Lincoln’s Forever Friendship

Review of Charles B. Strozier’s Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed (NY: Columbia University Press, 2016), ISBN: 978-0-231-17132-8, i-xxv, 1-307 pages plus 16 pages of images, hardcover, $35.00.

Professor Charles Strozier has published more than a dozen books about history and contemporary events viewed from a psychological perspective. I believe that now the magnitude of his fundamental contributions to psychohistory are approaching those of the pioneer founders of our modern discipline—Erik Erikson, Peter Gay, and Robert Jay Lifton who mentored Strozier as he had been mentored by Erikson. Strozier has written about the New York City Twin Towers terrorist attack, religious cults, political leadership (with Dan Offer), and the psychoanalytic “psychology of the self,” as well as Kohut’s psychobiography. Here he returns to his first scholarly love, Abraham Lincoln.

The seedling for the current volume can be found in a chapter of Strozier’s 1982 book, Lincoln’s Quest for Union: Public and Private Meanings, which portrays the President’s intense emotional ties with Kentucky merchant businessman and political activist Joshua Speed (1812-1882), starting in 1837 and ending with Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. I applaud Your Friend Forever’s rapid dismissal of the alleged importance of the two men sharing a bed for four years, immediately thereby desexualizing their intense intimacy. Instead, Strozier painstakingly scrutinizes every available bit of hard evidence from letters, newspapers, views from their wives and sundry women, as well as reports from legal/business colleagues and other friends to investigate their durable and para-

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digmatic male friendship.

For Lincoln, this tie offered moral, spiritual, and emotional protection, “a healing balm” for his core self-issues. These included recurrent severe depression with suicidal thoughts, heterosexual insecurity, and self-esteem vulnerability leftover from the traumatic after-effects of the death of his early love, Ann Rutledge, when she was 22 and Lincoln was 26. This agonizing loss may have reawakened the pain of the demise of his mother, Nancy Hanks, when he was only nine years old. Lincoln, in turn, helped Speed surmount his daunting fear of marital intimacy. The two friends’ prolonged courtship rituals are presented so thoroughly and vividly, they represent a type of educational cognitive model. Insights gained may serve the young even in their initiation of lasting emotional ties through an optimal use of today’s dating sites. Perhaps an in-depth grasp of the Speed-Lincoln attachment may today help us comprehend why politicians as dissimilar from each other as Carson, Gingrich, and Christie remain with the current candidate Donald Trump of Lincoln’s Republican Party, while many others have abandoned him.

Lincoln and Speed’s intense mutuality creates a foundation for conceptualizing the vast potential for growth promotion of non-sexual mutuality. Strozier in this latest contribution is informed by Kohut’s formulation of the “idealizing” and “grandiose self,” of “mirroring” and “twin-ship” transferences, rather than by Freud’s prioritizing of infantile sexuality with formulations of Oedipal and pre-Oedipal libidinal attachments. But his book remains miraculously free of psychological jargon, and scrupulously avoids “grand theory,” while remaining close to everyday life and direct observation. Respect for both facts and evidence reveal our author to be the quintessential historian.

The investigation of prolonged, mutually enhancing friendship relations of men and women has largely been neglected outside of romantic fiction, opera, and poetry. Their genesis (which can’t be accidental) and psychodynamics are certainly unlike those of siblings, the distortions of whose parental transferences can never be extinguished. Shared suffering of childhood experiences that have been integrated and surmounted may be more pivotal than even shared common values. Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation of slaves in the Confederacy, while politically daring, represented also a modest step toward the human equality of Negroes (as African-Americans were called during the 19^th century) and white

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men. Joshua Speed (in contrast to his older brother James, Lincoln’s Attorney General, who supported black male voting) was a bigoted slave owner until 1865.

Lincoln and Joshua Speed shared common anguish about a possible breakup of a fledgling United States. Speed was highly influential, perhaps crucial, in the decision made by Kentucky, one out of four slave states, never to secede from the Union. But their psychologically strange union seems to have been cemented by a different set of abiding personality traits. What were they? Since it is too late to place the two men on the couch, we have to be satisfied with educated speculations. Lincoln once wrote to Speed, “I now have no doubt that it is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me, to dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that anything earthly can realize” (186). Those who dream together stay together, my own mother used to say.

It is estimated that there are over 11,000 books about Abraham Lincoln. Of these, Charles Strozier has given us the two finest examples, combining historical detail with profound psychological understanding. I urge you to buy this volume and read it, if you are not already this book’s lucky beneficiary.

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