SIGMUND FREUD

by William H. Benson

May 6, 2004

     Born May 6, 1856, Sigmund Freud was the medical doctor of Jewish descent in Vienna, Austria who sought to understand the riddle of how and why the human mind worked as it did.  His ideas are today dismissed by most of the general public as well as many of the psychologists who chime in together and say that Freud’s “psychoanalysis is itself the illness of which it purports to be the cure,” considering it little more than a modern form of ancient shamanism, mere speculation, not even hypothesis, useless as medical science.

     In some regards Freud’s critics may be right, but “throwing him out will not get rid of him, because he is inside us.”  Freud is inescapable in that his terminology—such as repression, narcissism, Freudian slips, and the Oedipal complex—pervade modern ways of thinking.

     If he is now appreciated at all, it is by the literary critics who recognize him for what they say he truly was—a brilliant essayist, a master of exposition, and an unsurpassed persuader who had a very good prose style and whose works are very readable today.  These critics understand that his powerful mythology and his metaphors supersede what little science he created.

     Consider the universe of Freud’s inventions: the unconscious, the libido or the drive, the psychic functions of the id and the ego and the superego, the defense mechanisms of repression and regression and projection, and the consequences of a derailed infantile development.  Together these mental tools gave rise to Freud’s claim to his own science, that of psychoanalysis.      He had a portrait of men and women as insatiable beings who are pushed and pulled by unrespectable and unconscious inner drives and desires, and it was by psychoanalysis that he wished to determine those drives.  His map of the mind placed the unconscious in the central role which then created an inescapable inner and very recognizable human conflict.

     When one thinks of Sigmund Freud, one sees a bald head, a well-trimmed beard, a suit and a tie, a notepad and pen, a cigar, a chair, and above all else a couch.  Few people in humankind’s history had devoted their very life to listening to people’s stories of their memories of their infancy and childhood and of their dreams, all while they reclined on that couch.  Freud would offer some leading question, and then in free association they would talk while he took notes.

     His schedule was tight.  From 9:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. he would listen to patients, each for 55 minutes with a five minute break between.  Then, after lunch and a walk he would again meet patients beginning at 3:00 p.m. and work until 9:00 or 10:00 p.m.  In other words, he would see eleven or twelve people every day, each for an hour, and he would do so six days a week.

     And he held to that schedule for four plus decades, gathering an immense number of human stories from which he then worked out his theories.  Freud’s originality remains so impressive mainly because it rested upon so much serious and determined and dedicated hard work.

     And he did not stop with just psychology, but in a daring venture argued that psychoanalysis is universal and that it should be expanded and applied to every aspect of human culture: to the arts, literature, biography, mythology, religion, politics, education, the law, history, and even prehistory.  Whether one can and should do so is debatable.

     His most original and profound work is The Interpretation of Dreams in which he suggested that “fulfillment of a hidden wish” is the essence of a dream.  He noted that normal human dreams that happen when asleep display a striking resemblance to the hallucinations that the psychotics described to him.  He said that even though dreams often appear to be quite senseless, “dreams contain the psychology of the neuroses in a nutshell.”

     By boring deep into people’s dreams, Freud believed that he was tapping into the unconscious.  Indeed, it was those dreams that provided a secure basis for his theory that humans possess an unconscious.

     In early June of 1938 at the urging of his friends and even though he did not fully believe in the German Nazi threat, Freud and his family fled Vienna for London where he resumed his practice. But then that steady stream of cigars took their toll, and there in London on September 23, 1939 he passed away.

THE MARCH OF FOLLY

by William H. Benson

April 22, 2004

     In her book The March of Folly, the historian Barbara Tuchman, identified four types of misgovernment: tyranny, excessive ambition, incompetence, and folly.  The latter type she defined as the pursuit of a policy contrary to the self-interest of the electorate or the state, a policy that is counter-productive.  She listed as examples of folly the American war in Vietnam in the 1960s, but first and foremost was the British loss of the American colonies.

     The major issue between England and her North American colonies was over Parliament’s right to tax.  King George III and Parliament believed that they had the right to enforce taxation, but the colonists disagreed because each of the thirteen colonies had its own elected assembly, who had the right to tax its citizens.

