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Book Reviews
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 26, N. 2, Fall 1998
The Enduring Effects of Prenatal
Experience: Echoes from the Womb, Ludwig Janus. Northvale, NJ:
Aronson, 1997. 266pp.
Reviewed by Richard Morrock
Ludwig Janus, a German psychoanalyst, has produced a valuable work on a subject which so far has not often been seriously researched. At a time when few depth psychologists are looking into the lasting effects of birth-related events, others, of the cognitive persuasion, are insisting that even memories from childhood and adolescence are lost forever.
It has been known for sometime, by a few, that birth is not only traumatic, and at times deeply so, but that birth trauma remains buried in the deepest layers of the mind and can influence the development of neurotic symptoms in later life. Freud recognized this in his discussion of the "Wolf-Man" case. However, psychoanalysis was later to stray from this notion by attributing neurosis entirely to developments from age three onward. But in recent years, psychoanalysts are again looking at the events of earliest infancy.
Janus is not a follower of Melanie Klein, whose bizarre conception of infants as cannibalistic psychopaths has never been corroborated by recovered memories. Rather, his views are closer to those of Arthur Janov, founder of primal therapy, who argues for more humane birth practices, and recognizes the newborn as a "bundle of need."
The author enhances our comprehension of birth trauma/imagery in fairy tales and contemporary myths. He is probably correct in seeing stories of sleeping heroines awakened by the kiss of a handsome prince (e.g. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty) as recapitulations of birth experience. But one might also argue that such stories symbolize the loss of the real self during childhood, which is recovered with the experience of romantic love. These two levels of interpretation complement rather than contradict each other.
There is an interesting discussion of the symbolic roles of eagles and snakes, who are found in the mythologies of many cultures. Generally, the eagle is assumed to be the ruler of the sky, while the snake is obviously of the earth. Janus suggests that snakes may also represent the umbilical cord, while eagles may perhaps symbolize the newborn freed from the womb.
But I am hesitant to accept Janus's assertions that such modern tales as ET and Superman can be profitably understood in light of birth trauma. There are a number of plausible alternative interpretations of ET. It would be more to the point to view the original legend of Superman, created by the team of Siegal and Schuster in the late 1930's, as a defense against Jewish feelings of powerlessness in the face of rising Nazism. Superman is compelled to live in "exile" because of the loss of his home planet. He has to assimilate by adopting the alternate identity of Clark Kent. The name of his chief criminal nemesis is Lex Luthor (the law of Martin Luther).
From a psychohistorical perspective, I wish that Janus had more seriously considered relationships of birth trauma and political movements, especially those advocating a "national awakening," or following a messianic leader who pledges to "deliver" his nation. But this could easily fill another book. As is, Janus's work represents an important contribution to a neglected area of study.
Strange Dislocations: Childhood and
the Idea of Human Interiority: 1780-1930, Carolyn Steedman.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995.
Reviewed by B. K. Faunce
Mary Washington College
In Strange Dislocations, Carolyn Steedman proposes to map the various metamorphoses of Mignon, Goethe's child-acrobat in Wilhelm Meister (1795-96), as the character is rewritten and reshaped throughout the 19th and 20th centuries in literature, science, law and social history. Her purpose is to demonstrate how the physically deformed yet psychically charged Mignon serves as an on-going metaphor for Western culture's changing attitudes about children, and how these in turn reflect Modernity's growing concerns about the self. Mignon, quite simply, functions as a mirror for reflecting and displacing the desires of the adults around her, in particular male adults. Wilhelm, for example, sees in Mignon "his own childhood, turned within himself," an inner space in which the crisis of parental exclusion might be elided and the split or castrated subject overcome. For this reason, according to Steedman, the extra-textual life of Mignon embodies what is most uncanny (Freud's unheimlich), since what is familiar about the child her relation to the woman's body is also what is most unfamiliar. She conjures images of that birthplace from which we have come, but from which we have nonetheless been barred. These strange dislocations, then, represent a "fantasy of origins" in which a "psychological discourse was used to fashion a child-figure that explained new topographies of the human body." Human growth and the mystery of life and death become fixated and, it is hoped, fixed in a "semiology of infancy," a discursive transition between masculine and feminine that finds ontological lossÑthe subject's loss of the primary object assuming "the shape and form of a child."
