Studies of Life Positioning: A New Sociocultural Approach to Psychobiography (Advances in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology) [1 ed.] 1032608854, 9781032608853

Citation preview

Studies of Life Positioning

This book illustrates how Life Positioning Analysis can be used as a theoretical and methodological approach to sociocultural psychobiography. Life positioning psychobiography studies lives as they unfold within a world of interactivity. It recognizes and portrays us as social beings embedded and developing within our life relationships and circumstances and striving to make something of our lives. Here, Jack Martin presents both single-​subject and dual-​ subject studies of social psychologist Stanley Milgram, former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, existential humanist Ernest Becker, American heiress and child advocate Dorothy Burlingham and her life partner, renowned psychoanalyst Anna Freud, and indigenous athlete Jim Thorpe and his college coach Glenn “Pop” Warner. These case studies provide vividly memorable demonstrations of how we are positioned by circumstances and others, and come to position ourselves as socioculturally constituted, psychological persons. In so doing, they offer a systematic framework for studying the lives of people that shows sociocultural and social psychological development without resorting to mentalistic theories, concepts, and interpretations. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in areas related to sociocultural and developmental psychology, the psychology and sociology of personhood, theoretical psychology, qualitative methodology, and social science and life writing more generally. Jack Martin is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is a recipient of the Society of Theoretical and Philosophical Society’s Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions. The focus of Jack’s current work is on personhood and the study of lives, using positioning theories such as Position Exchange Theory and Life Positioning Analysis.

Advances in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology Series Editor: Brent D. Slife

A Humane Vision of Clinical Psychology, Volume 2: Explorations into the Practice of Compassionate Psychotherapy Robert A. Graceffo A Philosophical Perspective on Folk Moral Objectivism Thomas Pölzler A Psychological Perspective on Folk Moral Objectivism Jennifer Cole Wright Suffering and Psychology Frank C. Richardson Posttraumatic Joy: A Seminar on Nietzsche’s Tragicomic Philosophy of Life Matthew Clemente, Edited with Introduction by Andrew J. Zeppa Towards the Psychological Humanities: A Modest Manifesto for the Future of Psychology Mark Freeman Primer in Critical Personalism: A Framework for Reviving Psychological Inquiry and for Grounding a Socio-​Cultural Ethos James T. Lamiell Studies of Life Positioning: A New Sociocultural Approach to Psychobiography Jack Martin For more information about this series, please visit www.routle​dge.com/​Advan​ces-​in-​Theo​reti​cal-​ and-​Philos​ophi​cal-​Psy​chol​ogy/​book-​ser​ies/​TPP

Studies of Life Positioning A New Sociocultural Approach to Psychobiography Jack Martin

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Jack Martin The right of Jack Martin to be identified as author[/​s] of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 9781032608853 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032610474 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003461715 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003461715 Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK

To all who are interested in the study of lives.

Contents

Series Foreword by Brent D. Slife



1 A Psychobiography of Life Positioning

viii 1

2 Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing

17

3 Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis in the Canadian Province of Quebec

43

4 Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology by way of Human Evil

75

5 The Symmetrical Relationship and Conjoint Agency of Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud

96

6 The Asymmetrical, Manipulative Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner

121

7 Revisitings, Reflections, and Critical Considerations

145

Index

162

Series Foreword Brent D. Slife, Series Editor

Psychologists need to face the facts. Their commitment to empiricism for answering disciplinary questions does not prevent pivotal questions from arising that cannot be evaluated exclusively through empirical methods, hence the title of this series: Advances in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. For example, such moral questions as, “What is the nature of a good life?” are crucial to psychotherapists but are not answerable through empirical methods alone. And what of these methods? Many have worried that our current psychological means of investigation are not adequate for fully understanding the person (e.g., Gantt & Williams, 2018; Schiff, 2019). How do we address this concern through empirical methods without running headlong into the dilemma of methods investigating themselves? Such questions are in some sense philosophical, to be sure, but the discipline of psychology cannot advance even its own empirical agenda without addressing questions like these in defensible ways. How then should the discipline of psychology deal with such distinctly theoretical and philosophical questions? We could leave the answers exclusively to professional philosophers, but this option would mean that the conceptual foundations of the discipline, including the conceptual framework of empiricism itself, are left to scholars who are outside the discipline. As undoubtedly helpful as philosophers are and will be, this situation would mean that the people doing the actual psychological work, psychologists themselves, are divorced from the people who formulate and re-​formulate the conceptual foundations of that work. This division of labor would not seem to serve the long-​term viability of the discipline. Instead, the founders of psychology—​scholars such as Wundt, Freud, and James—​recognized the importance of psychologists in formulating their own foundations. These parents of psychology not only did their own theorizing, in cooperation with many other disciplines; they also realized the significance of psychologists continuously re-​examining these theories and philosophies. This re-​examination process allowed for the people most directly involved in and knowledgeable about the discipline to be the ones to decide what changes

newgenprepdf

Series Foreword   ix were needed, and how such changes would best be implemented. This book series is dedicated to that task, the examining and re-​examining of psychology’s foundations. References Gantt, E., & Williams, R. (2018). On hijacking science: Exploring the nature and consequences of overreach in psychology. Routledge. Schiff, B. (2019). Situating qualitative methods in psychological science. Routledge.

1 A Psychobiography of Life Positioning

Author’s Introduction My interest in life positioning arose in the second half of my 45-​year career as an applied and academic psychologist. In the early 1990s, having worked as an educational and counseling psychologist after receiving my doctorate from the University of Alberta in 1973, I was shocked to discover that although I had been studying people’s behaviors, thoughts, emotions, and volitions for many years, I had not thought seriously about persons as such, and what I since have come to think of as the psychology of personhood. Even my reading and study of humanistic and existential psychology, which emphasized the whole person, had not provided me with a clear sense of the concepts of “person” and “personhood.” How had this happened? Looking back, I came to understand that I had been so immersed in traditional psychology’s dissection of personhood into component parts and aspects, as distributed across its various subfields and subdisciplines, that I had lost sight of the intact person, acting and experiencing within historical, sociocultural, and biographical life contexts. The more I pondered this curiosity, the more excited I became about the possibility of redirecting my career to studying persons and their lives. And this is what I have continued to do, well past my retirement from Simon Fraser University’s Department of Psychology at the end of 2018. My attempt to get to grips with our individual and collective personhood has had and continues to have two primary aspects—​one conceptual and theoretical, the other interpretive and methodological. As will become clear in this introductory chapter, my theoretical studies of personhood and agency (e.g., Martin & Sugarman, 1999; Martin, Sugarman, & Thompson, 2003; Martin, Sugarman, & Hickinbottom, 2010) led me to a new appreciation and understanding of biography and psychobiography as ways of studying particular people, with a larger aim of understanding people and their ways of living more generally. However, as fascinating and helpful as I have found my readings and studies of psychobiography to be, I also found much of this personhood-​relevant literature to be directed at understanding and explaining major life events of persons in DOI: 10.4324/9781003461715-1

2  A Psychobiography of Life Positioning terms of the mental processes and intrapersonal dynamics of individuals. What I wanted was a sustained focus on the relational, interpersonal development of persons as actively enabled and constrained within their historical, sociocultural contexts, but in a way that still took our individual psychological capabilities seriously. Eventually, I hit upon the core idea of life positioning, various aspects of which I will describe in the rest of this chapter and go on to illustrate in the sociocultural psychobiographical studies that follow. Before beginning, I want to caution the reader against considering anything that I say in these pages as an arguably new theoretical or methodological orthodoxy. My purpose herein is to offer my work on life positioning as a set of “unfinished” ideas and practices that readers might consider critically and perhaps build upon in the conduct of related work of their own. To this end, I try to adopt a balanced and at times critical account of what I think I have accomplished thus far, what I find lacking in my efforts and work to date, and a few connections between my work and other recent attempts by social scientists to extend the range, orientations, and subjects of sociocultural psychobiographical inquiry. However, although I will introduce biography and psychobiography in this first chapter, my aim in this book is to present my work on life positioning, not to survey or detail biography and psychobiography more generally. What is Life Positioning?1 When psychologists think about life, we tend to think about it in psychological terms. Scientifically oriented psychologists conceive of our lives as flowing through, and finding expression in, our perceptions and thoughts, supported by neurophysiological and cognitive systems. Humanistically oriented psychologists think about life in terms of experiencing, feeling, and finding meaning in our existence. In this book, I write about life in a more biographical, sociocultural, and developmental way. Human life is person making. To live a life is to become a person. By participating within the circumstances of our lives, we become persons. The most basic way in which we participate in our lives is by being positioned within them. Life positioning concerns how we are located within our lives. It is a function of our life circumstances—​our interactions with others, things, ideas, and the perspectives and purposes we form and pursue within these circumstances and interactions. How we are positioned in our lives matters. Life positioning is a basis for the determination of our experiences, actions and interactions, perspectives, possibilities, and projects. Life positioning is of critical importance to the meanings we find in our lives, the kinds of persons we become, what we accomplish, and the legacies we bequeath. What we become and what becomes of us are determined in important ways by how we are positioned in life. Some of this positioning has little to do with our own actions and projects,

A Psychobiography of Life Positioning  3 some is created by our interactivities and relations with others within our life circumstances, and some is a consequence of the purposes we form and pursue, both for ourselves and for others. The circumstances of our lives are present at our births, but continuously change throughout our lives. As we develop within our families, communities, schools, and adult lives, we learn to influence our life circumstances to greater or lesser extents. Much depends on the nature of our circumstances and the nature of the capabilities we acquire and exercise as we develop within our sociocultural and interpersonal settings and exchanges. We become active participants in our lives, with intentions and purposes aimed at creating desired changes in our own lives and in those of others. However, whenever we act, we also create unintended consequences for ourselves and others, consequences that may exert profound influences that extend well beyond ourselves and our awareness. When we turn things loose in the world, there is no telling where these things will lead, but we and others, now and in the future, will need to live with the consequences. As our lives unfold and we develop as person agents, we constantly position and reposition ourselves not only through our interactions with others and communal practices and artifacts, but through our more private musings, plans, and reactions. Such aspects of human agency create possibilities within our lives that are grounded in our previous life circumstances and experiences but go beyond them. Our lives consist of a constant interplay amongst the circumstances we inhabit, the interactivities we engage, and the purposes and projects we initiate as we develop as agents within the frameworks of our lives. From a social developmental perspective, we begin our lives as actors whose actions become increasingly coordinated with the actions of those around us in ways that enable us to understand more and more of what is going on in our lives. Such understanding allows us to differentiate ourselves and our experiences for our contemplation, consideration, and tailoring. Our life experiences enable a growing autobiographical, storied sense of our lives and ourselves. This autobiographical framing enables us to see ourselves as authors of our life stories. Both our developmental trajectories and autobiographical storylines involve understanding how we are positioned by our life circumstances and come to position ourselves within these circumstances in ways that alter both our circumstances and ourselves. The focus of life positioning is what goes on within the contexts, interactions, relationships, and experiences of our lives, not only what happens in our heads. Psychobiography and Life Positioning The application of what might loosely be thought of as psychological insights to the study of lives has ancient roots. The Iliad and the Odyssey, stories of Mohammed, Buddha, and the Christian gospels contain compelling portraits of

4  A Psychobiography of Life Positioning lives infused with what we now recognize as psychological content. However, psychobiography as a disciplinary undertaking was launched much more recently by Sigmund Freud’s early twentieth-​century attempt to colonize biography as a means of promoting his life project of psychoanalysis (Hamilton, 2007, p. 144). In his 1910 Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood, Freud (1999) demonstrated how psychoanalysis could be used to interpret psychological riddles in da Vinci’s life and work, as connected to his sexual orientation. Freud’s foray into biography was much maligned by biographers as “essentially reductive and formulaic.” However, “in the aftermath of the Second World War, biographers did slowly begin to use Freud’s approach to the unravelling of an individual’s mind … In other words, biography became a psychological as well as an historical quest” (Hamilton & Renders, 2018, pp. 145–​146). When Erik Erikson published his book-​length psychobiographies of Martin Luther (1958) and Mahatma Gandhi (1969), psychobiography had already captured the interest of academic psychologists like Henry Murray and Gordon Allport at Harvard and eventually encouraged a new generation of personality psychologists who called themselves personologists. Personologists, like James Anderson, Rae Carlson, Allan Elms, Ruthellen Josselson, Dan McAdams, William Runyan, and Silvan Tomkins, contributed works that took a variety of methodological and theoretical forms, most often in interaction with the field of personality psychology. By the end of the twentieth and into the twenty-​first century, psychobiographers began drawing on an ever-​wider array of psychological theories to guide their work and interpret the lives of their subjects (cf. Köváry, 2011; McAdams & Dunlop, 2022; Ponterotto, 2015; Schultz, 2005). During the early twenty-​first century, many personality, clinical, developmental, educational, and sociocultural psychologists began to routinely complement their quantitative studies of aggregated data from many participants with qualitative and narrative studies that illustrated how their findings played out in greater detail in particular lives. During this same time, several personologists and psychobiographers published book-​length works that reflected the new methodological diversity of contemporary psychobiography—​ e. g., psychobiographies of George W, Bush (McAdams, 2011), Robert Louis Stevenson (Singer, 2017), and Bobby Fischer (Ponterotto, 2012). Other qualitative researchers studied the lives of everyday people as well as those of extraordinary achievers—​e.g., Ruthellen Josselson’s (2017) study of the quotidian lives of women searching for meaning and identity in their personal existence. Even more recently, a special issue of the Journal of Personality (Adler & Singer, 2022) published a set of psychobiographical studies of the lives of individuals devoted to progressive social change, including Michelle Obama, Nasta Keating, Harvey Milk, and others. Current work in psychobiography also includes studies of lives located and lived outside of Europe and

A Psychobiography of Life Positioning  5 America, the traditional homes of psychobiographical scholarship. Such work has been conducted by an increasingly international and diverse cohort of psychobiographers (e.g., Mayer, van Niekerk, Fouché, & Ponterotto, 2023). Today, it is possible to define psychobiography as the use of psychological methods and theories to study individuals and their lives in a wide variety of historical and sociocultural contexts. My reason for writing this book is to put life positioning into psychobiography. I believe that adding the theory and methods of life positioning to psychobiography will make such work more sociocultural, developmental, and less mentalistic than is typical of much extant psychobiography. Life positioning focuses on the development of persons in interaction with others within historical and sociocultural contexts that enable and limit their perspectives, possibilities, and life projects. I believe that life positioning can help us understand how our lives afford us opportunities and possibilities as well as constraints and limitations on our personal development. Such understanding can help us envision communities that maximize participation and engagement for all of us. Life positioning is grounded in the complex multiplicity and diversity of our life interactions, relationships, and contexts. In doing so, it does not privilege or ignore our inner, mental lives as sources of our successes and failures. Consequently, it carries explanatory potential for our weaknesses as well as our strengths that go well beyond our inner resources alone. If an important source of our psychological personhood is in our life situations—​if we become the kinds of persons we are through participating in the interactive practices that our social contexts afford—​ sociocultural psychobiographical studies of life positioning can potentially help us, individually and collectively, to consider social and political ways of living together that are equitable and just. Position Exchange and Positioning and Repositioning I understand persons to be “embodied, self-​interpreting, human agents with a distinctive sociocultural ontogeny, unique capabilities and dispositions, and moral, existential concerns” (Martin, 2022, p. 392). My first forays into life positioning as a theory and method for studying persons and our lives were in collaboration with Alex Gillespie (Gillespie & Martin, 2014; Martin & Gillespie, 2010, 2013; also see Martin & Gillespie, 2022) and focused on a phenomenon we labelled position exchange. Position exchange is a primary mechanism of life positioning that helps to explain our development as persons with psychological capabilities. It speaks directly to the ontogeny of personhood mentioned in the foregoing definition of persons. Although much psychobiography discusses the personal development of its subjects, as Freud did by focusing on Leonardo da Vinci’s childhood memories and dreams, the developmental theorizing in most such work tends to favor psychoanalytic and psychodynamic mechanisms over mechanisms of social participation and interactivity.