     Edmund Burke, a perceptive thinker and politician in England, said, “The retention of America was worth far more to the mother country economically, politically, and even morally than any sum which might be raised by taxation, or even than any principle so-called of the British Constitution.”  And yet King George sacrificed possession of a vast territorial empire of incalculable wealth for the principle.

     War against the colonies was not unanimously supported by all the British in England.  Some spoke out against the use of armed forces.  William Pitt stood before Parliament and warned of French intervention and the use of German Hessian soldiers in fighting the war.  He said, “My lords, if I were an American as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country I never would lay down my arms—never, never, never.”

     Instead of pursuing conciliation, King George sent in the British redcoats, and on April 19, 1775 at Lexington and Concord, shots were exchanged and the war for independence had begun.  It would last for seven years—years that severely tested Americans’ dedication to the ideal of independence, but at the same time it tested the resolve of Parliament and the King.

    About George III, Winston Churchill centuries later wrote, “But his mind was Hanoverian, with an infinite capacity for mastering detail, and limited success in dealing with large issues and main principles. . . . His stubbornness lent weight to the stiffening attitude of his Government.  His responsibility for the final breach is a high one. . . .

     “George III grew stubborn and even more intent. . . . Rarely has British strategy fallen into such a multitude of errors.  Every maxim and principle of war was either violated or disregarded.  The British forces were now dispersed and divided over five hundred miles of country.”

     The war ended in October of 1781 with Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown.  Lord North, the British Prime Minister who had the distinction of presiding over the loss of the colonies, heard the news and cried out in anguish, “Oh, my, it is all over!”  And King George, in the agony of defeat and humiliation, talked of abdicating the throne and returning to Hanover.

     The British lost America.  America lost in Vietnam.  And now we have an Iraq freed of Sadaam Hussein’s grip, and suddenly the political and religious factions are now vying for power.

     Folly can also be defined as acting and talking as if we know when we do not know.

     The Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter admitted, “We don’t know the answers to the scary questions (“What if the Sunnis and Shiites team up against us?”) and no one has a good idea of what the government should do. . . . Maybe the Senate could help by holding hearings where the best experts on the region toss in their best ideas. . . . But that would mean admitting that the Know-It-All-ism isn’t working. . . . Uncertainty is the only certainty now—in politics and terror.”

     President George Bush II went into his war convinced of the rightness of certain ideas about Iraq and that the war would vindicate all those ideas. But then, “as events unfolded, the administration proved stubbornly unwilling to look at facts on the ground, at the new evidence, and the need for shifts in its basic approach.  It was more important to prove that it was right than to get Iraq right.”  The march of folly.

ROGER WILLIAMS

by William H. Benson

April 8, 2004

     By the New Style calendar he was born April 5, 1604, four hundred years ago this week.  Scholars since have considered Roger Williams, the Puritan minister in early New England, a champion of freedom and of liberty, a precursor to Jefferson, and a prophet who established a person’s right to worship as she or he pleases.

     Those who listened to his ranting, such as Jonathan Winthrop and John Cotton, would find our estimate of him bewildering because to them Williams was odd.  He took the Bible with a foolish literalness, a pedantic and boorish man without a sense of perspective, a perfectionist who took his dogmas to the nth degree.  They did not see that his ideas were so much subversive as they were a nuisance, with little merit other than their novelty.

     The scholar Edmund Morgan said, “His thinking progressed not by opposing accepted ideas, but by pursuing them through their implications to conclusions that his contemporaries could not or would not accept.”

     Above all else, Roger Williams wanted to purify the Christian church of any taint of worldliness.  Utterly opposed to promiscuous membership, he argued that only the truly regenerated, those who had experienced all the stages of salvation, should be permitted to attend a worship service.  If the unregenerated were in attendance, it would blemish the act of worship.

     Furthermore, he expected all church members to repent of ever having associated with the Church of England, and if they refused to do so, he felt their worship services were marred.

     His restrictive membership requirements left him alone with only his wife Mary with whom he could worship and pray, and then the day came when he refused to say grace at mealtime with her because she had been friendly with some whom Roger felt had compromised their beliefs.

