Psychobiography and the Meaningful Life (festschrift article)

I met Mac Runyan after a psychoanalytic lecture we both attended in San Francisco in 1991. When the meeting ended, we left the building and stood under a light on Divisadero Street talking about the Study of Lives and the autobiographical nature of human expression until well after midnight. That was my first encounter with Mac Runyan’s extraordinary capacity to wonder out loud.

Soon thereafter, I read his landmark Life Histories and Psychobiography: Explorations in Theory and Method (1982) and joined the newly formed San Francisco Psychobiography Work Group––the most fascinating seminar I’ve ever attended. Unlike the other participants, I was not working on a psychobiography at the time but instead writing short biographical sketches of people associated with the early history of psychoanalysis in San Francisco.

Each group member had their own approach to psychobiography; for example, I always wondered about the nature of the transference an author develops toward the subject of the psychobiography. This transference aspect pertains to what I call the autobiographical nature of writing psychobiography. I’m not suggesting that a psychobiography is pure autobiography. Runyan has advocated effectively for methodological rigor in the Study of Lives. I strongly support his position, but of course, there are always autobiographical components reflected in the choice of a subject, the lenses through which the subject is viewed, the emphases that are made, and those aspects of the subject’s life that are given lesser or no attention.

Shortly after leaving San Francisco and moving to Venezue-

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la in 1999, I befriended Sigmund Freud’s oldest grandchild, W. Ernest Freud (originally Ernst Wolfgang Halberstadt), who in 2001 asked me to write his biography. When he was 18 months old, he was the object of his grandfather’s famous play observation described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920): The boy who played the game of fort-da, in which he threw a cotton reel out of his cot, with his mother retrieving it repeatedly. Ernest was also the only one of Freud’s grandchildren who became a psychoanalyst. My transference to him elaborated the originally unconscious motivation for my interest in psychoanalytic history, which I had previously discovered was related to my grandfather, Nissim Benveniste, who died when my mother was pregnant with me.

Nissim was much loved, and his early death left everyone in the family so pained they could rarely, if ever, speak of him. Consequently, I grew up in the silent presence of this absent other, leaving me always curious about anything that happened long ago. My transference to Ernest, who could remember his grandfather, maintained my interest throughout the project, but then there came a bonus. Ernest developed a transference to me! He saw me not as his son, Colin, who had died some years before and would have been about my age, but as his little brother, Heinerle, who died in 1923 of miliary tuberculosis just three years after their mother, Sophie Freud-Halberstadt, had died of the Spanish flu. I began my psychobiographical research wondering if I might find in W. Ernest Freud’s early life experiences traumatic scenarios that would have influenced his later life.

In searching for the meaning of life, some people find the formulas of others to be dead ends, as the meaning of life is generally not transferable, much less universal. Yet if we put aside formulas for the meaning of life and instead look at people who live meaningful lives, we discover people who are enthusiastic, impassioned, following their muse, and in the grip of their daemon.

In the Study of Lives and my psychotherapeutic work with patients, I have come to recognize that people often have experienced a childhood trauma that led to a psychological conflict, which was expressed as a symptom and later transformed into a sublimated activity. Maybe it’s a hobby, an artistic endeavor, a career, an intellectual line of inquiry, a spiritual calling, a political involvement, or even a family. The sublimated activity delivers to them a deep sense of satisfaction––a sense of meaning.

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Some, who were bullied in childhood, stay close to the trauma and remain symptomatic by pursuing a life of ongoing victimization, or they turn passive into active and become bullies themselves. Others, however, position themselves close to the traumatic scenario but sublimate their conflict by reconfiguring themselves as protectors. Some who were not well seen or recognized by parents may call attention to themselves in symptomatic ways or transform the trauma by becoming performers, politicians, marketing specialists, or some other profession that appropriately attracts the attention of others. Many medical doctors found their careers in childhood when a family member became ill. Many criminals, police, and lawyers are often engaged in the struggle between the demands of the id and those of the superego as they were initially played out in early childhood. As I like to tell my students, “A good dissertation topic is a symptom that you want to sublimate.”

Although Sigmund Freud did not write about the meaning of life, he evidently lived a meaningful life. He had a passionate engagement with the world: He saw patients all day long, ate dinners with his family, and then wrote with a fountain pen by lamplight until late in the night. By the end of his life, he had formulated psychoanalytic theory and technique, established an international organization, and written 23 volumes that illuminated the very nature of the soul. He also smoked 20 cigars a day and suffered digestive and cardiac problems. While many of our conflicts can be sublimated, no one’s conflicts––not even Freud’s––are sublimated completely or always.

We find psychological meaning in recognizing the social-emotional metaphor embedded in the remembered story of trauma, linking it to parallel scenarios in contemporary life. Some of those scenarios are themselves symptoms, and others are meaningfully sublimated. Let’s look at three of Freud’s early childhood traumas.

Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856, and his brother Julius came a year and a half later. In 1897, during his self-analysis, Freud recalled his malevolent wishes and childish jealousy directed toward this rival who had stolen his mother’s love. When Julius died at seven months, little Sigmund’s malevolent death wishes were miraculously fulfilled.

Freud’s mother was his father’s third wife. His father’s first wife had a son who, in turn, had a son, John, who was one year older than Sigmund, meaning that John was Sigmund’s nephew. The

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two were great friends and rivals. The dynamic of pleasure and guilt in surviving the death of Julius, combined with his intense friendship and rivalry with his nephew, John, established in Freud’s object relations a specific way of relating to close friends and colleagues.

