Volume 18 Number 3December 2011

Arthur Miller, artist’s soul, Conversations with Miller, The Crucible, Leo Tolstoy, Mel Gussow, microscope, psychohistory, psychology of creativity, revelation

In this article, which opens the symposium on artistic creativity, the author proposes a framework for the psychology of artistic creativity, emphasizing psychobiographical analysis of the connection between an artist’s life and work, and applies it to Arthur Miller and his play The Crucible (1953). Concentrating on fiction but extending the view to painters, architects, and filmmakers, he contends that artists write, usually indirectly and largely unconsciously, about the concerns and conflicts that haunt them. He questions Freud’s view that the Oedipus complex is the usual source, maintaining that an artist’s central conflict can take endless forms and that theories such as Erikson’s on identity and object relations theory should serve as guides rather than rigid templates. The evidence consists of Miller’s interviews, Timebends, the text of the play, and Miller’s 1956 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The author reads the play, despite its evident parallel to McCarthyism, as rooted in Miller’s guilt over his attraction to Marilyn Monroe while married, a dilemma he sees echoed in John Proctor. He attributes Miller’s political stance to rivalry with his father and brother, and states that a personal origin does not make a political position right or wrong. He concludes that audiences respond to a work when their own inner concerns correspond to the artist’s, so that viewers of the play enter Proctor’s psyche and thereby Miller’s.

Arthur Miller, artist, conflict, The Crucible, guilt, James W. Anderson, oedipal victories, oppressed people, personal concerns, political stance, psychohistory, reductionism

This response article in the symposium on artistic creativity replies to James William Anderson’s “The Psychology of Artistic Creativity: With Reference to Arthur Miller and The Crucible,” the lead essay of the symposium. The author accepts Anderson’s point that the personal motives behind a political position neither validate nor invalidate it, but contends that Anderson’s reading of Miller’s siding with the oppressed as a defense against oedipal guilt is psychologically reductionist. Drawing on Freud’s principles of overdetermination and multiple function, and on Eli Sagan’s distinction between superego and conscience, the author argues that Miller’s politics were also shaped by rational deliberation and by a conscience grounded in identification with the nurturer, and cites Rousseau on pity. Psychoanalytic study of politics, the author maintains, must examine how conflicting motives combine, and he faults approaches that reduce left-wing politics to oedipal aggression and guilt as ideologically biased. The author expresses regret that Miller’s analysis may have strengthened his superego, and concludes that a conscientious politics is a politics of love.

Arthur Miller, artistic creativity, conscious processes, creative work, defensive functions, expressive functions, James W. Anderson, psychohistory, psychological functions, restitutive functions, theoretical traditions

In this response article, part of the symposium on artistic creativity, the author replies to James William Anderson’s lead essay “The Psychology of Artistic Creativity: With Reference to Arthur Miller and The Crucible.” The author agrees with Anderson and Miller that artistic creativity at its best rests on the artist’s most insistent conscious and unconscious processes. The author proposes going further by asking what distinct psychological functions creative work serves for each creator, and distinguishes expressive, defensive, and restitutive functions. The author associates expressive functions with young artists’ search for identity, cites the Bildungsroman, and reads Miller’s emphasis on authenticity in this light. The author contends that psychobiographers stress defensive functions, and discusses Anderson’s account of Miller’s identification with the downtrodden in The Crucible and Timebends. The author maintains that defensive use leaves underlying conflicts unresolved, so the artist must keep returning to them, and points to Miller’s repeated treatment of his conflict between moral principle and desire for Marilyn Monroe in A View from the Bridge and The Misfits. Drawing on Anderson’s account and standard references, the author concludes that The Crucible did not work restitutively for Miller, and proposes that Miller’s last play, Finishing the Picture, indicates he was still seeking restitution. The author acknowledges being less conversant with Miller’s life than Anderson.

architecture, artistic expression, athletic excellence, creativity, ideals, imagination, James W. Anderson, psychohistory, unconscious conflicts