6  A Psychobiography of Life Positioning Position Exchange

Building on the social developmental psychology of George Herbert Mead (1934), Alex and I used position exchange to explain how humans develop psychological capabilities such as self and other understanding, perspective taking, and agency by participating in sociocultural practices involving reciprocal exchanges with others. We used children’s games like hide-​and-​seek to show how, through repeated experience of occupying one position, such as that of “hider,” and then exchanging that position for that of “seeker,” young children gradually (often with the assistance of their caregivers) are able to anticipate what others might do in the “hider” position while they themselves are occupying the “seeker” position and vice versa—​a kind of pre-​reflective, embodied form of perspective taking. Using this and other examples, we argued that capabilities that define our personhood, such as more reflective and strategic forms of perspective taking, have their developmental origins in exchanges of positions. Positions, understood as locations within our interactions with others, thus contain perspectives, understood as orientations to act when in particular situations. With the acquisition of language and other discursive capabilities, we are able to exchange and coordinate positions and perspectives in more abstracted ways that can be differentiated from the social, physical locations of their developmental acquisition. In this way, we come to understand others’ experiences because we have had our own functionally similar experiences in similar situations. As listeners, we experience the nervousness and excitement of speakers because of the many times we have moved between the positions of speaking and listening. We can imagine something of an intimate friend’s disappointment or delight in us because we also have been disappointed and delighted by others. More generally, it is because we have experienced and occupied positions within our own lives that we are capable of understanding and coordinating our activities with others who live within similar sociocultural contexts. As our linguistic, discursive, and imaginative capabilities develop through our embeddedness in interactive exchanges with others, we can entertain perspectives, possibilities, and projects in both direct and vicarious ways. However, even as adults, we may be inclined to exaggerate the extent of our comprehension and imagination, especially if they have been acquired vicariously rather than through direct experience. Oftentimes, there is no adequate substitution for real-​life positioning and position exchange—​yet another reason for caution concerning the primacy often given to assumed individual mental powers in psychological theories and methods. In keeping with George Herbert Mead’s (1934) propensity for illustrating his social psychological ideas with examples drawn from team sports such as baseball, much of the theoretical and methodological potential of position exchange for understanding the ongoing interplay among positions, perspectives, possibilities,

A Psychobiography of Life Positioning  7 and personhood can be glimpsed immediately by briefly thinking about how soccer players learn to position and reposition themselves when they adopt a strategy known as total football. As fans of the wildly successful television series Ted Lasso or any serious football fan will know, total football frees players from occupying fixed positions and allows them to move more freely between different positions, with the proviso that they ensure that when players change positions, teammates will move to fill any positions that become vacant in the process. Assuming requisite levels of practice, why might this strategy work? The answer supplied by position exchange theory is that when players occupy and move fluidly across different positions (moving from mid-​fielder to attacker to defender and filling in for each other) they simultaneously acquire perspectives and possibilities associated with each of the different positions they move between, thus enabling them to better anticipate what their teammates are likely to do when in positions of which they themselves now have direct experience. George Herbert Mead called this nearly simultaneous occupation of different positions and perspectives sociality, a process he understood as basic to the ability of persons to coordinate with and understand themselves and each other. Neo-​Meadians like myself, Alex Gillespie, and Vlad Glăveanu (2021) understand sociality as the ability of persons to understand and coordinate their own and others’ perspectives and actions in ways that potentially yield possibilities for the exercise of personal and collective agency. Of course, sociality does not ensure successful or desirable outcomes, but these seem much less likely in its absence. It also is possible for people to make use of position exchange in their intrapersonal lives. For example, in both his personal and professional life, behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner made extensive use of exchanges between positions of “being controlled” and “being in control.” Using the same principles he used to invent and construct his “Skinner box” to control the behavior of rats and pigeons in his laboratory research on schedules and contingencies of reinforcement, Skinner engineered and enabled his personal life by maintaining precise daily schedules and creating spaces suited and equipped for work, relaxation, and sleep. Indeed, much of Skinner’s life positioning, and related thinking and acting, was devoted to bringing order and control to disorder and lack of control. Skinner’s biographer Daniel Bjork (1997, p. 214) positioned Skinner as a “master of self-​management.” The apparatuses of behavioral control he invented (e.g., the operant chamber or “Skinner box,” the “baby tender” or “air crib,” his “teaching machines”) were an extension of ideas and practices he used throughout his life to control his own behavior. Life Positioning and Repositioning

The ways in which we are positioned in our lives are numerous, complex, and dynamic. At birth we have little awareness of our life circumstances and

8  A Psychobiography of Life Positioning contribute relatively little to our life positioning. However, as we move and interact within our homes, families, communities, societies, and cultures, we become increasingly active participants in these situations and the practices and perspectives they encompass. With language use and the resultant capability of moving beyond the places and times of our lives through remembrance and imagination, we occupy directly and vicariously a potentially infinite number of positions. Yet of all these possibilities, it is those that we encounter and learn to practice, even to create, on a regular basis in ways that function to sustain us materially, socioculturally, interpersonally, and psychologically that come to constitute our personhood. Similarly, although we constantly are positioned and repositioned in our lives by circumstances, by others, and increasingly through our own actions, perspectives, and projects, we nonetheless develop patterns and themes in our life positionings and repositionings that make us recognizable and understandable to others and to ourselves. Analysis of a person’s life positionings and repositionings requires careful consideration of these patterns and themes, especially as they contribute to major life experiences and changes that help to understand what our lives are about and how we might interpret them. Life positionings and repositionings that can be understood to relate directly to life projects and legacies typically, and rightly, draw the attention of psychobiographers. Sometimes such positioning and repositioning occurs gradually over a significant period of time in the life of a focal subject or subjects. This often is the case for positioning and repositioning that occurs through education, within long-​term relationships, and is associated with what comes to be regarded as one’s life work. Sometimes, a life event is so dramatic and memorable that its comparatively brief occurrence leads to major and sustained life repositioning. Psychobiographer William Todd Schultz (2005) uses the term “prototypical scenes” to refer to such life events. Chapter 3’s life positioning psychobiography of mid-​twentieth century Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau illustrates both gradual and dramatic life repositionings and the ways in which they often overlap and interact during the course of a life. The question asked in this particular study is why Trudeau invoked Canada’s War Measures Act in response to kidnappings and a murder in the Canadian province of Quebec in 1970. The answer provided through a life positioning analysis is that Trudeau’s relatively brief positioning as a right-​wing Quebec nationalist when he was a young adult conflicted so dramatically with his later and much more long-​standing positioning as a progressive liberal democrat that he perhaps overreacted to the violent revolutionary nationalism of the perpetrators of the October 1970 crimes. This example also hints at the way in which life positioning psychobiography inevitably involves the creation of a life positioning storyline that pieces together the various positionings, repositionings, and position exchanges that are interpreted as answering psychobiographers’ questions about the lives of their subjects.

A Psychobiography of Life Positioning  9 Symmetrical and Asymmetrical Life Positioning

Patterns of positionings, position exchanges, and repositionings can be symmetrical or asymmetrical and can find expression in both interpersonal and intrapersonal application and use. In the foregoing life positioning example of the exercise of control in the personal and professional life of B. F. Skinner, Skinner used techniques and technologies of control to counter possible positionings of haphazardness and disorganization in his professional and personal life. Such a balanced and functional exchange of positions of “being disorganized and out of control” for positions of “being organized and in control” demonstrates a symmetrical use of reciprocal life positioning and repositioning. As we will see in Chapter 2, Stanley Milgram’s habitual exchange and use of positions of “concealing” and “revealing,” although often linked to morally questionable practices of deception, also exhibited a symmetrical functionality in his life and work. In contrast, humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers struggled to balance the positions of “empathic listener” and “emotionally expressive speaker” throughout his life. As a child, Rogers experienced the greater articulation of his older siblings and the religious strictures of his parents as censorious in ways that inhibited his expression of his experiences and opinions. Even as a renowned counseling psychologist and psychotherapist, Rogers was reluctant to open his emotions and feelings to others. Rogers’ biographers have noted this lack of symmetry in Roger’s positioning as a therapeutic listener and healer versus that of a person who struggled with self-​expression in his own life. Some have gone so far as to link his early life positioning as a censored child to central ideas in his adult theory of person-​centered psychotherapy and to his own asymmetrical life positioning of “effectively listening to the emotional expressions of others” versus “expressing his own emotions to others.” “[F]‌or one who taught people how to express their feelings … he didn’t know what to do about his tendency ‘to clam up.’ The therapist had never been able to heal himself” (Cohen, 1997, p. 199). “[T]he sources of his unhappiness … is clear: the lack of unconditional love, the hurts inflicted by sibling rivalry, conditions of worth associated with achievement, and feelings of sinfulness engendered by family and religion” (Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 476). [I]‌n a sense, there were two Carl Rogers. One was the Rogers most of the world knew through his various professional roles and his typical “way of being”—​… an embodiment of the fully functioning person and professional he wrote about. … The other Carl Rogers was the one very few people were privy to—​a man who was not at peace with himself, who suffered from a drinking problem, who was surrounded by love but deeply lonely. (Kirschenbaum, 2007, pp. 476–​477)

10  A Psychobiography of Life Positioning A more explicitly interpersonal, but just as tragically dysfunctional, example of asymmetrical life positioning can be found in the relationship examined in Chapter 6 between world-​renowned indigenous athlete Jim Thorpe and his celebrated coach Glenn “Pop” Warner. As we will see in that chapter, this was a relationship in which Warner often exploited and betrayed Jim, while publicly positioning himself as Jim’s protector and savior. At an interpersonal level, asymmetrical positioning that flows from inequitable personal and sociocultural power, influence, and systemic prejudice can result in severe social and psychological damage to those positioned in ways that are marginalized and disenfranchised. Life Positioning Analysis (LPA) as Sociocultural Psychobiography Having discussed life positioning in general and particular kinds of life positioning (such as position exchange, repositioning, and symmetrical versus asymmetrical forms of positioning), is there a standard method for conducting sociocultural psychobiographical studies using life positioning analysis? When I first wrote about life positioning analysis (LPA) (Martin, 2013), I laid out a five-​phase methodological model for its conduct. However, I did so with some misgivings about possibly promoting a methodological orthodoxy in doing so. In the five psychobiographical studies of life positioning in Chapters 2 to 6, I have refrained from following any step-​by-​step methodological model. Instead, in these chapters I introduce readers to my purposes for conducting each of these studies. In each case, my purposes consist jointly of a question I try to answer in conducting the study and the kind of life positioning I hope to demonstrate. Thus, in Chapter 2, my purpose is to try to answer the question “Why did Stanley Milgram conduct his famous studies of obedience to authority in the early 1960s?” and, in doing so, to demonstrate how a particular kind of position exchange (i.e., that between “revealing” and “concealing”) was central to Milgram’s overall life positioning. In Chapter 3, my purpose is to present a life positioning analysis that explains why, in 1970, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau took the rather extreme step of invoking Canada’s War Measures Act in response to two kidnappings and a murder committed by members of a terrorist group devoted to achieving independent nationhood for the Canadian province of Quebec. To do so, I interpret a major repositioning in Trudeau’s political and personal perspectives and purposes and what Trudeau hoped to conceal and reveal about this repositioning. The LPA in Chapter 4 is devoted to informing readers about why and how existential humanist Ernest Becker thought it necessary to understand human evil in order to understand the human condition, and in so doing to demonstrate the possible utility of LPA with respect to analyzing life positioning in relation to a more intellectual form of perspective taking and repositioning. Chapter 5 demonstrates a dual life positioning

A Psychobiography of Life Positioning  11 analysis of the mostly symmetrical interpersonal positioning between Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham to explain how this relationship enabled the conjoint agency so evident in the life projects they pursued together. The last sociocultural psychobiographical inquiry in Chapter 6 consists of another dual life positioning analysis, this time of the relationship between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner. It is guided by the question of how Thorpe went from widely admired Olympic double gold medalist in 1912 to vilified sports cheater in 1913. This is an LPA that demonstrates social psychological consequences of the asymmetrical life positionings of the two men within the sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts of early twentieth-​century America. In each of these five LPAs, the specific life positioning methods I use are selected because they seem to me to fit well with the lives I have chosen to study and with my purposes as a sociocultural psychobiographer and as the author of this book. Any biographer or psychobiographer must make methodological decisions appropriate to their purposes in conducting their studies. These purposes also will be reflected in their choice of psychobiographical subjects and whatever interests have drawn them to these particular subjects. Psychobiographers of any stripe need to devote many hours and much effort over considerable periods of time to learn about the lives they decide to study. Such study includes extensive examination of relevant extant biographies, memoirs, and other relevant documents and multimedia sources. Sometimes to satisfy their purposes, psychobiographers will need to collect additional information through interviews, archival searches, and conversations with others with direct and indirect knowledge of focal subjects and their lives. In the case of dual psychobiographies like those in Chapters 5 and 6, the lives of two focal subjects will require considerably greater study. This period of intensive preparatory work includes the attempt to extract from it questions of interest to guide subsequent psychobiographical inquiry and writing. It is necessarily the first methodological step in any such inquiry. Psychobiographies of life positioning also necessitate learning about the contexts within which focal subjects lived their lives. Such learning involves reading and study about the general and local historical societies, cultures, and ways of living in which these subjects were born and developed as persons. Some well-​known biographers like Robert Caro have set a high bar for learning about the life contexts of their subjects. In researching his extensive multi-​volume, full-​life biography of President Lyndon Johnson, Caro and his wife Ina moved to the Hill Country of Texas where Johnson spent his childhood and young adulthood. Caro thought it essential to position himself as much as possible within the day-​to-​day existence of his biographical subject. While in Hill Country, he met and interviewed numerous people who had known and interacted with Lyndon Johnson as a boy and young man. In a book describing his research, interviewing, and writing methods, Caro (2019) gives an example of why his way of researching takes him so long.

12  A Psychobiography of Life Positioning During one interview, an elderly Hill Country woman told Caro about what her life was like, before Lyndon Johnson, as a young congressman, brought electricity to that remote and impoverished part of Texas. Without electricity, it was a daily job for married women like her to carry water from deep wells, often located at a considerable distance from the home, for all household bathing, cooking, drinking, and cleaning needs. During the interview, she asked Caro if he would like to see how she had carried these buckets of water and showed him a wooden yoke that fit around her neck to which buckets could be attached at each end. Together she and Caro walked down a slope to an old well covered with boards, which they removed. She handed one of the buckets to Caro to drop into the well until it was full and then pull it up. Surprised at how heavy it was, Caro later found a 1940 Agricultural Department study that estimated daily use of water for Hill Country farmers to average 40 gallons per person. For the then average household of five, this amounted to 200 gallons a day that the woman of the house had to fetch and carry in the manner Caro had just been initiated into. Clearly Caro’s method of working as a biographer would be impossible for most of us. However, from a life positioning perspective, it provides a wonderful example of how actual immersion into the positions and practices that constitute ways of living can provide vital information to assist the serious biographer to bring biographical subjects to life. Now Caro knew precisely why Lyndon Johnson’s gift of electricity factored into his congressional electoral victories in Hill Country Texas. Fortunately, most psychobiographers can rely on the primary research of biographers like Caro to provide much of the material they need to help answer specific questions that motivate their work. This is why psychobiographers’ personal libraries feature many biographies and other works about biography, autobiography, and life writing more generally. It clearly is the case that good psychobiographical studies that include sociocultural contextual content that can be linked to the lives and works of their subjects require a considerable commitment to locating, reading, and studying a wide variety of materials about focal persons. Typically, the greater the diversity and breadth of the materials consulted, and the life perspectives represented, the more convincing and informative the psychobiographical report. Once the sociocultural psychobiographer has undertaken adequate preparation, the focal life or lives must be searched for positionings, position exchanges, and repositionings relevant to answering or informing questions of interest aligned with the purposes and interests of the psychobiographer. This phase of LPA typically requires considerable ingenuity in summarizing relevant information, often in the form of chronological charting of life events, construction of family trees, diagramming of other lines of relationship among the focal subject and relevant others, outlining possible ways of organizing source materials, cross-​checking and carefully considering areas of agreement and disagreement in extant biographical and related work about the focal person and

A Psychobiography of Life Positioning  13 their life relationships and circumstances, and on it goes. Little of this work can be readily accomplished through pre-​set methodological procedures and routines. Different psychobiographical researchers will find and refine their own ways of working through relevant materials to locate particular life events of importance, and eventually discern more general patterns of life positioning, perspectives, possibilities, purposes, and projects that speak directly to their guiding questions and purposes. The sociocultural circumstances of different focal subjects also may require different kinds of consideration and ways of working. When the life positioning analyst eventually accumulates and organizes sufficient material and interpretations of that material that warrant attempting to pull these together in a life positioning storyline, this signals a readiness to move on to planning and outlining the writing of the psychobiographical study, essay, monograph, or book. Here again, there is no standard procedure for writing about lives and their circumstances that will ensure a successful effort to produce an interesting and readable product. There are no standard formats for producing such writings comparable to those for constructing written reports of more conventional psychological research. It is up to the psychobiographer to read extensively in the literature of biography and psychobiography to help think about and determine what combination of conveying content and stylizing the writing for reader interest works best. Noted biographer Nigel Hamilton (2008) has some good advice for would-​be biographers that also applies to researching and writing psychobiographies: “Make sure you don’t rush into print a work that you will regret. Be careful with your facts, as well as your assertions (p. 332).” With these cautions made, he adds: “Telling someone’s story well may be the most life affirming thing you’ll ever do!” (p. 333). In turning to sociocultural psychobiography late in my own life, I have found such work not only life affirming, but also enhancing of a sense of belonging, not only to those legions of life writers past and present, but to humankind more generally. Studying the lives of others has proved a powerful reminder of what it is to be human—​to be born, to die, and to strive to find meaning and purpose in what one does in between. Biography in general and psychobiography in particular are indispensable to a psychology of persons. Each life study carries possibilities for living. Psychobiographies of life positioning can inform us about challenging and life changing episodes, turning points, and defining scenes from human lives in ways that permit comparisons and contrasts that can illuminate both diversity and similarity in human problem solving, coping, joy and suffering, everyday experience, and crisis. The vividly vicarious experience of becoming entwined in the lived experience of others can give greater breadth and depth to our shared humanity, greater regard and empathy for our fellow travelers, and an abiding sense of belonging to a journey shared with others and a human community beyond ourselves—​a true personhood.

14  A Psychobiography of Life Positioning Not only are biography and psychobiography methods and frameworks for the practice of a psychology of personhood, but when taken up they also can become constitutive of who we are in ways that contribute to our sense of perspective, our self and other understanding, our identity and our purposes, and our rational and moral agency. In autobiography, we can develop and create ourselves; in biography, we can live with others. In psychobiography, we can sense and test the interpretive and explanatory strengths and limits of particular psychological theories fitted more or less well to various aspects of the life experiences and events to which we are exposed and with which we are engaged. In different places and times, people have developed and continue to develop a wide range of sociocultural practices and ways of life. The great advantage of a sociocultural approach to psychobiography is that without ignoring those subjective experiences that undeniably are parts of our life activity (e.g., Kirschner, 2010), such an orientation gives explanatory primacy to the times and locations of our lives with others. Whatever our differences in time and space, we require a sociocultural context from which we can draw our personhood and make it available to others and they to us. In this way, we might come to recognize that all of us are engaged in “the ethical project of making a life” (Appiah, 2008, p. 203). If we can see each other as persons with rights and responsibilities that deserve respect and understanding, perhaps we can find our way through those disagreements and differences that too often seem to divide us. Unfortunately, there are no guaranteed ways of preceding that will ensure such desired outcomes. The uncertainty and unpredictability that attend human life seem to be inevitable features of the life conditions we create but often cannot control. Life positioning psychobiography attempts to base its interpretations on human actions and undertakings unfolding developmentally within an historically established sociocultural world. The core idea is to recognize and portray us as social beings embedded and developing within our life relationships and circumstances as individual and collective agents striving to make something of our lives, something that matters to ourselves and others, something that warrants and validates our existence in the face of whatever challenges we might encounter in our life journeys. Note 1 Life Positioning can be understood as related to Rom Harré’s Positioning Theory (see Martin, in press). However, the latter concentrates on how people use words to locate themselves within comparatively brief social episodes, with an emphasis on the allocation of moral rights and duties, in which “a cluster of short term disputable rights, obligations and duties is called a position” (Harré, 2012, p. 193). Thus, the narrative storylines of Positioning Theory tend to focus intensively on discursive positioning that concerns power dynamics in interpersonal, inter-​group, and

A Psychobiography of Life Positioning  15 inter-​nation exchanges. Bamberg and Georgakopoulou (2008) developed and used a similar Position Analysis to study how narrators of life stories use their places in conversational interactions with others to position themselves within identity and self stories that consider normative and cultural practices. Life Positioning Analysis is a broader, more longitudinal psychobiographical approach to the study of lives that focuses on the development and transformation of persons and their life projects within the interpersonal, historical, and sociocultural contexts of their lives.

