When a Psychoanalyst Marries a Historian: Brookhiser and Safer

What happens when a psychoanalyst marries an author of historical nonfiction? Such is the case of Jeanne Safer and Richard (Rick) Brookhiser. He’s a very well-known conservative columnist, senior editor of the National Review, who writes books on the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and other subjects. Although not trained as a professional historian, he holds an honorary doctorate degree and a National Humanities Medal from President Bush in 2008. Through the years when interviewed on C-Span Book Notes, I have heard him speak on occasion with some psychological insight amidst an idealization of some Founding Fathers. His wife, Jeanne Safer, is a liberal whose most recent book is titled I Love You, But I Hate Your Politics: How to Protect Your Intimate Relationships in a Poisonous Partisan World (2019). As a result of wondering about how each influences the work of the other and how they worked around their political differences, I decided to interview them on August 14, 2019, on the telephone, and a question was added in early June 2020. During the interview, which had to be cut down considerably, the back and forth between husband and wife was striking; they often finished each other’s sentences—in the interest of space we have had to eliminate most of this. There was also lots of humor, mostly coming from Jeanne.

Paul H. Elovitz (PHE): I’d like to see how you’ve influenced each other in your conversation.

Richard Brookhiser (RB): Well, Jeanne is a very good judge of people, and my writing on history is mostly biographical, so that’s a good fit. You know, I was interested in Freud before I met her. I read some of Freud’s essays before I went to college.

Jeanne Safer (JS): Rick, don’t you think this is unusual for a conservative?

Page 46

RB: Yes, there are a few of us, but it is unusual. So, I guess I had an interest in it, but obviously, meeting Jeanne, living with her, and being married for so many years just deepens that. In writing biography, your biographical subject moves into your life and house with you. Some are easier to take than others. I remember feeling when I finished my book on four generations of Adamses that my life had gotten much quieter with their departure.

JS: They were an annoying bunch to have around. Very stimulating but quite difficult.

RB: Yes, admirable though difficult. I’d be talking about these people with Jeanne, bouncing my reactions and thoughts off her and she responded in ways that were quite subtle. For example, we were discussing George Wythe, who taught Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and Henry Clay the law and was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and served on a committee writing the Constitution. He had a young Black student toward the end of his life, who, like him, was poisoned, probably by Wythe’s great-nephew.

JS: To get the money?

RB: Yes, the young man and the great-nephew were Wythe’s two heirs, so, it seems as if the great-nephew poisoned his benefactor and his rival for the will. But, anyway, I assumed this young student was probably a child of Wythe’s with one of his slaves, and Wythe was taking an interest in him. But, then Jeanne said, well, why couldn’t he have just been an idealistic guy? Why do you just assume that Wythe had relations with a slave, and was taking some sort of paternalistic interest in his offspring? That made me think that maybe I’m doing this guy an injustice. There were other things about his character and his life that made me see things Jeanne’s way, too; that was just one of many examples.

JS: I remember one thing we did about the portrait or sculpture of Jefferson in your Hamilton show at the New-York Historical Society gallery, the bust by Houdon. You want to tell that story? It was funny.

RB: Well, this was a show that the New-York Historical Society did on Alexander Hamilton in 2004, before he was cool. One room of the show was just a collection, mostly of paintings, but with a couple of busts of various people who’d been in Hamilton’s life. I felt as if being in that room was like being in Hamilton’s head; here were all the people he encountered.

JS: The room was stuffed with these paintings.

Page 47

RB: Stuffed, stacked with paintings, like the Pitti Palace in Florence, or the Barnes museum. But, on one wall, there were these two busts. One was a bust of Hamilton by an obscure self-trained sculptor in New York, and the other was the great bust by Houdon of Jefferson. I was showing Jeanne through this room shortly after or before the show opened, and we came to the Jefferson bust. Jeanne looked at it and said, “I don’t trust this guy.” So, I guess although we disagree on politics, you and I are both Federalists (enemies of Jefferson).

PHE: Well, Jefferson did a lot that wasn’t so trustworthy.

JS: Living with a historian of Rick’s caliber has really been a thrilling experience for me. Just to see how he thinks, and, certainly, he also gave me psychological insights in my work, as well as introduced me to a kind of history that really is compelling. I always tell him that he is my postgraduate seminar in American history.

RB: We were even doing this for 15 years before I started writing history because that’s when I was only a political journalist. We talked about Reagan and his first memoir, Where’s the Rest of Me? (1965), in which Reagan remembered an incident where his alcoholic father had collapsed on the porch in the winter. The snow was falling all over him and Reagan pulled him inside the house. Now, Reagan writes in the book that “I couldn’t feel angry with him.”

