Is There Life Without Mother?

Psychoanalysis, Biography, Creativity

Leonard Shengold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138009790, 9780881633368
• eBook ISBN: 9781134905454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this richly textured study of personal growth and creativity hemmed in by childhood disaster, Shengold compares the differing gifts and differing solutions of extraordinary talents as they seek to negotiate a universal longing to refind the mother without sliding back into neglect, abuse, and despair. In the foreground of his analysis are moving portraits of Jules Renard and Anthony Trollope and the densely packed traumatic legacy of their respective childhoods, the one limned in sustained psychological torture, the other framed by neglect and abandonment. Long acknowledged as a master of the literary-biographic genre within psychoanalysis, Shengold does not view the study of creative individuals as the occasion to make pontifical pronouncements about the nature of creativity. Rather, he sees such study as affording the opportunity to borrow from genius, insofar as the gifted writer who is psychologically astute often captures the challenges of life and the nuances of suffering in language that "ordinary" patients would use, if only they could. By integrating literary analysis with biographical data, Shengold arrives at an appealingly direct, demystified approach to great literature as a vehicle for apprehending the intricacies of enduring psychological dilemmas. For the solutions of truly creative individuals not only reflect an artistic temperament wed to extraordinarily gifts; they illuminate the solutions we are all in search of. Elegantly sparing in language and judicious in presenting source material, Is There Life Without Mother? is abundantly generous in the wealth of understanding it provides and the deeper reflection it provokes. From the subtleties of identification as a means of consolidating identity in the face of neglect to the return of the traumatic as a fate that even a writer's "literary revenge" cannot circumvent, this work takes the reader deeper into the wellsprings of personality change than that it is usually possible to go.

PART I

BIOGRAPHY, CREATIVITY, AND PATHOLOGY

Chapter 1

BIOGRAPHY

Another Impossible Profession

Novelists have omniscience; biographers never do.… The biographer may be as imaginative as he pleases—the more imaginative the better—in the way he brings together his materials, but he must not imagine the materials.

—Leon Edel
Writing Lives. Principia Biographica

Anthony Trollope (1883) wrote in and of his autobiography, “That I or any man, should tell everything of himself, I hold to be impossible” (p. 1). When writing another’s biography, it is even more impossible to tell everything. Trying to find out and tell as much as one can about another person is a risky business that when done best requires—for biographer or psychoanalyst alike—tact, self-knowledge, and humility on the part of the author or the analytic interpreter. Psychobiography, which involves making considerable use of psychoanalytic knowledge and theory, is perhaps an even greater challenge. Lytton Strachey, who dabbled with a psychological approach, set the tone of biographies for decades after the publication of his first “best seller,” Eminent Victorians (1918). He wrote in the preface to that book:

[The biographer or the historian] will row out over that great ocean of material and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity. Guided by these considerations, I have written the ensuing studies. I have attempted, through the medium of biography, to present some Victorian visions to the modern eye. They are, in one sense, haphazard visions—that is to say, my choice of subjects has been determined by no desire to construct a system or to prove a theory, but by simple motives of convenience and art. I have sought to examine and elucidate certain fragments of the truth which took my fancy and lay to my hand. To quote from a Master—“Je n’impose rien; je ne propose rien; j’expose” [“I impose nothing; I propose nothing; I expose”] [quoted by Holroyd, 1994, p. 420].

The wicked Strachey was himself the Master who had made up this quotation, “which critics were to assume came from Voltaire” (p. 420). As for the sentiment itself, no one can be sure that his choices were not determined by a need to construct a system or prove a theory—a need that would involve some basic aggressive or libidinal desire (or both) kept outside of conscious awareness.

In an earlier book review, Strachey attributed another fabricated quote to Livy, who (Strachey falsely stated) had written that he “would have made Pompey win the battle of Pharsalia, if the turn of the sentence had required it.” Strachey, serious alongside the mockery of this characteristic variety of in-joking, added:

[Livy] was not talking utter nonsense, but simply expressing an important truth in a highly paradoxical way—that the first duty of a great historian is to be an artist. The function of art in history is something much more profound than mere decoration.… Uninterpreted truth is as useless as buried gold; and art is the great interpreter. It alone can unify a vast multitude of facts into a significant whole, clarifying, accentuating, suppressing, and lighting up the dark places with the torch of the imagination. More than that, it can throw over the historian’s materials the glamour of a personal revelation, … and its value ultimately depends upon the force and quality of the character behind it [quoted in Holroyd, 1994, pp. 419–420].

