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Emotional Experiences in Political Groups: The Case of the McCarthy Phenomenon*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Steven R. Brown  and
John D. Ellithorp
Steven R. Brown
Affiliation:
Kent State University
John D. Ellithorp
Affiliation:
Kent State University
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Extract

In many ways the study of political groups from a theoretical point of view can be said not to have progressed much beyond the conceptions of Arthur F. Bentley. There have been countless studies of political groups, to be sure, but it seems most have been little more than the collection and presentation of ad hoc facts obtained from the testing of ad hoc hypotheses, the concepts of “group” and of “group behavior” having been little altered in the process.

Much of the difficulty no doubt stems from Bentley's strict empiricism and the interpretation given his position by most social scientists who have aspired to translate him. When Bentley said that we know nothing of ideas and feelings but only of activity, he was merely reminding the social scientist to remain close to the operations of the phenomena he was studying. Activity, or behavior, can be worked with and studied directly, but it is questionable whether or not the same can be said of ideas and feelings. Scientific progress, Bentley would say, can be made only if one deals with what is visible and replicable. Critics as well as followers of Bentley, however, have interpreted him to mean that such matters as subjectivity are outside the pale of science, since subjectivity is presumed to be private, idiosyncratic, and nonreplicable.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 64 , Issue 2 , June 1970 , pp. 349 - 366
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1970

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was read at the meeting of the Ohio Association of Economists and Political Scientists, Columbus, March, 1969.

References

1 Bentley, Arthur F., The Process of Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1908)Google Scholar.

2 P. W. Bridgman is generally regarded as the father of the operational philosophy, and his intellectual indebtedness to Bentley is reflected in Bridgman, , “Error, Quantum Theory, and the Observer,” in Taylor, Richard W. (ed.), Life, Language, Law: Essays in Honor of Arthur F. Bentley (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1957), pp. 125–131Google Scholar.

3 Greenstein, Fred I., Personality and Politics (Chicago: Markham, 1969), pp. 35–36Google Scholar.

4 Bion, W. R., Experiences in Groups (London: Tavistock, 1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Essays in this volume previously were published in the following locations: Human Relations, 1 (1948), 314–320CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ibid., 487–496; ibid., 2 (1949), 13–22; ibid., 295–304; ibid., 3 (1950), 3–14; ibid., 395–402; ibid., 4 (1951), 221–228; International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 33 (1952), 235–247Google Scholar. A summary of Bion's theoretical position can be found in Edelson, Marshall, Ego Psychology, Group Dynamics, and the Therapeutic Community (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1964), pp. 31–40Google Scholar.

5 Kantor, J. R., “Feelings and Emotions as Scientific Events,” Psychological Record, 16 (10, 1966), 377–404Google Scholar.

6 Bion, op. cit., p. 169.

7 Ibid., p. 147.

8 “Egocentric,” that is, in the sense in which it is used by Piaget, Jean, The Moral Judgment of the Child (New York: Free Press, 1965)Google Scholar, to refer to that stage in which the child unilaterally defers to the generalized Elder. Under certain conditions, this respect for parents is transferred to other authority figures, such as political leaders, as has been described by Abse, D. Wilfred and Jessner, Lucie, “The Psychodynamic Aspects of Leadership,” in Graubard, Stephen R. and Holton, Gerald (eds.), Excellence and Leadership in a Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 76–93Google Scholar.

9 Devereux, George, “Charismatic Leadership and Crisis,” Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences, 4 (1955), 150–151Google Scholar. This group search for a suitable leader is a matter of elite recruitment, and whereas the political scientist is more accustomed to thinking of an elite controlling and manipulating the mass, roles are reversed in this case: the leader is manipulated by the group, being forced in a sense to play the lead role in the common group fantasy. See Bion, op. cit., p. 149.

10 Bion, op. cit., p. 151. Optimism as a rationalization is an attempt to effect a time displacement, the rationalization thereby producing a futuristic outlook. The rationalization, however, is a defense against a present (not future) threat. Any immediate behavior, therefore, must contain what Ezriel calls a “because clause”: a person adopts one course of futuristic behavior and avoids another because he fears the consequences of the latter, and not because he is genuinely interested in the possibilities of the former. See Ezriel, Henry, “Notes on Psychoanalytic Group Therapy: II. Interpretation and Research,” Psychiatry, 15 (1952), 119–126CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

11 Absence as flight behavior is illustrated in Herbert, Eléonore L. and Trist, E. L., “The Institution of an Absent Leader by a Students' Discussion Group,” Human Relations, 6 (1953), 215–248CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Bion op. cit., p. 153.

