Giving Voice to the Voiceless: Psychobiographical Reflections of a Psychobiographer (article)

In 1980, I read Faces in a Cloud: Intersubjectivity in Personality Theory, Robert Stolorow and George Atwood’s (1979) seminal psychoanalytic study of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Wilhelm Reich. Their masterful psychobiographies linking the lives and theories of these psychoanalytic pioneers were a revelation, opening up a new intellectual and emotional universe. I saw with unmistakable conviction the way psychological and philosophical theories were not the isolated product of solitary contemplation but emerged directly out of the life experiences of their creators. I never looked at human lives or psychoanalytic theories, works of art, or philosophy the same way again.

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In the 1990s, I wrote psychobiographies of Freud, D. W. Winnicott, and Heinz Kohut (Rubin, 1998). The data was drawn from theoretical writings, letters, diaries, interviews, memoirs, reflections on recurrent modes of thought and conduct in their lives, contemporary testimony from colleagues, and attention to the range of thoughts, feelings, and fantasies evoked in me by immersion in their life and thoughts. Five psychoanalytic perspectives deepened my psychobiographical reflections. From classical psychoanalysis, I utilized the developmental perspective, the attention to self-protective processes, and the creative states of mind Freud termed “evenly suspended attention” and “free association.” Intersubjectivity theory sensitized me to the irreducibly relational nature of human development and the therapeutic and psychobiographical process. Self psychology and object relations theory refined my understanding of issues related to identity, the other, and the formative role of caregivers in emotional development. My perspective was also enriched by the focus in interpersonal psychoanalysis on the therapeutic value of interpersonal enactments and on one’s own subjective reactions as a potentially useful data source.

In recent years, I have become interested in the emotional underpinnings of perplexing contemporary political and cultural topics—from the appeal of authoritarians to the psychology of White supremacists. I was deeply troubled by what felt like a tsunami of wickedness and madness, which I wanted to make sense of. As a psychoanalyst, I believed that politicians, like ordinary citizens, are shaped by the families they grew up in, the history they experienced, and the consequent feelings that arose. Because most people—from pundits to the rest of us—all too often approach politics consciously and cognitively, the hidden emotional forces that shape it are usually minimized and neglected. Politics, like history, also reflects the unconscious motivations and feelings of the people involved—the leaders and the led.

I hoped and believed that psychoanalytic wisdom could be brought to bear on these and related topics. I wrote psychobiographies of Trump, the Koch brothers, and David Lane (Rubin, 2024a; 2024b), a notorious White supremacist. It was emotionally clarifying to attempt to shed light on these disturbing figures. It was also painful to dwell in their universes.

During COVID-19, I returned to a project I had begun years ago, a psychobiographical study of Shakespeare, which I recently completed. Stolorow and Atwood’s seminal insight into the con-

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nection between one’s biography and one’s work guided and inspired all of these efforts, which have been both intellectually and emotionally gratifying. I have loved exploring and illuminating the lives, theories, and art of psychoanalysts, political figures, and literary geniuses, respectively.

I didn’t think of myself as a psychobiographer—even though I wrote psychobiographies—until I became involved with the International Psychohistorical Association and got to know several psychohistorical colleagues—Paul Elovitz, Inna Rozentsvit, Jim Anderson, and Ken Rasmussen. Before I met them, I thought of myself as a psychoanalyst. As I began to also identify as a psychobiographer, the theory, method, and underlying assumptions of how I think and work—and the possible reasons—came into clearer focus.

Human beings are remarkable symbol-generating creatures who are night-shift artists—fashioning phantasmagorical dreamscapes that rival Dadaist and surrealist artists. This is our first superpower. The chief lesson my patients have taught me in 43 years of practicing psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy is the importance of valuing human experience and the fact that we continuously reveal more than we know about ourselves via our speech and symbolic communications, including our symptoms and actions. Clinical experience has repeatedly taught me that there is always an emotional logic to what people say or do—even apparently bizarre behavior—but that only becomes evident when we understand the underlying history that shaped it. Central to my view of psychobiography is that the psychological theories, political philosophies, or artistic creations of the person being studied by the psychobiographer are often memorials of their unwitnessed pain and an unconscious attempt to communicate, make sense of, and heal underlying psychological disturbances.

Our second superpower is our remarkable capacity to cultivate heightened attentiveness, focus, and clarity and decipher unconscious and symbolic communication. Decades of immersion in psychoanalysis and Eastern meditative and somatic disciplines—e.g., Buddhist meditation, Chinese martial arts and qigong exercises, and Indian yoga—resulted in a marriage of Buddha and Freud: a union of mindfulness and meaning-making that made each wisdom tradition richer than if pursued alone. Integrating Asian contemplative and Western psychoanalytic practices provided an invaluable tool for making sense of human experience.

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Paul Elovitz’ invitation to contribute an essay on the psychobiography of the psychobiographer resulted in me thinking more self-consciously about the method underlying my psychobiographical approach to psychoanalysts, political figures, and creative artists. “Go where the energy is,” my friend, teacher, and mentor Joel Kramer used to say to me. The psychobiographical process begins for me with feeling drawn to a topic out of passion or perplexity—interest or befuddlement. On the one hand, I have loved Shakespeare since I first read him in high school; on the other hand, I was disturbed by and didn’t understand what felt like a tidal wave of evil in the world.