In spite of the fact that I was genuinely impressed with Steedman's account of Mignon and the historical, social and psychological narratives which underscore our fascination with childhood as an image of the inner self, Strange Dislocations remains a difficult book to recommend. Numerous redundancies compromise the seriousness of her argument. Steedman writes that "[w]hat follows is a history of a visceral sense of insideness, of an interiorised selfhood that the word Mignon and the cluster of ideas and beliefs embodied in Ôchild' allow us to retrieve; and of the how and why of its coming into being." This same idea, in virtually identical language, is repeated at the end and the beginning of each chapter giving the impression of an author still struggling to master her material. She might have trusted the reader's ability to follow the thesis. Even more disconcerting are the number of sentence-level errors throughout the book, exacerbated by too many unnecessary parenthetical remarks, strained, often long-winded sentences, and at times, outright contradictions. The author states that "[m]odern fascination with the sexual abuse of children is quite new;" yet in the very next paragraph, she writes: "The child molested and abused is one of the most commonly told stories of the late twentieth century."
Given the fact that child abuse has risen to epidemic proportions in postmodern America, a serious exploration of the adult fantasies which have helped contextualize this abuse would seem imperative. Unfortunately, Strange Dislocations leaves the reader more frustrated than enlightened.
The Artist and the Emotional World:
Creativity and Personality, John E. Gedo. New York, NY: Columbia
Univ. Press, 1996. xv, 255pp. $18.00 (Paperback) $49.00
(Hardcover)
Reviewed by Carol Bird Ravenal
American University
Gedo's book is a systematic study of personality features requisite for the creative producer. Data and conclusions are gleaned from his own observations over four decades of analytic work and a study of about fifty major figures among the visual, literary, and musical arts. From my personal experience as artist and art historian, many of Gedo's core motivational theories appear valid.
Opposed to the narrower drive theories of Freud, who thought all creative activity to be motivated by sublimated instinctual drives, Gedo holds that creativity is not a by-product of id sublimation but formed by preconscious aspects of the ego. He notes that there is no lack of passion in art. Indeed some art works, such as Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, are quite capable of inspiring men to action. Freud never seems all that clear about the element of passion/intensity in the instinctual transformation. He seems to believe that the ardor is deflected into a socially acceptable, less physically aggressive area. Perhaps it is possible to redefine sublimation, or creative replacement, as a manifestation of preconscious and conscious aspects of the ego, as well as the id, in a secondary activity. This activity results in redefinition of the primary impetus. I think that all of these areas are needed in creative production.
Nor does Gedo accept Greenacre's assumption that creative activity is essentially a reparation of childhood deficiencies. She says that the artist undertakes his journey into insight and self-esteem partially to achieve a substitute and more satisfactory "love affair with the world." This world, a replacement for the ambivalent parents, admires the artist as well as his work, unconditionally. This is not to suggest that the solitary artist loves or is able to relate to his public.
Gedo believes that the creative individual is often misunderstood by those around him because of constitutional idiosyncrasies, and must consciously undertake the forming of self. This is precipitated when the artist is faced with crisis and reaffirmed in exercising talent that leads to reward for creative work. George Klein's notion of "vital pleasure" is defined by the author as the joy exercised through competence or "effectance." I found "effectance" true as a sustaining principle. But it may be that the two notions, effectance and the secondary hope for an anchoring or at least affirmative public, are merged in the obsessive nature of most artistic work. Certainly pleasure and desire, if not the compulsion to work, have been strongly present in artists that I have studied (Gauguin, Munch, and Matisse).