13 Gibb, Cecil A. (“The Principles and Traits of Leadership,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 2 (07, 1947), 267–284)CrossRefGoogle Scholar earlier pointed to the relationship between an individual's being a leader and his ability to embody many of the qualities of his followers.

14 Bion, op. cit., p. 87. One might, also make an analogy to the focussing of a camera lens: if one focusses on the foreground, the background becomes blurred; if, on the other hand, one focusses far away, objects close by will become blurred. This does not mean that the objects close by do not exist, only that attention has been directed elsewhere. Similarly, the study of emotional group behavior does not deny the existence of task-oriented behavior.

15 Ibid., p. 154.

16 See Kirk, Roger E., Experimental Design: Procedures for the Behavioral Sciences (Belmont, Calif.: Brooks/Cole, 1968), pp. 171–229Google Scholar.

17 Stock, Dorothy and Thelen, Herbert A., Emotional Dynamics and Group Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1958)Google Scholar. The statements, the factorial combinations they represent, and their factor scores (to be discussed subsequently) can be obtained from the authors.

18 Brunswik, Egon, Perception and the Representative Design of Psychological Experiments (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956)Google Scholar. More appropriate for the methodology employed here, see Steven R. Brown, “On the Use of Variance Designs in Q Methodology,” Psychological Record, in press; and S. R. Brown and Thomas D. Ungs, “‘Representativeness’ in the Study of Political Behavior,” forthcoming.

19 Stephenson, William, The Study of Behavior: Q-technique and Its Methodology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953)Google Scholar. A guide to literature on this technique is to be found in Brown, S. R., “Bibliography on Q Technique and Its Methodology,” Perceptual and Motor Skills, 26 (04, 1968), 587–613CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. The Q-sorting session in this instance becomes an experimental situation (similar to the psychoanalytic session described by Ezriel, op. cit., pp. 122-123), which allows the respondent to enter into the object relationships in a dynamic way as they are represented in the Q-sample structure. If Bion's theory is correct, some respondents will resonate to some items, will become defensive toward others, and so forth, and in a systematic way.

20 The importance of sex differences in political orientations has not been stressed often enough. Men and women are reared under different sets of contingencies, and as a consequence each sex develops a prior readiness to perceive certain events to which the other is oblivious, as subsequent results indicate. See Sigel, Irving E., “Rationale for Separate Analyses of Male and Female Samples on Cognitive Tasks,” Psychological Record, 15 (07, 1965), 369–376CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Most factor work proceeds by correlating tests across a sample of persons. Inverted factor work, of which this study is an example, proceeds by correlating persons across a sample of tests, where “tests” in this case are Q statements. Correlation under these conditions indicates the extent that respondents did or did not rank the statements in essentially the same pattern, providing us with an indication as to how the audience was segmented relative to the phenomenon. Factors now represent clusters of likeminded persons, not clusters of traits. (See Stephenson, loc. cit., for the differences between Q and R factor analysis.) Further, the factors in this study are inductive, such that individual membership in a factor is nonarbitrary: Respondents 1–6 in Table 1 are members of factor 1 because they organized the statements in essentially the same way. The factor array is simply their six Q sorts, which are already similar, averaged together. The factors then are nonarbitrary types, or classes (operants), in Skinnerian terminology. (See Skinner, B. F., Contingencies of Reinforcement (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969), pp. 127–132.Google Scholar) Much typological work, on the other hand, is arbitrary with respondents assigned to a type or not as a function of operations performed by the investigator: For example, whether a person is typed as a moron, nincompoop, or genius depends on the magnitude of his IQ relative to the arbitrary cutoff point imposed by the test-giver. In the present study, however, respondents classify themselves by behaving or not behaving alike as manifested in the intercorrelations based on their independent card sortings.

22 Scores for statements in each factor range from +5 (most agree) to −5 (most disagree) with the same frequency as in the forced distribution above. Each factor at this point can be regarded as an operant possibility, i.e., in principle an individual exists who would provide this arrangement of the statements to represent his own viewpoint. When factors are referred to as if they were persons, therefore, reference is to the operant possibility of which those loaded on a factor are approximations.

23 Bion, op. cit., pp. 120–121. In Bion's psychoanalytic framework, the failure of the dependent type to react to such a statement would reflect an unwillingness to accept the symbolic death of the leader.

24 See footnote 20. Wiebe found the same phenomenon in the reaction of women to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the televized Army-McCarthy hearings of the 1950s. See Wiebe, G. D., “The Army-McCarthy Hearings and the Public Conscience,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 22 (Winter 1958–1959), 490–502CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wiebe, , “Social Values and Ego Ideal: Recollections of the Army-McCarthy Hearings,” Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences, 5 (1958), 164–186Google Scholar. The 1968 McCarthy phenomenon lended itself to emotional expression since a large number of his followers were novices who brought with them no previous political experiences upon which to draw. The mass character of the movement is illustrated in McDonald, William P. and Smoke, Jerry G., The Peasants' Revolt: McCarthy 1968 (Mt. Vernon, Ohio: Noe-Bixby, 1969)Google Scholar.