References Adler, J. M., & Singer, J. A. (2022). Psychobiographies of social change agents: Introduction to the special issue. Journal of Personality Psychology, 91, 5–​13. Appiah, K. A. (2008). Experiments in ethics. Harvard University Press. Bamberg, M., & Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis. Text & Talk, 28, 377–​396. Bjork, D. W. (1997). B. F. Skinner: A life. American Psychological Association. Caro, R. A. (2019). Working: Researching, interviewing, writing. Knopf. Cohen, D. (1997). Carl Rogers: A critical biography. Constable. Erikson, E. H. (1958). Young man Luther: A study in psychoanalysis and history. W. W. Norton. Erikson, E. H. (1969). Gandhi’s truth: On the origins of militant non-​ violence. W. W. Norton. Freud, S. (1999). Leonardo da Vinci: A memory of his childhood. Routledge. (Original published in 1910.) Gillespie, A., & Martin, J. (2014). Position exchange theory: A socio-​material basis for discursive and psychological positioning. New Ideas in Psychology, 32, 73–​79. Glăveanu, V. P. (2021). The possible: A sociocultural theory. Oxford University Press. Hamilton, N. (2007). Biography: A brief history. Harvard University Press. Hamilton, N. (2008). How to do biography. Harvard University Press. Hamilton, N., & Renders, H. (2018). The ABC of modern biography. University of Amsterdam Press. Harré, R. (2012). Positioning theory: Moral dimensions of social-​cultural psychology. In J. Valsiner (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of culture and psychology (pp. 191–​206). Oxford University Press. Josselson, R. (2017). Paths to fulfillment: Women’s search for meaning and identity. Oxford University Press. Kirschenbaum, H. (2007). The life and work of Carl Rogers. PCCS Books. Kirschner, S. R. (2010). Sociocultural subjectivities: Projects, prospects, problems. Theory & Psychology, 22, 765–​780. Köváry, Z. (2011). Psychobiography as a method. The revival of studying lives: New perspectives in personality and creativity research. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 7, 739–​777. Martin, J. (2013). Life positioning analysis: An analytic framework for the study of lives and life narratives. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 33, 1–​17. Martin, J. (2022). A non-​reductive “person-​based ontology” for psychological inquiry. In B. D. Slife, S. C. Yanchar, & F. C. Richardson (Eds.), Routledge international

16  A Psychobiography of Life Positioning handbook of theoretical and philosophical psychology: Critiques, problems, and alternatives to psychological ideas (pp. 391–​411). Routledge. Martin, J. (in press). Positioning theory and personhood. In M. McVee, L. Van Langenhove, C. Brock, & B. A. Christensen (Eds.), Routledge international handbook on positioning theory. Routledge. Martin, J., & Gillespie, A. (2010). A neo-​Meadian approach to human agency: Relating the social and the psychological in the ontogenesis of perspective-​coordinating persons. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 44, 252–​272. Martin, J., & Gillespie, A. (2013). Position exchange theory and personhood: Moving between positions and perspectives within physical, socio-​cultural, and psychological space and time. In J. Martin & M. H. Bickhard (Eds.), The psychology of personhood: Philosophical, historical, social-​developmental, and narrative perspectives (pp. 147–​164). Cambridge University Press. Martin, J., & Gillespie, A. (2022). Position exchange theory. In V. P. Glăveanu (Ed.), The Palgrave encyclopedia of the possible (pp. 1036–​1044). Springer. Martin, J., & Sugarman, J. (1999). The psychology of human possibility and constraint. State University of New York Press. Martin, J., Sugarman, J., & Hickinbottom, S. (2010). Persons: Understanding psychological selfhood and agency. Springer. Martin, J., Sugarman, J., & Thompson, J. (2003). Psychology and the question of agency. State University of New York Press. Mayer, C-​H., van Niekerk, R., Fouch, P. J. P., & Ponterotto, J. G. (Eds.). (2023). Beyond WEIRD: Psychobiography in times of transcultural and transdisciplinary perspectives. Springer. McAdams, D. P. (2011). George W. Bush and the redemptive dream: A psychological portrait. Oxford University Press. McAdams, D. P., and Dunlop, W. L. (2022). The person: A new introduction to personality psychology (6th edition). Wiley. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist (C. W. Morris, Ed.). University of Chicago Press. Ponterotto, J. G. (2012). A psychobiography of Bobby Fischer: Understanding the genius, mystery, and psychological decline of a world chess champion. Charles C. Thomas. Ponterotto, J. G. (2015). Psychobiography in psychology: Past, present, future. Journal of Psychology in Africa, 25, 379–​389. Schultz, W. T. (2005). (Ed.). (2005). Handbook of psychobiography. Oxford University Press. Singer, J. A. (2017). The proper pirate: Robert Louis Stevenson’s quest for identity. Oxford University Press.

2 Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing

Author’s Introduction I have selected Stanley Milgram as the subject of this first illustrative sociocultural psychobiographical study for several reasons. Because position exchange is so central to life positioning, it seems appropriate that position exchange also figures prominently in this first case study. Not only was exchanging the positions of “concealer” and “revealer” common in Milgram’s childhood escapades, it also typified the kind of performance artistry that became a signature feature of his famous experiments in obedience to authority. Moreover, what Milgram quite purposefully chose to reveal and conceal about these experiments, both to himself and to others, is a key that opens the door to a possible explanation of why he decided to conduct his famous experiments in the first place—​a question that is the focus of the case study in this chapter. The following demonstration of the importance of position exchange as a potential explanatory mechanism for Milgram’s aspirations and conduct also is intended to demonstrate how life positioning in sociocultural and sociopsychological contexts can result in forms and kinds of explanation that go well beyond, yet include, explanations based on assumptions about people’s inner mental structures and processes. I previously have published one extended essay comparing Stanley Milgram’s attempt to explain human evil to that of existential humanist Ernest Becker (Martin, 2016). More recently, I have used a very brief example of Milgram’s oscillation between positions of “revealing” and “concealing” as a real-​life example of position exchange and life positioning in a chapter in an international handbook of positioning theory (Martin, in press). Neither of these pieces focus directly or extensively on why Milgram conducted his studies of obedience, nor do they include the detailed interpretations of Milgram’s life positionings that appear in this chapter. I first became interested in Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority as an undergraduate psychology student at the University of Alberta. At that time, I was excited about what I then thought was a striking example of how quasi-​experimental, laboratory research in social psychology could speak DOI: 10.4324/9781003461715-2

18  Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing to important questions concerning human nature and the human condition. As will become clear in what follows, this is an enthusiasm that has long since left me. However, for many years when teaching an introductory course in the history of psychology at Simon Fraser University, I used the film that Milgram made of his famous experiments as a basis for class discussions concerning the relevance and ethics of psychological research. When my career interests shifted to an almost sole focus on the theory and history of psychology and my oldest son was a postdoctoral student at Yale, I dived into the Milgram papers available through Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library during a couple of visits to New Haven, Connecticut. By this time, critical commentary and occasional defenses of Milgram and his experiments had become commonplace in the contemporary literature of psychology and social psychology. Nonetheless, I still was able to locate and study interesting documents in the Milgram papers that contained information I had not encountered previously. I quote directly from one such document in this first sociocultural psychobiographical study. More importantly, for current purposes, is that during my study of these papers, I became obsessed with the question of “Why did Milgram do these experiments in the first place”? The answer that Milgram’s biographer Thomas Blass gives to the question of Milgram’s motives is succinctly expressed in a 1998 article that preceded his 2004 full-​ length biography of Milgram. “Milgram’s research had two determinants: First, his attempt to account for the Holocaust and, second his intention to apply Solomon Asch’s technique for studying conformity to behavior of greater human consequences than judging lengths of lines” (Blass, 1998, p. 46). Although I agree that these factors found a place in Milgram’s motives, I believe there is much more to say about how Milgram was positioned and positioned himself to achieve academic celebrity and legacy through his famous studies of obedience to authority. From “Hide” and “Seek” to “Conceal” and “Reveal” The famous experiments on obedience to authority conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale University in the early 1960s are discussed in almost all introductory textbooks on social psychology and in most introductions to general psychology. These experiments also have been the subject of many heated exchanges in scholarly journals that have focused on the ethics (or lack thereof) of using deception in psychological research and the relevance of Milgram’s obedience experiments to our understanding of horrendous social political movements and genocides in Nazi Germany, on the killing fields of Cambodia, and elsewhere. Special issues of psychology journals (e.g., Journal of Social Issues, 1995; Theory & Psychology, 2015) that have been devoted to the Milgram studies have detailed widely divergent interpretations of the findings from these studies and their implications. These include a host of criticisms of the studies, comparisons with historical records of events in Nazi Germany during

Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing  19 the Holocaust, applications of alternative methods of analysis to Milgram’s data, and accounts of resistance to authority intended to contradict Milgram’s findings. More recently, historians of psychology (especially Perry, 2012) have reported accounts of not only the experimental conditions discussed by Milgram (1974; also see 1973a), but of 13 additional conditions not discussed by Milgram and not featured or referred to in his 1965 film Obedience. Interestingly, to date there has been surprisingly little attention given to what strikes me as one of the most interesting questions of all those that might be asked about the Milgram studies: Why Did Stanley Milgram conduct these studies? In this chapter, I use positioning theories and methods to illuminate why Stanley Milgram did what he did at Yale University between August 1961 and May 1962. Some of the most common life positionings during childhood can be located in children’s games like hide-​and-​seek. Some version of this game can be found in almost all cultures. Position Exchange Theory (PET) offers a unique social-​ developmental interpretation of such games (cf. Martin & Gillespie, 2010). In hide-​and-​seek, initial guidance from caregivers and others assists young children to gradually learn to position themselves as hiders or seekers and to move between these positions in successive enactments of the game. PET understands such position exchanges as contributing to children’s developing capabilities of personhood, such as perspective taking and self and other understanding. With experience of playing the game, a child who is in the position of seeker is able to take the perspectives of hiders based on the child’s past experiences of being in the hiding position and vice versa. For many of us, including American social psychologist Stanley Milgram, these and other childhood experiences eventually help us to alternate between more abstract positions of “revealing” and “concealing” that are mediated by the discursive practices of our social and cultural contexts. As I will demonstrate in this chapter, Milgram’s life was replete with such positionings, which were evident in his childhood pranks, his famous psychological experiments on obedience to authority, and in his adult thinking and reflections. In many ways, when conducting his studies, Milgram positioned himself as a stage director and performer as much as a social experimental psychologist. Evidence of the centrality of “concealing and revealing” and a penchant for performance art includes examples drawn from Thomas Blass’s (2004) biography of Milgram and documents I located in the Milgram papers housed at Yale’s Stirling Library. In one of these documents, Milgram reacts critically to himself as an experimenter and to his obedience experiments by constructing an argument with himself wherein he alternates between taking the position of “conscientious social psychological researcher” and positioning himself as a “scathing moral critic of himself and his experiments.” A sociocultural life positioning interpretation of Milgram’s larger life project concerns the ways in which Milgram attempted to position himself (for personal, contextual, and existential reasons) as a major participant in a form of social psychology that he

20  Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing believed was relevant to understanding major events in the twentieth century—​ especially the mass murder of European Jews by the Nazi regime during the 1930s and 1940s. This interpretive analysis examines Milgram’s penchant for strategically revealing and concealing his personal and professional actions as facilitated and enabled by the sociocultural backgrounds of his upbringing, his higher education, and a tradition of deception in American social psychology associated with Kurt Lewin, Solomon Asch, and others. Early Life Stanley Milgram was born in the Bronx, a borough of New York City, on August 15, 1933. The south Bronx neighborhood of his birth housed many Jewish Eastern Europeans like his parents Samuel and Adele Milgram, who married after immigrating to America from Hungary and Romania respectively. Like many in their neighborhood, Milgram’s parents had a strong desire to improve their lot in life, especially for the sake of their children. Samuel Milgram was an expert baker and decorator of cakes. Adele was a cheerful, wise woman who frequently arbitrated domestic disputes in their south Bronx neighborhood. Short in stature, both radiated an emotional warmth that they showered on their three children—​Marjorie the oldest, Stanley the middle child, and Joel the youngest. Samuel, whom Stanley idolized, was a proud father whose children were “the smartest and most beautiful … his treasures” (Blass, 2004, p. 6). As a child and teenager, Stanley Milgram was a prankster who enjoyed tricking his friends. On one such occasion, he convinced one of his friends, named Wex, that Wex had telepathic powers and could read minds. Stanley told Wex that he (Stanley) was thinking of a number that he previously had written on a piece of paper and inserted into a box under his bed. Stanley then asked Wex to say what the number was. Stanley’s younger brother Joel, who was hiding under the bed, wrote the number Wex said on a piece of paper and slipped it into the box. After a pause to build Wex’s anticipation, Stanley extracted the box from under the bed, opened it, and displayed the piece of paper with the number Joel had just recorded, but which Stanley had told Wex that he (Stanley) had previously put in the box prior to Wex’s arrival in Stanley’s room. Although the playing of such deceptive tricks is common in childhood experiences, I think this one warrants particular consideration as a somewhat unusual example of perspectival positioning. When I first encountered this story from Milgram’s childhood, I misunderstood its details. After an initial cursory read, I assumed that Stanley was tricking Wex into believing that he, Stanley, had telepathic powers. Only upon rereading Joel’s account as relayed by Milgram’s biographer Thomas Blass (2004, p. 3) did I understand that Stanley was attempting to convince Wex that he (Wex) had telepathic powers. In my account here, I have inserted Stanley’s or Wex’s names to ensure that the reader will not make the same mistake I did when reading Blass’s report of this incident.

Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing  21 It is much more common for pre-​teens to position themselves as the active agent (in this case, as the one who possesses the telepathic powers) in such deceptions than to position another as the active agent. To do the latter requires an ability to take perspectives more removed from the child’s immediate experiential sense or tendency than most children possess. The possibility that this story of youthful deception orchestrated by Stanley Milgram raises is that the young Milgram had a somewhat uncommon capability of taking and comprehending the perspectives of others in ways that could be used to deceive them. On other occasions, Stanley would gain attention at school for reciting material he had acquired from listening to his mother and older sister Marjorie talk about Marjorie’s homework assignments, without revealing the source of his perspicacity. Not adept at sports, Stanley spent considerable time scheming with his buddies in ways that also would draw attention. One such “experiment” was to lower a large container of sodium into the Bronx River, creating an explosion that drew neighbors and local fire engines. Although the young Milgram claimed that doing experiments “was as natural as breathing … I tried to learn how everything worked” (Blass, 2004, p. 5), there clearly were social benefits to his experimentation that were not exhausted by his being a “natural” experimenter. In yet another incident that involved stretching a belt to measure distances, Stanley wounded a cousin who was bloodied when the belt recoiled. Recalling the incident as an adult, Milgram insightfully remarked that “to be blamed for such things was a burden. But whether I learned my lesson remains unclear. For many years later, was I not again to become an object of criticism for my efforts to measure something without due regard to the risks it entailed for others”? (Blass, 2004, p. 5). As an adult, Milgram frequently recalled listening to the radio with his family for news from Europe in the build-​up to and during the Second World War. The Milgrams had relatives in Europe. Some of them, who had escaped the National Socialists, stayed briefly with the Milgram family. Joel Milgram recalled “reading the numbers on their arms” (Fermaglich, 2006, p. 100). Although well removed and protected from the direct horrors of the Shoah, Milgram as a child was well aware of these atrocities as recounted and discussed by his father, mother, and relatives. On the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah, Stanley said that “Perhaps this 13th year of my life will be even more significant as marking the beginning of a new era for the Jewish people, an era of justice and liberty and a homeland. … May there be an end to persecution, suffering, and war” (Blass, 2004, p. 8). From an early age, Stanley excelled at school. When he entered James Monroe High School, his IQ was measured at 158, the highest of his classmates. He was placed in a special class and allowed to complete the four years of high school in three years. He was prominent in school activities—​a member of the honor society and yearbook staff, editor of a student newspaper, and designer of sets for theatrical productions. The future looked very bright for Stanley