Presumably the reliable character of the writer is all (Strachey is surely thinking of himself). But attempts to approach both current and historical “truth” do indeed depend on the predominantly reliable character of the biographer or the historian, or, in the case of my discipline, the psychoanalyst and the patient. And neither psychoanalysis nor biography is a field for scientific exactitude, although trying to achieve the impossible goal of gathering, establishing, and evaluating “fact” should, contra Strachey’s tongue in cheek, not be abandoned in the service of art or any other tendentious goal—as far as one can help it. Complexity demands compromise; we must try to establish comparative certainties alongside the awareness that we are surrounded by uncertainties.

A psychoanalyst, in contrast to most biographers, who frequently have a dead or an uncooperative subject, at least has direct access to a patient’s attempt to tell his story (as it is currently represented in his mind) by way of attempts at free association. Free association supplies patterns of unknown trends that can come to light as well as of characteristic distortions and elisions of conscious and unconscious material, involving, to use psychoanalytic jargon, defenses and resistances against the flow of emotion. These can be worked over in the course of time by analyst and patient and, it is to be hoped, modified. If the analysis works, what is insistently felt in relation to the analyst will, in time, bring to the present—through the transference and projection of feelings—some of the hidden basic conflicts of the patient’s past. The psychoanalytic process involves the extended working over of the patient’s defenses and resistances, transferences and projections as they gather emotional life in the verbal interactions and concentration on the flow of the relationship between patient and analyst. The artifacts and narratives available for applied psychoanalysis and for most biographers come at a remove from the subject, and inferential conclusions remain untested by the psychoanalytic process.

On the other hand, the biographer/researcher can, as the psychoanalyst cannot, actively seek out and make use of documents that might prove to provide corroborating “facts.” An artist’s work is itself a record that has been worked over by the artist’s conscious awareness of shaping form and content. Works of art, like all human psychic productions, can transmit the creator’s intentional conscious as well as cryptic unconscious communications. The cigar is also a cigar. But the psychoanalyst, who does not have firsthand contact with the artist as he (or she) does with a psychoanalytic patient, obviously has no more privileged access to certainty here than has anyone else. Psychotherapists may be more able to apply skills for informed speculation about what is unconsciously being communicated in works of art. These skills develop from innate perceptive abilities as well as from practice at picking up the unconscious tendencies of patients. Whether this is an advantage or a disadvantage in writing or reading biography depends on the tact and judgment of the observer in dealing with observations based on conjecture. Such conjecture always involves the observer’s biases; reliability cannot be ascertained. Compensating for these prejudices depends on what can at best be only partial knowledge and mastery of one’s unconscious predilections. The observer—from whatever discipline—needs honesty, self-knowledge, a gift for discrimination, Strachey’s “a careful curiosity,” and humility in relation to recovering historical truth. Writers of biography should be aware, as they attempt to interpret the life of a human being from his or her writings—as should psychoanalysts working with their patients’ associations—of the subtle implications of George Gissing’s statement, “The only true biography is to be found in novels” (quoted by Holroyd, 1994, p. 606). This partial truth implies the need to tolerate, work, and work well with uncertainties.

And the biographer is always there in some major way in the biography he fashions; the psychoanalyst is always there in some major way in the work of the psychoanalysis. Edel (1985) writes, “[The biographer] is far from anonymous. He is present in his work as the portrait painter is present in his” (p. 31). The art, sound judgment, and reliable character of the biographer can contribute more to the creation of a good biography than an inherent interest in the life and importance of the person evoked and described in it.

