How does a biographer bring to life an often long-dead subject? As the biographer accumulates data, the subject must in some way come vividly alive in the biographer's mind. If this is the case, then the subject must shape and form the content of the biography as it resonates with the writer's psychology. Such were the issues panelists were asked to consider for the May meeting in Toronto.
Introducing the panel, Margaret Fitzpatrick Hanly, a faculty member of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute and an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, cited John Keats, the subject of her Ph.D. thesis. From him she learned about negative capability, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Hanly believes that biographers must tolerate this negative capability as they attempt to chronicle a life. Certainty is an impossible goal, since there is never enough information. Anxiety over fairness to the subject is fruitless because the biographer inevitably imposes herself on her portrait of the subject. Hanly counsels patience and confidence that will permit the biographer to be guided and informed by her feelings in her efforts to bring vitality to a life lived.
When Martin Silverman, training and supervising analyst for both the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the New York University Psychoanalytic Institute and a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at New York University Medical Center, found himself co-teaching a course on Sylvia Plath at a local college, he wondered why had he been so powerfully drawn to her in particular. Ann Sexton and Adrienne Rich, both of whom he also admired and who wrote in a vein similar to Plath's, had not stirred him as much as she. The answers he discovered within himself provided the compelling and moving text of his paper for the panel.
Plath's great technical and evocative gifts were givens for Silverman. “Nevertheless, something, which I could not quite put my finger on, troubled me about the poems, especially the way in which their form and structure seem to squirm and struggle to come into their own.”
Silverman pondered the shift in Plath's poetic style. Initially traditional in character with controlling and containing structures, her poems began to show an “increasingly unrestrained, loosely ordered, unbound, openly expressive style that mirrored the outpouring of raw self [and] reflected her mounting depression.” Silverman found himself touched by her despair and curious about her conflicts. Pursuing his empathy for and interest in her, he came to understand that some qualities in Plath's poetry reached deeply within him. “It is as though one gives out vibrations that reach a tuning fork of just the right pitch to harmonize with and reinforce what emanates from one's own exploratory interest. … Sylvia Plath and her work represented to me, as I eventually came to realize, an itch I had to scratch.”
Silverman found his scratching stick in his analytic self-scrutiny. In the study of a frightening intrusive thought and later from the analysis of a dream, he discovered the inevitable target sites in him that Plath's psychology had touched. Without any conscious awareness of it, Silverman “extended tendrils from those internal issues outwardly toward [Plath's] poetry, first as a reader and then as a psychobiographer.” Writing biography, Silverman concluded, requires the writer to dig as deeply within himself as he digs into his subject.
It was easy for Susan Quinn, a writer for thirty years, to know why she selected Karen Horney as the subject of the first of her two well-known biographies. Quinn knew very little about Horney until 1981, when she read Horney's 1926 essay “The Flight from Womanhood.” Quinn was “amazed to discover” that Horney “had written a critique of Freud's theory of penis envy to which feminists of the last twenty years have added very little.” In that essay Horney asserted that woman were envious of men, not for their penises, but rather for their social advantage. The very day she read this visionary paper, Quinn said to a friend, “Remember this was the time and place at which I decided to write a biography of Karen Horney.”
For the subject of her second biography, Quinn chose Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie, who was very different from Horney, an unsung heroine ahead of her time. Curie had been an adolescent inspiration for Quinn. The first biography of Curie, after her death, gave an idealized image of the famous scientist. Quinn came to know a great deal more about Curie even before she started her own biography, learning that even this icon, perhaps more than many of us, had suffered great loss and pain. Quinn was moved to set the record straight.
What did Horney and Curie have in common that also sparked a flame in Quinn? All three had suffered under the tyranny of male-dominated institutions that rejected and derogated women. When a new editor arrived at Boston Magazine, where Quinn had worked for a number of years, he promptly fired her. Horney had been rejected from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute because of her unorthodox views that included her radical revisionism of penis envy. Curie was rejected for membership in the French Academy of Science, most likely because she was a woman. Here was the instigation of Quinn's two biographical journeys. But the roads traveled were very different.
As Quinn pursued her research of Horney, Quinn found herself falling in love with her. Quinn understood that because love is blind, she had to stand back in order to portray her subject convincingly as a full human being. Her idealization of Horney ultimately collapsed under its own weight after she discovered some unsavory facts of Horney's life. This led to a brief period when Quinn hated Horney.
Morris L. Peltz, M.D., is a training and supervising analyst for the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. He manages the “In-Depth: Art, Culture, and Politics” section of the Scientific Program.
But the hatred gave way to forgiveness as Quinn could piece together the reasons for Horney's moral departures. In the end, Quinn was convinced she would never encounter the likes of Horney again.
Quinn went through quite a different process as she researched Curie's life. Curie, like so many women before and after her, had to struggle hard to be taken seriously by men who could and often were prejudiced and cruel. “Over and over, in my interviews with scientists who knew her … in Paris, I heard this: Pierre was the original thinker, the physicist and the genius; Marie was the chemist and the hard worker.” It became important to Quinn to bring a better balance to the “standard” portrait of Marie Curie as conscientious but unoriginal. Quinn pursued and demonstrated Curies specific contributions to the discovery of radioactivity and her impact on twentieth-century science.