22  Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing Milgram. He seemed well positioned socially and intellectually for attending one of the Ivy League universities or prestigious liberal arts colleges in the US Northeast. Unfortunately, by the time he graduated from high school, Milgram’s social, financial position and that of his family had taken a downturn with the collapse of his father’s bakery business and significant losses incurred through bad investments. Consequently, in the fall of 1950 Stanley Milgram enrolled in Queens College, which had the advantages of being close to home and tuition-​ free, but did not otherwise recommend itself to the aspiring Milgram and his ambitions. Higher Education In high school, it had been the physical sciences that attracted Milgram. But at Queens, his major was in political science. The liberal arts focus of the College also allowed him to study music, art, and literature. Active in extracurriculars, Milgram became well-​known on campus for his involvement in the debating club and the international relations club. He also tried his hand at writing poetry and Broadway-​style musicals. After completing his junior year, he spent the summer of 1953 touring Spain, France, and Italy. In France, he studied French, a language he subsequently went on to master. Overall, his time at Queens marked an initial flowering of Milgram as a potential interdisciplinary scholar—​a life positioning he never fully realized when he later pursued graduate work at Harvard that was more narrowly focused on social psychology. Unfortunately, 1953 also brought great pain to Stanley Milgram with the death of his beloved father Sam (aged 55) on December 11th from a coronary thrombosis. The consequences for Adele and the children were that they were left with the emotional upset of Samuel’s passing and almost nothing else. However, Adele proved to be resilient in the face of her loss and financial need, finding a job in another bakery to sustain herself and her family. A major effect of his father’s death on Stanley was to strengthen his resilience and determination to position himself to achieve a success and renown that had escaped his father. In his senior year of undergraduate studies, Milgram was told by a Queens dean about the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University. Shortly thereafter, Stanley applied to that Department to undertake graduate work in social psychology. The attraction of the Department of Social Relations was that it promised a scientific approach to topics of interest to Milgram, including leadership styles and mass persuasion. Research in these and related areas was being conducted at Harvard by social psychologists at the forefront of their discipline. As a leading ivy-​league university, Harvard also carried the prestige that Milgram craved. The problem was that Stanley had absolutely no undergraduate coursework in psychology. His initial application to Harvard was rejected on this basis. However, with the encouragement of Gordon Allport, who chaired the graduate program in Social Relations at Harvard, Milgram took and excelled

Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing  23 in five undergraduate courses in psychology (from three different New York colleges) during the summer of 1954. He was admitted to Harvard that same Fall as a special student. Allport, who “was to become the most important person in Milgram’s academic life and a constant source of encouragement” (Blass, 2004, p. 16), was impressed by Milgram’s “limitless drive and persistence in the face of obstacles” (Blass, 2004, p. 16). Allport also arranged financial support for Milgram’s studies and for much of Milgram’s early career provided wise and effective counsel. During his time at Harvard, Milgram thrived on the diverse intellectual riches provided in the Department of Social Relations, which drew its curriculum and faculty from social and clinical psychology, social anthropology, and sociology. His outstanding performance during his first year of graduate work made him a regular full-​time student during the 1955–​1956 academic year. Interacting with professors like Allport, Roger Brown, Talcott Parsons, Jerome Bruner, and Visiting Professor Solomon Asch, Milgram “really fell in love with the discipline and … [vowed] to follow through to a Ph.D. in Social Psychology and then, probably, secure a position with a psychology faculty of a fair-​sized university, where I would teach and engage in research” (quoted in Blass, 2004, p. 24). As his assistant in 1955–​1956, Milgram became immersed in Asch’s experimental approach and the methods Asch used to study social conformity. The basic approach was to place individuals in group contexts, populated with confederates of the researcher, in which the experimental subjects found that their judgments concerning simple tasks such as estimating the length of lines, which are clearly of dissimilar length, were inexplicably at odds with those of their supposed peers. Asch’s methodology also involved constructing variations on this basic set-​up—​changing the size and degree of unanimity of the majority group, the difficulty of the judgment task, the lengths of the lines, and so forth. Buoyed by his successes as a Harvard student, Milgram’s characteristic chutzpah was much in evidence as his graduate program advanced. He improvised skits and parodies as occasions warranted, interacted on a first-​name basis with junior faculty, and “unveiled an unbuttoned persona, marked by spontaneity, imaginative whimsy, and uninhibited sociability, a wry sense of humor, and sometimes cockiness” (Blass, 2004, p. 29). A good sense of how Milgram began to position himself as an innovative social psychologist can be gained from a talk that Roger Brown, one of Stanley’s Harvard mentors during his graduate student days, gave at a commemoration of Milgram’s life held at the City University of New York a few months after Milgram’s death at the age of 51 on December 20th. On this occasion, Brown (1985) recalled a typical Milgram class presentation in a graduate seminar on psycholinguistics: Instead of leading yet another bookish discussion, he brought in an audio tape he had made of many kinds of psycholinguistic phenomena: slips of the

24  Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing tongue, rhetorical flourishes, a child’s first few words, a stretch of psychotic speech, all wittily edited and assembled and presented to us as things to be appreciated first and then, perhaps, explained. Here, Brown reveals an aspect of Milgram’s academic work that many later critics would also note—​ his emphasis on presentation without immediate concern for explanation, a style that also revealed his privileging of dramatic presentation over scientific explication. Milgram loved to position himself as an entertaining and provocative performer as much or more than as a social scientist. Fortunately for Stanley, his performance as a graduate student during his first year at Harvard was noted by Department Chair Gordon Allport and other faculty and rewarded with graduate assistantships that supported his Harvard studies at little financial cost to him or his hard-​pressed family. Later, Milgram was able to acquire more extensive support from the US-​based Social Science Research Council for the rest of his doctoral studies and research. With no need to worry about finances and with a growing self-​confidence and determination, Milgram’s research assistantship with Solomon Asch quickly became the basis for another Milgram academic performance, this time well beyond Harvard Square. Milgram’s doctoral dissertation, funded by the Social Science Research Council was a cross-​cultural comparison of Norwegian and French students and workers on a variety of Asch-​style conformity tasks that Milgram designed, executed, and analyzed with his characteristic precision and attention to detail. The work was supervised by Gordon Allport, who was famously tolerant in allowing students to follow their own inclinations and methods. In both Oslo and Paris, Milgram’s experiments centered around participants’ judgments of the comparative durations of pairs of brief acoustic tones, one of which was clearly longer than the other. Milgram’s subjects would give their judgments after hearing the voices of five other “subjects” whom they could hear but could not see. In fact, all five of these others were voice recordings of Milgram’s confederates. The conformity studies conducted by Solomon Asch, to whom Milgram had been assigned as a graduate research assistant, involved in-​person confederates purposefully misjudging the lengths of lines in the actual presence of Asch’s experimental subjects. Milgram’s use of confederates’ voice recordings made his doctoral studies much more efficient and economical to conduct—​testimony to Milgram’s inventiveness and talent as a producer and director of experimental performances. In the first experiment, subjects heard the sound pairings and judgments of the five recorded voices before making their own judgments. In the second experiment, before engaging in this same sequence of listening and responding, subjects were told that the results of this experiment would be used to design audio safety signals on airplanes. The third experimental variation

Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing  25 allowed the subjects to write their own judgments on paper so that the others (i.e., the recorded voices masquerading as five other subjects) ostensibly could not hear their responses. In the fourth experimental variation, a “censure” condition, Milgram audiotaped the voices of his confederates making critical comments (such as “Trying to show off?”) that the subjects heard after making a correct response that contradicted the confederate responses in a series of trials. Finally, to determine if using students as subjects produced results that might differ from those of other people, Milgram tested the judgments of workers in a Norwegian electrical appliance factory. Sixty-​two percent of student subjects made incorrect responses that agreed with the incorrect judgments made by Milgram’s confederates in the first experiment, 56 percent did so in the aircraft condition, 50 percent in the privacy condition, and in the censure condition conformity with confederates’ incorrect judgments jumped to 75 percent. In two conditions tested with the factory workers, these subjects displayed lower conformity rates (thus showing more resistance to the incorrect responding of the confederates) of 49 percent in the aircraft condition and 68 percent in the censure condition. These differences were not statistically significant. Subsequent research in France revealed that French students conformed to the confederate’s misjudgments much less frequently in all conditions. For example, in the first (basic or baseline) condition, 50 percent of French students conformed (compared to 62 percent of their Norwegian counterparts), a result that was statistically different. The overall pattern of conformity levels across all conditions was similar, albeit with the French conformity levels consistently lower. I have provided details of Milgram’s doctoral research for two reasons. First, as a concrete example of Stanley Milgram’s experimental precision, dexterity, and flexibility. Second, to show how his doctoral research prepared the way for his famous studies of obedience to authority conducted at Yale University in the early 1960s. His doctoral research allowed Milgram to further indulge and develop his flair for the production of innovative social psychological dramas. The year Milgram spent conducting this research in Oslo and Paris also afforded him opportunities for extending his scholarly and personal development in other areas of academic and personal interest. In Norway, Milgram learned to ski, and made the acquaintance of several fellow students, including future Norwegian prime minister Arne Olav Brundtland. In Paris, he also immersed himself in the local student scene and perfected his idiomatic French, even writing opinion pieces for a student newsletter. Becoming familiar with the customs and inclinations of acquaintances in both countries, Milgram speculated that the French participants in his research conformed less to peer and societal judgments than his Norwegian participants. The strong sense of group identity and social responsibility he perceived in the Norwegians seemed to Milgram to underlie their higher levels of conformity, whereas he saw French society as

26  Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing much more diverse, making social pressures less powerful and individuals more skeptical. Milgram’s time abroad shifted his personal and career positioning in important ways. Having successfully applied his approach to social psychological inquiry in cross-​cultural contexts gave Milgram even greater confidence that he was capable of doing great things. Thereafter, he would never settle for the mundane but would shoot for the stars in his future career. One especially prophetic aspect of this stronger positioning as a future risk-​taking star in social psychology might be attributed to Milgram’s systematic use of post-​experimental questionnaires to probe his European subjects’ reactions to the deception they experienced during their participation in his studies. Discovering that subjects’ overall reactions were quite benign “unquestionably lifted some of the ethical doubts that might later have prevented him from pursuing [even more] controversial research using deception” (Blass, 2004, p. 54). Arriving back in the United States and brimming with confidence, Milgram accepted a one-​year position at Princeton to assist Solomon Asch, who was now a visiting fellow at that university’s famous Institute for Advanced Study, with the writing of a book. Milgram’s one condition was that he also be allowed to write up and polish his doctoral dissertation. However, what promised to be a wonderful year transitioning from doctoral student to neophyte academic turned out otherwise. Milgram was not able to work on his dissertation as much as he wished and his relationship with Asch was not as he expected. When he arrived in Princeton, Milgram discovered that Asch had made no arrangements for his accommodation or for any formal status at the Institute of Advanced Study. Furthermore, although Asch had agreed to Milgram’s request that he be allowed time to work on his thesis, it was obvious that Asch begrudged any time away from his work as Asch’s assistant. To add insult to injury, when eventually both Asch’s book and Milgram’s thesis were completed, Asch did not give Milgram co-​authorship on his book, settling instead for a comparatively obscure thank you in the book’s preface. Nonetheless, Allport succeeded in keeping Milgram’s spirits up. In the late spring of 1960, Milgram successfully defended his doctoral dissertation and, with Allport’s backing, obtained a junior faculty position at Yale, another of America’s most revered universities. The Milgram who left Harvard with a doctoral degree in social psychology was now positioned very differently from the uncertain first-​year graduate student admitted provisionally to study social psychology at Harvard in the autumn of 1954. By 1960, he had become an expert practitioner of what has been called the pragmatist tradition of research on the social psychology of social influence and persuasion—​a tradition that Peter Lunt (2009, p. 23) locates in the work of psychologists like Solomon Asch, Kurt Lewin, and Muzafer Sherif. Through his undergraduate studies in political science at Queens College, and his European reading and experience, Milgram also was familiar with the writings of some of the political theorists who had

Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing  27 helped to create the broader intellectual and sociocultural context for critical, pragmatic social science more generally. These included Holocaust scholars like Adorno, Arendt, Fromm, and Weber. Milgram was part of the pragmatist tradition in that he wanted his experimental social psychology not only to be theoretically and ideologically neutral but also to be relevant to the key social, moral and political questions of the day. Milgram asked how we can explain the Holocaust and what implications obedience to authority has for thinking about the best possible arrangements for democratic society. (Lunt, p. 27) Milgram at Yale: Studies in Obedience to Authority With his spirits restored by Allport’s enthusiastic support, Milgram arrived at Yale in the Fall of 1960. While at Princeton, he had determined how he would make his mark, and he was anxious to put his plan into action. According to Blass (2004), Milgram had “told Roger Brown that he hoped to find a phenomenon of great consequence such as Asch had done, then ‘worry it to death’ ” (p. 62). The program of research Milgram had planned was to study obedience to authority using a realistic staging of participants’ willingness to administer harmful electric shocks to what they thought were other participants. It was funded by the US National Science Foundation and ran from August 7th of 1961 to the summer of the following year. Milgram’s research used Asch’s general method (the one he himself had applied in his doctoral research in Europe) of varying conditions of a core experimental procedure. The different conditions followed each other and involved different participants. In Milgram’s obedience studies, 23 variations of the basic “teacher-​ learner, shock-​ machine” set-​ up were conducted, that involved a total of 780 participants—​typically, 40 for each variation, including one condition with 40 female participants (the only women who participated). However, in seven cases only 20 participants participated. (See Perry, 2012, pp. 304–​310, for a summary of all experiments and conditions.) The core, and best known, condition (actually the second experiment run in 1961) consisted of 40 participants who took part in the experiment one at a time. Each participant was instructed to act as a “teacher” and to administer shocks of increasing intensity to a “learner” (actually a Milgram confederate) whenever the learner failed to respond correctly by recalling words previously paired with other words that the teacher had presented as memory cues. The learner was in a separate room, and could not be seen, but was heard by the teacher. At the beginning of the experiment, the teacher/​participant had witnessed the learner being seated and strapped into a chair with an electrode attached to a wrist. When the teacher depressed a shock button on the machine that indicated 100 volts, the learner, following a script prepared by Milgram, called out in pain. As things progressed,

28  Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing and the shock levels increased, the learner protested more, shouted, screamed with pain, and at 150 volts demanded to be released. At 300 volts, the learner stopped responding. Throughout all of this, the experimenter (a confederate of Milgram’s, as was the learner) encouraged the teacher, in a matter-​of-​fact way, to continue administering the shocks in the interests of advancing science. In several of the conditions in which this basic set-​up and procedure were employed without much alteration, 60–​65 percent of the participant “teachers” continued to shock the “learner” to the maximum and dangerous level of 450 volts (with the encouragement, commands, and reassurances of the experimenter). This is the result that is most often reported by Milgram and others in support of Milgram’s theory of obedience. In the different variations, this percentage ranged from 0 percent (when there were two experimenters, who delivered conflicting orders to the teacher to stop and to continue) to 100 percent (when the learner was willing to take on the role of learner only if the experimenter tried it first). In this staged role-​play, the experimenter agreed with this request, was strapped into the chair and given shocks from the teacher, while the learner in the role of experimenter encouraged the teacher to do so. In a condition in which the teacher was allowed to choose any shock level he desired, only 2 percent of participant teachers went to 450 volts. Also of considerable importance, the more proximately the learner was positioned to the teacher and the less proximately the experimenter to the teacher, the lower the number of participants who administered shocks to the 450-​volt level. Proximity was manipulated in different conditions by having the learner in the same room as the teacher, requiring the teacher to directly and physically apply the shock by holding the learner’s hand to a metal plate, and having the experimenter replaced by a tape-​recorded set of instructions. In one little known but particularly ethically questionable condition, the participants were family and friends of the “learners,” who were coached by Milgram to follow and respond according to his detailed script for the learner. Given all of his precise planning, scripting, and directing of these various experimental conditions, it is striking that Milgram did not articulate a definite theory to explain his results until the publication of his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority, a full 12 years after the obedience to authority experiments were concluded. This observation has concerned and convinced several commentators not only to decry what they regard as the immoral and unethical conduct of Milgram’s experiments, but to suggest that Milgram’s experiments were motivated by his desire for fame and penchant for showmanship (e.g., Baumrind, 1964; Nicholson, 2011; Perry, 2012). For, if Milgram was testing no clear theory, what possibly could justify his experimental conduct? Was he just playing around to see what would happen? Even some of Milgram’s most staunch supporters (e.g., Blass, 2004; Miller, 1986) and others who seem “on the fence” (e.g., Lunt, 2009) agree that Milgram’s 1974 theorizing is both “tacked on” and unconvincing.

Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing  29 Lunt (2009) understands Milgram’s methods, as well as some of his theorizing, as grounded in the tradition of social psychological demonstration and experimentation pioneered by Lewin and extended by Sherif, Asch, and others. Lunt also traces Milgram’s theorizing about his results and the nature of evil more generally back to his undergraduate studies in political science and his reading of “a group of writers of social and political theory … including Adorno, Arendt, Fromm, and Weber” (p. 23). Almost all Milgram scholars recognize the influence of Arendt, especially her volume Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil (1963), as especially influential on Milgram’s theorizing. The possible influence of the other scholars mentioned by Lunt is more difficult to determine. To understand Milgram’s privileging of method over theory, it is helpful to recall that his university education positioned him primarily as an experimental social psychologist steeped in a situationist perspective. He was primarily interested in gathering empirical demonstrations of the power of immediate situations to affect individuals. As a prototypical social scientist of this stripe, Milgram claimed neutrality concerning his research as he was proposing it and surprise at his results as these appeared. His core experimental methods and procedures placed each participant in the dilemma of adhering to the directives of a socially sanctioned, scientific authority whose detached demeanor seemed increasingly at odds with a situation that gradually unfolds as one that involved the physical torture of a fellow human being. “Milgram adopts a forensic, experimental approach in which he manipulates situational factors that might induce obedience in individuals in order to reveal the psychological dimensions of the experience of obedience to a malevolent authority” (Lunt, 2009, p. 25). However, for this to be the case, several assumptions must be made concerning the experiences of the participants in Milgram’s studies, experiences that are very difficult to interpret and confirm. Milgram’s much criticized theory of obedience to authority is first articulated fully in Chapter 10 of his book Obedience to Authority (1974). In this chapter, Milgram interpreted his results as demonstrating disquieting levels of obedience. He assumed that obedience to authority is the common reaction of human beings, even when they find the relevant situational demands unsettling. He also claimed the experiments showed that reducing social pressure by lessening the proximity of the teacher, learner, and experimenter reduces obedience levels. The explanation he offered is biological, social, and ultimately psychological. Biologically, animals including humans have evolved throughout our natural history to live successfully in dominance hierarchies. At the same time, social rituals and submission cues gradually emerged as a means of maintaining order in such hierarchical structures without the necessity of injury and death. Milgram proposed that the human tendency to challenge then submit to dominance and authority is part of our natural biological and social order, one that ensures smoothly functioning groups and societies. However, Milgram added,

30  Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing the particular manner of submission, especially the extent to which it is manifest in passive obedience, is largely a matter of socialization. The psychological part of all this then takes a cybernetic, self-​regulating turn. For Milgram, human conscience is a self-​regulating mechanism capable of resisting and overcoming societal demands. Putting all this together, Milgram pictured a self-​conscious individual capable of some degree of autonomous self-​regulation of obedience to the systems of authority in which the person is located. Ultimately then, moral reflection and the organizational needs of the social system are in a constant state of adjustment. Individuals are agents but their agency always must operate within hierarchical systems. Self-​control constantly interacts with social authority. Both are necessary and can shift with situations and individual psychology. The central idea that Milgram derived from the foregoing theoretical formulation is what he termed “the agentic state,” which contrary to what one might think does not describe a psychological agent, but a state of being under the control of an external agent. Milgram applied this idea to his experiments by suggesting that the participants (the “teachers”) in his studies undergo an “agentic shift,” one that moves them from acting as self-​regulating persons to acting as social beings controlled by the social situation. In this context, the agentic state is characterized by a narrowing of attention to the tasks and role of “teaching” as directed by the experimenter. Anything else, including the “learner’s” apparent pain, is ignored. According to Milgram, when in this agentic state, the participant in the obedience studies “defines himself in a social situation in a manner that renders him open to regulation by a person of higher status. In this condition the individual no longer views himself as responsible for his own actions but defines himself as an instrument for carrying out the wishes of others” (Milgram, 1974, p. 134). Inclining to what he understood to be Arendt’s view of Eichmann, Milgram believed that in such situations, the individual becomes an automaton. The behavior revealed in the experiments reported here is normal human behavior but revealed under conditions that show with particular clarity the danger to human survival inherent in our make-​up. And what is it we have seen? Not aggression, for there is no anger, vindictiveness, or hatred in those who shocked the victim. … Something far more dangerous is revealed: the capacity for man to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures. (p. 188) Most Milgram scholars, even those supportive and sympathetic to him and his work, question both his description of his results and his theoretical explanation for them. Many of Milgram’s participants did not appear to experience Milgram’s “agentic shift.” Some directly confronted and refused to obey the experimenter,

Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing  31 while many others, even those classified as obedient, attempted various forms of decidedly un-​Eichmann-​like protest. Moreover, several participants obviously saw through or doubted the attempted experimental manipulations and the “reality” they presented. Consequently, Milgram’s attempt to link his results and ideas to the Holocaust has been received with derision by his critics, many of whom also have vigorously protested the “ethics” of his studies (e.g., Mastroianni, 2015; Nicholson, 2011; Perry, 2012). And yet, for many others, there is a lingering sense that Milgram’s obedience studies nonetheless say something important about the human capacity for evil, and in so doing support the possible relevance and importance of his results, despite his moral lapses (Blass, 2000; Miller, 1986). There were very few explicit mentions of the Holocaust or any recognition of his Yale studies as studies of evil in his NSF applications or in the vast majority of Milgram’s letters and notes written from 1960 to 1962, while the obedience studies were taking place. However, later in his life Milgram increasingly identified the explanation of evil, especially that of the Nazis during the Holocaust, as the most important goal of his program of research. He highlighted this theme in his first published account of the obedience experiments (Milgram, 1963) and elaborated it further in his full, book-​length account of his studies eleven years later. The question arises as to whether there is any connection between what we have studied in the laboratory and the forms of obedience we so deplored in the Nazi epoch. The differences in the two situations are, of course, enormous, yet the difference in scale, numbers, and political context may turn out to be relatively unimportant as long as certain essential features are retained. The essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred in the person, all of the essential features of obedience follow. (Milgram, 1974, p. xii) Later still, Milgram, in his book The Individual in a Social World (1977), is unequivocal in making the connection between Nazi evil during the Holocaust and his own laboratory studies. … the laboratory paradigm merely gave scientific expression to a more general concern about authority, a concern forced upon members of my generation, in particular upon Jews such as myself, by the atrocities of World War II. … The impact of the Holocaust on my own psyche energized my interest in obedience and shaped the particular form in which it was examined. (pp. 92–​93)

32  Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing Almost all Milgram’s biographers and students of his life and work accept his obedience studies as an attempt to explicate the nature and causes of human evil, especially as manifest in the Holocaust (whether or not they agree with the validity of such an explication). Numerous critical questions and assessments of Milgram’s experimental methods and theories as relevant to the question of evil have been raised and elaborated (e.g., Mastroianni, 2015; Nicholson, 2011; Reicher, Haslam, & Miller, 2014). Milgram’s work related to evil was completed early in his academic career. He subsequently held positions at Harvard, at which he failed to obtain tenure (at least in part because of the ethical controversies swirling around his work on obedience to authority—​cf. Blass, 2004) and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he eventually was awarded a tenured, distinguished full professorship. In these positions, Milgram conducted several other highly innovative and widely recognized programs of research, but none of them was as clearly connected to the study of evil per se as the obedience studies he conducted at Yale in 1961 and 1962. Milgram died, following a succession of heart attacks, at the relatively young age of 51, but continues to be one of the most widely cited and recognized social psychologists in the history of psychology. In the words of James Korn (1997): “Milgram took social psychology to its limits in terms of creative research design, ethical standards, and the significance of his findings. He was an independent researcher, like Solomon Asch, working on problems that he saw as important, usually before other psychologists thought of studying them” (1997, p. 111). I want now to turn directly to a central question that has animated this life positioning study of Stanley Milgram—​Why did Milgram conduct his famous experiments? Before doing so, I want to remind readers that Milgram understood his experiments as a form of theater. As described by his biographer Thomas Blass (2004, p. 263), “Milgram was much like a director of a play, both in his meticulous attention to technical details and staging and in their intended effects upon his audience” (i.e., readers of his reports). Milgram believed that “Although experiments in chemistry and physics often involve shiny equipment, flasks, and electronic gear, an experiment in social psychology smacks much more of dramaturgy or theater” (Milgram, 1976, pp. 24–​25). One salient feature of Milgram’s dramaturgical approach was what he chose to reveal to and conceal from participants in his research. As we have seen, much of Milgram’s life involved acts of revealing and concealing. His doctoral research and his famous studies of obedience to authority displayed these same ingredients. Dramatic use of revealing and concealing, helped to make Milgram’s reputation as one of the great social psychological experimentalists of all time. In his publications and public pronouncements, Milgram consistently positioned himself as a dedicated scientist intent on understanding the power of immediate situations to affect individuals’ behavior. He claimed to be entirely neutral with respect to his findings and said he often was very surprised by his

Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing  33 results. Milgram just as consistently argued that his research provided scientific evidence of human willingness to act viciously to others when commanded to do so by those in positions of authority. He also claimed that such evidence was ample justification for any psychological discomfort participants might experience when they recalled their willingness to administer possibly lethal shocks to other human beings. However, in a file I found in the Milgram papers housed in the Yale University Archives in the Sterling Memorial Library, I came across a very different, self-​report by Milgram (circa 1961), one in which he positioned himself quite differently. It may be said that the good that stems from an understanding of human behavior compensates for, and thus helps justify the abuses which were necessary for the conduct of the experiment. A fine argument but the author does not buy it. It is true that the investigations may alert some persons to the dangers of obedience; in rare instances, the study may even inspire a few to resist unjust orders. But the findings are equally available to those who seek more obedience in the interests of destruction. On balance I am not prepared to say which effect will be greater. But in general, my hopes for the former are dim. No person who has seen the fruits of science perverted to the cause of destruction in our time can dare think otherwise. Moreover, considered as a personal motive of the author the possible benefits that might redound to humanity wither to insignificance alongside the strident demands of intellectual curiosity. When an investigator keeps his eyes open throughout a scientific study he learns things about himself as well as about his subjects and the observations do not always flatter. (Stanley Milgram Papers, box 46, folder 165) In the June 1964 issue of the American Psychologist, developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind took Milgram to task for his apparent insensitivity to the wellbeing of participants in his research: I regard the emotional disturbance described by Milgram as potentially harmful because it could easily effect an alteration of the subject’s self-​image or ability to trust adult authorities in the future. It is potentially harmful to a subject to commit, in the course of an experiment, acts which he himself considers unworthy, particularly when he has been entrapped into committing such acts by an individual he has reason to trust. (p. 421) Despite the self-​critical positioning Milgram had adopted in the foregoing note to himself I read in the Yale Archives, Milgram claimed to be “totally astonished” by the criticism of Baumrind. He was also incensed that the editor

34  Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing of the American Psychologist had not alerted him to Baumrind’s critique prior to its publication (Blass, 2004, p. 124). He claimed, in a letter to the editor: “The fact of the matter is that no one who took part in the obedience study suffered damage, and most subjects found the experience to be instructive and enriching” (quoted in Blass, 2004, p. 124). In his published response to Baumrind in November 1964, Milgram (1964) assertively positions himself as a neutral scientist advancing a legitimate scientific agenda: “Understanding grows because we examine situations in which the end is unknown. An investigator unwilling to accept this degree of risk must give up the idea of scientific inquiry” (p. 849). Milgram’s biographer Thomas Blass labelled Milgram’s reaction to Baumrind’s criticism as a “reflexive overreaction to being attacked” (Blass, 2004, p. 124). Perhaps, but was Milgram reacting to being attacked or to having his carefully guarded self-​interest exposed? After all, as Diana Baumrind has more recently reminded us, “participants who are lied to are deceived [so as] to serve the experimenter’s purposes not the participants’ interests” (Baumrind, 2015, p. 692). Why Did Milgram Conduct his Famous Experiments on Obedience to Authority? All positioning theories in psychology (from that of Rom Harré to my own work with Alex Gillespie on position exchange theory, to the kind of life positioning analysis being illustrated by the case studies in this book) hope to produce a credible storyline that helps to understand and perhaps to explain certain aspects of lives as lived with others within particular sociocultural contexts and traditions. This being so, what life positioning storyline (or perhaps storylines) might plausibly capture the kinds of positionings, perspectives, possibilities, and life projects described and discussed in this case study of the life and work of Stanley Milgram, with a special focus on his studies of obedience to authority? More specifically, why did Milgram conduct his famous studies of obedience to authority? In the foregoing life positioning analysis of Stanley Milgram’s childhood, higher education, and early career research on obedience to authority, I have positioned Milgram as a precocious child who was unusually adept at understanding the perspectives of others. For example, in one of his childhood hoaxes, I described how a young Milgram strategically employed positions of “revealer” and “concealer” to convince a friend that the friend had telepathic powers. Here, we see in an embryonic form the beginnings of what was to become an almost signature way in which Milgram created and directed ambiguous positionings for others by selectively revealing and concealing from them how they were being positioned. By manipulating others’ positions through what he revealed and concealed, Milgram aimed to deceive and confuse

Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing  35 them about the agency that they exercised so that he could constrain and direct their actions, perspectives, and possibilities. In his doctoral studies of social conformity, Milgram’s deceptive scenarios revolved around concealing from his research participants the important fact that the erroneous comparative judgments of acoustic duration made by what the participants thought were other participants like themselves, actually were voiced by “recorded confederates” of Milgram and were a crucial part of Milgram’s experimental deception. A very similar pattern of concealment typified his famous experiments on obedience to authority. Here, research participants were told that the person to whom they (positioned as “teachers” and givers of electrical shocks) were directing their supposedly learning-​ inducing electrical shocks was a fellow participant in the experiment who had just happened to be selected for the position of “learner” (and receiver of electrical shocks). However, there is a more pervasive social psychological position that Milgram seems to have succeeded in creating and orchestrating for the unwitting others involved in his childhood hoaxes, doctoral research, and in his studies of obedience to authority conducted as a junior professor of psychology at Yale University. I refer to this positioning as that of the confused and conflicted agent, for in all these cases Milgram created situations in which others did not know what to make of the situations in which they found themselves and consequently did not know what to make of themselves. His childhood friend Wex was led to believe he had telepathic powers, which must have surprised and confused him as he had no previous experience of such a magical positioning. Many of the Norwegian and French subjects in his doctoral experiments on social conformity clearly endorsed the purposeful misjudgments of Milgram’s “voiced confederates,” even though many of them must have known that these judgments were in error. Finally, participants in Milgram’s studies of obedience to authority were clearly bewildered and emotionally upset by finding themselves, against their better natures, administering painful shocks to those whom they thought were other participants like themselves. In all these cases, Milgram purposefully positioned childhood friends and participants in his research studies as confused and conflicted moral and rational agents who found themselves out of character in the sense that they found themselves in highly unusual situations in which they acted in unfamiliar and disturbing ways. There is no doubt that confusion and conflict often typify our actions in our everyday lives. However, a central claim in Milgram’s interpretations of the results of his research was that “Good experiments, like good drama, embody verities” (1973b). Indeed, Milgram often implied that his experiments on obedience to authority were especially real because they somehow distilled the essence of evil doings. In his 1974 book Obedience to Authority, Milgram discusses the “agentic state” that some of his subjects supposedly fell into when they became detached

36  Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing from what they were doing and its consequences, and responded only to the procedures enforced, and the reminders and encouragements voiced by Milgram’s experimenter. Milgram goes so far as to suggest that this oddly named state is an experimentally invoked distillation of the kind of “benign evil” proposed by Hannah Arendt as a possible explanation for some of the horrific acts of the Holocaust. “This investigation [his studies of obedience to authority] deals with the obedience not of the oppressed, who are coerced by brutal punishment into compliance, but of those who willingly comply because society gives them a role and they are motivated to live up to its requirements” (Milgram, 1974, p. 175). As elaborated by Thomas Blass, “For Milgram, laboratory experiments were a form of theater, with one important difference: Unlike a real play, which is scripted from start to finish, in an experiment the ending—​ the subject’s behavior—​ is always an unknown until it actually unfolds” (2004, p. 263). However, such valorizing of the reality reproducing features of Milgram’s experimental dramas seems conveniently to ignore the extent to which participants in Milgram’s famous experiments were repositioned out of their everyday contexts—​contexts which, while often ambiguous and uncertain, never included respected authorities such as university professors demanding the commission of atrocities. Milgram’s notion that his created world of agential confusion and conflict somehow explained the often willingly, non-​forced commitment of murder by so many of the Nazi perpetrators (cf. Fenigstein, 2015, p. 581) seems forced at best. I’d be quite willing to wager that nearly 100 percent of the participants in any of the conditions of his obedience studies would not have murdered “the learner” if the experimenter gave them a gun and asked them to do so. This said, it seems relevant here to mention one experimental condition that Milgram never disclosed, but which might be seen as especially morally suspect. In this little-​known condition, revealed to me for the first time when I read Gina Perry’s (2012) book Behind the Shock Machine, subjects who responded to Milgram’s various calls and postings for research participants were asked to bring a friend or relative to the experimental session that had been arranged for them (also see Athanassoulis, 2023). In this experimental condition, one of each pair of friends/​relatives was assigned to the role of teacher and one to the role of learner. The one taking on the role of learner was taken to an adjoining room and before being strapped into the “electrical shock chair” was briefed by Milgram and provided with a script indicating what noises, shouts, and words to utter at particular points in the experimental scenario that was about to be enacted. Only 15 percent of the participating “teachers” administered dangerous shocks when placed in this particular position—​still surprising, but far from the 62 percent of “teachers” who administered such shocks in the second or core experimental condition that, through his publications and film, became the prototype of the Milgram studies of obedience to authority. But the question that must

Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing  37 be asked about this particular condition is: Why on earth did Milgram demand that participants administer what were claimed to be lethal shocks to their close friends and relatives? My answer to this question is that, despite being well aware that running this particular experimental condition could not be squared with his self-​positioning as a conscientious, responsible social psychologist, Milgram simply could not or would not “help himself.” Why? Because he was more committed to positioning himself as the provocatively courageous, risk-​taking, showy impresario he fancied himself to be. It was this positioning that trumped any of his committed social scientist positionings. In the final analysis, Stanley Milgram coveted a complicated, edgy persona that would impress others through its invocation of him as a uniquely multi-​talented genius. For Milgram, “the play was the thing,” and he coveted a “playwright as impresario” positioning that celebrated his creativity and originality. Stanley Milgram’s deceptive repositioning of his subjects as befuddled pseudo-​ agents in his purposefully confusing dramas created contexts and resulted in actions on the part of his subjects that do not qualify as essences of evil comparable to those committed during the Holocaust or other horrendous past and present genocides. In many ways they are much more typical, if more extreme examples, of the behaviors of the subjects of experimental psychologists who use restrictive and reductive inquiry practices that allow them to reveal and exaggerate the supposed agency of participants in their research while simultaneously concealing and downplaying their own agency as exercised in the design and conduct of their studies—​studies which seldom are conducive to the free display of participants’ individual or collective agency and reasons for acting (cf. Gozli, 2019). To obtain a more detailed understanding of the particularities of the Milgram studies of obedience and how they positioned participants as befuddled pseudo-​agents, consider the following excerpt from a transcription of one of Milgram’s research participants. This is a transcription of an exchange between a research participant and Milgram’s experimenter, John Williams, in which Williams follows a pre-​set script prepared by Milgram. After delivering a supposedly highly dangerous shock of 180 volts, as indicated on Milgram’s shock machine, the participant turns to Williams and says “I can’t stand it. I’m going to kill that man in there. You hear him hollering”? Williams responds in a matter-​of-​fact way, “The experiment requires that you continue, Teacher. … Whether the learner likes it or not, we must go on through all the word pairs.” The participant protests: “I refuse to take the responsibility. He’s in there hollering”! Once more, Williams tells him that “It’s absolutely essential that you continue, Teacher.” Pointing to the questions he has yet to put to the Learner, the participant declares “There’s too many left here, I mean, Geez, if he gets them wrong … who’s going to take responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman”? Williams calmly responds by saying, “I’m responsible for

