Exploring the Psychological Roots of the Need to Emulate

Enthusiasm and Ambivalence for the Idea of This Special Issue

When Peter Petschauer proposed a special issue on heroes and role models, I welcomed the suggestion, but not without some ambivalence. Young people I know thirst for heroes and role models, as have all of the generations of college students I have taught. However, their judgments as to who constitutes a good role model are often faulty, as they are inclined to confuse celebrity with achievement and what was called “character” in the 19^th century. In teaching senior-level students in courses on leadership, I have stressed their need to develop leadership skills, career plans, and mentorship relationships with role models.

I came to appreciate the mentorship system from psychoanalytic training and my research as a historian. The essence of training to become an analyst was the one-on-one work with my analyst and with my control analysts, rather than the mostly interesting course work. I experienced it as a type of apprenticeship. The literal apprenticeships of many of the inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs who created the first industrial society in England offered the advantage of up-close role models and mentors mostly lost in our modern educational system. These were people whose lives I probed in archives in Great Britain and great American research libraries. Their examples inspired me to consider my position as a role model and mentor to my students and the

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young people who assist me in producing Clio’s Psyche.

Any idea coming from Peter Petschauer deserves attention because he is a history colleague and human being who, in my experience with him, improves whatever he touches. Here are some examples. Rather than look for a more prestigious institution after he started his professorial career in a then-backwater university in the mountains of North Carolina, he did yeoman service to improve it, devoting his last years to creating and directing a mentorship and support center for faculty and staff. Even in “retirement” he works hard for its visual arts center. Professor Petschauer’s use of role models helps me to understand how he achieved much despite the difficulties of growing up during World War II and its aftermath, with a mother who was nearly incapable of doing much nurturing and a father whom he seldom saw. His father relocated him during the war to the mountains of South Tyrol with the expectation that he and his brother would have ready access to food and would be safer there. He grew up in a world of women whose men were away at war and subsequently wrote a doctoral dissertation on a woman the German-born Empress Catherine II of Russia. The death of his brother due to inadequate medical care did not dampen his spirits for long, and he thrived in various boarding schools despite loneliness and the incarceration of his father by the American army. As a 17-year-old, he emigrated to the U.S. where he refused to settle for the life of a factory worker, soon becoming a night student at New York University, and eventually attaining there his doctoral degree. When his first marriage faltered, he picked himself up again and eventually made a wonderful life with his second wife, Joni, whom he often mentions in his writing. Even as he enters his seventh decade, he continues to grow; for example, I find his writing style to be much better now than it was a quarter century ago. Yes, for me, Peter Petschauer has been a model of a most decent human being who

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uses the heroes and role models he finds to create a good life and to improve our world.

I should note that Peter Petschauer’s search for heroes is intimately connected with the struggle to find his father. Most of his adult life, he feared that this seemingly gentle man, a German diplomat in Italy and after 1940 a lieutenant in the SS, had committed horrible crimes during WWII. Three decades after his father’s death, he found the records of the secondary Nuremberg Trials and discovered that the father was not the monster the son had feared, but rather a disillusioned officer who was threatened with being put in Dachau when he realized the full monstrosity of the Nazi regime. By then, Peter had learned to adopt more traditional heroes and became open later in life to the sorts of mentors he discusses in “My Literary Role Models: Three Men and One Woman.”

My initial uncertainties about this special issue were related to several questions. How would it be sufficiently psychological and psychoanalytic? What would academic psychologists and psychoanalysts think of the loose usage of both these terms? Might some historians be inclined to mutter about “the repudiated great man’ theory of history” as the very notion of heroes brought to mind the essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), Nietzsche, and the adoration of Hitler. Adding ego ideals to the title of the issue steered it in a psychoanalytic direction though when I think of ego ideals, I have a sense that they are “heroes of the mind,” and thus, not very different from traditional heroes. Whatever they are called role models, heroes, or ego ideals they represent a type of idealized self for those who seek to better themselves or who feel vulnerable or inadequate. For Freud, ego ideals were transformational elements in his development as the creator of psychoanalysis, as spelled out by Jacques Szaluta in a whole series of articles, including

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“Freud’s Heroes and Ego Ideals” in this issue. Millicent Lambert, “Heroes Are What I Am Not,” shows how her life-long search for role models and heroes has been an effort to compensate for trauma she suffered as a very young child. Of course, the stronger our egos, the greater our ability to accept the mentoring of role models with the right elements for us, and the less need we have to search for an idealized self.