Quinn also wanted “to get past the façade Marie Curie had thrown up — her version of her life and in the elaborations of that version which followed. … I wanted to find the intensive, feeling creature beneath.” After Curie's private letters and journals were opened to the press in 1990, Quinn was able to access the full Curie. Quinn learned of Curie's intense pain after Pierre's premature accidental death. “[He] is gone forever, leaving me nothing but desolation and despair.” The newly released material also “opened a window on the emotion Madame Curie had most thoroughly avoided: Marie Curie's sexual passion. … Here, in the words of … [her] best friends, were the vivid details of a love triangle involving Marie, her colleague Paul Langevin, and his violently jealous wife.” The story was not new to Quinn, but for the first time she understood the full extent of the disaster the whole affair brought down upon Curie. Contrary to the rumors and the press reports of the time that portrayed Curie as a promiscuous foreigner intent on destroying French family life, Quinn believes Curie had been truly in love with Langevin and hoped to build a future with him. “For me, and I believe for others, the story of her affair with Paul Langevin was liberating. Not only was Marie Curie a woman capable of desire, but she sometimes acted irrationally and unwisely as a result of her passion,” Quinn wrote.
For Peter Loewenberg, a professor of history and political psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles and a training and supervising analyst at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, the bond between him and his subject, John Muir, was their common, almost sexual, love of the wilderness. John Muir, the founding president of the Sierra Club and the eloquent champion of national parks, was responsible for the creation of Yosemite National Park. Loewenberg confessed, “I need the Sierras. I love and erotize wilderness. I am attracted to John Muir by the verdant sensuous imagery of his prose. When he anthropomorphizes the mountain it is the evocation of a bountiful lover. Listen to him fuse his body with nature.”
Loewenberg illustrated Muir's near orgiastic love-death experiences with excerpts from his letters. In describing a day on a glacier, for instance, Muir wrote of his descent into a thousand-foot crevasse. “Solomon's marble and ivory palaces were nothing to it. Such purity, such color, such delicate beauty! I was tempted to stay there and feast my soul, and softly freeze, until I would become part of the glacier. What a great death that would be!”
Loewenberg disclosed the personal history that accounts for his intense love of nature. Born in Shanghai, he spent his first four years there. “If there is a thoroughly humanized, densely populated and domesticated, de-natured landscape in the world, it is eastern China.” When Loewenberg recently revisited Shanghai for the first time since his childhood, he felt like an insect on an anthill, so crowded and so squeezed, so “claustrophobic [and] contre-nature, the antithesis of all that John Muir and I came to love of unbounded wilderness.”
Loewenberg first encountered the embrace of nature at age nine, when his family moved to the Feather River in the High Sierras. Loewenberg has now lived in California for more than sixty years, and his passion for these mountains has deepened over the years. “This is the place where I am happiest and where I most wish to be.”
John Muir's love affair with the Sierras and their stark solitude had a vastly different origin from Loewenberg's: traumatic child abuse. The tale Loewenberg narrated was one of brutality ultimately transformed and redeemed by Muir in an act of self-creation.
Muir was born into a Scottish Calvinist family where corporal beating was the rule both at school and at home. Muir wrote, “The old Scotch fashion of whipping for every act of disobedience or of simple playful forgetfulness was still kept up in the wilderness [when Muir was eleven], and of course many of those whippings fell upon me. Most of them were severely outrageous.”
Muir's journals disclose a particularly harrowing experience, a major trauma that nearly killed him when he was forced to dig a well on the family farm. For months he was lowered by basket into the ever-deepening cramped well shaft to chip away the rock with hammer and chisel. One morning, at eighty-five feet, he was nearly overcome by accumulated poisonous gases. Only his non-response to his father signaled his distress. Nearly asphyxiated, he was hauled out violently gasping for breath. Yet he was returned to the well two days later to complete the task for another ten feet before a geyser of water was reached. His father never spent an hour in the well.
Loewenberg described how in some fortunate victims of child abuse, trauma can be mastered. “Muir's need for the mountains and his genuine experience of happiness alone in nature was the working-through and mastery of his boyhood trauma of isolation; aloneness, and desperation under the harsh rule of his father. … The perfect freedom of the mountains, under no power but that of the sun, the moon, the sunset, and the weather. … In the mountains no man and no clock was his master — the tyranny of the time of civilization was suspended.”
Mary Kay O'Neil, a training and supervising analyst for the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis, faced a different challenge from the other panelists' when writing a recent biographical piece. O'Neil was asked to contribute a paper to a journal that was documenting contributions of some largely unsung women analysts. She chose Ruth Easser, whom she believes was an important psychoanalytic pioneer.
A candidate of the Columbia Institute, Easser was one of the three first women graduates to be on Columbia's staff and faculty, the first to be appointed supervising and training analyst, and the first graduate to be invited to present the prestigious Sandor Rado lecture. In the twenty-five years from 1946 until her death from cancer in 1975, Easser was an inspiring clinician, teacher, and writer.
The dilemma for O'Neil, as she thought about the questions asked of the panelists, was that she had been in analysis with Easser during the two years preceding her death. Her transferences to Easser had been of the intense and conflicted nature that analytic transferences are, not the often muted transferences of the biographer to a largely unknown subject. O'Neil was therefore obviously constrained in disclosing this aspect of her relationship with Easser. She was further held back by matters of propriety and discretion as her research disclosed matters of Easser's personal and family history O'Neil had not known. Loyalty and love for her analyst and the ethical issues of personal disclosures were additional concerns as she prepared for the panel discussion.
O'Neil chose to chronicle the highlights of Easser's career. Easser completed her analytic training when she was twenty-seven, which was young even in those days. She was appointed a training analyst five years after her graduation. Students soon began flocking to her although she was known to be “hard as nails” when necessary. Easser had a unique capacity to inspire respect for patients. She wrote several papers on the hysterical personality and narcissistic disorders. Among her many interests were perceptually handicapped patients. She published papers that described their psychology and recommended techniques for working with them.