The Self-Analytic Education of Henry Adams

This paper considers the varied forms in which frequently irreconcilable inner dualities influenced the personality and life of Henry Adams. Primarily a historian, he was also an extraordinary Socratic teacher, an indefatigable traveller and student of primitive places and societies, journalist and editor, and friend and advisor in the shadows to those who shaped American social and intellectual thought and wielded political power in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Using 'The Education of Henry Adams' (1907) and Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres(1905) as primary sources, the paper examines the process of self-discovery in a literary artist who attempted to confront the fact and nature of dynamic unconscious forces in himself, particularly conflicts between male and female identifications, and terror and guilt derived from cannibalistic drives and fantasies of omnipotence which seemed to threaten limitless destruction if unleashed.

In the 'Education', Adams described what can be understood as a family romance fantasy which included the personal myth of rebirth at the age of 4 as a 'variation'. This subjective sense of dramatic difference from his father and older brothers was the beginning, perhaps, of a life-long culturally enforced equation of the artistic with the feminine sensibility. Such an equation contributed to his view that the course of his life—and the history of civilizations as well—were both determined by clashes of dynamic forces occasionally alternating with periods of resolution.