Sheathing the Bodkin: Combating Suicide - A Conversation with Jennifer Michael Hecht

Howard Burton

• Publisher: Ideas Roadshow
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781771700597
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is based on an in-depth conversation between Howard Burton and poet, author and historian commentator Jennifer Michael Hecht. After intriguing details about how she combines writing poetry, doing scholarly history and public writing, this wide-ranging conversation movingly embellishes upon Jennifer Michael Hecht's book, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, which is an intellectual and cultural history of the most persuasive arguments against suicide from the Stoics and the Bible to Dante, Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, and such twentieth-century writers as Albert Camus. This carefully-edited book includes an introduction, ..Or To Lend A Hand, and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter: I. Different Hats - And how to combine themII. Facing the Unthinkable - Confronting suicideIII. Historical Examinations - A litany of intriguing insightsIV. Suffering - Worth recognizingV. Meaning and Mattering - The benefits of faithAbout Ideas Roadshow Conversations: This book is part of a series of 100 Ideas Roadshow Conversations. Presented in an accessible, conversational format, Ideas Roadshow books not only explore frontline academic research featuring world-leading researchers but also reveal the inspirations and personal journeys behind the research.

The Conversation

I. Different Hats

And how to combine them

HB: Your past strikes me as quite singular. You’ve studied history and philosophy, you’re a practicing poet, you’re a successful writer, and you also do a lot of educational, volunteer work.

JMH: Yes, I give a lot of talks. Right now, I’m actually teaching in a high school in Queens, Young Women’s Leadership School. It’s a wonderful place. They don’t have a ton of resources. I brought them one of my poems today for the first time. It was an amazing experience, very deep. I teach two classes. They’re 14 years old.

HB: The integration of all these different things—is that normal, in your experience? How did that happen?

JMH: No, it’s not common. Every once in a while I’ll meet somebody who does non-fiction and poetry, and we get all excited about each other because it’s pretty rare. I decided I wanted to be a poet at a very young age, certainly I was sure of it by the time I went to college, but I didn’t know much about modern poetry at all. I was thinking of the Romantics. It was in college that I really started learning about modern poetry, and at first it was a little hard to take, because I was so in love with the Romantics and some other, more classic, poetry.

HB: So, in your mind, when you decided to be a poet, you were really imagining being a Romantic poet.

JMH: Yes, Keats. Keats and Dickinson were the people I wanted to talk to—as well as others, of course. For me, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan was like a pop song—I just loved it: I memorized it, and recited it to myself all the time. I’ve always found rhyme very delicious.

My father was a physics professor and he was home all the time writing—mostly textbooks in his case, but it was clear that you could be a professor and be home all the time writing, which is what I wanted to do. I am still amazed that my young self came to the conclusion that I wanted a body of knowledge; I didn’t want to study creative writing. I’m not sure how much I understood it existed, as such; I really didn’t know. But I decided to get my PhD in history with the idea of being a history professor, so I could go home and write poetry.

HB: So this was a tactical decision?

JMH: That part definitely was, yes. I went to Columbia for my PhD with the idea of studying cultural history. They gave me a nice offer, but they didn’t have a cultural historian. They kept saying they were going to hire one, but they never did while I was there. So I studied with Robert Paxton, who studies modern French history. He had some cultural stuff in his work, so there was something there. But, in the meantime, I took a course in the history of science and I just fell in love with it. It was the most like poetry that I had found in history.

HB: How so?

JMH: It was the way of feeling around with your gut, almost. I joke that the philosophy of science is how science works, and the history of science is how science doesn’t work. So what we’re really doing is looking at the ways that cultural ideas shape both the questions that are asked and the answers that are accepted.

Well, how do you know when that’s happening? Foucault was doing a classic history of science move when he said, “The Victorians, who are constantly saying, ‘Let’s keep sex under wraps. Let’s not look at it. Put a skirt around the piano because it has legs,’ are actually obsessed with sex. Talking about not having sex is almost the same thing as talking about having sex.” That’s an example of a kind of flip, a kind of feeling that you have to go with.

Another example would be, say, studying early anthropologists and realizing that some of their metaphors for women are similar to their metaphors for people of colour or their metaphors for children, seeing how each one is supporting a kind of hierarchy.

Again, you’re looking for clues. You’re feeling around. For me, you’re also leaving yourself open to a new conclusion, which I think is true in any study.

One thing I always say is that, to write a book, you first have an idea, you have something you know that your friends don’t know. I always tell people, “Don’t try to be brilliant. Don’t try to do a lot. Just say what you know that your friends don’t know, but check every fact. And as you check, you’ll find that, actually, most of them will be a little wrong. You’ll have remembered the quote a little wrong, or it was in a context you forgot about. And, as you fix that, you’re going to put things in the exception pile. After a while, sometimes the exception pile is bigger than the rule pile; and if you’re good (because a lot of people won’t do it, they’ll just keep explaining away the exception pile) but if you’re willing to look at the exception pile and try to explain it, that’s how you’ll get to a new idea.”

HB: Were you looking at all areas of the history of science equally—history of biology, physics, psychology, and so forth?

JMH: No. At Columbia it was mostly the history of biological sciences, so predominantly medicine and anthropology. I always say, “The closer to the body you get, the less stable the scientific ideas are.” So ideas in cosmology can last a couple of centuries, while in the social sciences, ideas might last a century. But when you get to medical advice, that changes every couple of decades. And when things change with that rapidity, it’s only reasonable to realize that they’re being culturally moved around.

HB: When you were doing this, when you started recognizing this interesting way of developing new ideas—paying attention to your exception pile, as you put it, to generate new ideas—did you start getting excited and passionate about that type of research just as much as poetry?

JMH: Absolutely, yes. I was very much drawn in by the style of research as well as the actual stories that I was researching. I was enchanted. My dissertation, which became my first book, was a study of a bunch of late nineteenth-century French anthropologists who were dissecting each other’s brains after death, ostensibly to show the relationship between brain morphology (weight, shape) and characteristics, traits and abilities.

And I came to believe that, on a fundamental level, this was a secular version of Catholic last rites that most of these people had grown up with. They did this for 30 years. What inspired them to start was—well, one of their most famous members was Paul Broca, who, in the middle of the 19th century, was the first to find a relationship between an area of the brain and an ability. It’s the first time we see that the brain can be mapped.

HB: You mean language ability, right?

JMH: That’s right. Broca famously dissected the brain of someone called “Tan”, so called because that was all he could say. In dissecting his brain, Broca found a lesion precisely where he expected to from others’ research (on the third, left-frontal, circumvolution of the brain, indicated from others’ research). This happened in 1861.

Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species in 1859, but it isn’t translated into French until 1862, by a woman named Clémence Royer, who’s an unequivocal atheist. She recognizes all the Lamarckian antecedents in On the Origin of Species, which she points out in a very long, 35-page preface, to the translation. Every part of her preface is about human beings, whereas Darwin only said one thing about human beings: in the last line, he writes, “Perhaps this shall throw light on the origins of humans.” The rest is about finches, dogs, and horses.

I’m looking at the dates and saying that many of these anthropologists are influenced even more by Broca’s work than On the Origin of Species, but both look like a way to demonstrate that there is no God. Broca was the founder of the Society of Anthropology, and he invited her to join (as the first female member) in 1870.

Then there was Léonce Manouvrier, who was a student and disciple of Broca. Manouvrier was a profound egalitarian who argued strongly against racism and sexism at the end of the nineteenth century in many very sophisticated ways.

HB: How much time did it take before there were long-term effects on society based on these ideas?

JMH: Church and...