And yet what we can be certain about must not be ignored. “Novelists have omniscience. Biographers never do” (Edel, 1985, p. 15)—an overstatement. Virginia Woolf (1932) writes that, whereas the imagination of the novelist is relatively free, that of the biographer is tied. She criticizes her old friend Lytton, then dead, and praises his Queen Victoria, a book he had dedicated to her. In that book, she wrote, “He treated biography as a craft. In the Elizabeth and Essex he flouted its limitations” (p. 223). That book’s Queen Elizabeth, she thinks, lacks the feel of reality that Strachey had given Queen Victoria or the fictional reality of a great Shakespearean character. She reproaches him both for a relative failure in his art and for not anchoring his narrative enough on facts. In his foreword to Queen Victoria, Strachey wrote, “Authority for every important statement of fact in the following pages will be found in the footnotes.” Of course, allegations of authority do not always make for “facts,” but the note shows that Strachey was trying for historical accuracy as well as for art. “Facts” about Elizabeth’s life were, of course, harder to find and establish than were facts about the Queen, who had died when Strachey was 21.

The biographer should strive to be tied to the facts. But what are facts? The biography of Sir Thomas More by his son-in-law, William Roper, who undoubtedly knew him well, is still an idealized portrait by a perhaps not too discerning and certainly positively prejudiced witness. The dates and most of the happenings may or may not be “facts”; mistakes are always possible. Roper’s selections, omissions, and interpretations are inevitably contaminated by distortion motivated by his probably sincere need to see his father-in-law as good and right. Perhaps he also needed to deny forbidden hateful feelings that could have made for wishes to expose the parent-figure’s weaknesses and sins. Those with or without personal knowledge of the individuals they have chosen to write about will be influenced by their own identifications, projections, and transferences directed onto the biographical subjects. This inevitable imposing of the author’s inner conflicts and imagos¹ will produce both conscious and unconscious prejudices, positive and negative, of many varieties. The resultant biography is bound to be (to some extent) a palimpsest—the “facts” and their interpretations here thickened, there eroded—created by the confluence of the results of conflicting wishes within the biographer’s mind.

Biographical biases can be predominately aimed in a derogatory and destructive direction, sometimes with an obviously conscious intention to distort and vilify. Shakespeare’s Richard III—not a biography but an “historical” play and indubitably a work of creative art—was probably accepted by its contemporary audience as valid history and biography. The author either wanted or felt he had no choice but to serve and please Queen Elizabeth by portraying King Richard, the man whom her Tudor grandfather had killed and replaced, as a cruel and murderous criminal and usurper. Therefore Richard, despite descending from the reigning York dynasty, would have had no moral right to the crown. Propaganda, not truth, was undoubtedly intended—although the playwright may have simply, and perhaps relatively innocently, been continuing a long-established, politically motivated calumniation created by earlier chroniclers and playwrights in order to establish the legitimacy of the reigns of the Tudor monarchs. In any case, such tendentious purposes were transformed into a great play, and Richard III into a great villain, by Shakespeare’s magical artistic creativity. Despite the continuing controversies of historians about the actual nature of King Richard’s character and deeds, it is the fictional portrayal imagined and constructed by Shakespeare that we remember.

There is a depiction of the relationship between the Victorian explorer and author Richard Burton and his wife in a recent biography by Mary S. Lovell, (1998) that is very different from the relationship described by other biographers of Burton (for example, Brodie, 1967; McLynn, 1993). Lovell portrays Richard and Isabel Burton as having had a primarily loving and sensual marriage following their romantic courtship. This depiction challenges the view of other biographers who have depicted Burton as predominantly running away from his wife and from his dependency on her and stressing Isabel Burton’s being driven by impulses both to idolize and to castrate her husband. In these Burton biographies envious hatred and revenge have been interpreted as the chief motivations for her censoring, mutilating, or burning his prurient unpublished writings and documents left in her care after his death. One biographer seems to like and defend Isabel, the others to dislike and attack her. The reader of these biographies finds conflicting elucidations of “facts” and “truth.” The differences may be endlessly debated; it is possible that they will simply turn out to be unresolvable by “evidence” in the form of certainties that would settle contradictory interpretations. It can be salutary to conclude that one cannot settle on what actually happened in such cases. (I do not know enough to say that such a conclusion would be proper in relation to the Burtons.) Remaining in doubt about people in the past can be analogous to what the psychoanalyst sometimes has to settle for when a patient makes a charge of having been abused as a child by an adult, an accusation that cannot be resolved with certainty in spite of long and thorough mutual analytic work. Sometimes the best that both patient and analyst can do is suspend disbelief in the possibility of abuse. To do so is better than adopting what may for some people be a false sureness in the course of trying to “establish” historical truth (see Shengold, 1999).