The "Janusian" idea, formulated by Ehrenzweig, referring to the ability of the artist to think in two disjunctive modes simultaneously, is of great importance for understanding artistic work. I came to the same conclusion independently in my work on Matisse. However, Gedo holds that the mark of true genius involves the confluence of several factors: constitutional; characterological, including the capacity to tolerate isolation; boldness; choice of perfection in work over all else; and sufficient stimulus. These are all codetermined by values of the environment. For example, if a society values order, discipline, harmony, and is authoritarian, only those artists that adhere to such a scheme will be valued and survive. If however, a society is in a period of disintegration, introspection, and chaos, artists such as Gericault or Delacroix might reflect, even inaugurate change.
Gedo believes that great art should reflect ethical values and social utility. This view of art might eliminate those great artists who practiced primarily for formal, expressive, or fantastic aims. This might make one wonder about his analytic neutrality, but not really. The text appears to be a synthesis of a close and long view. Listening to the tribulations of talented analysands over the years, devoted to helping them relieve their deficient self-esteem, Gedo correlates his experience with the life history and works of the greatest contributors to society, some on the edge of dysfunction. Considering the efficacy of creative accomplishment in restoring fragile egos, Gedo was inspired by both patients and geniuses for their remarkable dedication and resolve to reconstruct themselves through their art. This self-affirmation, although originating in personal experience and expressed in artistic objects, has also been a reflection of the psychohistory of their age.
Ignatius of Loyola: The Psychology of a
Saint, W.W. Meissner. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1994.
xxix, 479pp. $18.00 (Paperback) $45.00 (Hardcover)
Reviewed by Frederick Harling
Westfield State College
If you are looking for a strong biography of Ignatius of Loyola, read this book. The author, a Jesuit and noted psychoanalyst, has put all the significant historical and biographical material together in a careful and appreciative manner. Anyone interested in psychobiography and Freudian psychology will find this book a rare treat.
Meissner is quite clear about his motives for this project. The dominant force in his spiritual life has been the example of Ignatius, and the dominant motivational force in his intellectual life has been Sigmund Freud. Meissner states that "my path through life has been an effort to integrate these two disparate influences in some meaningful wayÉthese two diverging yet interacting and intersecting influences will be in play throughout what follows." The author does exactly what he has said.
He does not ignore methodology. In attempting to understand Loyola, "correspondence and coherence compliment each other in the search for historical truth." Nor does he forget the clash of psychoanalysis and faith. While he strongly appreciates the Freudian approach, he believes that it has limits. But it may be a means of purging faith of all idolatry. Yet the question of faith or non-faith ultimately "does not rest with psychoanalysis."
The author's strong knowledge of historical and biographical detail allows him to create a firm foundation for his Freudian interpretation. Meissner's strict Sitz im Leben historicism about Loyola's specific context sets a limit for any historical criticism of this biography. Ignatius' life "took place in the context of a highly specific value systemÉIn additionÉLoyola was a child of the catholic culture of sixteenth-century Spain, both in his role as a sword-swinging amorous courtier and hidalgo and in his role as a potential ascetic."
Within these historical boundaries, Meissner relentlessly applies his psychoanalytic skills. He is at times critical of his subject, as when he asserts that "Loyola's reactive traits cannot be ignored." These traits are exhibitionism, grandiosity, exploitation, and manipulation, as well as being alternatively and inconsistently tender and rigid in dealing with subordinates. "One might conclude that the possession and exercise of power was a conflictual issue that he never adequately resolved, to the end of his life."
Toward the end of the book Meissner raises the etiological question of divine and/or psychic causality. "We cannot hope to encompass the full scope of his [Loyola's] spiritual life and doctrine without articulating them with what we can piece together of his inner spiritual life. His spiritual life under grace had a profound effect on his psychic life, but I maintain that his psychic life had its own influence on the pattern and content of his spiritual and mystical ascent on the mystical mountain." This is a "both ends" approach in that the spiritual and psychic aspects of life are viewed as being interrelated. Meissner seems to view the spiritual and psychic as different, but I wonder if they could not also be viewed as the same?