     Finally, he arrived at the conclusion that the true Christian church did not exist, that it had ceased to exist after the reign of Constantine in the fourth century.  Because of this, he concluded that there were then no true preachers and had not been since the time of the apostles.  Today’s clergymen, he argued, were nothing more than self-appointed saints without any authority to preach and teach because the chain from the apostles to them had been broken.

     In addition, he violently disagreed with the civil authorities’ interference in any religious matters; and so he opposed a law that would require the unsaved to swear an oath of loyalty in God’s name to the civil powers.  To Williams, each part and act of worship was sacred.

     He pointed to the flagpole and cried out that it was wrong to have St. George’s cross on the British flag because the government was using religion to justify itself.  One man in colonial New England, John Endecott, acted on Williams’s argument, pulled down the flag, and cut out the cross—an act that the governor, Jonathan Winthrop, thought may be construed as treasonous.  He knew that Roger Williams and his crazed ideas had to go.

     Winthrop had him arrested, put on trial, and found guilty of sowing dissent.  His punishment was banishment, but before the sheriff could apprehend him, he fled into the wilderness about Narragansett Bay, to what would become Rhode Island, arriving there in early April of 1636.

     He welcomed anybody and any theology.  In 1638 a group of Anabaptists arrived, and they convinced him that he needed to be rebaptized as an adult.  He agreed and was baptized, something that so utterly astonished Winthrop that he wrote Roger a letter, and asked him, “From what spirit and to what end do you drive?” 

     But then after four months as a Baptist, Roger found fault with them and drifted away.  Some scholars today consider him the father of the Baptist faith in America, but few if any Baptist today would claim him as such, so liberal and radical was he. 

     But by pursuing his ideas to their final end, he had worked his way to the principle of separating the church from the state—a monumental intellectual achievement, but it was not for the same reason that James Madison had in mind when he wrote the First Amendment.  It was that Roger Williams was so determined to purify the Christian church that he ended up alone, solitary, in a sect with just one person, himself, but then later generations looked back and gave him a halo, calling him the American pioneer of religious freedom.

DANIEL BOORSTIN AND THE QUAKERS

by William H. Benson

March 25, 2004

     The historian and public servant Daniel Boorstin passed away earlier this month in Washington.  He was eight-nine years old.  In addition to teaching law for twenty-five years at the University of Chicago and serving as the chief Librarian at the Library of Congress from 1975 to 1987, Boorstin also wrote exceptional and readable history.

     Early in his career he wrote the three-volume The Americans and then ten years ago he wrote another three-volume work: The Creators, The Discoverers, and The Seekers.  He was easily recognizable with his bowtie and black-framed glasses.

     My favorite Boorstin essay comes from his chapter The Quest for Martyrdom found in his book The Colonial Experience in which he described the lust that the Quakers’ of the seventeenth-century felt for hardships and torture and mutilation and imprisonment while in their search for a crown of martyrdom.  These Quaker men and women preferred “to die for the whole truth, rather than live with a half-truth.”

     From a base in Rhode Island they would trudge across the wilderness, risking Indians, snowstorms, and wild animals because they “felt moved” to go to Boston to preach to the Puritans, who already were set in their religious beliefs.  The exasperated Puritans would give these Quakers thirty stripes with a three-cord knotted whip, confine them to a jail without food nor water, cut off one of their ears, and, if all else failed, hang them.

     Three times Mary Dyer made the pilgrimage to Boston.  The first time she was banished to Newport, Rhode Island.  The second time in late October of 1659 the Boston Puritans marched her to the gallows along with two Quaker men, who were first hung.  Preparations were made to hang Mary Dyer, but then at the last moment, the authorities gave her a reprieve and banished her again for a second time.  Then, on May 21, 1660, she was back in Boston preaching her Quaker beliefs, but this time she was hanged.

     The Quaker Josiah Southwick told his persecutors after successive whippings that “it was no more terrifying unto him, than if ye had taken a Feather and blown it up in the Air, and had said, Take heed it hurteth him not.” 

     What seemed to redirect the Quakers away from their mindless focus upon martyrdom was land, in other words having their own colony in Pennsylvania, around Philadelphia, William Penn’s venture.  There they established themselves and then prospered, and along the way they gave up their frenetic devotion to spreading their particular form of the Gospel.