My guess was that he seemed so out of control that Reagan forgave him, but then I talked to Jeanne about this and with her help, I realized he was angry with him. But Reagan would just say “I’m putting that aside.” It’s that kind of dynamic that I think was very important in his life and his political career. It has some bad consequences, but I think it was helpful to him as a politician, and it helped him in the election because he was able to project this optimistic attitude. So figuring that all out was very much helped by having my in-house psychoanalyst that I could just turn to.

PHE: Very convenient.

JS: Well, to be fair to Rick, he also has such an innate psychoanalytic-mindedness and such an ability to observe that anything I said was really heard in a way that I would not have even imagined. I mean I would just make a comment and Rick would make use of it. It’s been a really exciting partnership.

RB: You always said interesting things, Jeanne. That’s why I

Page 48

made use of them.

JS: Well, we read everything we write to each other and Rick also edits my work because he’s a wonderful editor. He also encourages me to step out, which is very good. Thanks to Rick, the historical people who have populated our two-bedroom apartment have really enriched our lives. Rick has made history alive for me. Really as alive as my patients.

PHE: That’s a remarkable compliment.

JS: Well, it has the added advantage of being true.

PHE: Well, it’s a great facility. Rick, I’m kind of interested in your writing these profiles because I’m trained as a European/English historian. I sometimes joke that I made the “mistake” at a 1976 psychohistory conference of saying I’m looking at this book by Jimmy Carter; this guy is more open than most politicians. The organizer suggested I go down to Plains, Georgia, to interview significant people in his growing up, and since then I’ve done 43 psychobiographies, struggling in more recent years to do comparative ones before the election.

JS: Oh, that’s fascinating. Have you done Trump?

PHE: Yes, although after my first two 2016 Trump articles I broke my tradition of political neutrality before the election with “The Countertransference of a Presidential Psychobiographer.” I no longer could contain my very strong feelings, like I had been able to with everyone else.

JS: He evokes that.

PHE: Yes, he evokes strong negative and positive reactions. I suspect I should’ve been looking at some of your psychobiographical profiles. I’m always trying to get at the coping mechanisms, life crises, personality, style of leadership, and values of my subjects.

JS: Rick, have you written about Trump or his personality?

RB: Not a lot, since I didn’t cover this election as a journalist.

JS: One thing, Paul, that’s interesting for us: this is the first time Rick and I have been totally reunited in our experience and our emotional and psychological reactions to a political figure. I don’t know which of us detests and hates Trump more, but it’s really nice to have the experience and be on the same side as him for a change.

PHE: So, you can’t agree on abortion and most political issues, but

Page 49

Trump has a way of bringing people together in opposition as well as in support.

JS: You know, the offence is so great, and the danger is so great, and it’s so exciting to have someone where you could say, “Rick, do you think he’s going to destroy every institution we hold dear?”

RB: Well, and I just say no, America’s great big ship takes a lot to sink.

JS: But he says that with knowledge, you know, with the history. He’ll say, we had the Civil War, and we survived that. He’s not going to destroy everything that matters.

PHE: Even though he seems to work hard at times to subvert every instrument of government that doesn’t fit his immediate needs.

JS: One interesting thing in the biography of our current president is that he had an elder brother, Rick?

RB: Well, an older brother, maybe the eldest.

JS: I think he was, named after the father, he was Fred Jr. He was to take over the company. He was extremely handsome, he became a pilot and died young.

RB: Was it a car crash? I think he became an alcoholic. So, Donald Trump, with his brother’s demise, felt obviously a certain triumph and relief, so I’m sure there’s a lot to be found out there.

PHE: Yes. Trump family dynamics are interesting. Fred Jr. chained smoked and became an alcoholic as a result of his not being able to take his father’s extreme criticism and lack of praise. Donald Trump, though, from very early on, just spoke back to everyone, and in the business, his father respected Trump even though at times he didn’t like the directions that Donald went in. He broke the will of his eldest son and his second stood up to him and worked to surpass him.

JS: Yeah, I thought it was an interesting dynamic, and the kind of survivor’s guilt that Trump must have felt.

PHE: I saw a sign of it during the campaign, when he free associated about “Freddy.” There was a whiff of guilt about his brother during a long monologue at one of his rallies.

JS: Oh, interesting!

PHE: So, I think you’re onto something there with sibling issues.