For psychohistorians this book is about "as good as it gets." The author leaves no stone unturned, whether he is covering issues of asceticism, prayer, sex, narcissism, faith, authoritarianism, oedipal relationships, mysticism, or religious experience. Nothing is "off limits." Meissner believes that "psychoanalysis can supply some information which cannot be arrived at by other meansÉSince it is one of the principles of our thinking to master the material of the external world psychically, it seems to me that thanks are due to psychoanalysis if when it is applied to a great man, it contributes to the understanding of his great achievement."
Meissner's vast psychoanalytic knowledge and clinical experience leaves him with few equals, and perhaps uniquely qualified to write this psychobiography. This is must reading for psychohistorians. For me, reading it was a therapeutic experience in the best sense of the term.
Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1 The
Years of Persecution, 1933-1939, Saul Friedlander. New York:
Harper Collins, 1997. 436pp. $30.00 (Hardcover)
Reviewed by Albert Schmidt
Brandeis University
Every year, historians of the Holocaust are confronted with a new book heralded by publishers and reviewers alike as the one that makes the incomprehensible comprehensible. Saul Friedlander's newest requires no hype to convince the reader that it is authoritative. Its style is as seductive as its presentation is powerful. Nazi Germany and the Jews should prove immensely influential and definitive in the tradition of the great Raul Hilberg. And this is only Volume One.
The book is remarkable because it boldly addresses the two perhaps most controversial issues of the Holocaust: the role of Hitler and the role of the German people. In contrast to ordinary racial anti-Semitism, Hitler followed a "redemptive" variant that demanded a final apocalyptic showdown between Germans and "world Jewry." Only by eliminating this source of all degenerative influences could the triumphant Aryan race possibly achieve final salvation. Friedlander finds that the intellectual roots of this hyper-aggressive anti-Semitism grew from the pseudo Christian, ultra-nationalist Wagner groupies who gathered at Bayreuth for the annual Walpurgesnacht-like orgy of race and religion. It was this fusion "of a murderous rage and an idealistic' goal" to which Hitler and a few other influential members of the Nazi elite subscribed. Here is where Friedlander leaves the psychohistorian wanting more. Despite the strength of the author's case, Hitler's anti-Semitism surely had a more complex and personal foundation. Why was Hitler more receptive to "redemptive" anti-Semitism than other Nazis? But, perhaps more importantly, Friedlander does clearly demonstrate the central role, and therefore the primary, albeit secret, responsibility, of Hitler in the extermination of the Jews.
The responsibility of the German people is entirely different though no less important than that of the Nazi elite. The German people, "ordinary" anti-Semites though they might have been, "shied away from widespread violence against [the Jews], urging neither their expulsion from the Reich nor their physical annihilation." Their crime was one of quietly accepting and deliberately ignoring the social and economic segregation of the Jews carried out by the SS and the government ministries involved in the Jewish Question. This deadly combination of acute fanaticism at the top and general passivity/compliance at the bottom made the Holocaust possible.
Rather than focusing exclusively on the agenda of the methodical perpetrators or the pleas of bewildered victims, Friedlander juxtaposes the voices of both in his narrative. When the Nazi regime takes an action, we are also provided with the reactions of ordinary Germans, Jewish and Christian alike. It is this integrated framework that allows us a unique opportunity to witness the cause-and-effect relation between idealistic intent and brutal reality.
Psychohistorians will feel some disappointment with Friedlander, because they know that certain vital questions about Hitler and the Germans cannot be answered by conventional means alone. It is well known that the author is sufficiently conversant with the unconscious to try. But this conservative approach and the fact that no one surpasses his level of professional integrity and sound judgment will help give this book an enduring strength.
Richard Nixon: A Psychobiography, Vamik D.
Volkan, Norman Itzkowitz, and Andrew W. Dod. NY: Columbia
University Press, 1997. xii, 190pp.