25 Stock and Thelen, op. cit., pp. 43–44.

26 Bion, op. cit, p. 152. The fight orientation, as is the case with the other basic assumptions, can have a persistent quality. In a speech before a 1969 graduating class, McCarthy reportedly received his biggest ovation for the following statement: “You may be called upon to cross the Red Sea knowing it will close on you—and, having made the passage, realize that you may be called upon to make the passage again.” See Brownmiller, Susan, “Eleven Months After Chicago: Gene McCarthy Is Waiting for a Sign,” New York Times Magazine, 07 20, 1969, p. 25Google Scholar. Upon the same occasion, a McCarthy supporter is also reported to have said, “Really like old times. Even the Boston Globe said he was welcomed like a returning hero …. A lot of us are prepared to go the route with him again.” It would be difficult to find a clearer expression of the leader-follower relationship in the fight context.

27 McCarthy's implicit recognition of his followers' wants frequently borders on the explicit. As he was again reported to have said (in Brownmiller, ibid., p. 18), “Last year I was more out-spoken than anybody. I fought the fight where it should have been fought. What is it that people would have me do now? … What is it that people want from me?”

28 Stock and Thelen, op. cit., p. 44.

29 For example, respondent 21, with the highest factor loading on factor 5 (Table 1), attended the Convention and reported being so angered at McCarthy's loss that he refused to return to the floor of the Convention even to listen to the acceptance speech of the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Senator Edmund Muskie, and refused to vote for any presidential candidate in the general election. Bion has suggested (personal communication) that factor 5 may represent an attitude of hatred toward thoughtful observation itself, a kind of fight-flight behavior. If so, he speculates the depression characteristic of the factor could have two contradictory roots: Failure of the liberal-scientific attitude to prevail and failure to destroy the liberal-scientific attitude. Such duality has been expressed as well in pure science in what Beveridge, interestingly enough, has chosen to call the “attack-escape” reaction to new ideas. The premature ridicule heaped on new ideas in science is the very antithesis of the scientific attitude, and although the scientific attitude, as a consequence, does not prevail, neither is it destroyed. See Beveridge, W. I. B., The Art of Scientific Investigation (New York: W. W. Norton, 1951), pp. 105–106Google Scholar.

30 Bion, op. cit., pp. 154–155.

31 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, trans. by Mairet, P. (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. 26–27Google Scholar.

32 Lasswell, Harold D., Psychopalhology and Politics, Compass Books (New York: Viking Press, 1960), pp. 75–76Google Scholar.

33 Klein, Melanie, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” in Klein, Melanie, Heimann, Paula, Isaacs, Susan, and Riviere, Joan (eds.), Developments in Psycho-Analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1952), pp. 292–320Google Scholar. (Originally published: International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27 (1946), 99–110.Google Scholar)

34 Feuerbach, Ludwig, The Essence of Christianity., trans. by Eliot, George (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), p. 317Google Scholar.

35 See Talmon, J. L., Political Messianism (New York: Praeger, 1960), p. 209Google Scholar. As a propositional matter, Klein (op. cit., pp. 303–304) postulates just the reverse, i.e., that there is a direct rathrr than inverse relationship between the projection and the individual's situation: “For instance, the projection of a predominantly hostile inner world which is ruled by persecutory fears leads to the introjection—a taking back—of a hostile external world; and vice versa, the introjection of a distorted and hostile external world reinforces the projection of a hostile inner world.” The relationship of such dynamics to alienation are discussed in a symposium, “Alienation and the Search for Identity,” American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 21 (1961)Google Scholar, entire issue.

36 Lasswell, Harold D., “Key Symbols, Signs and Icons,” in Bryson, Lyman, Finkelstein, Louis, MacIver, R. M., and McKeon, Richard (eds.), Symbols and Values: An Initial Study, 13th Symposium, Conference on Science. Philosophy and Religion (New York: Harper, 1954), p. 200Google Scholar.

37 Edelman, Murray, The Symbolic Uses of Politics, Illini Books (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), pp. 6–7Google Scholar.

38 Blumer, Herbert, “The Crowd, the Public, and the Mass,” in Schramm, Wilbur (ed.), The Process and Effects of Mass Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1954), pp. 363–379Google Scholar.