Freud as the Ego Ideal of Psychoanalysis and Psychohistory

Sigmund Freud invented psychoanalysis, out of which psychohistory has developed. His incredible contributions have enabled us to see ourselves, others, and the world so much more accurately then our predecessors have been able to view the individual and society. I personally enjoy reading Freud and about him; indeed, I have The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud and the six-volume Concordance to the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud on my bookshelves. Nevertheless, I am most selective of what aspects of Freud I choose to emulate.

As a human being, historian, and psychoanalyst, I am quite wary of idealization. When I have idealized people in my own life, mostly because they seemed to have characteristics I lacked or did not feel confident in the exercise of, it did not make me a better person nor bring me closer to either reality or them. It mainly blinded me to some aspects of their personalities. As a psychohistories, I have always resisted the inclination I have observed at the professional meetings of various psychoanalytic societies to focus overwhelmingly on the writings and thoughts of this great Austrian. My Freudian ego ideals are his courage, creativity, humanism, methodology, and willingness to face the dark side of our nature. He had the courage to probe his own unconscious, right down to interpreting a dream revealing his death wish for a

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beloved son who was fighting in World War I. Freud had the courage to keep working, despite the incredible pain caused by cancer, the resulting 30 operations, and the awkward wooden apparatus holding his jaw together after some of those medical procedures. It is Freud’s methodology of probing the unconscious that inspires me rather than his failed work as a historian and the specific positions he took on the Oedipus complex, death wish, and penis envy.

It is the Freud who built the psychoanalytic movement who inspired me, not the Freud who insisted upon a high level of orthodoxy and broke off relations with those who strayed too far from the fold of what he defined as orthodoxy. It is good to know Freud’s writing, but not to let it slip into becoming a kind of Gospel, as is all too common among some devotees of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Qur’an. In my capacity as a psychohistorical institution builder, I have been inspired by Freud’s divisive choices to step around certain pitfalls he failed to avoid.

Mentorship in My Life

Clio’s Psyche and the Psychohistory Forum have benefited from my parental role models being workaholics. My immigrant parents worked extremely hard and long hours, thus setting an example that would influence me throughout my life. Although I only lived above “the store” in which they worked for five years, it and its work was a focal center of my existence. I couldn’t wait to be allowed to sweep the floor and do other menial tasks the way my older brother did. I was told school was supposed to be “my work,” and despite my period of rebellion, school in the form of expanding knowledge, learning, knowing, and teaching has become my life’s work. My teachers were certainly important mentors, although I did not always warm up to their concern. For example, the vocal prejudices of an eighth grade teacher against Italian American classmates seemed grossly unfair to me. Consequently, I was embarrassed by

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her interest in me and distanced myself from her. In contrast, my teacher Ms. McGovern’s love of history and learning was so transparent that I welcomed her encouragement and suggestions.

Sidney Halpern (1927-1994), a colleague at Temple University where we taught Western Civilization in adjacent rooms, introduced me to psychoanalysis and psychohistory. Over coffee, he heard my despair at my lack of progress in writing my dissertation on the English Industrial Revolution, and suggested we meet on a regular basis so I could explain my research and literary roadblocks. Although he was a professor of ancient history and I was a modern European historian writing about a late 18^th and early 19^th century subject in English history, he was enormously helpful. Sid simply listened, and then made suggestions based upon what I had told him. As the sole supporter of my wife and three children, I had to write that dissertation, yet I was totally blocked every time I tried. (It did not help that my first memories of writing were of not being able to write!) But when Sid spoke, my thoughts appeared worthy of writing down. I soon went from someone who felt he couldn’t write, to someone who had a friend who would be a sounding board to help him get past any and all problems of research and writing.

As I realized that I would be able to complete my dissertation, I became more and more curious as to what Sid was teaching in his classroom, since it was certainly different than what I taught in mine, with my pedagogy being based upon the knowledge gained from having studied with some of the best scholars in the field. This soon led to my auditing the very class I was teaching, which was a totally different course with Professor Sidney Halpern, who had the insights of a personal psychoanalysis, some psychoanalytic training, and extensive reading in the field of psychoanalysis. I found myself reading a psychobiography of Sir Isaac Newton and then every book on psychoanalysis I could get my hands on,

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especially in applied psychoanalysis. The whole new world of the unconscious was opened up to me.

