My Psychobiography Outside the USA

In one sense I am certainly “outside of the United States,” but also at the same time not connected anywhere else, except with the few individuals in various countries with whom I correspond fairly regularly. Generalizations drawn from American experiences strike me as strange, even though I was born a Jewish boy in Boro Park, Brooklyn, New York in 1940 and remained in the USA through my university education. In addition to the shift in cultural location, there is also a time gap between what I knew and learned as a child and grew up with until my mid-20s more than 50 years ago. Increasingly over time, the meaning of words and phrases, the allusions to popular television shows and films, the emphasis on sports, and the prominence of celebrity personalities have become, at best, empty sounds and images. This is particularly true when my psychohistorical readings seem to fill up with unconscious and inadvertent resonances that make no sense to me.

At the same time I have lived, worked, and developed my own scholarly modus operandi in various parts of the world: in Winnipeg, Canada, then in Hamilton, New Zealand, with shorter and longer stints in England, Romania, France, and Israel. I have never really felt “at home” anywhere other than in my own mind, and perhaps not very comfortably there either. While having friends, I have never really had intimate acquaintances, certainly not family, and so have remained the outsider sufficiently as to view each society, culture, and institution as more or less alien to my feelings and experiences. In each place where I have stayed long enough to teach, do research, and write some of my articles and books, I have never felt more than very superficial constraints placed on what I do in order to “get ahead” and become a “high-flyer.”

This very distance from immersion and intimacy has helped

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me develop a different kind of perspective on what I call “midrashing” life or practicing psychohistory. From formal training in literary studies through involvement with folklore studies to engaging with the paradigms of history of mentalities, and more recently the kind of art history Aby Warburg called Geistgeschichte (history of the mind), I have reached a point where my focus has refined itself in the attempt to understand particular historical individuals. My last several books have therefore been psychobiographies. My reading has taken me more and more into the close scrutiny of journals and diaries, private letters and personal memoirs, autobiographies and biographies.

In the last 10 years especially I have published three volumes on Alfred Dreyfus and his wife Lucie, not so much about the affair which bears his name, as about the way in which they created codes of language and gesture to keep them both alive and sane during the long ordeal of Dreyfus’ imprisonment on Devil’s Island and in the subsequent struggle to achieve full exoneration from the charges of treason and espionage against him, and then to fight the demons that still haunted his nightmares. I recently wrote a 1,000-page study of a small cluster of Jewish intellectuals and artists who thought they had achieved success and happiness in France and Germany but discovered (often too late) that they had actually tumbled into a hellish nightmare, and a few could see that their reputations would be crushed by the rising tide of vicious anti-Semitism and Nazi persecution.

For the most part, this is not what these people (Bernard Berenson, Gertrude Stein, Arthur Meyer, Sarah Bernhardt and a few others) say. They often deny that this is what happened, as do many (not all, of course) of the historians who try to write their biographies. So how does one deal with a life story in which the evidence is neither explicit nor even mentioned only incidentally? How does one write the psychobiography of someone who is not typical of the time they live in, the colleagues with whom they engage with, or the expectations of their critics? Indeed, what do you do when most of the opinions about them are either simply not there at all or still hostile?

My studies seek to immerse the chosen person in his or her own work and those of their contemporaries. I’m seeking their fictional scenes, dramatic moments, inadvertent confessions in essays and journals, and so forth within the metaphoric structures of their mind’s experiences. Thus I find I am analysing their dreams, hallu-

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cinations, jokes, and other symptomatic moments in their lives, as either they consciously or unconsciously realize what they are doing, or are reported by others. Let me give a few instances of how this kind of psychobiography works.

Alfred Dreyfus uses the term fantasmagorie (phantasmagoria) to describe what he is going through. Today the term has become a general one meaning anything elaborately fantastic and grotesque, with both negative and positive connotations, probably more of the latter than the former. During the 19^th century, however, it leaned toward the negative, and included many mental events such as hallucinations and emotional confusions. Writers referred to phantasmagoric episodes in novels, short stories, and plays where we would today use the very psychological terms made available by the rise of psychoanalysis and especially dream analysis. The term had developed a specific technical meaning near the end of the 18^th century as a kind of public entertainment using smoke and mirrors, projected images, eerie music, and suggestive speeches about people and events in history, and in this way leading right towards the development of early cinema. In order to understand what Dreyfus was going through when he called his life a fantasmagorie, we have to look at his letters, journals, and various doodles drawn in his notebooks. This, as well as reading all the books and authors he ever mentions, helps contextualize his statement.

Reporters describe Dreyfus’s second court martial in Rennes in 1895 and their scenario reproduces many of the kinds of actions and characters in horror stories of the fin de siècle (end of the century). Without any intention, the journalists provide a key into the way in which people of the period tended to organize the little facts, tonalities, and actions of that courtroom scene, especially when they noted how Alfred sat rigidly, passively quiet throughout most of the proceedings and then suddenly leaped up from his seat and began to rage against his accusers. I showed in one of my books how this scene reproduces almost exactly a bear-baiting show, with similar types of gestures, sounds, and metaphors. Unable to control himself, Dreyfus acts out the shared fantasy the reporters have been waiting to see, one that has unconsciously become a formulaic event in the fictional horrors of the fin de siècle.

Another instance of how I proceed with psychobiography is analyzing a kind of living dream that Sarah Bernhardt describes in her autobiographical Ma vie double (My Double Life, 1907). Sarah

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Bernhardt goes down to the sea in Brittany on holiday, a rest recommended by her physician after a period of exhausting work; she leaves her son Maurice, still a toddler, by himself on the nearby beach. Tied into a makeshift harness, she is lowered down a declivity into a swirling pool below, and there is startled by mysterious sea monsters. She tugs desperately to be winched back up. Later the local guide tells her she glimpsed a group of octopuses, which she had never seen before, and that they are the spirits of drowned sailors. This incident, uniquely recounted in My Double Life, offers insight into her own unconscious fears and anxieties about herself, her career, her new role as a single mother, and as an ambiguous Jewish woman accused of being a traitor, a pushy and manipulative woman, and an overly thin and talentless actress. Again, I search her own writings, theatrical roles, activities as a painter and sculptor, the negative reviews in the press, the hostile pamphlets attacking her performances as an artist and female celebrity, and other contemporary accounts of sea creatures and legendary monsters.

Catulle Mendès had a dream of his own accidental death 10 years before it happened. He died in a railway accident in 1906 just outside of the Saint-Germain-en-Laye station, when he arrived late at night, perhaps befuddled by drink, certainly exhausted from a full day’s work, and opened the door too soon, tumbled out of the car into the tunnel, and was crushed under the wheels of the train. A decade earlier, according to Maurice de Waleffe, Mendès revealed to a group of theatrical friends that he had a disturbing nightmare: he fell out of a railway coach and was killed. Though none of the contemporary commentators or later literary historians connects these two events, a psychohistorian must see the deeper significance of both as related. To do this, I again read through most of Mendès’ poetry, stories, novels, opera librettos, and drama texts to find similarities in expression, imagery, and themes of sudden and horrendous death. Casual entries in the journals and essays of his friends and critics also yield insights and points of entry into discussion of how his personality, character, and aesthetic sensibilities developed.

Without the distraction of personal intimacy and immersion in a country or society, I feel that I am better able to gain psychological insights into my subjects. As I study an individual, I am able to immerse myself into their life, using their own writings, to better understand their motivations and mentality during important

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events. In particular, I find this is helpful in understanding subjects from other times and places, which sets me apart from American psychohistorians, who by default often share so much with their subjects.

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