaranteed to involve his students in passionate discussion of the psychological study of groups. To the many questions he poses in his article concerning film, I would add one more: why do some films perform disappointingly at the box office, only to attain status as “classics” (from It’s a Wonderful Life to The Shawshank Redemption) through subsequent airings on television or as DVD’s? I would also ask, in view of the large role popular music plays in the lives of my students, currently made virtually omnipresent by the iPod, why some bands that are enormously popular in the United States generate little interest outside the country, while other bands that struggle for audiences here have large followings abroad? What has the role of group fantasy played in the rise (and in some cases the fall) of popular music trends, including rock and roll, disco, punk, rap and hip hop? A final consideration that might appeal especially to college-aged audiences: what might we learn about group fantasy by studying the best-selling/most popular Halloween costumes of various time periods, especially the political masks?

Like Beisel’s students, I frown at the notion that violent images can actually reduce the incidence of acting out. I would counter the quote from Martin Scorsese about exposure to cinematic violence being largely therapeutic with the firsthand experience of writer, producer, and director Ron Nyswaner which he relates in the documentary The Celluloid Closet. Some of what inspired Nyswaner to write the screenplay Philadelphia, which features a sympathetically depicted gay man, was to counteract the violent homophobic reactions evoked by William Friedkin’s film Cruising. When physically attacked by a group of street youths, Nyswaner and his partner were told during the beating, “If you’d seen the movie Cruising, you’d know why.” The questions that Beisel poses about group fantasy and the impact of film violence, pornography, and rape are important ones that are not only controversial, but can engender intense debate and be emotionally upsetting. It takes enormous skill to discuss such intense subjects productively in a classroom setting, and I think many of us might shy away from such potential minefields. Beisel’s courage in tackling such subjects is to his credit and his students’ benefit.

In short, David Beisel’s essay “Teaching About Groups” gives insight into the philosophies and practices of a master teacher, one who understands and respects both his subject and his stu-

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dents. I wish I could take his class.

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