Reviewed by Henry Lawton
Institute for Psychohistory
As the first President to resign his office, Richard Nixon will always occupy a unique place as one of the great tragic/infamous figures of our political tradition. He was a totally political man, who lived for combat in the arena of politics; yet at the height of his career he resigned his office, consigning himself to a kind of death in life until he died for real. Nixon was a man that people either loved or hated, there was seldom any middle ground of feeling about him. He has been the subject of many biographies of varying quality in the last 35 years; the public record about every phase of his life, especially his life in politics, is immense. Yet there remains a sense of mystery about the man. Why was he the way he was? Why did this most political of men destroy himself politically? What drove him to such ignominious disgrace? The full truth may never be known, but scholars continue to write and try to understand.
Richard Nixon: A Psychobiography, one of the most recent efforts to comprehend this man, is both illuminating and disappointing. The authors profitably bring a strong degree of psychoanalytic sophistication to their subject. They proceed on "the premise that, just as in the clinical situation or with a creative endeavor, the psychobiographical subject has products' and creations that are available for examination. In Richard Nixon's case, we looked at his political thinking, decisions, and actions as his Ôproducts' and creations and we selected certain ones for closer examination." This is fine as far as it goes, but in giving less attention to his childhood and family relationships, the authors limit the quality of their, and our, insights into this man. However, they are especially insightful on the narcissistic aspects of Nixon's personality (something I had not thought of when I first wrote about him some 25 years ago). "With Richard Nixon we see exaggerated narcissism, but not malignant narcissism. Nixon organized his personality at such a level that he had an exaggerated need to be Ônumber one' in his own eyes as well as in the eyes of others His need to be number one' found an echo in reality since he was in fact successful most of the time. It is this congruence with reality that ultimately differentiates successful people with narcissistic personality organization from those who, having such an organization, try to maintain their grandiose selves in the absence of realistic validation." Their insights on this aspect of Nixon was the best part of the book.
What the authors present on Nixon's childhood and family relations is fine, but there needs to be more. There is a huge, readily available public record, plus extensive oral history materials in the Nixon Library. By not looking at this material more extensively, the authors miss some important aspects of Nixon's emotional dynamics.
It is clear that Nixon's father, Frank, was an angry, contentious man, who could certainly be scary to his children. "Frank was a thumper' he would snap his index finger against the boys' heads when they angered him. And the other boys angered him frequently, while RichardÉmanaged generally to stay out of troubleÉHannah [Nixon's mother] stood on the sidelines and kept peace" (Hoyt, p. 188). Nixon recalled that "Dad played no favorites with usÉI used to tell my brothers not to argue with himÉDadÉexpected to be obeyed under all circumstancesÉthe only way to deal with him was to abide by the rules he laid down. Otherwise, I would have probably felt the touch of a ruler or the strap as my brothers did" (Kornitzer, p. 79). Nixon was right to the point about his mother who "loved me completely and selflessly..." (Richard Nixon, p.13). She never had to raise her voice at her children, she did not have to. Her calm verbal discipline was so awesome that the children would plead for spankings by their dad rather than a lecture from her (Hoyt, pp. 183-184). Thus, Nixon and his siblings lacked consistent nurturance from either parent.
While the authors note the tragic losses and separations Nixon endured in his youth, they give little consideration to the emotional effect of these experiences on him. "He sank into a deep impenetrable silence. From that time on, it seemed Richard was trying to be three sons in one, striving even harder than before to make up to his father and me for our loss" (Hannah Nixon, pp. 212-13). Nixon was never quite able to mourn for his own sense of loss because he was too driven to make it up to his parents. The force of unresolved grief (see Wolfenstein) is a powerful dynamic for this man.