38  Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing anything that happens to him. Continue please,” and on it goes (transcription excerpts from Milgram, 1974, pp. 73–​74). Clearly, the research participant in this instance is positioned in a most sinister way by the experimenter. He must either risk the disapproval of a qualified researcher at one of America’s leading universities or he must continue to commit what, in any other circumstance, would be criminal assault or even murder. The “Learner” is yelling “Get me out of here. My heart’s bothering me!” and the experimenter keeps telling the participant that it is imperative that he continue to administer potentially lethal shocks to this poor man. Displaying signs of distress, the research subject, cast as Teacher, seems to experience a lapse of moral agency, and performs as if he was on automatic pilot. It is no surprise to learn from Gina Perry’s (2012) detailed examination of Milgram’s studies of obedience to authority that this research participant spent considerable time in the U.S. armed forces, where automatic obedience to authority was drilled and lauded as virtuous. What was Milgram’s own interpretation of this episode? “The subject’s objections strike us as inordinately weak and inappropriate in view of the events in which he is immersed. He thinks he is killing someone, yet he uses the language of the tea table” (Milgram, 1974, p. 77). Having put the research subject in an almost impossible position to which he responds with an habituated deference to authority in an automatized, robotic way, Milgram now positions the research participant as a blameworthy, immoral, and culpable non-​agent. In doing so, Milgram ignores the experimental deceptions and manipulations he purposefully orchestrated to encourage his research subjects to react in precisely this way—​so much for his self-​positioning as a social psychological situationist! It was Milgram’s experimenter John Williams who used “the language of the tea table,” not the emotionally wrought research participant. The interpretation I have offered is that at an early age Stanley Milgram began to master the notion of positional perspective taking that is central to position exchange theory and life positioning analysis, not that he would have explicitly described himself in this way. Milgram “was unusually sensitive to the fine-​grained details of his surroundings” (Blass, 2004, p. 188). I believe that Milgram understood that the positions people occupy in sociocultural contexts embody the perspectives they are capable of understanding and using in their interpersonal interactions. In his own words, “What I am, my personality if you will, does not exist apart from my present company” (quoted in Blass, 2004, p. 189). Our life positions and perspectives inevitably are part of our sociocultural and interpersonal, relational positionings and exchanges. We like to think that we possess great powers of imagination that help us to comprehend the circumstances and positions of others. And, indeed, compared to any other animals, we do. Nonetheless, our understanding of others and their circumstances do not run deeply if we never have occupied and experienced their sociocultural positions and circumstances, which may be very different

Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing  39 from our own. Even if we have read about the horrors of war, or the ravages of domestic abuse, or the joys of finding a soulmate or having a child, we understand the positions of warrior, abused spouse, intimate friend and lover, or parent (and the perspectives such positions encompass) in significantly different ways from what we understand when we actually occupy these positions and gain these perspectives in the interpersonal, social reality of our existence. In his intense and detailed observations of social, interpersonal life, Milgram seemed to understand this, yet was apparently willing to ignore the extent to which he spent much of his personal and professional life positioning others in deceptive, manipulative ways. Despite having very mixed feelings about what he was doing, especially in the orchestration and conduct of his experiments on obedience to authority, Milgram positioned himself primarily as a rigorous, conscientious, and provocatively courageous social psychologist. Yet, when contemplatively alone, perhaps at night and very likely under the influence of the drugs he sometimes used, he would write and ponder the different sides of his character and motivations, as evidenced in the file I located in the Milgram papers at Yale’s Stirling Library. According to Milgram’s biographer Thomas Blass, “inconsistencies in Milgram’s behavior were actually—​and paradoxically—​manifestations of a deeper continuity between his professional and personal lives” and “quite possibly … his occasional use of amphetamines, cocaine, and marijuana” (2004, pp. 188–​189). All of us selectively reveal and conceal our motivations, actions, and experiences, both to others and to ourselves. Sometimes we do so quite purposefully; at other times we seem to just find ourselves doing so as our social and psychological circumstances and experiences dictate. But there can be no doubt that some of us are more skilled at doing so than others. Despite being well aware of the questionable moral and ethical aspects of his own conduct in directing his experiments on obedience to authority, Milgram quite consciously adopted a pattern of revealing and concealing various aspects of what he had done in orchestrating these studies. In public, he revealed what he knew would position himself in the perspectives of others as an exceptionally gifted social scientist conducting research directly relevant to human evil doing, while simultaneously concealing parts of his experimental conduct that he knew would support less flattering positionings and perspectives. So, for example, in any of his many public statements, in the film he made about his obedience experiments, and in his professional exchanges with critics like Diana Baumrind, Milgram never made mention of anything related to the experimental condition in which he manipulated his experimental scripts and procedures to see what would happen if the “teacher” and “learner” were friends and relatives. Given what I have said in this chapter, I think it is well warranted to position Milgram, in the creation and conduct of his studies of obedience to authority, as self-​serving in advancing his personal desire for success and

40  Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing fame. In doing so, he also could honor his deceased father, whom he had idolized, and contribute to our collective understanding and memory of Jewish death and suffering during the Shoah. These would be his lasting existential gifts to his family, his heritage, and himself—​i.e., his immortality project (Becker, 1973). Such contributions also would advance the kind of pragmatic, socially relevant social psychology he had adopted in his graduate work with Allport, Asch, Brown and other famous social psychologists. It is possible that Milgram might have been inspired by an emerging celebrity culture in American psychology that reflected psychology’s increasing importance on the broader cultural landscape of the country. As a star of psychology, Milgram perhaps imagined that other doors might open to his more general artistic and existential desires. For example, in the many letters and documents I perused in the Stanley Milgram Papers in Yale University Archives there was considerable evidence of his interests in writing plays and fiction. Although Milgram’s premature death (like that of his father before him) did not allow much of this to occur, there can be no question of his lasting fame as a social psychologist of note. Stanley Milgram is likely to be long remembered as the innovative, creative social psychologist he positioned himself to be. He also will be long remembered as the infamous perpetrator of a morally suspect kind of social psychological experimentation, a legacy he did not desire, but one he perhaps thought necessary to ensure his professional and personal renown in psychology and beyond. Position exchange theory and life positioning analysis explore the intimate connection between what we do with others and who we become within the sociocultural circumstances and relationships of our lives. This is a lifeworld in which we human beings occupy a private and collective past, present, and possible future in which actualities we encounter mix with possibilities we create. The overall aim of positioning theories and methods is to construct life positioning storylines that give accounts of this mixing of life positions, perspectives, possibilities, purposes, and projects, as these constitute our moral and rational agency and other aspects of our personhood. References Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Viking. Athanassoulis, N. (2023). The Milgram experiment no one (in philosophy) is talking about. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 43, 61–​75. Baumrind, D. (1964). Some thoughts on ethics of research: After reading Milgram’s “Behavioral study of obedience.” American Psychologist, 19, 421–​423. Baumrind, D. (2015). When subjects become objects: The lies behind the Milgram legend. Theory & Psychology, 25, 690–​696. Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press. Blass, T. (1998). The roots of Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments and their relevance to the Holocaust. Analyse & Kritik, 20, 46–​53.

Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing  41 Blass, T. (Ed.). (2000). Obedience to authority: Current perspectives on the Milgram paradigm. Psychology Press. Blass, T. (2004). The man who shocked the world: The life and legacy of Stanley Milgram. Basic Books. Brown, R. (1985). Commemorative talk about Stanley Milgram. City University of New York, May 10. Fenigstein, A. (2015). Milgram’s shock experiments and the Nazi perpetrators: A contrarian perspective on the role of obedience pressures during the Holocaust. Theory & Psychology, 25, 581–​598. Fermaglich, K. (2006). American dreams and Nazi nightmares: Early Holocaust consciousness and liberal America, 1957–​1965. Brandeis University Press. Gozli, D. (2019). Experimental psychology and human agency. Springer. Korn, J. H. (1997). Illusions of reality: A history of deception in social psychology. State University of New York Press. Lunt, P. (2009). Stanley Milgram: Understanding obedience and its implications. Palgrave Macmillan. Martin, J. (2016). Ernest Becker and Stanley Milgram: Twentieth-​century students of evil. History of Psychology, 19, 3–​21. Martin, J. (in press). Positioning theory and personhood. In M. McVee, L. Van Langehove, C. Brock, & B. A. Christensen (Eds.), Routledge international handbook on positioning theory. Routledge. Martin, J., & Gillespie, A. (2010). A neo-​Meadian approach to human agency: Relating the social and the psychological in the ontogenesis of perspective coordinating persons. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 44, 252–​272. Mastroianni, G. R. (2015). Obedience in perspective: Psychology and the Holocaust. Theory & Psychology, 25, 657–​669. Milgram, S. (circa 1961). Document in the Stanley Milgram Papers, box 46, folder 165, Yale University Archives. Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371–​378. Milgram, S. (1964). Issues in the study of obedience: A reply to Baumrind. American Psychologist, 19, 848–​852. Milgram, S. (Producer & Director) (1965). Obedience. DVD Version available through Penn State University Audio-​Visual (DVD 002 399). Milgram, S. (1973a, December). The perils of obedience. Harper’s, 247, 62–​66 & 75–​77. Milgram, S. (1973b). Letter to Alan Elms dated September 25, 1973, in the Stanley Milgram Papers, box 1, folder 2, Yale University Archives. Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. Harper & Row. Milgram, S. (1976, August 21). Obedience to authority: A CBS drama deals with the shocking results of a social psychologist’s experiments. TV Guide, 24–​25. Milgram, S. (1977). The individual in a social world: Essays and experiments. Addison-​Wesley. Miller, A. G. (1986). The obedience experiments: A case study of controversy in social science. Praeger. Nicholson, I. (2011). “Torture at Yale”: Experimental subjects, laboratory torment and the “rehabilitation” of Milgram’s “Obedience to Authority”. Theory & Psychology, 21, 737–​761.

42  Stanley Milgram’s Penchant for Revealing and Concealing Perry, G. (2012). Behind the shock machine: The untold story of the notorious Milgram psychology experiments. New Press. Reicher, S. D., Haslam, S. A., & Miller, A. G. (2014). What makes a person a perpetrator? The intellectual, moral, and methodological revisiting of Milgram’s research on. The influence of authority. Journal of Social Issues, 70, 393–​408.

3 Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis in the Canadian Province of Quebec

Author’s Introduction Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, father of Canada’s current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is the subject of the life positioning psychobiographical essay in this third chapter. The sociocultural psychobiography of Stanley Milgram in the previous chapter highlighted position exchanges between positions of “revealer” and “concealer” across different phases of Milgram’s life. In this chapter, the emphasis is on a significant life repositioning that had lasting consequences for Pierre Trudeau and Canada as a nation and which also involved what Trudeau chose to reveal and conceal about this significant event and what had precipitated it. The event in question is Trudeau’s October 1970 invocation of Canada’s War Measures Act, which many Canadian baby boomers like myself recall vividly, thanks in no small measure to Trudeau’s colorful and controversial statements and actions at the time. Indeed, Trudeau himself was one of the most dramatically conflictual presences in Canadian history. Few public figures could match the multifaceted, contradictory, yet for many, alluring persona that Pierre Elliott Trudeau presented to Canada and the world. He alternated between performance artist and withdrawn loner, passionate believer and icy cynic, professorial scholar and ruggedly athletic outdoorsman, generous friend and petty enemy. He combined the rigid discipline and asceticism of a multilingual Catholic intellectual with the occasional sybaritic immaturity of a Don Juan and the risk-​taking of a Cyrano de Bergerac. In a truly Nietzschean manner, he purposefully presented himself to the world as “a work of art.” He spent long, studious hours memorizing poetry and classical texts, perfecting accents and performance talents, honing rhetorical tricks and oratorical turns. He commanded attention, leaving few others unaffected and unimpressed, although not always in favorable ways. His apparent contradictions and unpredictability have provided fodder for numerous attacks on his ideas and reputation by English-​and French-​Canadian intellectuals, yet ordinary Canadians continue to rank Pierre Trudeau as one of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003461715-3

44  Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis their greatest citizens. For me and others of my generation, he made it cool to be a Canadian, even as we sometimes cringed at his antics. I previously have published a brief life positioning account of Trudeau’s intellectual and political positioning and repositioning in a chapter I wrote for the Routledge International Handbook of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (Martin, 2022). I also recently wrote and self-​published a book of nonfiction for a general audience that discussed the lives and political visions and battles of Peter Lougheed (former Premier of the Canadian province of Alberta) and Pierre Trudeau during the era of conflictual federalism that typified Canadian politics during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s (Martin, 2023). Neither of those works focus specifically or extensively on Trudeau’s invocation of the War Measures Act. Nor do they offer a detailed analysis of the repositioning of his political thought and action during and following his graduate studies at Harvard, Sciences Po, and the London School of Economics, or use this significant life repositioning to explain his controversial and seemingly unpredictable actions in what has come to be known as Canada’s October Crisis of 1970. Some of the factual information about Trudeau’s childhood, education, and life before politics that appears in this chapter is taken from my 2023 book about Trudeau and Lougheed. The Controversy Concerning the October Crisis of 1970 and the War Measures Act In October of 1970, Prime Minister of Canada Pierre Elliott Trudeau invoked the Canadian War Measures Act, the only time it had been used in peacetime in Canadian history. He did so in response to the terrorist Front de Libération du Québec’s (FLQ) series of bombings and crimes that had culminated in the October kidnappings of British trade commissioner James Cross and Québec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte. The purpose of this historical sociocultural psychobiographical essay is to suggest a viable answer to the question “Why did Pierre Trudeau make such a drastic response to the FLQ”? Although widely supported in English Canada, many political scientists, historians, legal experts, and journalists strongly opposed Trudeau’s decision to put Canada on a war footing that essentially placed Trudeau and his Liberal government above the law of the land. Using ideas and methods of Life Positioning Analysis, I suggest that Trudeau’s dramatic response was rooted in the bicultural positioning he experienced growing up in Montreal, Quebec, his elite education at Collège Jean-​de-​Brébeuf, and the sociocultural and personal repositioning of his sociopolitical views that he experienced during his higher education at Harvard, Sciences Po in Paris, and the London School of Economics. Particular attention is given to Trudeau’s personal involvement as a young adult, while completing a law degree at the Université de Montréal, in a radical right-​wing group that shared some similarities in its tactics to those used by the FLQ during the 1970

Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis  45 October Crisis. This was a part of his life that Trudeau never acknowledged after becoming a left-​leaning Liberal, philosophical personalist, and avid multiculturalist. But first, a more contextualized description of the controversy surrounding the Quebec Crisis and the War Measures Act is warranted. No credible commentators on Trudeau’s and his federal government’s implementation of the War Measures Act (WMA) have doubted the seriousness of the two crimes of kidnapping that precipitated the October crisis of 1970. That said, very few of those commentators have argued that these crimes warranted this extreme reaction. Rather, most have considered various aspects of the historical, cultural, and political context of the crimes to attempt to explain what they believe to have been an act of panic, or perhaps worse, an act of political opportunism by Trudeau and his cabinet. During the 1960s, the Quebec independence movement had germinated and rapidly gained ground to the extent that in April 1970 its political arm, the Parti Québécois (PQ), had secured seven seats in the province’s National Assembly. Those arguing for Quebec’s recognition as a nation separate from Canada had been buoyed by the international attention gained through the endorsement and support of then French President Charles de Gaulle in 1967, the year of Canada’s centennial celebrations. By 1970, a host of longer-​standing political grievances concerning the treatment of French-​Canadian Quebecers within the Canadian federation had been revisited, updated, and used to fuel the nationalist agenda of the PQ. Also in the 1960s, the terrorist Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) had formed and between 1963 and 1970 had been responsible for more than 200 bombings and dozens of robberies. Yet, most informed commentators agree that none of this should have precipitated the use of the War Measures Act. This act had been designed for war. It had been invoked in both the First and Second World Wars so that the federal government of Canada would have all the powers it needed to ensure an immediate and effective preparation for the exigencies of being in a state of war—​including the training, transport, and provisioning of its armed forces and ensuring consequential means of redirecting and managing reduced funds and services to enable the citizenry at home to keep essential services functioning and goods flowing. Most of this was accepted and understood as necessary by all parties concerned. The WMA, which included the suspension of civil liberties and judicial rights of Canadians, was also used during World War II to combat a widespread anti-​conscription movement in Quebec—​a movement in which a young Pierre Elliott Trudeau had been a youth leader and effective speaker. During this earlier time, the WMA had allowed the internment of anti-​ conscription protesters in Quebec without trial, including the arrest and detention for four years (1940–​1944) of popular Montreal mayor Camillien Houde, a friend of Trudeau’s father and frequent guest at their home. In 1970, the WMA was being used for the first time during a period of peace to combat two crimes of kidnapping.