     But then Boorstin in another essay How the Quakers Misjudged the Indians pointed out how the Quakers’ pacifism left them unprepared when dealing with the Native Americans. 

     Boorstin wrote, “The political success, even the very survival of an American colony, often depended on a realistic estimate of the Indian.  But the Quakers’ view of the Indian was of a piece with their attitude toward war: it was unrealistic, inflexible, and based on false premises about human nature.”

     In 1748 instead of voting money for the defense of the colony, the Quaker Assembly gave 500 pounds to the Indians who promptly purchased lead and powder and guns and attacked the Irish and German settlers on the Pennsylvania frontier.  The Quakers failed to understand that by their own hands this bloodbath had happened.

     In August of 1756 Benjamin Franklin said, “In short, I do not believe we shall ever have a firm peace with the Indians, till we have well drubbed them.”

     How can we apply Boorstin’s lessons on the Quakers and the Indians to what Western Civilization faces from today’s religious fanatics?  We must somehow find ways to turn their focus away from their religion and their constant search for martyrdom and their wish to terrorize toward a more prosperous and substantive life.  We have to build up our defenses for our own protection.  And as Benjamin Franklin suggested, peace will happen only after “we have well drubbed them.”

COMEDY AND TRAGEDY

by William H. Benson

March 11, 2004

     Comedy is about getting the right guy with the right girl, and the play ends with a wedding.  It is about light-hearted and romantic emotions, smiles and kisses.  It is desire and fulfillment acted out in a solemn ceremony before others, for love is that quantity which keeps strife and chaos away.  In Much Ado About Nothing Benedick marries Beatrice, and the play ends.

     Tragedy on the other hand is about murder, the reasons leading up to it and the consequences thereafter.  It is serious and full of frowns.  It is hatred plotting its own course in private. 

     Master Shakespeare had read North’s translation of Plutarch’s life of Julius Caesar and had then put the murder in Act III of his play.  Brutus and Cassius had watched Caesar take over the powers of the government in a disregard for the law and for the Senate, and fearful of the outcome of his ambition, these nobles had plotted to murder him.  On March 15, 44 B.C. they gathered about and stabbed him repeatedly until he lay dead.

     They then cried out, “Liberty!  Freedom!  Tyranny is dead! . . . Ambition’s debt is paid.”

     And then Shakespeare, being the genius he was, brought love and murder together into the same play.  Because Othello and Desdemona loved each other intensely, they had married.  But then a third party Iago, out of his own jealousy and anger and hatred, presented evidence that Desdemona had been unfaithful, even though she had not.  Despite her pleas that she was innocent, Othello in a murderous rage suffocated his once-beloved wife.

     Romeo and Juliet on March 11, 1302, according to Shakespeare, married secretly.  Young and in love, “two star-crossed lovers” they were.  But then that same afternoon Romeo in the midst of a brawl on the streets in Verona killed Tybalt, one of Juliet’s relatives, and had broken the Prince’s law, who had strictly forbade fighting.  Knowing that the punishment for this crime was execution, Romeo fled Verona, only then to die beside Juliet.

     They say that love is blind, that it drives people in both the right direction and at times in the wrong direction.  Othello and Romeo were at the mercy of others and also of their own powerful unchecked emotions—love and anger and jealousy and hatred.  Instead of desire and fulfillment, they ended up with strife and chaos.   A wedding which should have been the means to a deep and abiding love ended in a tragic murder.

     Television can be classified into comedy or tragedy—either the thirty-minute sitcom or the hour-long murder mystery, and we can quickly flip channels from one to the other.

     Forty years ago on Monday nights I watched Andy Taylor and Barney Fife chase Helen Crump and Thelma Lou, and we laughed then as we do now at the reruns.  And then there was Perry Mason who each week solved a case, identifying who murdered the victim.

     Today we have Greg and Dharma and Law and Order, a comedy and a tragedy.   

     As it has throughout humankind’s history, the issue of marriage is once again today in the news.  But this cannot be classified a comedy, for it is not about getting the right guy with the right girl.  And neither is it a tragedy because no one is being murdered.  Perhaps it is that other of Shakespeare’s dramatic forms—history; some would argue that this is a just a social development filling the newspapers that future historians will sift through to try to determine its causes.

