You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Perhaps once in a generation, as if from nowhere, an individual appears and performs an act of such daring courage as to make the whole world catch its breath. The young Chinese man who stood alone before a tank in Tiananmen Square demonstrated courage so stunning as to become a universal icon of the valor possible in the human soul. We onlookers could only gasp, proud to be members of a species capable of such moral majesty.
Recently, we have once more been dazed with awe upon learning of the remarkable courage of Wesley Autrey, the fifty-year-old Harlem construction worker who leaped into the path of an oncoming subway train to save the life of a stranger. He was explicit that for him it had nothing to do with being a hero. “It was,” he said, “just being there and helping the next person. That's all I did.”
Such courage has also arisen within psychoanalytic ranks, exemplified by Muriel Gardiner, the model for Lillian Hellman's Julia, who risked her life in the anti-Nazi underground in Austria, and by Edith Jacobson, who even while imprisoned by the Nazis refused to reveal the identities of patients.
In today's world at war, we hear anew the tales of very young soldiers who risk their lives to protect their comrades. From where comes that capacity for such valor? Any act of manifest behavior has multiple forces behind it—forces combined from all aspects of the mind, its experiences, and its meanings. Yet what is the source of these special qualities of inner strength?