46  Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis The Act was formally declared at 4 a.m. on October 16, 1970. By that time Canadian soldiers had been deployed in Quebec, the number of which grew to 7,500 over the next few days. As many as 10,000 homes were searched and 450 people were arrested. With all of this going on, Pierre Laporte, Quebec’s Minister of Labour and one of those who had been kidnapped, was killed on October 17 at about 6 p.m., his body found in an abandoned vehicle six or seven hours later. Pierre Laporte had been a childhood schoolmate of Pierre Trudeau. Although frequently cited as a reason for the invocation of the War Measures Act, the killing of Laporte came after the Act had been declared and enacted. A Bicultural Childhood and Jesuit Education The son of a French-​Canadian father and English-​Canadian mother, Pierre Trudeau was positioned at birth to benefit from a rich mix of cultural, social, and financial resources. His childhood and adolescence were securely anchored by his father’s money, his mother’s love and social grace, and an elite education, all of which positioned the young Trudeau as strongly independent and socially responsible. His home and school contexts and relationships offered a combination of support and challenge, mixed with oppositional tensions and tendencies—​the boisterous excitability of his father versus the calm quietude of his mother, the sociocultural differences between Francophone and Anglophone Quebec, and the sociopolitical, leadership goals of his upper-​ class Jesuit schooling versus his comfort in solitary reflection and self-​exploration. The premature death of his father, his new role as protector of his mother and siblings, and resultant confusions about his social and occupational duties and possibilities helped to create an uncharacteristic experimentation with more radical political positions while completing his degree in law at the University of Montreal. Trudeau’s Childhood

Pierre Trudeau’s parents were social, cultural, and characterological opposites. Charles-​Émile Trudeau, a Catholic Francophone, was “a dynamo, gutsy, gregarious, extravagant, and loud,” (Clarkson & McCall, 1990, p. 27) “an extrovert who loved games, gambling, and the high life” (English, 2007, p. 13). “He spoke loudly and expressed himself vigorously” (Trudeau, 1993, p. 10). Grace Elliott was “contemplative, devout, frugal, forbearing, and resolutely refined” (Clarkson & McCall, 1990, p. 27). She was of French-​Canadian and Scottish ancestry (British loyalists who had come to Canada from New England), whose businessman father had sent her to be educated at Dunham Ladies’ College in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, with daughters of the Anglo-​Protestant establishment. However, she, like her mother and her husband, was Catholic. Charlie’s Québécois family had farmed land on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River for nine generations before his semi-​literate father had sold

Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis  47 the land at the urging of his mother (whose brother was a physician) so that their boys could be schooled at the eminent classical college of Sainte-​Marie in Montreal. After winning many academic and athletic prizes and earning a reputation as a troublemaker at Sainte-​Marie, Charlie studied law at the Montreal campus of Laval University (now the Université de Montréal) and established a successful, three-​person law firm. Energetically driven to succeed, Charlie quickly grew bored with his legal practice. He founded what he called the Automobile Owners’ Association, a string of garages selling gasoline and maintenance services, which he expanded into a club for car owners who paid an annual fee. By the time Pierre entered adolescence, his father owned thirty garages, which he sold to Imperial Oil in 1932 for the then extravagant price of $1.2 million. He invested these funds wisely in enterprises like the Sullivan Mines, Belmont Park, and the Montreal Royals baseball team, for which he served as vice-​president. He “became a member of the Cercle Universitaire, the Club Canadien, and several golf clubs” (English, 2007, p. 14). Although a political conservative, his circle of friends contained both conservatives and liberals, including the mayor of Montreal, Camillien Houde, who Pierre, in his memoirs, recalled as “incredibly portly … which made a big impression on such a little guy as I was then” (Trudeau, 1993, p. 12). The Trudeaus “became and remained members of the haute bourgeoisie of Quebec, with financial resources that ensured security for Grace and her children for the rest of their lives” (English, 2007, p. 15). The Trudeau family (Suzette, Pierre, Charles Jr. or Tip, and their parents) first resided modestly at 5779 Rue Durocher, just inside the boundaries of the new middle-​class suburb of Outremont. The Durocher house was in a somewhat mixed neighborhood of primarily French Canadians, but also included some Irish Catholics and Jews. With the windfall from the sale of Charlie’s garages and service stations, the family moved to a new three-​story building of brown brick on McCullough Street in the heart of Outremont. At twelve, Pierre was enrolled at Collège Jean-​de-​Brébeuf, the elite Jesuit classical college within walking distance of his home, to continue his schooling and eventually to obtain the equivalent of a university undergraduate degree. Throughout his childhood and early education, young Pierre lived with a mostly absent, but when present, domineering father, who was simultaneously loving and demanding. It was his mother who maintained the home and cared for the children. At eight pounds four ounces, Pierre was a well-​sized but colicky baby, who when he turned one had an operation on his adenoids that stopped most of his crying. From his birth, his mother kept meticulous records and mementos of his development and accomplishments. Having just turned two, Pierre made the sign of the cross and could say his prayers alone. Precociously bilingual, little Pierre already knew many children’s songs in both languages. During his absences, Charlie wrote frequent letters to Grace and the children, reminding her to observe their character and correct their faults, because such correction was important and

48  Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis for their own good. His older sister Suzette and Pierre found their father strict, intense, and dynamic when he was present. He taught Pierre to box, wrestle, and shoot, encouraging him to become strong and independent. Biographer, George Radwanski (1978) describes a typical day when Charlie was at home. Promptly at 5:15 every day, he would drop whatever he was doing at work and go home to spend at least an hour giving his three children … his undivided attention. Then he would usually go out and spend the evening with friends. … Though he was severe when disobeyed, he preferred to encourage his children with incentive… he would offer a quarter to whoever could jump the highest or run the fastest or hang by his legs the longest, or he would promise to buy a canoe when his children could swim a certain distance. (p. 46) In Suzette’s words: “He wasn’t with us an awful lot, but when he was there he was very much present. He was interested in our schooling … he always wanted to see our homework and see what kinds of marks we were getting” (quoted in Radwanski, 1978, pp. 46–​45). In Trudeau’s own words: He was basically a very good father, because he didn’t punish very often; he rewarded much more than he punished. … He was a successful man. … He was a leader, he had wit … He wielded some authority; that made me respect him and, during the last years of his life, probably also challenge him from time to time as adolescents do. But he died before I ever got into any open conflict with him. … He had demanding standards, which didn’t consist of saying, “You must be more like me,” but did consist of saying, “You must do whatever you are doing properly.” … He gave me a taste for life; he was much more exuberant than I and I wanted to imitate him. But he was stern. He had principles: when we were fooling, we were fooling; but when it was serious, it was serious. … I felt so inferior to him in all respects … But he gave me the means to be like him: He taught me boxing, to shoot a rifle, he taught me to talk, to read … (quoted in Radwanski, 1978, pp. 46–​47) By contrast, Pierre’s mother Grace was refined and cultured, often frequenting museums and concerts—​intelligent and charming, even adventurous, though quiet. Like her husband, she had many friends. She possessed a good sense of humor and was not prone to criticize. As described by Trudeau: She was a good mother, spent a lot of time with us. … my mother was more discreet and withdrawn [than her husband], didn’t loom so large. But in terms of love and presence, of course, she was always there. … I remember

Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis  49 spending a lot of time with her. … She loved liberty perhaps more than my father did. She never gave me the impression of an overly protective mother. … She wasn’t always off to parties, didn’t break down and weep, never took things too tragically, never imposed her wishes on us. She left her children free. What I most admire about her was her lack of possessiveness: I never felt held back in any way. (quoted in Radwanski, 1978, pp. 47–​48) Trudeau’s Schooling and Adolescence

At Collège Jean de Brébeuf, a mile away from his family home, the twelve-​ year-​old Pierre was encouraged by the priest pedagogues, with the approval of his father, to counteract his shyness and sensitivity by cultivating his reason and assertiveness over his emotion and reticence. Brébeuf traditionally emphasized rational argument and cogent debate through a classical curriculum that combined the usual academic subjects taught in junior and senior high school with extensive forays into the arts, philosophy, and politics. Trudeau proved to be an outstanding student, usually at or near the top of his class. The school’s emphasis on personal development fit his father’s desires. Pierre became determined to assert his individuality. At school, he cultivated an aggressive mix of mischievousness, playfulness, aloofness, flair, and pugnacity that made him a leader of a group of similarly minded Outremont adolescents, often referred to by other students as the snobs. While at Brébeuf, the adolescent Trudeau also excelled as a student athlete and editor of the student newspaper. In these roles he encouraged his fellow students to shake off their inertia and assert themselves: “If you are right to have your ideas, you are wrong to keep them to yourself. If you are wrong to have your ideas, you would be right to expose them to correction” (Nemni & Nemni, 2006, p. 89). In his own life, Trudeau now was consciously cultivating an “international accent that most students must have considered alien or pretentious” and “developing his own style, writing in terse, pithy sentences” and seeking “to stimulate debate, arguments, or at least expression of personal viewpoints” (Nemni & Nemni, 2006, p. 89), without fully realizing that there were strict limits to what he was asking other students to do—​limits that were imposed by the pedagogue priests. Although seeing himself as independent and sometimes rebellious, Trudeau mostly kept well within the bounds of what the priests would tolerate. Much of Pierre’s time at Brébeuf was spent in developing his intellectual and athletic capabilities and personal style. He was learning how to stand out from the crowd as he studied and experimented in how to lead it. In short, Pierre Trudeau was being positioned and was positioning himself to be his own person—​a leader whom others would follow, just as his father and the Brébeuf priests wanted him to be.

50  Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis Trudeau biographers George Radwanski (1978) and Max and Monique Nemni (2006) disagree about the nature of the education the adolescent Trudeau received at Brébeuf. For the most part, Radwanski extolls Brébeuf’s classical education as serving to broaden his intellectual horizons, selecting Father Jean Bernier, a young French-​Canadian Manitoban, as a stellar example of the kind of teacher and education Brébeuf had to offer. Citing a 1969 interview and profile of Trudeau by Edith Iglauer that appeared in the New Yorker, Radwanski indirectly quotes Trudeau as saying that “Father Bernier [who taught French Literature] was the most highly cultivated man I had met,” teaching “me to like beautiful things, poetry or books or art; he really set standards of appreciation which have never left me” (1978, p. 56). Bernier himself is quoted as saying “Literature, philosophy, music, painting—​all went together. … All this was a bit cut off from the atmosphere of daily life, but these were the sons of bourgeoisie and didn’t have money troubles, so they could throw themselves into art and beauty. It was an atmosphere of elation, where everything was beautiful … I taught them French, Greek and Latin literature” (pp. 56–​57). Recognizing the elitism that characterized a Brébeuf classical education, Bernier qualifies by remarking that: although all of this was a typical modern French culture, it was open to other streams of thought, [including] Tagore, the Indian poet … [and] what Thoreau said about the wilderness, which was very appealing to Canadians … Our little life gave the boys respect for the rational, an instinctive repulsion against the rising Fascism and Nazism. I insisted on a respect for man-​ made beauty. They had to understand that real men are not destroyers but builders—​of society, of poetry, and of beauty. … I used to give the boys Plato as a model of intellectual courage. … You could feel that Pierre had this kind of courage; even as a boy, he would say what he thought any place. (Quoted in Radwanski, 1978, p. 57) Both Radwanski and the Nemnis credit Brébeuf as being decisive in positioning young Trudeau as “a French Canadian who speaks impeccable English, rather than a French-​ speaking Anglophone” (Radwanski, 1978, p. 58). However, whereas Radwanski credits Brébeuf with keeping the adolescent Trudeau “at a skeptical distance from the Quebec nationalism of his classmates and thereby providing the first major channel for his urge to swim against the prevailing currents of thought” (p. 57), the Nemnis insist that whatever the merits of Brébeuf, such an education also included indoctrination into a nationalist worldview stereotypical of Quebec during the 1930s, one that was both anti-​ English and sympathetic, or at best neutral, about events in Europe at that time, in direct contradiction to the claims of Father Bernier. The Nemnis’ portrait of the young Trudeau was “of a youth who was well adjusted to his surroundings” at Brébeuf—​an educational environment that was

Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis  51 carefully constructed to “fulfill its divine mission” of preparing its students “to save the people” of Quebec from the oppressive practices of English Protestant liberalism, which were understood as threatening their culture and religion. They go on to say that “Pierre Trudeau accepted that he personally had such a mission. He believed that a good student who was a good Catholic had a duty also to be a nationalist.” Indeed, according to the Nemnis, “Nationalism and religion together constituted the fundamental values that infused all the life of the college. Brébeuf even developed a reputation as a bastion of separatism.” They point directly to what they regard as a core hypocrisy: “At Brébeuf, it seems, every effort was made in the 1930s to develop free spirits who, remarkably, would then agree to promote the two fundamental values of their Jesuit teachers: Catholicism and French-​Canadian nationalism.” “Almost all the students, including Trudeau, ended up with identical values … and they were convinced that they reached these values of their own free will” (Nemni & Nemni, 2006, pp. 43–​48). As for Father Bernier’s claim to have instilled in his students an appreciation for democracy, federalism, and pluralism and “an instinctive repulsion against Fascism and Nazism,” the Nemnis are disparaging, attributing such a view to a memory lapse. They back their critique with a careful reading of Trudeau’s student essays, notebooks, and editorials for the Brébeuf student newspaper. “In Trudeau’s notes from the period, when he was the Jesuits’ student, we found no trace of the promotion of federalism, democracy, or a pluralistic society” (Nemni & Nemni, 2006, p. 57). Instead, they found ample evidence that the Brébeuf curriculum to which Trudeau was exposed marched in time to the common Québécois chorus of the day—​i.e., “that Pétain was a hero and de Gaulle a traitor, [that] Mussolini, Salazar, and Franco were admirable corporatist leaders, [that] the democratic leaders were sell-​outs” (Nemni & Nemni, 2006, p. 57). Trudeau “adopted the notion that he must develop all his capacities to the fullest degree so as to join the ranks of the elite” (Nemni & Nemni, 2006, p. 79), thus supplementing his father’s faith in the virtues of self-​reliance and self-​discipline, convictions to which Trudeau added what became a lifelong commitment to asceticism, especially as expressed in physical challenge and endurance. Throughout his life, Trudeau “would take pleasure in pushing his body and mind to their utmost limits” (Nemni & Nemni, 2006, p. 80). In remembering an essay assigned by Father Bernier, requiring students to write about how they envisioned their future, Trudeau (1993) recalls that he “wanted to know everything and experience everything, in every realm. Maybe the essay even envisioned that someday, at the end of my life, I might want to become an important figure such as governor general or a prime minister. But first I would have explored the world” (pp. 25–​26). “Trudeau wanted to succeed by himself, owing his success to no one but himself” (Nemni & Nemni, 2006, p. 68), not recognizing the extent to which he was being influenced by the fathers, both his

52  Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis own and the priests. For example, Trudeau thought nothing of requesting the permission of the Catholic Church to read books on the Church’s Index of books judged to be morally dangerous, a practice he continued into his twenties. By the time he left Brébeuf to study law at the University of Montreal, Trudeau was positioned as an exemplary Catholic Québécois who was purposefully preparing himself to pursue a political career through which he would ensure a place and role for a vibrant Québécois society. Questions concerning how such a Québécois society should be, or even if it should be, part of Canada were largely ignored by Trudeau while he was attending Brébeuf. This was to change rather dramatically during his legal studies at the Université de Montréal. Young Trudeau as a Right-​Wing Corporatist Revolutionary Radwanski (1978, p. 58) describes Trudeau’s decision about what to study at the Université de Montréal in Pierre’s own words: One fork in the road was law, and another was all the area of the mind—​I’m thinking of psychology, philosophy, and so on. What interested me was to know what makes a society tick, what it was that produced order or disorder … either in the mind through psychological derangement … or in society itself by legal or monetary troubles. Such a linking of the personal and the societal was typical of Trudeau’s thought at the time and subsequently. In Trudeau’s mind, his private, personal development was yoked closely, and strategically, to the development of his public, social persona. Unable to leave Canada because of the Second World War and unwilling to leave Montreal and Quebec, Trudeau’s decision to study law was an easy one because UM then offered no programs in psychology or political philosophy. However, Pierre never was particularly interested in the study of legal practice. Instead, he “studied it [the law] as one would study economics or political science, to understand how a society works, how it governs itself, how it controls itself” (Radwanski, 1978, p. 59). He detested his courses, although he did develop further his interest in law as an instrument of justice, especially against abuses of authority. It was the social process of how the law worked in relation to society and its governance that fascinated Trudeau and subsequently led him to continue his studies in economics and political science at Harvard and abroad. Freed by his relative disinterest in his legal coursework, Trudeau used his years at UM to test his mettle through demanding and dangerous outdoor adventures by canoe, motorcycle, or on foot, during which he demonstrated stamina, courage, and careful calculation. Such adventures allowed him to “project the image of a breakneck type” when being “actually very careful,” in the words of his good friend Gérard Pelletier (quoted in Radwanski, 1978,

Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis  53 pp. 59–​60). Perhaps so, but there is no doubt that 100-​mile hikes and remote trips through churning, freezing waters, accompanied only by canoe and paddle, sleeping bag, fishing rod, rifle, knife, and a few canned provisions, were arduous in the extreme. For Trudeau, such adventures combined his deep love of nature with ascetic, almost mystical self-​discovery. “It is a condition of such a trip that you entrust yourself, stripped of your worldly goods, to nature” (quoted in Radwanski, 1978, p. 60). In a more frivolous but perhaps equally revealing way, Trudeau also spent substantial extracurricular time during the early 1940s honing a peculiar penchant for pranks and teasing. His sister Suzette told George Radwanski that Pierre liked “to tease” her and his younger brother Tip, to “see how far we could stand being teased before we broke out” (Radwanski, 1978, p. 61), something that later staffers in the PMO (Prime Minister’s Office) would describe as giving “you a good shot now and again, just to see how you’ll react” (p. 61). More elaborately and obnoxiously, while at UM, Trudeau, who enjoyed a bit of acting (both on stage and off), impersonated a German soldier wandering about in the Quebec countryside, apparently just to witness the reactions and possible upset of locals. Even more cruelly, after losing a public debate at the University, he pulled a pistol (rigged to fire with smoke and a bang, but no bullet) on a fellow debater, saying “That will put some stuffing into your head” (p. 61). The German soldier stunt hints directly at how disconnected Trudeau was from the actual events that took place in Europe during the Second World War. He avoided conscription by being enrolled in his legal studies at UM and taking his unenthusiastic part in the Canadian Officers Training Corps. Like many French Canadians of his generation, he wanted nothing to do with what was widely regarded in Quebec as an imperialistic war of Britain and her allies, of which they were not part. According to John English, “The war made Trudeau into a Quebec nationalist … He increasingly regarded his heritage as primarily French” (English, 2007, p. 68). He saw the Canadian government’s Defense of Canada Regulations as an imposition that not only invoked conscription, but that also limited the free speech and cultural expression of French Canadians. He became increasingly and “deeply concerned about the fate of his ‘French self’ ” (p. 68). The Nemnis (2006) provide comprehensive and compelling evidence that Trudeau in the early 1940s, while a law student at UM, devoted himself to the study of writings that espoused forms of corporatism entailing a rejection of capitalism and liberal democracy in favor of the Catholic authoritarianism and self-​sufficiency espoused and practiced after 1940 by Pétain’s Vichy government in France. Like historian Esther Delisle, they argue that Trudeau became a member of a secret revolutionary cell (Les Frères Chausseurs) and actively participated in enacting plans to overthrow the government of Quebec, and by implication that of Canada, with a view to establishing a distinctive Quebec nation. “For the Trudeau of 1942, a sovereign state was the essential condition