Freud wrote to Lytton Strachey after the publication of the latter’s Elizabeth and Essex in 1928:

I am acquainted with all your earlier publications, and have read them with great enjoyment. But the enjoyment was essentially an aesthetic one. This time you have moved me deeply, for you yourself have reached greater depths. You are aware of what other historians so easily overlook—that it is impossible to understand the past with certainty, because we cannot divine men’s motives and the essence of their minds and so cannot interpret their actions. Our psychological analysis does not suffice even with those who are near us in space and time, unless we can make them the object of years of the closest investigation, and even then it breaks down before the incompleteness of our knowledge and the clumsiness of our synthesis. So that in regard to the people of past times we are in the same position as with dreams to which we have been given no associations—and only a layman could expect us to interpret such dreams as those. As a historian, then, you show that you are steeped in the spirit of psychoanalysis. And, with reservations such as these, you have approached one of the most remarkable figures in your country’s history, you have known how to trace back her character to the impressions of her childhood, you have touched upon her most hidden motives with equal boldness and discretion, and it is very possible that you have succeeded in making a correct reconstruction of what actually occurred [quoted in Holroyd, 1994, p. 615].

This was high praise, which Strachey appreciated. But whether the reconstruction can be called “correct” is, alas, subject to unresolvable doubt. Freud here stressed his reservations—knowing how much we do not know.

1. An imago is an internalized mental representation of another, usually a parent or a parent-figure. A biographer can, unconsciously, project a representation of self or other onto the subject of his study and his book.

Chapter 2

ARTISTIC CREATIVITY

To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit—General Knowledges are those Knowledges that Idiots possess.

What is General Nature? is there such a thing? What is General Knowledge? is there such a thing? Strictly Speaking All Knowledge is Particular.

—William Blake
“Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses”

I want to stress how much I do not know about artistic creativity and its relation to trauma and pathology, as well as (with more hubris) how much is not known generally. A genius like Freud is always worth reading on any subject, and there are works and isolated insights about art and artists by him and other psychoanalysts that are valuable and even brilliant. Some analysts have shown a talent for literary appreciation and have avoided reductionism, and good use has been made of literary examples that illustrate or even enhance psychoanalytic clinical findings. But, in my opinion, applied analysis has not been one of the glories of psychoanalytic writings. (There has been brilliant writing about creativity by psychoanalysts, such as Ernst Kris ([1953]) and, more recently, John Gedo and Gilbert Rose, but I feel that the valuable insights of the latter two are not primarily derived from psychoanalysis, although they use its lexicon.)

Freud appreciated how much he had learned and could learn from literary artists like Shakespeare and Goethe and philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. But Freud’s (1908) initial published ideas about artistic creativity were reductive and faulty, as were those of his followers. In the early psychoanalytic literature, understanding the artist tended to be equated with connecting his creative product with neuroses and complexes. The work of art was relegated to being a substitute for the gratification of some instinctual need, and artistic creations were equated with daydreams. Creativity was viewed primarily as stemming from conflicts and deficits, from pathology. In “Philoctetes, The Wound and the Bow,” Edmund Wilson’s (1929) essay on creativity, influenced by Freud, the author chose Philoctetes as a symbol of the creative artist, the hero’s stinking and unhealing wound motivating him to perfect and exercise his extraordinary powers as an archer.

There is some truth in this kind of linkage: trauma, misfortune, deficit can give rise to an impetus toward achievement and excellence. One sees many victims of child abuse and deprivation (of what I have called soul murder [Shengold, 1989, 1999]) and persons born with deficiencies spurred on to adaptation and mastery. Motiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Biography, Creativity, and Pathology
• Part II: Literary Lives
• Part III: Conclusion and Epilogue
• Epilogue Multiple Personalities
• References
• Index