A Journey in Psychohistory

At 16 years of age, I found myself standing in water up to my knees in the Gulf of Mexico, near Tallahassee, Florida, holding my father’s ashes in a nondescript can.

I had intensely idealized my charismatic father. As a little boy I loved to sit in his lap and feel his clothes and smell his cigarettes and the glass of bourbon he drank after work. I could listen for hours as he talked with his friends and distinguished colleagues who passed through our apartment in Chicago near the university

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where he was a French professor and dean. It was a shock for me when he became president of Florida State University and we moved to Tallahassee in 1957. I was 13 and it was the old, segregated South. I had to learn a whole new set of cultural cues, adopt an accent, and dumb myself down. But it was also football country, and I quickly became a good defensive end, on track to get a scholarship from and play for Bear Bryant at the University of Alabama. Then suddenly on April 20, 1960, my father died of a massive heart attack in Chicago. He had been there to give a speech that was the beginning of the process to become president of the university.

There was no good reason for me to be holding this can with my father’s ashes. My mother was traumatized by my father’s death and, without thinking it through, directed my brother and me to spread the ashes near our beloved vacation house on the Gulf. We picked up the ashes from the unctuous undertaker in his stereotypical black suit and put them in the back seat of the car as we drove the 40 miles to the beach. My brother wanted no part of actually spreading the ashes and stood impatiently on the beach while I waded out into the water. I wasn’t at all sure what I expected when I opened the can, though I think I assumed I would find the white ash of the remains of a wood fire. Instead I found this ugly pile of grey, clumpy stuff. I hesitated, thinking I should say something but had no idea what would be appropriate or meaningful, so I reluctantly threw the ashes in an arc into the water and watched in despair as they slowly sank.

I think much of my life has been a search in those ashes of memory to find the living in the dead of the past.

I have spent a good part of my life writing two major biographies: two books about Abraham Lincoln and another on Heinz Kohut. One was a political leader, the other a psychoanalyst. One was a very public figure caught up in civil war and strife, the other spent his working life sitting quietly in a straight chair behind a couch listening attentively to the musings of his patients. One dominated 19^th century American life, the other fled 20^th century war and the Holocaust on one continent for the safety of America in mid-century. But however different their lives, these two idealized figures drew me inexorably to them.

I was in my late 20s when I began to work on Lincoln. It was 1972 and I had just moved to Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln’s

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hometown, for my first university job. I had been hired as a psycho-historian at Sangamon State University, a new school with some bold ideas. It was the first and will probably be the last time such a position would be created at an American college or university. I realize now I was looking for a new project. What else can one do in Springfield, Illinois, except study Lincoln?

In a real sense I grew up with Lincoln and found in him struggles for identity that paralleled my own. I was often unhappy then as my marriage disintegrated and I spent a number of years single parenting my three boys. I had been closely studying Erik Erikson for many years. I was captivated by the way Lincoln sought in his own struggles with love and marriage to find resonance with analogous issues in the public space as the country hurtled toward war. In that house divided Lincoln sought to solve for all what he could never solve for himself alone.

Recently, I returned to Lincoln after 35 years and wrote a book about his friendship with Joshua Speed. A major focus of that second book is an attempt to understand the clinical depressions he fell into in his late 20s and early 30s and how he vicariously worked them through as a function of his friendship with Speed. It is a story I came to understand because of my new grasp of such issues as a practicing psychoanalyst (since 1992).

Between my Lincoln books, I wrote about Kohut. I had been in psychoanalytic training at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis in the 1970s. I was in my 30s then and became a junior colleague of Kohut’s. He was always generous and kind to me, and it was a startling experience as a mere research candidate to have stardust sprinkled on my head from above by the mighty leader of psychoanalysis. Everyone treated me differently. Some six months after he died in 1981 I decided suddenly to write his biography. That idea had never consciously occurred to me before. But I have since wondered if he brought me into his circle with such a project in mind. He never said anything like that to anyone and certainly not to me. There was never a knowing nod or look. But he saw himself as the major figure in psychoanalysis after Freud and I was a young, psychoanalytically-informed historian who understood his work. I am sure he imagined that people would write lots of books about him on groaning shelves. But I was at hand, and timing is everything.

The journey of the research and writing my Kohut biog-

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raphy took over the next 19 years surprised me in its intensity. I expected to linger in dusty archives, to spend years searching out colleagues, friends, and patients for interviews in remote corners of the earth, and to immerse myself in his letters and scientific writings so thoroughly that I would have much of it memorized. But I was caught off guard by the often fierce opposition to my project that I encountered from Kohut’s widow and from most of those in “the group” that Kohut had formed around him after 1974 (with the marked exceptions of Arnold Goldberg and David Terman, who both provided unstinting support). I was kept away from Kohut’s letters for years, key figures shunned me, and some hoped their open distain would discourage me from my writing. One figure who had been close to Kohut muttered, “Who asked Chuck to write the biography?”

Such ridiculous opposition merely steeled my resolve. The book is hardly a debunking and unmasking of Heinz Kohut. There is no question I greatly admire Kohut and feel his work has transformed psychological thought. But my story explores the more hidden corners of his experience that are relevant for a deep understanding of the man and his work. He needed to redefine psychoanalytic theory to find a place for himself in it. In time I also came to realize the opposition to my work from most of those close to Kohut was itself part of the story and reflected the odd workings of idealization—just as Kohut had theorized.

I would like to think I still have more arrows in my quiver. I am currently working on the peace process in Northern Ireland from the point of view of my friend and colleague, John, Lord Alderdice. He played a key role there in the 1998 Good Friday Agreements that ended the Troubles. He is also himself a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. It is a story of psychoanalysis in the real world helping to make peace.

But I always linger on those ashes. I want to be sure, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, that in having the experience I don’t miss the meaning.

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