In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud wrote, “This nephew and this younger brother have determined, then, what is neurotic, but also what is intense, in all my friendships” (Masson, 1985, p. 268). The dynamic of a great friend and rival in the same person was obvious in Freud’s relationships with Joseph Breuer, Wilhelm Fliess, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and others. In another letter to Fliess, Freud wrote, “I have found, in my own case too, [the phenomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood, even if not so early as in children who have been made hysterical” (Masson, 1985, p. 272).

Freud recognized the same scenario in the legend of Oedipus Rex and the dreams and free associations of his patients. He further speculated that the Oedipus complex was an organizing dynamic in the construction of personality and the very foundation of culture.

Freud’s heir apparent was his daughter Anna Freud. It is well known that she had a very close relationship with her father and dedicated herself to preserving and extending his work. What is acknowledged to a lesser extent is that she had a lifelong conflict with her mother and, not coincidentally, dedicated her clinical and theoretical work to the importance of the mother-child bond.

Her mother, Martha Freud, and older sister, Sophie, were both seen as feminine, but Anna was not. She was dedicated to her books, her work, and her father. Anna and Sophie were engaged in a lifelong sibling rivalry that did not end until Sophie died of the Spanish flu in 1920. Anna then swooped in to look after Sophie’s two young boys, Ernest and Heinerle. She dedicated much of her time to caring for her nephews and other orphaned and troubled children. In The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936), Anna identified two new defense mechanisms: sublimation and a form of altruism, both of which she embodied in her personal and professional life.

Anna Freud’s nephew Ernest, born in 1914, was Freud’s oldest grandson. As a young boy, Ernest was deeply in love with

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his mother and openly hostile toward his father. His love for his mother was further threatened by a little brother, Heinerle, born in 1919. In 1920, while pregnant with a third child, Sophie died. It was a terribly disorganizing trauma for the almost six-year-old Ernest. Then, when he was nine, his brother Heinerle died. Ernest struggled emotionally and socially through childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood. He was sensitive, irritable, moody, and had frequent conflicts with others. He studied psychology, was psychoanalyzed, and went into psychoanalytic training.

Working with his aunt Anna at the Hampstead Clinic, he became interested in mother-infant relations and baby observation, then specialized in the psychological aspects of neonatal intensive care. He visited neonatal intensive care units (NICUs), wrote on the topic, and lectured internationally. By 1977, at the age of 63, Ernest felt “hooked” on the study of neonatal intensive care but didn’t understand why. He observed that people who work in NICUs were typically born prematurely or had a family member who was a preemie.

These circumstances, however, did not apply to Ernest, so to explore his fascination further, he free-associated. The following thought occurred to him: “‘I owe it to my little brother!’ On reflection, this did not refer to the brother I had lost when I was nine and a half, but to when I was five and three-fourths when my mother died….” He went on to reflect: “I later learnt that my mother had been pregnant with a third child, and I must often have puzzled about it, and the process went on unconsciously…. By observing preemies… I was trying to retrieve information about the little unborn sibling” (Freud & Martin, 1985, pp. 33-34; emphasis added by author). As Friedrich Nietzsche (1907) noted in Beyond Good and Evil, “It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography” (p. 10).

Erik H. Erikson was another person who sublimated his trauma into a meaningful life. Erikson never knew his father but was given his stepfather’s name, Homburger. He was born and raised in Germany; began his career as an artist; became a psychoanalyst without ever going to the university; had his psychoanalytic training in Austria; married a Canadian; moved to the United States; changed his name to Erikson (son of Erik); and coined the term “identity crisis.”

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Joseph L. Henderson, a student of C. G. Jung, recalled that “at one time [Jung] said that the whole of his [Jung’s] psychology was a personal confession” (Benveniste & Henderson, 2000, p. 45). I take this to mean that parts of Jung’s psychology contained autobiographical components, and these are what made his work into a meaningful project throughout his life. This does not mean that he only discovered himself. When a man knows a little something about himself, he knows just that. But when he knows himself at great depths, he also begins to know something about all humanity. Of course, the same goes for women, and in this regard, we could wonder about the lives of Jane Goodall, Margaret Mead, Frida Kahlo, Frieda Fromm-Reichman, and so many more.

I recently came across the interesting story of Diana Trujillo. I have not studied her life in any depth at all, but a People magazine article gives a charming glimpse into her story. She was born in Cali, Colombia, in 1983. She recalled, “There was a lot of violence going on in my country, so for me, looking up at the sky and looking at the stars was my safe place.” As well as how: “My parents got divorced when I turned 12. After that happened, my mom had nothing. No money. We didn’t even have food. We’d boil an egg and we’d cut it in half, and that was our lunch that day.” She continued by saying: “I remember just laying down on the grass and looking at the sky and thinking, ‘Something has to be out there that’s better than this. Some other species that treats themselves better or values people better’” (DeSantis, para. 6 & 7, March 1, 2021). Diana Trujillo is now an aerospace engineer and Flight Director at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where she continues to look up at the stars. She is the Robotic Arm System lead for the Perseverance rover now making discoveries every day on the planet Mars.

It is evident to many that Mac Runyan also leads a meaningful life. He was significantly influenced by his direct associations with Erik H. Erikson, Henry A. Murray, Robert W. White, and other teachers and colleagues. Yet I would assume that early childhood experiences may have been the determining factors responsible for driving his interest in the Study of Lives into nothing less than a passion, a passion that is evident in both his academic productivity as well as in his remarkable ability to show us all how to wonder out loud.

In conclusion, I assert that those who lead meaningful lives are those who have discovered how to sublimate the psychological

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traumas of their early childhood experiences. This allows them to love, work, care, and create with enthusiasm, determination, and passion transforming at least a part of their life into an adventure that gives meaning to it all.

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