Perhaps the authors' major omission has to do with the persistent pattern of crisis and resurrection that is one of the hallmarks of Nixon's life. They allude to it here and there, but always as an isolated phenomenon: e.g. "Not having had a Ôgood enough' mother most likely contributed to Nixon's need to resurrect himself from the disgrace and humiliation of his resignation from the presidency." OK, but why did he have to resign? In his memoirs, Nixon admits that he set himself up for his fall via a number of poor decisions. Getting into crisis and successfully surmounting it had been an aspect of his emotional life at least since high school. As he grew older the crises became increasingly extreme, and the narcissistic gratification of resurrecting himself greater and greater. When he lost the governor's race in California and made his famous "you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore" speech, it was widely regarded as an act of political suicide. Winning the Presidency a few years later was felt by many to be one of the great political comebacks ever. Nixon went on to win in his second term by the biggest vote margin in American history, and then resigned during his second term, turning success into disgrace and failure. All things considered, his comeback after the resignation was indeed remarkable. While the authors are quite correct that we need to understand "Americans' perceptions of a fallen Ôhero,'" we also need to understand that Nixon had been locked into a progressively more destructive pattern of crisis and resurrection since childhood. He knew on some level that he would be trying to come back. For example, he told Haldeman that "We'll survive. Despite all the polls and the rest, I think there's still a hell of a lot of people out thereÑand you know they want to believe..." ("Sightings of the Last New Nixon," p. 22).
Even though this book has problems, psychohistorians interested in Nixon can profitably learn from it and should read it closely. Do not stop with this book, though; Nixon is a complex man and challenging historical figure who does not lend himself to easy understanding. Because he has been so much a part of American political life in the last half of this century, it is important that we try to know what he is about.
A somewhat less detailed, shorter version of this review will
appear in a future issue of Clio's Psyche. Readers wishing a much
more detailed psychobiographical discussion of Nixon's life might
wish to consult my article: "Milhous Rising," Journal
of Psychohistory, 6, #4 (Spring 1979), 519-542.
Hoyt, Edwin, The Nixons: An American Family. NY: Random House,
1972.
Kornitzer, Bela, The Real Nixon. NY: Rand McNally, 1960.
Nixon, Hannah M. as told to Flora Rheta Schreiber, "Richard
Nixon : A Mother's Story," Good Housekeeping (June 1960),
pp. 55-57, 207-208, 212-213.
Nixon, Richard M., RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. NY: Grosset
& Dunlap, 1978.
"Sightings of the Last New Nixon," TIME (July 17,
1978), pp. 22-23.
Wolfenstein, Martha, "Loss, Rage, and Repetition,"
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 24 (1969), 432-460.
Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in
Nineteenth Century America, Wilma King. Bloomington, Ind.:
Indiana University Press, 1995. xxi, 253 pp.
Reviewed by Walter T. Howard
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
Wilma King's Stolen Childhood is an important book that should be enthusiastically welcomed by psychohistorians as well as scholars of southern, African American, and slavery history. Although King writes about a subject American slavery in the Old South that has been exhaustively treated by a wide assortment of specialists, she successfully breaks new ground. She achieves something unique with her sharp focus on the children victimized by the "peculiar institution."
King's thesis that American slavery "stole" childhood from several million black youngsters in the first half of the 19th century is powerful. She skillfully analyzes the psychic cost of slavery for its most vulnerable victims by offering useful insights into the painful conflicts and wrenching dilemmas affecting the inner life of slave children. She convincingly argues that youthful bondsmen lived in a "pervasive state of war atmosphere" characterized by separation, terror, misery, and despair. It was a nightmarish experience. Quite early in life, slave children faced the shock of white racial hatred when they discovered that they were the object of contempt and derision. King documents revealing stories of the untimely, sudden, or abrupt separation of the developing child from nurturing parents. She clearly shows the peculiar complexities in the lives of slave children. Psychic traumas were commonplace for these youths as they witnessed the regular humiliation and punishment of their parents and other black adults who were publicly whipped. These and other similar experiences often stimulated embarrassment, humiliation, mortification, and shame. There was, in effect, no real childhood for over half the slave population of the South on the eve of the Civil War.
Slave youngsters, therefore, were forced to "handle situations involving violence, injustice, and arbitrary power at early ages." If for no other reason than survival, slave youths, their families, and indeed the entire slave community, turned with intense resolve to their shared culture as an internalized resource from which to draw ego strength and a measure of self-esteem. This adaptation did more than minimize psychic deflation and self-hatred. In the slave quarters, out of the sight of whites, enriching cultural elements of spirituality, family life, music and dance, folklore, and the like, offered slave children positive value judgments about themselves, augmented ego strength, and encouraged higher self-appraisal. The family was especially important. Thanks to the parenting skills in the slave community, children learned to resist slavery and maintain their integrity under the worst of circumstances.