This response article belongs to the symposium on artistic creativity opened by James William Anderson’s “The Psychology of Artistic Creativity: With Reference to Arthur Miller and The Crucible.” The author agrees with Anderson that artists draw on what haunts and troubles them, and takes Arthur Miller’s self-revelation as an example. The author contends that creativity is more widespread than usually recognized, that its process is the same across media and occupations, and that levels of achievement nonetheless differ. Everyday acts of care are not counted as creativity, which the author attributes partly to society’s neglect of women’s contributions. The author proposes that networking can be an art form, citing the salons of Madame Geoffrin and Gertrude Stein and the Burghölzli hospital under Eugen Bleuler and C. G. Jung, and maintains that this talent is more developed among women. Breakthrough creativity is described as pushing boundaries through passion and sustained work, with Humphry Davy, Steve Jobs, and Martin Luther as examples. Turning to psychohistory, the author sees valuable work by Rudolph Binion, Andrew Brink, Peter Loewenberg, Robert Jay Lifton, and Vamik Volkan but no breakthroughs that have caught the wider public imagination. The author attributes this to institutional focus on Freud, speculation, the diffusion of the field’s ideas, and the reluctance of forums such as The New York Review of Books to credit it. The author suggests the problem may be society’s reluctance to accept creativity, and urges its recognition in ordinary lives and in women’s everyday work.

Arthur Miller, artistic creativity, authenticity, creativity, The Crucible, inner experience, introspection, James W. Anderson, Leo Tolstoy, psychobiographical sources, psychohistory

This response article replies to the symposium on artistic creativity, responding to James William Anderson’s lead essay, “The Psychology of Artistic Creativity: With Reference to Arthur Miller and The Crucible.” The author argues that psychobiographical sources are integral to understanding creativity but are not equivalent to it, and that discussion should also address how the artist shapes personal material through craft and authenticity. Anderson attributes the 1953 play to Arthur Miller’s guilt over his relationship with Marilyn Monroe and sets aside Miller’s feelings about McCarthyism as a source. The author questions this and contends that the account is incomplete unless it considers Miller’s whole life, earlier plays such as All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, and recurring themes of betrayal, corruption, and the sins of those in authority. Reading John Proctor as a stand-in for Miller and Abigail as the figure onto whom blame is projected, the author maintains that the play rationalizes Miller’s wish to keep a self-image of moral integrity, and so shows less self-understanding than Anderson credits. The author notes that Miller reached greater self-understanding in later works, including After the Fall, The Price, and Timebends: A Life. The author concludes that the play’s political message and personal conflict are joined, with Abigail serving as a scapegoat for sins Miller could not face.

Arthur Miller, creative process, The Crucible, inner life, James W. Anderson, psychobiographical sources, psychohistory  

In this response article in the symposium on artistic creativity, the author replies to James William Anderson’s essay “The Psychology of Artistic Creativity: With Reference to Arthur Miller and The Crucible,” writing from experience as a psychotherapist who works with artists. The author agrees with much of Anderson’s premise that creative work arises from an artist’s personal conflicts together with historical circumstances, and compares it to C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination. The author cautions, however, that theories of how creativity works risk reducing it to formula. Proposing that what an analysis leaves out may shape what it finds, the author suggests that Miller’s Jewish background is missing from Anderson’s account. The author conjectures that Miller’s relationship with Marilyn Monroe, and his refusal to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, may have borne on his sense of Jewish identity. The author concludes that psychobiography can offer only conjecture, invoking Keats’s idea of negative capability, and expresses appreciation for Anderson’s effort.

Arthur Miller, creative processes, The Crucible, intersection of personal and political, James W. Anderson, messiah role, politics, psychohistory, unconscious, Wilfred Bion

This response article replies to James William Anderson’s lead essay in the symposium on artistic creativity, “The Psychology of Artistic Creativity: With Reference to Arthur Miller and The Crucible,” adding two dimensions to his account of Miller. The first is Wilfred Bion’s observation that small groups choose and groom one member as a messiah, which he equates with mystic and genius. The author proposes that audiences look to artists as such groups do, and reads John Proctor’s death and Miller’s refusal to name names before HUAC in this light. The author maintains that Miller, having survived, remains a hero, not a messiah. The second dimension is the author’s earlier proposal that artistic creation recreates an infant’s experience of the mother’s face. The author reads Miller’s remarks on characters displaced from what they should be as approaching this dynamic. The author further suggests that Miller did not consciously perceive Abigail, an orphan of about sixteen, as Proctor’s victim, and that audiences collude in this refusal to see. The author compares Abigail with the public image of Marilyn Monroe, drawing on Ferenczi’s “Confusion of Tongues.” The author concludes that Miller, like his audience, is both Abigail and Proctor, that a weakness akin to Balint’s basic fault may accompany genius, and that Miller may be recognized more fully over time. The author is admiring of Miller and of the play.