Page 50

One of the courses I’m teaching is a survey of literature and history for a couple thousand years. The first thing I have the students write is on sibling issues after they’ve read Cain and Abel in the Bible. They can speak, write freely, and of course, they cover up a lot; they’re not ready yet to be open in a classroom or even to themselves, as they ultimately would be in analysis.

JS: Have you seen my book Cain’s Legacy (2012)?

PHE: No, the only two of your books that I looked at are I Love You, But I Hate Your Politics and Death Benefits (2008).

JS: Well, Cain’s Legacy was my second book about siblings. There’s an analysis of siblings in the natural world of creatures and there’s also an analysis of the Book of Genesis.

PHE: Oh, wonderful!

JS: The chapter I wrote offers an alternate translation and I was astonished at the brilliance of the analysis and how it laid bare sibling relationships, particularly the hatred and competition between sisters. The only person to overcome sibling strife is Joseph.

RB: Well, and also Esau. To a degree.

JS: Yes, when he says “I have enough.” I was just entranced by the psychological awareness of the authors of Genesis.

RB: This came up in my writing with the Adams; John Adams had three sons and the eldest, John Quincy, follows him into the White House, and the other two become alcoholics. Then John Quincy has three sons and one of them, Charles Francis, becomes an important diplomat and politician, then the other two were alcoholics. So, it seems like in the Adams’ family you either had to be in the White House or you could go to the bar.

JS: It’s really been a very fruitful, I think, exchange between us in this. I think it’s impossible to be a psychoanalyst without being interested in history, it’s the basis of what we do. I think it’s also impossible to be a profound historian without understanding psychodynamics.

PHE: I’m inclined to agree with you. When I was working on my dissertation, I discovered psychoanalysis because the person teaching in the next classroom at Temple University was a brilliant ancient historian (by the way Rick, also a political conservative), and he had some psychoanalytic training and was teaching the same material differently. I’d finish teaching Western Civilization I or II and go sit in Sid’s classroom and furiously take notes. I saw a new

Page 51

world opening up to me, and that’s the world I pursued.

JS: That’s so exciting that you were able to do that, to mingle these two professions.

PHE: I’m very fortunate. It didn’t endear me to most historians because by the early 80s the institutional historical profession turned away from psychoanalysis, but good historians, especially if they’re doing psychobiographies, ended up using the insights of psychoanalysis and psychohistory. They either did it quietly or they did it like the Hitler historian Kershaw, by just attacking psychohistorians and then proceeding to psychoanalyze Hitler.

JS: Also, psychoanalysts have not covered themselves with glory in the way they’ve dealt with presidential candidates, and that’s been a real blackmark. It’s made people wary of the legitimate use of psychoanalytic understanding to see who these people are.

PHE: One of my struggles is against psychopathologizing presidents and others. If psychohistory is only good for people we hate, the field will always stay on the margins of respectability. I argue for a psychohistory based on researching family background, childhood, creativity, innovation, overcoming trauma, and unconscious motivation. One in which we acknowledge our transference and countertransference feelings.

JS: Well, that’s what Rick really did with Washington and Lincoln whom he adores. One thing that was also interesting was that when someone is writing a biography, the person they’re writing about really joins your family.

RB: Well yeah, that’s the trouble with the Lincoln book. You’re going to Ford’s theater. You know that from the beginning.

PHE: Yes. We just had a Lincoln exchange in Clio’s Psyche, the journal I edit. I argued that at some level there was an element of suicidal inclination in Lincoln because of his depressive tendencies and especially “The President is Dead Dream” he had a week or so before he was assassinated. Rick, have you read Chuck Strozier’s two psychohistorical books on Lincoln?

RB: Yes, I read the first one, Lincoln’s Quest for Union (1982).

PHE: I think the second is better. Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed (2016) is more concrete. As much as I love using psychoanalysis as a tool to study society and politics, I’m most comfortable when I’m down to individuals and their relations. I think we know

Page 52

most, but Jay, as a presidential psychobiographer, I now get into generalizations of some of the emotions of the public and what the public is looking for, so we can’t just say it’s Trump or Obama or either of the Bushes or Clintons. They relate to things that we often unconsciously are looking for.

JS: They’re transference objects for us.

JS: I think that a lot of people who turn to history look to Trump as a father figure, of sorts.

PHE: A bigger than life, idealized father figure. In my post office, the mail clerk said, “If Trump loses the election, I’m going to throw myself off the George Washington Bridge.”

JS: Oh good God. If he wins it I’m thinking of doing the same.

RB: No no, no need for either of you.

JS: No, I know!

PHE: But, circling back a little bit, what’s the story with Trump? What’s he doing, in terms of your analysis?