Next comes wholehearted immersion in the life-world of the person I am studying combined with self-forgetfulness, by which I mean attempting to bracket what I think or believe, which fosters greater emotional intimacy with who or what I am studying. In other words, I dive into the person’s history without any concern for what I think I know. I try to engage the material with Freud’s “evenly-hovering attention”—letting it speak to, teach, and guide me—rather than superimposing my prior assumptions or wishes. This opens up a space where the otherness of what I encounter can touch and grace me. Then, I return to myself and attempt to empathize, reflect on, and play with what arose when I initially delved into the material. I am alert to repetitive or irrational themes, tensions, and contradictions (Winnicott says treatment doesn’t begin until the True Self is found and that the discovery of the True Self is like a rape); universalizing claims; unexplained strangeness; excessive or deficient emotions; and symptomatic omissions (there is no Mrs. Lear in Shakespeare, and Prospero has no wife).

When I encountered Shakespeare as a middle-aged man, themes that I read past as a college student—mistaken and stolen identities, absent and predatory mothers, familial betrayals, and murdered children—struck me with greater force. A crucial dimension of my process is riffing with the material like a jazz improviser who is grounded in the fundamentals of human development and motivation yet is capable of springing from the conscious and manifest level to the hidden and unsuspected depths as well as thinking about it. I remain alert to what thoughts, feelings, somatic sensations, and images emerge. More specifically, I began to wonder if Shakespeare’s plays were a heartbreaking tale of what had happened to him, as well as a remarkable illumination of the human condition.

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The roots of my theories and methods lie, of course, in childhood and my own history. I grew up in a middle-class family in the New York metropolitan area. My father was an executive at a clothing company, with a bad temper and a total inability to deal with emotional frustration. My mother was rigid, doctrinaire, and emotionally immature. She was at home when I was young and later became a psychotherapist. The only therapist I ever met who didn’t participate in a day of therapy, she had a nasty habit of denying—and redefining— reality.

I was the oldest of two boys. My brother, who was five years younger, loved tennis and had a sweet tooth and a disregard for the law, which he frequently ran afoul of. My parents couldn’t manage him. Overwhelmed and lost, they turned to me to solve the growing mess they couldn’t handle.

“We don’t blame the mother [for her wayward son],” my mother intoned, in a confusing phrase I now realize was probably an unconscious attempt to ward off her own shame for a son who was a monstrous embarrassment to extraordinarily image-conscious parents. In a letter to a judge in one of my brother’s numerous encounters with the courts, my mother wrote that my academic, athletic, and social success had damaged my brother and caused his difficulties in living. The fact that two out of three of those descriptions of me were erroneous—I was shy, introverted, and rebellious in school—didn’t seem to slow down her headlong quest to exonerate herself and blame me for her youngest son’s frequent brushes with the law.

My mother had lost her parents when she was in her 20s. The child of an authoritarian doctor and a quiet and reserved mother (after who I was named) who died before I was born, my mother seemed to identify with her father and follow his ways. My speculation is that she was lost when her parents died. Image—how things looked—guided her through a universe she was not equipped to handle.

I occupied a strange role in my family—savior-scapegoat—who was alternatively called on to save everyone and blamed for my brother’s growing difficulties. This left little room for much focus on what was important to me. The role I was invited to fulfill expanded my empathy and fed self-erasure. Looking back now, I think I developed a very self-corrosive habit of taking care of the other and forsaking myself. I felt invisible and voiceless. But what

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also unconsciously developed was a fierce wish not to let other people handle agony and madness alone. In being there for other people in the lurch, I could provide what I yearned for, which was/is, for me, a joyful experience.

In my third experience with psychoanalysis—my first two were of negligible value—I found in my therapist, George Atwood, a person who listened with extraordinary attention and heard what I couldn’t yet see. Early on in our multi-decade treatment, I said to him that I would pay him a million dollars if he got the boulder off of me. We eventually recognized that the boulder was the massive weight and crushing power of instantaneously caring for the other and forgetting myself. If practicing psychoanalysis unconsciously and inadvertently sometimes reinforced this interpersonal pattern, being in psychoanalysis became a remarkable journey through the vicissitudes of self-annihilation back to a self that had been lost. George’s profound empathy and wisdom removed the immense boulder that had been crushing me and was of inestimable value in opening the portal to the not-yet-me and helping me find—and be—myself.

I wonder now if my interest in lives—psychoanalytic, historical, political, and artistic—was related, at least in part, to my own being marginalized and eclipsed. My childhood sensitized me to the secret life of pain that many people experience. From Shakespeare, I learned the importance of seeing it “feelingly,” not simply cognitively. In my approach to psychobiography and my interest in the psychology of evil, insanity, imagination, and creativity, I can see the links between my childhood and my own efforts to make sense of and survive a horrifying home. I knew the agony of suffering alone—and the voicelessness of self-extinguishment. My appetite for listening to the hidden stories that shape who people are and the wish to understand and aid souls in distress was, I suspect, an attempt to provide what I yearned for and to give voice to the voiceless.

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