Arthur Miller, artistic creativity, audience, The Crucible, historical lens, inner conflicts, James W. Anderson, psychohistory

This response article, part of the symposium on artistic creativity, replies to “The Psychology of Artistic Creativity: With Reference to Arthur Miller and The Crucible” by James William Anderson. Anderson maintains that artists create from intense inner conflicts, even when their work appears tied to political or social events, and that a play succeeds to the extent that its audience has a corresponding inner conflict. The authors take up these claims from a historicist perspective and pose questions rather than objections. They maintain that conceptions of the singular creative artist, and of authorship as intellectual property linked to copyright, are relatively recent. They ask whether Anderson’s account applies to earlier eras, to scientists, or to writers such as Shakespeare, for whom little biographical evidence survives. They point to collaboration in Shakespeare’s plays (with John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton), in the television show Phineas and Ferb, and in autobiographical memory. They ask how shared authorship bears on the claim that a work reflects one person’s conflicts, and whether inner conflict remains central to a play’s success when large sociopolitical issues are at stake. They state that they do not disagree with Anderson. They contend that his view requires a limited set of inner conflicts recognizable across eras and individuals. They propose that psychologists and psychoanalysts integrate diverse theories of conflict, draw on literary theorists, and pursue empirical study of how conflicts arise and are transformed in various media.

Arthur Miller, artist’s inner life, composition, The Crucible, inner conflicts, James W. Anderson, literature, Marilyn Monroe, psychohistory, unsettling

In this response article to the symposium on artistic creativity, the author replies to James William Anderson’s lead essay, “The Psychology of Artistic Creativity: With Reference to Arthur Miller and The Crucible.” Agreeing with Anderson’s contention that an artist’s finest work typically draws on raw, unfinished, conflictual material, the author says that his account of The Crucible and Arthur Miller’s preoccupation with Marilyn Monroe is something to draw on in teaching literature. The author then qualifies the claim by medium. Abstract forms such as a Bach fugue, the author proposes, could arise from a passion for analytical puzzles rather than from the composer’s psychological conflicts. Representational forms such as literature are richer when they touch an author’s unfinished business, provided emotional roughness is balanced by formal coherence. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is presented as an example. The author compares two lyrics by William Carlos Williams: “As the Cat,” which is thought probably free of personal conflict yet effective, and “This Is Just to Say,” which is linked to tensions in Williams’s own marriage and judged the richer poem. The author concludes that writers achieve some of their best effects when they set aside fear of embarrassment, and cites the poet Sharon Olds in support.

artist analysis, interpretation, intrusive, James W. Anderson, psychobiography, psychohistory

In this response article in the symposium on artistic creativity, the author replies to James William Anderson’s “The Psychology of Artistic Creativity: With Reference to Arthur Miller and The Crucible.” The author defends psychological interpretation of art and artists against two objections: that art speaks for itself, and that only the artist knows why he makes it. In answer, the author maintains that people interpret constantly, that interpretation gives art life, that artists often do not know or do not want to know their motives, and that psychobiography is a research enterprise into creativity. The author holds that the best psychobiography starts from a non-obvious question and arrives at a non-obvious answer, and credits Anderson’s reading of The Crucible with meeting that standard. In the author’s account, Anderson finds emotional force in a play often taken as a sociological polemic and traces a political stance to guilt, so that art becomes a form of hiding. The author is admiring of this reading and calls for more psychobiography of this kind.

artistic interpretation, audience, creative interpretations, The Crucible, James W. Anderson, life story, Mona Lisa, psychobiography, psychohistory