     However, some brave commentators have labeled it what it is–lawlessness.  Thomas Sowell said, “It is an issue solely because a few headstrong judges in Massachusetts and an opportunistic mayor in San Francisco decided that they were above the law.”  Bill O’Reilly said, “What kind of message does this send to Americans who don’t like a variety of other laws? . . . Either the law rules or it doesn’t.  And in California and much of the liberal press, it doesn’t.”

     “Liberty!  Freedom!  Tyranny is dead!”  The Founding Fathers understood and believed that liberty and freedom could only survive in a society when the laws were obeyed.

     We shall have a “Comedy tonight, and a tragedy tomorrow.”

KERRY AND BUSH

by William H. Benson

February 26, 2004

     Scandals, accusations, finger-pointing, denials, justifications, and dirt-digging—all seem to overshadow the run up to elections wherever and whenever across America, and the 2004 Presidential campaign is no different.  But this year, the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kerry, who deeply desires the Oval Office, has brought up for discussion two things from a time almost forty years ago: John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War.

     After all, Kerry has modeled his life after Jack Kennedy—the World War II hero, the former Senator from Massachusetts, and the President elected in 1960.  It is coincidental but they even have the same initials, JFK, and both were Eastern bluebloods, Ivy league-educated, war-heroes, and liberal-minded.

     Because Kennedy commanded a PT boat in the Pacific during World War II, Kerry requested duty aboard a Swiftboat, patrolling up the river in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam in a free fire zone, where his men shot at anything that moved, and he ended up receiving three purple hearts.

     George W. Bush also served in the military during the Vietnam War, as did 8,762,000 other Americans, but instead of going to Vietnam, he enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard where he learned to fly, transferring in 1972 to the Guard in Alabama where he could practice his “weekend warrior” duties, allow his flight physical to lapse, and not bother to show up very often.  Only the dental records prove he was there.

     Of course, Kerry wants to parade his war medals and drape himself in the memory of JFK because it embarrasses Bush.

     Pushing aside all of this to look at the facts that lie below the legend, the historian Paul Johnson wrote, “In November 1961 Kennedy did send in the first 7,000 US troops to Vietnam, the critical step down the slippery incline into the swamp.  That was the first really big US error.”

     And Kennedy had been warned.  On May 31, 1961 Charles de Gaulle urged him to cut his losses in Southeast Asia.  “I predict you will sink step by step into a bottomless military and political quagmire.”  He knew, for that is what had happened to the French in Indochina.

     And Kennedy knew the dangers and said so.  “The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have forgotten.  Then we will be told to send in more troops.  It’s like taking a drink.  The effect wears off, and you have to take another.”

     He made a second mistake in the autumn of 1963 when he authorized American support for a coup that toppled and then murdered Ngo Dien Diem, the US’s main ally in South Vietnam.  The CIA then paid $42,000 in bribes to those officers who once in power set up a military junta.  “The worst mistake we ever made,” was Lyndon Johnson’s comment.

     Three weeks later Kennedy was himself murdered, and LBJ made a third crucial mistake when he ordered the bombing of North Vietnam rather than a forceful and aggressive ground attack.

     All these mistakes rested upon the “domino theory”, the idea that should South Vietnam fall to communism so would the rest of Southeast Asia to which Paul Johnson warned, “Beware public men when they use metaphors, especially mixed ones!”

     Even though Kerry has referred to it as “Nixon’s war,” ever since his return from Vietnam, it actually was Kennedy’s.

     And furthermore, the Time journalist Charles Krauthammer argued that polishing war medals will not guarantee Americans will get a great President.  FDR, an excellent war-time President, had no military experience.  Lincoln had only six months during Black Hawk’s Rebellion, and Grant, a brilliant soldier, was one of the worst Presidents ever. “Heroic military service doesn’t always translate into wise leadership at the top.”

     We as Americans in this election year of 2004 should insist upon more from a Presidential candidate than parading his war medals and then pointing out the conspicuous absence from the other.  Instead, we should expect an honest discussion on what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan and what he will do to halt what could prove to be a slippery slope into a quagmire.