In a larger historical context, King analyzes her subjects' experiences in work, play, education, socialization, and resistance under the plantation regime. This carefully researched book is the first full-length study that focuses primarily on the lives of pre-Civil War slave children. The author's use of such primary sources as slave narratives, WPA interviews with ex-slaves, plantation records, etc. is exemplary. King has covered nearly all the bases; her extensive and comprehensive notes and bibliography are impressive in their scope and thoroughness. They will surely assist any researcher wishing to build on this pioneering work. Though this subject cries out for further scholarly treatment, King has made effective use of relevant literature from such fields as psychohistory, psychiatry, psychology, pediatrics, and women's studies.
This book would have been stronger had it dealt more extensively with the compelling psychological aspects of the interactions between black and white children. It also fails to examine the history of slave children in various sections of the South in different time periods. In spite of these shortcomings, this book stands as a vital contribution to the history of American slavery.
The Truth about the Virgin: Sex and
Ritual in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Ita Sheres and Anne Kohn Blau.
New York: Continuum, 1995. 236 pp. $27.50 (Hardcover)
Reviewed by Geraldine Pauling
The Truth about the Virgin is a speculative work about the ancient community which collected and/or wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. Although the sectarian inhabitants of Qumran remain, in many respects, an enigma, Sheres and Blau attempt to interpret the group's rituals and esoteric wisdom to shed light on its gender relations. In particular the authors show how the Qumran sect, which abhorred sexuality, devised a procreation ritual that eliminated sexual contact. Using the ancient Dead Sea texts, the authors define three distinct eras or principles in the development of ancient Jewish religion, characterized respectively by fertility, separation and salvation. The era of fertility was significant because it represented the replacement of the Goddess religion with that of a patriarchal deity necessary to sustain a patrilineal inheritance system. The second concept focuses on the separateness of gender and of an entire tribe. And the third concept relates to how salvation is limited to those who are "holier" than all others and who adopt the tenets of monotheism. The Dead Sea sectarians were obsessed with the belief that sexual purity, when practiced by superior members of the brotherhood, who were the "most holy," would somehow insure their salvation. The virgin, either man or woman, was required to ritualize fertility without defilement (direct sexual intercourse). The Qumran ritual of the immaculate conception positioned the young virgin to receive the semen of a righteous elder through an elongated container or reed. An "angel" (eunuch) was the only one permitted to perform this act, having first collected the "holy water" (male emission) and later pouring it through a cylinder, such as a stick or reed, which was vaginally inserted into a young female whose hymen remained intact. Chanting and prayers accompanied this ritual in the hope that the Sons and Daughters of Israel would be blessed with a man-child who would become the symbol of their purity and their chastity and ultimately revered as their salvation. In their discussion of this fertility ritual, the authors reveal that both Arab horse breeding (around the seventh century C.E.) and ancient Egyptian gynecologic practices contained knowledge of what modern science calls artificial insemination.
The authors do not attempt to explain why the leaders of the Sect (the only ones permitted to perform the ritual) were able to employ the aid of "angels"/eunuchs in collecting their semen for use in the fertility ritual, even though it was forbidden to practice onanism or to "spill seed." Other aspects of this puzzle which remain unexplained by Sheres and Blau are what appear to be the psychological, cultural and religious sanctioning of a master/slave relationship among the members of this sect, whose female virgins were 12 or 13 years of age while the men, the "holiest of holy," were much older. Since no bodily contact was permitted and the relationship between the holy men and the pubescent females was purely spiritual, and the desired goal was birth of a "male savior," perhaps the need for renewal of masculine power actually expressed a deeply embraced narcissism. In modern times, such self-perpetuation might be conceptualized in terms of cloning.