This response article belongs to the symposium on artistic creativity and replies to James William Anderson’s lead essay, “The Psychology of Artistic Creativity: With Reference to Arthur Miller and The Crucible.” The author considers what psychobiography adds to the appreciation of art. Noting Anderson’s claim that Arthur Miller drew on his relationship with Marilyn Monroe and on his confrontation with anti-communist persecution in the late 1940s and 1950s when writing about the Salem Witch Trials, the piece maintains that audiences can find their own meaning in The Crucible without that knowledge. It contends that Miller’s biography adds a further dimension, provided it is not presented as the only correct interpretation. It proposes that psychobiography can also explain changes in an artist’s style and content over time, and offers Vincent van Gogh’s move from The Potato Eaters to his bright wheat field paintings near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence as an example, attributing the change in part to a more stable environment. Recounting a visit to the René Magritte Museum in Brussels, the author describes disillusionment on learning of Magritte’s reported statement that his paintings had no deeper meaning, and a resulting reluctance to look for meaning in them. The piece concludes that psychobiography can enrich the experience of art and serve a teaching role, so long as people keep searching for their own meaning.

Alfred J. Devlin, Arthur Miller, artistic creativity, Conversations with Tennessee Williams, inner tension, mid-20th century, playwright, psychohistory, Tennessee Williams, unconscious mind

In this article, the author replies to the respondents in the symposium on artistic creativity that followed his lead essay, “The Psychology of Artistic Creativity: With Reference to Arthur Miller and The Crucible.” He restates his central position that artists create out of their inner, personal preoccupations and conflicts, and he notes that no respondent disputed it. He treats commentaries stressing historical, ideological, and other personal influences as supplements, and he credits Alan C. Elms and William Todd Schultz with adding to his account. His main objection is to the term reductionism, which he maintains misdescribes his claim: inner concerns fuel creation but do not supply a key to interpreting a work. Answering Lisa Ruddick’s doubt that the account covers all artists, he argues that even a brief poem by William Carlos Williams may be emotionally motivated. He offers an example from his clinical practice and a private communication from David M. Terman on Gustav Mahler. Answering Monisha Pasupathi, Vimala C. Pasupathi, and Benjamin Armintor on collaboration, he proposes that each collaborator’s psychology shapes individual contributions, citing em>Casablanca and Verdi and Boito. Answering Irene Javors, he reads Miller’s autobiography Timebends as indicating conflicted feelings about Judaism. He finds no evidence for her speculation about Miller and Marilyn Monroe, and he concludes that psychobiographers must let evidence determine their conclusions.

adolescence, dependency, empathetic mirroring, family dynamics, idealization, identical twin, psychohistory, sibling relationships, visual talents

This article presents the autobiographical narrative of art historian and painter Carol Bird Ravenal, excerpted from a 2011 e-mail question-and-answer dialogue for the Makers of Psychohistory Research Project. The author recounts her Brooklyn childhood, her admiration for and sense of being engulfed by her artistic mother, and her closeness to her identical twin, which she connects to recurring imagery in her paintings. She describes her studies at Brooklyn College and Harvard, a doctoral thesis on five restored houses in Providence, her marriage and three children, and her teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design and American University. She reports a five-year psychoanalysis with Paul Gray beginning in 1980 and what she took from it about her marriage, twinship, and art, which she characterizes as a search for resolution of opposites. She is critical of some contemporary performance art, of art-historical training that lacks visual judgment, and of Clement Greenberg’s influence. She proposes that creative activity may be driven by loss rather than abundance. The narrative closes with summaries of her interpretations of Edvard Munch, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Matisse, relating each artist’s work to childhood experience and family relationships, and mentions her collaboration with psychiatrist Harold W. Wylie, Jr., on Munch. She concludes that the creative life has sustained her and her twin.

American expatriate, art analysis, creativity, fascist heroism, lesbian, missing person, portrait, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, Romaine Goddard Brooks

This article offers a psychobiographical interpretation of the American expatriate painter Romaine Goddard Brooks (1874–1970), focusing on her portraits and her relationship to fascism. The author, who disclaims training as a psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, or psychohistorian, draws on Brooks’s unpublished memoir No Pleasant Memories, her correspondence with the Italian writer Gabriele d’Annunzio, works including The Impeders, The White Bird, Au bord de la mer, and her 1923 self-portrait, and a 2007 interview with the writer Charles Henri Ford. Using psychoanalytic concepts of idealization, mirroring, and idealized self-objects, the author argues that the childhood of abandonment and abuse Brooks describes produced a need for protection and control. The author reads that need in her heroic self-images, restrained gray palette, and sexual ambiguity. The author contends that fascist aesthetics are visible in her work, notes that most art historians avoid the subject, and attributes her sympathy for fascism to her identification with suffering outsiders, her need for order, and her longing for a male authority figure. The author maintains that her engagement was imaginative rather than ideological. The article concludes that Brooks’s search for a defender led her to turn a blind eye to what was happening to her Jewish friends, and criticizes her for overlooking that enduring power requires a moral basis.