Although I had, and have, enormous affection and appreciation for my colleague’s friendship, knowledge, and mentorship, I never wanted to be Sid Halpern. We had totally different personalities with divergent values. He was a contrarian who enjoyed scandalizing people, while I prefer putting people at ease. Sidney also was a Jewish chauvinist who had once picketed the White House because Nixon had invited French Premier George Pompidou, who sold jet aircraft to Israel’s enemy Egypt, for a presidential dinner. However, when Nixon was on the road to impeachment, Sid became one of his strongest supporters. My marching and picketing were against the American involvement in South-eastern Asia, Richard Nixon, and for civil rights. He was as passionately for the war in Vietnam as I was against it. He thought the Save the Earth Movement was based on misinformation and hysteria, but his suggestions for the environmental studies week I was co-organizing before the first Earth Day were most helpful.

Although I “perished rather than published” at Temple University, before I departed for Ramapo College I was able to help Halpern become the dean at the small campus where we both taught. (He become a major administrator in a time of academic crisis.) It felt good to give something back to a friend and mentor who had helped me in so many ways. The Psychohistory Forum continues to sponsor the Sidney Halpern Award for Outstanding Contributions to Psychohistory. It should also be pointed out that the Forum’s Work In Progress Seminars are designed to nurture; that is, to mentor scholars by providing historical, psychohistorical, psychological, or any other knowledge we can to strengthen their work.

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Parents, Siblings, Caretakers, and Teachers as Our Earliest Role Models and Mentors

Merle Molofsky, “My Mother as My Ego Ideal,” elaborates on the impact of her immigrant mother on her life and values. As children, we learn by identifying with our mother, father, siblings, and later, with our teachers and others. David Lotto, “Freud and Me: Idealization and Over idealization,” insightfully elaborates on this when he discusses how we learn by the processes of imitation, incorporation, introjection, internalization, and idealization. These things “from the outside world,” which are “somehow taken inside, digested, metabolized, and turned into a part of you,” are the things that caused the formation of our psychic structure. Yet, parents usually go off to work leaving others and television as caretakers of the children; teachers divide their time among 15 to 40 children at a time. Children often form a group identity, which is in opposition to the goals of the teachers, as a result of their frustration in not getting the full parental attention they crave when they want it. Rather than having the models of their parents working before them, as has been the case for most of our human history, they have little notion of what their parents actually do, aside from them getting in their cars or buses to go to faraway places called “work.” Is it any wonder why youngsters become so enamored by the celebrities they see on televisions, online, and in the movies? These distant heroes and role models are the imagined, idealized selves of the young and have little to do with the realities of ordinary life. The imaginative worlds and the real worlds that their parents would like to prepare them for are often galaxies apart.

Celebrities as Role Models

Usually, celebrities are terrible role models! They are far more fantasy than reality to those who view them or read about them. They are distant objects, the reality of which is always dubious because more often than not the autobiogra-

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phies they supposedly write are the work of some publicists or professional writers. Yet, these are the heroes and role models of so many young people. This is reflected in the number of college students flocking to the School of Contemporary Arts at my college. While I have enormous regard for the arts, the realities for the overwhelming number of these students is that they neither have the special talent nor the drive that will enable them to make a living in this extraordinarily competitive field. Similarly, many students are drawn to sports with dreams of great fame and wealth. The sad reality for those pursuing this dream is that they are 1,000 times more likely to have a sports injury that will pain them for the rest of their life than to succeed in living their dreams of becoming a rich professional athlete. The costs and pressures on those in sports are spelled out in the articles by Tom Ferraro, “Falling Heroes, Why Heroes Tend to Self-Destruct;” Christine Silverstein, “My Hero is a Nine-year-old: Not a Celebrity;” and Stanley Teitelbaum, “Sports Heroes and Mental Health Problems.” I encourage each student to find a passion and build his or her future life around it where possible; however, as a strong advocate of realistic goals I recognize that a life of economic and professional frustration is not a fulfilling life.

Celebrity heroes are fine to look at on a screen at a distance, but in the end they constitute poor ego ideals, heroes, and role models. Reality television shows proliferate not simply because they are inexpensive to produce but because it is easier for the audience to identify with the ordinary people who are having their 15 minutes of fame. Young people need to find role models up close, as well as at a distance.

