A Psychobiographer’s Ruminations on Ayn Rand (article)

As a psychobiographer, I have always been curious about why Alisa Rosenbaum reinvented herself as Ayn Rand and how this reinvention related to both her personality and experiences growing up in Imperial and Bolshevik Russia. Although Jennifer Burns, in Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, avoids delving into Rand’s psychology, she does provide considerable data for such a study. As I read that “Alisa was a

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lonely child” with a “withdrawn nature,” who was “never able to maintain a steady friendship,” yet who “saw herself as a child of destiny,” I wondered what her childhood was like, and what kind of a mother she had. How did Alisa, as a highly competitive lonely child with a volatile mother who “had never wanted children,” come to grips with her situation (pp. 10-11)? Her physical, but not her emotional needs, were met in her somewhat intellectual household before the Russian Revolution threatened the economic and intellectual basis of her family’s life. Alisa’s sense of specialness and feeling of being apart from her family led her as a young woman to flee to relatives in America in 1925 and then to Hollywood as a screen writer, where she learned her craft as a writer. Alisa became Ayn, who drew upon her formative Russian experiences for materials for her books that she set in America.

Some of the evidence for her childhood fantasy life can be found in her novels and the theory of objectivism. She developed a philosophical system around her experience in the Russian Revolution, which involved the government—the Reds—simply expropriating what they needed during “War Communism” as they fought for survival against the Whites and foreign interventionists. Rand became convinced that only the individual could be counted on amidst the chaos of civil war, revolution, and the loss of incentive to produce as a consequence of the expropriations carried out by force under war communism. She could idealize her father, whose labor strike was the model for John Galt in Atlas Shrugged.

In Soviet Russia, it might be dangerous for Alisa to speak her mind freely at school and in public, but she could view herself as a Nietzschian superwoman and create Dominque, her heroine who was unbounded by the standards of the mere mortals surrounding her. Yet, I wonder if Rand’s decision later in life to have an affair with a young disciple was influenced by communist denunciations of marriage as a bourgeois form of female subservience. (In the name of her objectivist philosophy, announcing the breaking of their marriage vows to the world made this infidelity no less painful for her devoted husband and her paramour’s wife.) Could her atheism have been influenced by that of Soviet Russia? These are questions worth pursuing.

Just as she didn’t get along well with others as a child, as an

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adult Rand didn’t get along with anyone who wasn’t a loyal disciple, including a sister who eventually joined her in America. Nor did she have good relationships in conservative politics. She denounced libertarians as “scum” and railed against Hayek and Reagan. Her books brought people to these movements or simply let them enjoy a fantasy of complete individualism, as in my case. Whether in Russia as an adolescent or American as an adult, this talented woman “was mercurial, stubborn, and driven,” prone to “anger and depression.” Mood swings would be exaggerated in her later life by “her habitual use of amphetamines” (p. 279).

The development of the conservative intellectual infrastructure, well-funded by the Koch brothers and other conservative plutocrats, is a powerful example of the ability to turn fantasy into reality—Ayn Rand’s great talent. Some conservative intellectuals, like Paul Ryan, still draw their inspiration from Rand’s antigovernment tirades. However, once they hold the reins of government or even came close to holding them, her ideas are mostly repudiated, as in the case of Ryan.

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