art analysis, assertion, containment, diaries, Donald Kuspit, emotional state, An Interview with Louise Bourgeois, Louise Bourgeois, mastery, memories, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, sculptures, triumph

This article offers a psychobiographical interpretation of the artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), applying psychoanalytic ideas to her work. These include Freud’s formula of ego replacing id and Anna Freud’s account of identification with the aggressor. The evidence base is Bourgeois’s own record: notes and diaries kept from girlhood, late-life interviews including one with Donald Kuspit, the film The Spider, The Mistress, The Tangerine and Myself (2008), and her glossary in the catalogue for the 2007 Tate retrospective. The author argues that her sense of being unwanted by a father who had wanted a son, and of a household marked by his humiliation of family members and his infidelity, shaped her art. The article reads the phallic projections in her sculpture as assertions of presence and power. It interprets the Femme Maison works as images of a woman defined by household duties, and connects that theme to her identification with her mother. It reads The Blind Leading the Blind and Destruction of the Father as a shift from passive fear to active aggression. The author proposes that Bourgeois’s creative process functioned like a psychoanalysis, converting painful memory into insight. The article concludes that her work explores her emotional experience and carries universal significance.

balloon, Barbara Rose, construction, disappointments, fears, figurative work, imagination, Magdalena Abakanowicz, psychohistory, reconstruction, transformation

In this article, the author applies Hanna Segal’s Kleinian psychoanalytic aesthetics to the work of Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz, focusing on her 2006 installation Agora in Grant Park, Chicago. The evidence is the artist’s published statements, biographical accounts and critical literature, together with the author’s own experience of the installation. The article outlines Abakanowicz’s childhood on an estate near Warsaw, the German invasion of 1939, her training under Socialist realism, and the development of her work from the woven Abakans of the 1960s to the later cast figures. It identifies recurring themes of the hollow shape, the multiplied form becoming a crowd, and the hand-worked surface. It rejects Freud’s psychobiographical method as reductive, especially for a living artist. It contrasts Freud’s emphasis on sublimation and verbal content with Segal’s emphasis on reparation, aggression, and formal qualities, while crediting Freud with anticipating a parallel process between artist and viewer. It maintains that Segal’s original ideas, tied to the depressive position, suit contemporary art less well, though her later work on symbolization and psychic truth extends them. The article argues that Abakanowicz transformed traumatic childhood events into monumental sculptural environments. It further argues that viewers, through introjective identification, unconsciously relive the artist’s experience of creating, and that contemporary works are completed by each viewer. It concludes by proposing an oedipal, triangular relationship among viewer, work, and artist.

America’s greatest parks, Biltmore Estate, book review, Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted, Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted: Abolitionist, Conservationist, and Designer of Central Park, Greenspan: The Man Behind Money, Justin Martin, landscape architecture, life study, model suburbs, Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon, political landscape, psychohistory, public spaces, social landscape, Stanford University, U.S. Capitol

This review of Justin Martin’s Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted: Abolitionist, Conservationist, and Designer of Central Park (2011) addresses a biography of the landscape architect (1822–1903) for readers in psychohistory and psychobiography. The reviewer describes Martin, a journalist, as covering Olmsted’s formative years, his varied early careers, his 1850s reporting on the antebellum South for the New York Times, his role in preserving Yosemite and Niagara Falls, his design of Central Park and other public spaces, and his leadership of the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. The reviewer reports Martin’s contention that Olmsted shaped American attitudes through reasoned argument, that The Cotton Kingdom influenced British policy toward the Confederacy, and that public parks answered a psychological need of city dwellers. On Olmsted’s inner life, the reviewer summarizes Martin’s account of his mother’s death when he was four, his insomnia, alternating frantic activity and depression, breakdowns, and commitment to an asylum in 1898. The reviewer observes that Martin treats childhood influences lightly and appears to attribute Olmsted’s difficulties to brain chemistry, with one reference to bipolar disorder. The reviewer judges the biography lively and comprehensive and concludes that Martin conveys a life of both torment and achievement while largely avoiding psychological jargon.