Mentorship and the Fear of Being a Mentorship or Protégé

Bonnie Oglensky, “The ‘M’-Word,” highlights the importance of mentorship and the fear that is commonplace

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among people who are fulfilling a mentorship role for someone seeking a mentorship. She explains this reluctance in terms of fear of self-aggrandizement and long term obligation, as well as boundary, control, and power issues. These fears may be mutual in all relationships with elements of mentoring. Peter Petschauer found a definite reluctance to accept the idea of mentorship in the mentoring center he headed at his university. Clearly there are power relations involved when someone becomes a disciple or protégé the question of power granted is extremely important. Sexuality also may arise in such close relationships. Some modern historians of ancient Greece have depicted homosexual relationships whereby an older man sexually used an adolescent boy as involving issues of mentorship.

Student resistance to helpful mentoring by teachers can be considerable. Most 18 to 22-year-olds don’t like to be singled out from the class as a whole. The exceptions I have noticed are among incoming freshmen who can be quite worried about their ability to perform in college, very needy students in general, students who are used to being helped by their elders because of warm relationships with grandparents or much older parents, and those who have a strong sense of self, and therefore need to be less concerned about being close to the teacher.

In a sense, most teaching involves elements of mentorship. Jeffrey Berman, “The Professor As the Role Model For Love, Loss, and Recovery,” helps his literature students deal with the most personal and difficult of issues: death. Harold Takooshian, “The Courage of Stanley Milgram,” is one of a number of former Milgram graduate students who have attested to the extraordinary impact of this remarkable professor on knowledge and the field of social psychology in this journal. Special types of mentorship teaching are those of the control analyst of the psychoanalytic candidate and the voice coach and her student as described by Susan Gregory,

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“Mrs. Seyfert and Mozart.” Michael Isaacs, “Career and Personal Role Models, Heroes, and Mentors,” traces role models throughout his life, which has taken him to law, psychoanalysis, and yoga and meditation. It is noteworthy that those who inspire him have gone from being entirely men to predominately women.

The neediness of young students is often striking, as illustrated by LaToya Lewis’ account, “How the Gift of Compassion Changed My Life,” of her being rescued from dire circumstances as a fourth-grader by a kindly teacher who helped her to identify learning as a way out of an African American inner city cycle of poverty when growing up with a schizophrenic mother. Fortunately, she was able to accept his “gift of compassion.” Her case reminds me of that of a businessman, born in a displaced persons camp after World War II, who grew up with a schizophrenic mother who adored her only child. Beyond intensely loving him to the best of her abilities and imparting a sense of his specialness, she could give him much less help than most mothers. In life, he had to figure out many things on his own. For example, he learned to drive simply by watching others do it. Although he could not articulate many of his needs or readily take help directly, he found positive people in his life he could emulate. As stated earlier, an enormous amount of learning in life occurs through the process of identification, which is one reason why role models are so important in life, and mentorship is a bonus even if it is approached warily by many who shy away from the labels “mentor” and “protégé.”

Of course, there are some who welcome mentorship. For example, during his long career as an overworked, self-trained case worker for the New Jersey Department of Youth and Family Services, the psychohistorian Henry Lawton used his psychoanalytic and psychohistorical knowledge to greatly improve the prospects of some youths lost in the foster care system. One woman feels such intense gratitude to Henry for

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his extraordinary efforts on her behalf that she wrote an article on him as her mentor and role model.

Whether the My word label is accepted or not, the act of mentorship is enormously important in the lives of many people.

The President as Role Model

American presidents are portrayed as being admirable and heroic to the youth of the country. However lacking they may be in personal charisma and heroic deeds, they have enormous appeal by virtue of their presidential office. The psychological role of presidents should not be belittled, especially in times of crisis. For instance, the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, as revealed by the research of Martha Wolfenstein whose co-edited 1965 book, Children and the Death of a President: Multidisciplinary Studies had a profound impact even on kindergarteners who had previously never heard of JFK. The president serves as a role model not simply for the children of the country, but for adults as well. This is why there are so many pure myths about presidents, such as George Washington never telling a lie, even as a boy when asked if he cut down the cherry tree. However ambivalent adults may feel about a particular occupant of the White House, he is the person in charge of keeping us safe while we sleep, work, or lose ourselves in the fantasies of television and other electronic devices. People are inclined to think well of him (and someday “her”), even while opposing particular policies. The president is put forth as a role model to the youth. Consequently, in electronically searching through public library card categories, I must be careful to exclude books on presidents listed under the category of “adolescent” and “juvenile” lest I be inundated by them.