The paradoxical ritual of fertility through sexual denial was regarded by the Sect as the highest manifestation of appeasement and sacrifice to their God and as an assurance of salvation. The psychological denial (defense) the Sect had toward sexuality as well as its intense obsession with collecting and utilizing the holy emissions seems to be a ritualization of misogyny.
Trauma and Self,
ed. Charles B. Strozier & Michael Flynn. Lanham, Md.: Rowman
& Littlefield, 1996. 280pp. $58.50 (hardcover) $22.95
(Paperback)
Reviewed by Jerry S. Pivan
Syracuse University
This new book of essays in honor of Robert Jay Lifton's work explores the vicissitudes of human brutality, symbolic immortality, and the search for continuity amid destruction and misery. As Strozier notes in his introduction, "any investigation of violence, trauma, and survival that moves below the surface will soon encounter Lifton." The contributors to this book are psychiatrists, academics, and other authors concerned with the history of human suffering, the possibilities of future genocide, and the means we have to prevent violence and achieve protean survival. They also seek to debate the tensions in Lifton's work, extend his theories, and test the implications of his ideas in further arenas.
If indeed "we live psychologically on images," as Strozier asserts, and "it is only our capacity to symbolize the self's immortality that gives life meaning," then we will also be bound to images which become sacred and illusory in order to perpetuate our survival. History has shown us the consequences of investing ourselves in vital lies. Thus, we face a formidable intellectual and spiritual task to decide how we may achieve symbolic immortality without deceiving ourselves into sacred violence, victimization, psychic numbing, and vital transferences which veil us from reality at the expense of a host of victims as well as our own sanity.
The opening article, "Crime and Memory" by Judith Lewis Herman, offers excellent elaboration upon the dynamics of our memory of atrocities. Herman shows the importance of terror in traumatic experience and its influence on the amnesia, selective memory, and alteration of perception following the event. She shows how terror narrows attention and can elicit dissociative reactions. She further shows how memories can often reappear in disguised forms as psychiatric symptoms (Freud's "compulsion to repeat"). Herman goes on to state that while we know a great deal about the memories of victims, there is an uncanny social absence of memory, "a curious amnesia," about many crimes and atrocities. Between the silence, forgetfulness, denial, and numbing, we seem to evade a great deal of the crime we witness, allow, and commit. While many cannot forget individually, societies and groups often seem not to remember the atrocities in any way.
Part of the problem with our understanding of criminals is that they frequently appear normal, even loving toward their children, while they torture or murder others. This is the banality of evil which often confounds both moralists and psychologists, because it places the capacity for evil not on the aberrant psyche, but on the human being in circumstances where sadism becomes the norm. Here we have intimate connections to where Ernest Becker was headed in The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil. Not only criminals and maniacs, but "normal" people may kill lavishly under critical circumstances which drive them to such acts, even though they may fail to realize their own sadism.
While Herman explicates the dynamics of memory in societies and individuals which have witnessed or perpetuated crimes, Cathy Caruth proposes that we look at history from the perspective of Freud's repetition compulsion, reading trauma as an "enigma of survival." What Herman explained as symptoms of persons forgetting and/or coping with intrusive memories of traumatic events, Caruth now extends into historical movements as repetitions of traumata which beset societies and are repeated on an unacknowledged social scale. If neurosis shapes individual lives, let us conceive historical movement as the recapitulation of trauma and repetition of traumatic memories in disguised, pathological form. History now becomes the means by which a society perpetuates itself while enacting trauma in a pathological form it does not recognize.
Also worthy of attention is "Life in Death" by Noel Walsh which examines the effect of death imagery and the "death imprint" upon the lives of people struggling against their own feelings of isolation, loss, disintegration & threats to organismic integrity. Walsh does a nice job showing many of the key aspects of death anxiety and existential struggle, and how they are manifested within different individuals. He frames our struggles with mortality in terms of psychosexual stages and the Eriksonian life cycle. While such terminology may seem trite to some, he describes the vicissitudes and variations of human reaction to death anxiety rather well.
Virtually all the articles in this book deserve to be read and many are excellent. Trauma and Self is an intriguing insightful work that deserves close attention by psychohistorians.
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