book review, childhood, Diane Arbus, An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, photography, psychohistory, psychology, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Todd Schultz

This book review assesses William Todd Schultz’s An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus (Bloomsbury, 2011), a psychological study of the American photographer Diane Arbus (1923–1971). The reviewer reports that Schultz applies John Bowlby’s attachment theory to her childhood in a wealthy Manhattan family, characterizing her as anxiously attached. He finds this account plausible, while noting that her adult behavior did not clearly match the pattern described, and proposes that her marriage to Allan Arbus may have moderated it. Drawing partly on his own acquaintance with Arbus, he is critical of Schultz’s claims linking her inner life to her photographs, judging them speculative and reductionist and faulting the book for lacking a theory of art. He disputes Schultz’s contention that Arbus made her sitters reflect her own feelings, arguing that photography records rather than makes and that her strongest portraits reflect both sitter and photographer. He also disagrees with Schultz’s assessment of her psychotherapy. He maintains that her suicide had more to do with health, financial, and medication circumstances than with her photography. He questions Schultz’s dismissal of Revelations (2003) alongside his frequent citation of it, and his reliance on Patricia Bosworth’s biography, which the reviewer regards as unreliable. He concludes that Schultz illuminates Arbus psychologically but that her artistry may need a photographer-writer to illuminate it.

Barack Obama, childhood dynamics, decision making, family influence, International Psychohistorical Association (IPhA), Janny Scott, mother-son relationship, psychohistory, Psychohistory Forum, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother

In this article, two psychohistorians, Ken Fuchsman and Paul H. Elovitz, continue an exchange begun in the December 2009 issue on how Barack Obama’s childhood and family shaped his decision making and presidency. The dialogue grew out of presentations at the Psychohistory Forum’s Research Group on the Childhood, Personality, and Psychology of Presidents, at the International Psychohistorical Association meeting at Fordham University on June 9, 2011. It draws on Janny Scott’s A Singular Woman, Obama’s Dreams from My Father, and Obama’s reported statements. Elovitz contends that Ann Obama’s parenting, including her discouragement of open anger, prepared her son for the presidency and bears on his limited public expression of anger, while he also sought a life different from hers. Fuchsman stresses Obama’s mixed response to his mother, citing their separations, his identification as African American, and his search for stability. He argues that Obama’s pursuit of compromise with Republicans, despite substantial legislation, let opponents set the agenda. Elovitz adds that race, congressional ownership of legislation, public ambivalence at midterms, and reception of Obama’s speaking style also matter. They disagree over whether Ann Obama’s anthropological outlook and the Indonesian years influenced him, and over whether his foreign-policy interventions trace to his mother. Both regard him as less compromising abroad than at home. Elovitz concludes that space does not permit judging whether Obama acts on the values he attributes to her, and the two note that their approaches have moved closer.

conscience, ego ideal, Eli Sagan, Freud, Women and Morality: The Psychology of Good and Evil, Freudian theory, Melanie Klein, moral development, Oedipus complex, psychoanalytic theory, psychohistory, Sigmund Freud, self-observation, sociology, superego

This article presents the author’s appreciation of Eli Sagan’s contributions to psychoanalytic theory and psychohistory, centered on Freud, Women and Morality: The Psychology of Good and Evil (1988). The author maintains that Sagan corrects a deficiency in Freudian theory by distinguishing conscience, which is grounded in attachment and concern for others, from the superego, which is fueled by aggression turned against the self and formed by internalizing a culture that may be racist, sexist, or heterosexist. Citing Paul Bloom’s “The Moral Life of Babies” and the Kleinian distinction between persecutory and depressive guilt, the author contends that conscience arises far earlier than the Freudian superego. Huck’s dilemma in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Robert Lifton’s work on Nazi doctors are offered as illustrations. The article also outlines Sagan’s earlier books, from Cannibalism (1974) to Citizens and Cannibals (2001), and his stage theory of social evolution, developed from Talcott Parsons and Robert Bellah. In the author’s account, Sagan sees a gradual widening of liberty and rights, interrupted by periodic regressions such as Stalinism and Nazism. The author sides with Sagan and Rousseau in locating conscience in feeling rather than reason, against Franz Alexander and Sandor Ferenczi, who sought elimination of the superego. The author concludes that conscience arises through identification with the nurturer and operates through reciprocity of love, while the superego arises through identification with the aggressor and operates through revenge.