Fatherless Obama as Father, Hero, Mentor, and Role Model

At his inauguration on January 20, 2009, Barack

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Obama was a terrific role model for many Americans. The inspiring story of an African American boy raised by his single mother and his grandparents who goes on to become president is ready-made for children’s books and made for television movies. A year into his presidency, there are innumerable laudatory adult and children’s book about him. You can also go to the bookstore, where you can choose between two Barack Obama calendars and an Obama quote of the day calendar from which you get your daily inspiration before ripping it off to face a new day with a new inspiration from the President.

Barack Hussein Obama grew up bearing the name of a brilliant, idealized, absent father who abandoned his family before his son was even a year old, and who appeared only once in the boy’s life when he was 10 years old. President Obama’s literary success is based upon his book, Dreams From My Father. Obama used the occasion of his first Father’s Day as president to go to an African American church to exhort fathers to step up to be a part of their children’s lives, setting an expectation of excellence and teaching their children empathy. He spoke of the “toll” being fatherless took on him and of his resolution “to break the cycle” of abandoning fathers by being “a good father to my girls,” the “rock…on which to build their lives,” as “the greatest gift I could offer.” Although he preaches the importance of being with your children (close rather than absent fathering), by choosing the profession of the “Father of the Country” he is required to be away from them for long periods of time.

Idealization and Denigration

Molly Castelloe Fong, “The Statues of Central Park,” focuses on how the statues in New York help immigrant and ethnic groups develop a sense of acceptance in our country, highlighting the important subject of idealization. Statues are made for people to emphasize their specialness. Yet I cannot think of statues without having images of those of Marx,

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Lenin, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein being torn down. Putting people on pedestals is a way to protect them from negative feelings, since every hero may very well become an antihero. No amount of building statues of heroes of the moment can protect the reputation of somebody from these processes of denigration following idealization. A major reason for denigrating the formerly idealized individual is the unrealistic expectation. Even if most citizens did not bother going out to vote, they expect presidents to almost magically change things once in office. In “Presidential Savior Fantasies and the Election of Barack Obama” (March 2009) in this journal, David Beisel wrote about the impossible-to-fulfill expectations the President faced as he entered office.

The dynamics of idealization and denigration became clear to me in the course of writing presidential psychobiographies for over three decades, when I realized it wasn’t just failed, “bad presidents,” like Richard Nixon, who got knocked off the pedestal, but that all presidents were subject to the contrary impulses of being built up and knocked down by the electorate. The impulse to denigrate correlates with a declining economy, disappointed expectations, fears of abandonment toward the end of a term in office, and especially fear that the leader is weak; that he cannot protect the country.

The processes of idealization and denigration go on with almost anyone in the public eye, although they are especially intense with those related to politics. Thus, not long ago the picture of Elizabeth Edwards as the courageous, cancer battling mother of young children and wife of former Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards began to be replaced by one of her as “an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazy woman.” “St. Elizabeth” is being knocked off her pedestal (Judith Warner, “Elizabeth Edwards Teeters on Her Pedestal” New York Times [01/17/2010]: pp. ST 1, 6). This is the stuff that sells newsprint and books, but has

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little to do with the lives of real people, especially that of a dying woman who grew tired of putting on an adoring face in public in looking at or discussing the charming, youthful husband who has betrayed her with another woman, fathering a now two-year-old child. The interested public condemns, defends, or empathizes with Elizabeth or John Edwards, depending in part on identifications based on their own needs. The pattern of heroes and heroines being displaced and labeled anti-heroes is endless because it connects to the human need to build heroes up and knock them down when they do not fulfill our fantasies.

Psychoanalysis, which works to make fantasies explicit and help the analysand develop a more realistic sense of self, can be an antidote to the patterns of building up and tearing down. It is the in depth study of the self. This is why one of the few articles Sid Halpern ever published argued that Socrates, famous for teaching his disciples to know thyself, I was the first psychoanalyst. The analytic process strengthens the ego, offering some protection against societal, as well as personal, emotional shifts. This frees individuals to more realistically use ego ideals, heroes, mentors, and role models to achieve their goals.

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