39 As a symbol, McCarthy represented something or somebody many of his followers had experienced before in their separate life spaces. As Laing states, “behavior is a function of experience; and both experience and behavior are always in relation to someone or something other than self.” See Laing, R. D., The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), pp. 9–10Google Scholar. The concept of protective identification has been used retrospectively to account for the facts, and this is apt to bother some investigators concerned with confirmation. The concept need not remain this inferential, however, but can be put to test. In the context of the present study, for example, statements could be obtained relative to presumed characteristics of McCarthy's character: (1) a kind person; (2) warm and friendly; (3) dependable and conscientious; (4) wary of other politicians; (5) distrustful of our present policies and policy-makers; (6) cautious of attempts to trick or ensnare him; and so forth. A sample of, say, 40-some attribute-statements could be presented to respondents, such as those in the above study, who would then be asked to rank the items from “most like what I think McCarthy is like” to “most unlike what I think McCarthy is like.” If, as Bion suspects, the dependent person seeks out a father-figure type of leader, then factor-1 persons will give high scores to items like 1–3 above, reflecting their projection onto McCarthy of father-figure characteristics (kind, warm, dependable, and so on). The important matter, of course, is that McCarthy objectively might be none of these. The private motives of the fight-oriented individual leads to a need for a leader with paranoid tendencies and a consequent projection onto McCarthy of these kinds of traits. This is reflected instrumentally by the giving of high scores to statements like 4–6 above, indicating McCarthy to be wary, distrustful, cautious, etc. The differential rankings could then be correlated and factored as before, different factors indicating differing perceptions of the same stimulus object. The concept of protective identification then can be held constant for steady inspection in terms of factor loadings and factor scores, all subject to standard error formulae and statistical evaluation.

40 Klein, Josephine, The Study of Groups (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), p. 184Google Scholar; Stock and Thelen, op. cit., p. 43.

41 The genuineness of the phenomenon in a technical sense is supported by a replication study by Professor Brij B. Khare (California State College, San Bernardino) who with only 14 respondents and the same McCarthy Q sample has shown some of the same responses (factors) emerge again. This tends to substantiate this small-sample approach, and we are grateful to Professor Khare for his assistance. No claim, of course, can be made on the basis of a study like this regarding the percentage of this or that factor type, but the inclusion of another 1000 respondents will do little more than fill up the factor space and, perhaps, add another factor or two. However, additional factors would in no way detract from the ones we have found. This study was designed to illustrate the different ways in which the McCarthy audience was segmented, and this can be done without recourse to large numbers of cases. See Brown, S. R., Small-Sample Behavioral Research: Procedures for Employing Q Technique in Political Science (Kent, Thio: Institute for Government Research and Service, Kent State University, 1970)Google Scholar, in press.

42 Ezriel, op. cit., p. 125. The idea of a central figure was first put forward by Redl, Fritz, “Group Emotions and Leadership,” Psychiatry, 5 (1942), 573–596CrossRefGoogle Scholar. (Reprinted: Endleman, Robert (ed.), Personality and Social Life (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 527–537.Google Scholar)

43 Beradt, Charlotte, The Third Reich of Dreams, trans. by Gottwald, Adriane (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966)Google Scholar. See also the discussion of “transpersonal system of collusion” by Laing, R. D., The Politics of the Family (Toronto: CBC Publications, 1969), p. 29Google Scholar.

44 Bion, op. cit., p. 159. Since absence of developmental process is a characteristic of the basic-assumption mentality, much interesting research could proceed by assuming from the outset that both left and right, despite what they say, are committed to no change, and then looking for the subtle ways in which this is accomplished. It is not infrequently the case that on the eve of victory, radicals make new demands which render impossible a settlement or perform acts which cause them to Jose the very support necessary for the legitimate majority for which they verbally appeal.

45 See Szasz, Thomas S., The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (New York: Harper and Row, 1961)Google Scholar. Even lunatics begin to quit acting insane, apparently of their own volition, when given the power and respect denied them in the game of reality. Playing normal is therefore to some extent contingent upon power and respect which reinforce a particular behavior pattern. Evidence of this is to be found in Rubenstein, Robert and Lasswell, Harold D., The Sharing of Power in a Psychiatric Hospital (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966)Google Scholar, and Rubenstein, , “The Study of Political Processes in Psychiatric Illness and Treatment,” in Rogow, Arnold A. (ed.), Politics, Personality, and Social Science in the Twentieth Century: Essays in Honor of Harold D. Lasswell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 147–154Google Scholar.

46 Rogow, Arnold A., “Psychiatry, History, and Political Science: Notes on an Emergent Synthesis,” in Marmor, Judd (ed.), Modern Psycho-analysis (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 663Google Scholar. See also, Greenstein, Fred I., “Private Disorder and the Public Order: A Proposal for Collaboration Between Psychoanalysts and Political Scientists,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 32 (1968), 261–281Google Scholar.

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