boarding school, bullying culture, English school, guilt, psychobiography, psychohistory, sexual exploration, shame, sibling-relationships, victimization

In this article, the author recalls his years at an English boys’ boarding school in the 1930s, a private institution founded on non-conformist Christian principles to teach middle-class values. He describes a regime of military-style parades, widespread corporal punishment, an emphasis on competitive sports, and a fagging system in which the youngest boys served as servants to senior students. He also describes a prohibition on any discussion of sex and teachers’ contradictory messages about class superiority and individual worth. He reports that the school sanctioned and modeled bullying, that boys learned to lie and keep silent to avoid humiliation, that even the gentlest fags became bullies, and that breaking rules undetected brought prestige. He recalls a senior master whose kindness offered refuge from the school’s ethos, and he maintains that boys confined to all-male institutions seek affection where they can. He states that shame and guilt kept him silent throughout his life, and that he is now over 90. He argues that punishment distorts truth, confuses pain with justice, and encourages false beliefs. He contends that such schools were common across Europe and its colonies and that their culture of military supremacy helped justify domination of distant nations. He proposes that the grievances of suppressed populations contributed to two world wars and the Holocaust, and he calls for the historical role of punishment to be addressed within a framework of international justice.

9/11 terrorist attack, blind spots, David Beisel, German invasion of the Soviet Union, historical landscape, Pearl Harbor, psychohistory, psychology of terrorism, unconscious motivation, World War II (WWII)

This response article replies to David Beisel’s contribution to the September 2011 symposium on military and diplomatic blind spots and traumatic reliving. Beisel contends that unconsciously motivated blind spots recur in history, citing Stalin before the German invasion of 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt before Pearl Harbor, and the Bush administration and most Americans before 9/11. The author observes that Beisel is more concerned with establishing that blind spots occurred than with explaining them. The author questions his hypothesis linking 1990s preoccupation with stock portfolios to inattention to warning signs, doubting that most Americans held portfolios. The author calls interesting but too grand his suggestion that later crises, including the Korean War, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Iranian hostage crisis, were unconsciously arranged reliving of Pearl Harbor, maintaining that each would require book-length study of State Department and presidential records. The author also disputes Beisel’s opening example, arguing that Hitler was not blind but identified himself with Christ and foresaw his own crucifixion. Citing The Sign of the Cross: From Golgotha to Genocide and The Mind of Stalin: A Psychoanalytic Study, the author proposes that Stalin’s identification with the aggressor, in Anna Freud’s sense, kept him from anticipating Hitler’s attack. The author concludes that only in-depth study of the evidence can substantiate such hypotheses. An editor’s note says the essay was omitted through a technical problem and is now published.

analyst community, book review, Madness and Murder: Eigen in Seoul, Volume 1, Michael Eigen, Object Relations, psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic seminars, psychohistory, The Psychotic Core, Seoul

This book review considers Michael Eigen’s Madness and Murder: Eigen in Seoul, Volume 1 (Karnac, 2011), which collects three seminars given to an analytic community in Seoul in 2007. The reviewer reports that the seminars begin from Freud’s view of the early ego and then take up Melanie Klein on annihilation anxiety and the paranoid-schizoid and depressive phases, D. W. Winnicott on the infant’s scream as communication, and Wilfred Bion on wounded nourishment. The final seminars, drawing on Eigen’s own work including Toxic Nourishment, turn to destructiveness in relationships, how the other survives it, and contrasting maternal responses to an infant’s vitality. The reviewer judges that Eigen’s insights show how these analysts complement and reinforce one another. The review then addresses psychohistorians, whom it characterizes as favoring universalist theory. It cites David Beisel’s family-systems work, Lloyd deMause’s evolution of parenting modes, the Oedipus complex, and Margaret Mahler’s account of early development as examples. The reviewer proposes Eigen’s synthesis as a paradigm for the pre-oedipal zone of early hazards and traumas. It argues that these persist into adult life and are displaced onto history, and suggests that reconstructing the self before splitting may clarify the form, direction, and tenacity of the splitting on which much psychohistorical work rests.