RB: Well, like I said, I don’t think he’s going to ruin the country. That’s beyond him. I don’t even think he’s going to ruin the Republican party.

PHE: He’s been working hard on it.

RB: That’s right, but these parties have been around 150 years; They’re not going away. What he has destroyed is the conservative movement, which I feel is like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). There are just so many people, people I know, people I liked, people I’ve known for years, and they’ve become Trump pods and it’s dismaying.

The man’s a Trumpist; he’s all about himself. He likes you or dislikes you entirely based on whether you praise him or not, and that’s the only calculus he knows. You know, from his point of view he can say it’s worked. So, there’s no incentive to grow or change, but, I think it’s possible that he gets reelected. So we could have this guy for plus four more years, but we’ll go on.

PHE: Yes, but we will lose a lot more in a second term. What is his appeal and what do you see as his prospects for reelection?

RB: Trump’s appeal has several aspects: first, his opponent’s lack of it. Second, his skills as a performer, honed over 30 plus years in an array of media: tabloids, TV (his shows and other people’s), Twitter, and for the campaign he added stadium speaking. Mike

Page 53

Pence told me and my colleagues (it sounds like an often-used line, so I am not revealing anything): “People were tired of being told.” Told how bad they were, how good their betters were, and Trump said, “you don’t have to listen to anything, you are better than your betters.” Regarding his chances: Before COVID, Trump was narrowly ahead. Post COVID, he is behind. Note: A lot can happen in four-plus months. As British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said, “Events, dear boy, events.”

The two presidents I can compare Trump to are Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson. Jackson had positive qualities and did some important things very effectively, but he had a self-absorption, a certain lack of self-control that could take him over. He also took things personally; he said that his only regret from leaving the White House was that he hadn’t hanged John C. Calhoun or shot Henry Clay. It is no accident that he framed those thoughts in a very personal way.

The other one is Andrew Johnson, who really had very few positive qualities. I mean, he was self-made, he was a unionist, he was the only Southern senator from a seceding state to defy his state to stay with the Union, so I give him that. But he was just temperamental, he was all about himself, he couldn’t learn anything. I won’t go into it, but his vulgarity, his intemperance, it is very Trumpian. So, we’ve also been there before, and we’re still around, so there is some cause for hope.

PHE: Yes, despite all my worries I incline to agree with you. Whenever Trump says something, I always initially ask “Is this his projection?” It’s hard to know the reality, but he’s likely, with any of his extreme statements, to be projecting something within himself. I find that much more the case than with anyone else I’ve ever studied, whether a president or otherwise.

JS: Yeah, that’s a disturbingly true statement.

PHE: I’ve had some psychotic patients, though I don’t see Trump as psychotic, rather as an extreme narcissist disrupter.

JS: No, he’d be more sympathetic if he were psychotic.

PHE: What is your answer Jeanne to Trump’s specific appeal to the minority of the population that elected him in 2016 and what are his prospects for reelection? Perhaps with more psychoanalytic insights on his appeal?

JS: To more of an extent than we could have imagined, Trump’s prospects for reelection have plummeted. But I think he

Page 54

remains a potent transference object for his core supporters. For example, one young man I interviewed entirely overlooked Trump’s pathological behavior, explaining it away by asserting that Trump was “playing 3-dimensional chess,” that he knew exactly what he was doing and was masterfully in control. This man had a traumatic childhood spent primarily in the hospital with a serious allergic condition, unable to see his parents—and his father was a passive, depressed drunkard who was exiled to the family’s basement by his mother. His idealized version of Trump was the father he longed for. In contrast, his partner abhorred Trump’s character, which he assessed accurately as pathological, but voted for him because he supported his policies. Both, I think, will vote for him again, but the first with passionate conviction, the second more cynically.

PHE: I’m sure it’s been a long day for you two.

JS: If you have any other questions or thoughts, please write. It’s been delightful to talk to you and I hope we can meet in person sometime.

PHE: Well, that would be nice. The next meeting of our Psychohistory Forum Work-In-Progress seminar is on September 28^th and it would be good to have you there or at a future meeting.

JS: Well, send me the particulars and I would like to see your journal as well. Also, send me your address, and I’ll send you a copy of Cain’s Legacy, I think you’ll like it.

PHE: Will do, and I can send you a copy of the compendium of my journal so you can see my approach, especially in the introduction.

JS: Oh! that’s exciting. Thank you so much for having us.

RB: Thank you!

PHE: It has been my pleasure to get to know you two, your research, how you influence each other’s work, and how you live with your divergent politics. Thanks for the interview.

Page 55