54  Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis for the triumph and the maintenance of the Good. And that required a revolution” (Nemni & Nemni, 2006, p. 219). At this stage in his life, the 22-​year-​old Trudeau “simply accepted … that the triumph of the Good demanded a nation that was simultaneously … French and Catholic. It followed that … a revolution was necessarily morally justified” (p. 220). Trudeau never, in his memoirs or elsewhere, responded to or refuted such charges. The closest he ever came was during a House of Commons session in 1977, well after the 1970 Quebec Crisis, during which he so vigorously linked the October terrorists to the Quebec separatists he had by that time come to despise. During this session of the House of Commons, Trudeau was asked by the Quebec member of parliament for the federal electoral district of Champlain if he ever had been “a member of a secret association which recommends a conciliatory attitude towards independence in Quebec” (p. 229), to which Trudeau appeared to give what the Speaker of the House Ray Hnatyshyn said was a “nodded yes” (p. 229). It is remarkable that no journalists of the day, either English or French, probed deeply into this matter, allowing Trudeau’s attempts to conceal his wartime activities to go mostly unchallenged. A typical later day concealment of his nationalist days in the early 1940s was to blithely dismiss them “as something of a lark, just another attack on authority” (quoted in Radwanski, 1978, p. 36), typical of anyone in their late teens and early adulthood. Nonetheless, given that his political stance at this time was in stark opposition to his strident and forceful denunciations of all forms of Quebec separatism after he entered federal politics, that he got away with it, and was allowed to get away with it, seems amazing. Perhaps, considering the widespread prevalence of the kind of educational indoctrination Pierre Trudeau received at Brébeuf for many well-​to-​ do and influential Quebecers, there likely were many others of Trudeau’s social class and standing who were equally leery of revealing much about their views and actions during the Second World War. During his revolutionary period and his legal studies at the Université de Montréal, Trudeau also was negotiating several personality and psychological hurdles—​how to reconcile his ambition with his timidity, his love and need for solitude and escape with his desire for celebrity, and his strident individualism with a necessary sociability in support of his ambitions. Such tensions, in part, reflected divergent positions and perspectives he occupied and to which he was exposed in his childhood and early adolescence, such as those between his Francophone and Anglophone cultures, as personified in his interactions with his father, mother, and on the streets and playgrounds of Outremont. At Brébeuf, in a more consistently francophone and nationalistic environment, Pierre had displayed his intellectual brilliance, athletic skill, and combativeness. At home, in his father’s absence and after his death, young Trudeau embraced greater solitude and escape from the demands of the classroom, athletic fields, and peer interactions. When studying law at UM, he assuaged his boredom with more

Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis  55 aggressive pursuits, including the revolutionary activities just mentioned, in which he could test his leadership mettle and hone his rhetorical abilities in ways that appealed to his ever-​present penchant for drama and danger, but from which he always thought he could escape, given his familial and personal resources. In developing this ability to be different and act differently in different contexts, Trudeau could be mistaken for perhaps showing signs of a “double personality,” but from a positioning perspective it seems more likely that such shifts reflected differing demands and expectations that others placed on the young Trudeau and that he placed upon himself—​a kind of compartmentalization that allowed him to focus all his energies on the tasks at hand, without concern for any overall coherence, so long as his purposes of the moment and his image of himself were served. As an aspiring politician, an ambition he most often concealed, he reveled in developing charismatic, adventurous, and semi-​mysterious ways of presenting himself. By taking on the beliefs and sociopolitical views of many of his Jesuit teachers at Brébeuf, even to the point of involving himself in subversive political games, which he apparently took quite seriously, he was exploring possibilities for political action and allegiance. In short, he was getting to know different aspects and sides of his society and himself. Through all of this, the individualism and competitiveness he internalized from his father, suited his oscillating desires for solitude and celebrity, allowing him to reveal and conceal himself as he found it advantageous to do one or the other. Knitting it all together, young Trudeau saw himself as a romantic spirit in the manner of Cyrano de Bergerac. In his late teens and early twenties, Pierre found in Cyrano “an expression of who I was and what I wanted to be: I don’t care if I don’t make it, providing I don’t need anyone else’s help, providing what I do make I make alone, you know, without begging for favours” (quoted in Radwanski, 1978, p. 35). Even when the immaturities and excesses of this period of Trudeau’s life began to fade, the assertion of individuality remained a major priority in both his lifestyle and his philosophy. So long as what seemed to others like contradictory aspects of his character and undertakings fit his Cyrano-​like persona of presentation and disguise, he was happy to ignore how these others regarded him. The important thing, he decided, was not to compete against others or to seek outside approval, but constantly to test himself and improve: I guess I was competing against myself all the time, which contains an element of immaturity. Just look at sports. When I was in college, there were no other sports but team sports. I played them, hockey and lacrosse, but as soon as I was out of college, I didn’t stay in team sports. I went into solitary things like skiing or cycling or skindiving or canoeing or things that you do alone or with very few people. You’re testing yourself.” (Quoted in Radwanski, 1978, p. 35)

56  Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis Nonetheless, throughout his life Trudeau maintained a small circle of close and carefully chosen friends, whom he cultivated with purpose, yet with obvious enjoyment. Even Pierre, the rugged individualist, realized that you can’t fight and succeed entirely on your own. One of these was Jean de Grandpré, a Brébeuf classmate and long-​time friend, who subsequently became a major figure in legal and business circles in Quebec. De Grandpré, in an interview with Trudeau biographers Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall, reminds us of the importance of Trudeau’s independent wealth in his development as a would-​be politico. Given the heavily psychological leanings of some of his biographers, it is important to keep in mind that “In those days … three million dollars was a lot of money. … It set Pierre apart. It meant he had choices the rest of us didn’t have. He could afford to search for his identity. … As a rich bachelor, Pierre was able to spend years ‘finding himself’ ” (quoted in Clarkson & McCall, 1990, pp. 44–​45). Indeed, Trudeau’s life-​long oscillation between periods of solitude and celebrity and his attendant strategies of being alternatively sociable and reclusive, revealing and concealing, would have been impossible without the ready financing that always was available to him. It was the reality of this important fiscal positioning that allowed him to play “the reluctant groom” and enter into games of “cat and mouse” with both his supporters and detractors, stratagems that served him and his interests extremely well in the years to come—​entering the limelight when it served his purposes; withdrawing from it when he required solitude to collect himself and consider his circumstances, inner strengths, and ambitions. Without financial worries, young Trudeau was free to prioritize and explore the mastering of himself and how he wanted to present himself to the world. For the next two decades Trudeau’s major life concern was how best to position himself for success as a political leader in ways that would serve his visions of what he, his home province, and Canada could be. Trudeau’s Educational and Personal Repositioning This sociocultural psychobiography of Pierre Trudeau contains several examples of position exchanges between “revealer” and “concealer” that also were evident in the previous case study of Stanley Milgram. However, it also includes a major and significant repositioning of Trudeau’s personal and political positions and perspectives, one that would have lasting effects for Trudeau and for Canada, the country he served as its Prime Minister from 1968 to 1984. This was a repositioning that occurred during his graduate education at Harvard, Paris’ Sciences Po, and the London School of Economics, and continued through his world travels and an extended period of preparation, experimentation, and further self-​development that lasted until he was elected as a member of the Canadian federal parliament in 1967.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis  57 New Perspectives and Possibilities at Harvard

By 1943, Trudeau had completed his law degree at the Université de Montréal, graduating at the top of his class, despite his boredom with his legal studies and his activities as a right-​wing, corporatist, would-​be revolutionary. As the Second World War ended, he was employed as a lawyer with the firm of Hyde and Ahern on St. James Street in Montreal. With the end of the war and his interest in legal practice waning, Trudeau applied for and was admitted to Harvard University’s Graduate Program in Political Economy and Government. Following commencement of his studies in the autumn of 1944, it did not take Trudeau long to realize that his Jesuit education and legal studies in Montreal had given him only a glimpse, and a somewhat skewed one at that, of the scholarly riches places like Harvard had to offer. Realizing and relishing how much he had to learn, Trudeau devoted the intensive and sustained concentration of which he was so capable to mastering those aspects of the social sciences that had escaped Brébeuf speculation and debate concerning the nature of truth, beauty, and the existence of God. Now exposed to new arguments and positions that challenged his previous understandings and perspectives, Trudeau soon was pulling in top marks in many of his courses. Trudeau’s study of the economic and political positions and perspectives available to him at Harvard made him skeptical about the scientific status of both disciplines: “The more you read … the more you realize that respectable political scientists can also indulge in pseudo-​science” (quoted in English, 2007, p. 127). In consequence both disciplines were prone to special interests related to political positionings and perspectives, economic circumstances, and individual and collective psychologies. He also was brought face to face with his own ignorance about the Second World War. Works like Franz Neumann’s Behemoth gave Trudeau a full portrait of Nazi atrocities, militarism, and exploitative capitalism. Through such readings and related discussions, he was forced to re-​examine what he previously had learned and done. In a letter to a girlfriend, he wrote “Will this be my great regret? Never to have raised my eyes … when the greatest cataclysm of all time was occurring ten hours away from my desk” (p. 127)? By the time Pierre received his MA from Harvard in 1946 and passed his “General Examination for entry to the PhD in Political Economy and Government” on May 16th of that year, he was ready to move further afield. He began to apply to European universities for entry that Fall, and never returned to Harvard to complete his doctoral thesis. Yet, given his stated objective of attending Harvard to become a statesman, “he had undoubtedly received a thorough intellectual grounding” in “the restructuring of the post-​war world. … He became familiar with many schools of thought, both in economics and politics” and “awoke to the dangers of political and philosophical principles he [once

58  Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis had] held dear.” Trudeau “definitely emerged from his cave. A new man was gradually coming into being” (Nemni & Nemni, 2011, p. 46). Personalism in Paris

In the fall of 1947, Pierre Elliott Trudeau traveled to Paris, ostensibly to work on his Harvard doctoral thesis, but with equally clear intentions to further develop and enjoy himself. He enrolled in the prestigious École Libre des Sciences Politques (Sciences Po), also harboring the intention of “having a bloody good time” (Clarkson & McCall, 1990, p. 48). Paris had returned to life after the war, with public intellectuals like Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, and Merleau-​Ponty, and was in the midst of reviving its unique blend of literary and philosophical discussion and debate. With a few friends from Montreal also in Paris, Trudeau spent an enjoyable year, reading widely and exploring much that Paris had to offer in its salons and cafés. Nonetheless, the 1947–​48 university year in postwar Paris also provided what Trudeau biographers Clarkson and McCall describe as perhaps “the most exhilarating and important thing that ever happened to him. He embraced the percepts of personalism, a radical Catholic doctrine that had become a formidable post-​war ideological rival to existentialism in France” (1990, p. 56). In his late twenties, Trudeau found himself stretched intellectually and personally between the demands of his strong Catholicism and his obsession with his own personal freedom and desire to explore and extend himself at every opportunity. Personalism suggested a way to reconcile his conflicting needs and resolve tensions between not only his faith and personal freedom and exploration, but also between the different political theories and perspectives he had studied. In his memoirs, Trudeau (1993) describes the pivotal role that personalism played in his personal and political repositioning: “I completed a search I had begun in my adolescent years. On what values would I base my life?” Obsessed with freedom, Trudeau wanted his personal consciousness to take “precedence over even the commandments of the Church or the rules of the college” (i.e., Brébeuf). Trudeau understood personalism, of the kind developed in Paris during the 1930s and 1940s by Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier, as a way of reconciling “the individual and society. The person … is the individual enriched with a social conscience, integrated into the life of the communities around him and the economic context of his time, both of which must in turn give persons the means to exercise their freedom of choice.” In this way, “the fundamental notion of justice came to stand alongside that of freedom in my political thought” (Trudeau, 1993, pp. 39–​40). It would be difficult to overstate the impact of personalism on the repositioning of Trudeau’s personal and political thought as he approached the age of 30. The centrality of Trudeau’s interpretation of personalism to his future politics is

Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis  59 elaborated in an essay that he later wrote for a volume he edited with Thomas Axworthy: I have long believed that freedom is the most important value of a just society and the exercise of freedom its principal characteristic … [but] the value with the highest priority in the pursuit of a Just Society had become equality. Not the procrustean kind of equality where everyone is raised or lowered to a kind of middle ground. I mean equality of opportunity. (Trudeau, 1990, pp. 357–​358) Personalism thus became one of the most basic personal, philosophical, and political positions in Trudeau’s adult life. It is evident in many of his subsequent writings and speeches, basic to his commitments to Canadian federalism and multiculturalism, and enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that Trudeau insisted be attached to the patriation of the Canadian Constitution that released Canada from British colonial status in 1982, perhaps the crowning act of Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s political life. In Paris, Trudeau had mostly ignored the atheist existentialism of Sartre and others, but under the influence of French personalism and French culture more generally (and perhaps aided by his entering into psychoanalysis while in Paris), Trudeau became less constrained by the ecclesiastical authority of the Catholic Church. Given the left-​wing socialist sympathies of some French personalists like Mounier and their attempts to fashion a more relevant Christianity, it is perhaps not surprising that Trudeau’s next and final stop on what had become his tour of graduate education was the prestigious London School of Economics, considered by many to be a socialist institution. London, Laski, Federalism, and Pluralism

Harold Laski, whose writings Trudeau had studied at Harvard, was perhaps LSE’s most renowned political scientist. As the Cold War began, Laski (who also was chairman of the British Labour Party) was highly controversial in his socialist beliefs and his encouragement of open debate at LSE and beyond. Under Laski’s tutelage, Pierre Trudeau was able to integrate his political views: “Everything I had learned until then of law, economics, political science, and political philosophy came together for me. … I was to acquire more knowledge and to encounter countless options throughout my life. But my basic philosophy was established from that time on, and it was on those premises that I based all my future political decisions” (Trudeau, 1993, p. 47). Trudeau enjoyed many one-​on-​one and small group discussions in several courses he took with Laski. He recorded his reactions in notebooks he kept of his readings and educational experiences, reactions that display a sophisticated understanding and exchange of different views and arguments. Laski was not a

60  Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis proselytizer, but a warm and humorous man who, despite considerable powers of persuasion, insisted on rigorous analysis, active debating, and intellectual autonomy. Although the Jesuits of Brébeuf also had appeared to applaud the autonomy and independence of their pupils, Laski actually practiced doing so. He even went so far as to invite well-​known speakers to express and defend positions and perspectives antithetical to his own. He also encouraged students to follow and get involved in actual politics, believing that no one can truly understand or teach politics who does not know politics at first hand. This stress on the necessity of direct experience for deep understanding is basic to all forms of positioning theory, but especially important for position exchange and life positioning. As a source of genuine understanding, the much-​vaunted human imagination pales in comparison with the understanding gained through actual occupation of positions, and their associated perspectives, within real sociocultural contexts and interactive exchanges and relationships. With Laski, Trudeau learned to focus on ideas and their possible coherence and utility, irrespective of their labels. Given Laski’s encouragement and openness to a wide range of views, Trudeau was able to step outside of his previously held positions and experience directly, through debate and animated discussion, a much broader portfolio of political perspectives and possibilities. “Pluralism had become part and parcel of Trudeau’s thinking” (Nemni & Nemni, 2011, p. 46). After Brébeuf, Trudeau gradually became much more suspicious of the invisible power wielded by authorities who never seemed to stray far from their self-​ interest. Under the influence of Parisian personalists like Mounier and Jacques Maritain, and through interactive exchanges of political and economic positions and ideas with the social democrat Laski, Trudeau began to formulate what would become his uniquely pragmatic, functionalist, and pluralist agenda for the Canadian federation. He was ready to enact Laski’s dictum of practicing what he now preached, ready to test himself and his leadership potential in the cauldron of real political involvement. He abandoned his doctoral studies once and for all, as he began to make plans to insert himself in the lifeworld of Canadian politics. However before doing so, he felt the need for one final, educational undertaking, this time a completely out-​of-​classroom and self-​directed experience of world travel. Globe-​Trotting and Self-​Testing

Trudeau, now 28, embarked from London on yet another of the many physical and intellectual challenges he set for himself, with the purpose of acquiring the personal strengths and experiences to achieve his destiny as an influential political leader. What was to be a year-​long adventure began in Western Europe and extended to include a stint behind the Iron Curtain, which after

Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis  61 World War II, separated Europe’s western and eastern parts. During his travels, Trudeau was jailed, deported from some of the countries he visited, and at least once resorted to using false documents to cross from one country to another. Having arrived in Turkey from Communist Europe and without the security of a Canadian embassy, he obtained a British passport from the embassy of the United Kingdom that allowed him to continue his adventures throughout eastern Asia, where he traveled and lived among some of the most poverty stricken and downtrodden of the world’s people. Reflecting on his journey, Trudeau attributed the subjugation and degradation of the world’s lower classes, and the contempt in which they were held by others (including some of the priests and professors with whom he found shelter during his travels), to their lack of material well-​being and education. He began to see how his strong commitment to personalism, with its emphasis on the rights, freedoms, and dignity of each individual human being, could be combined with a kind of left-​leaning liberalism that championed education and socio-​political participation. The ideal of such a liberal polity was to give all citizens, through education (and the capability it conferred) and basic sustenance, an equal opportunity to participate in all levels of social and political life. Applying these ideas to Canada, he began to understand how “a party like the Liberal Party of Canada, slowly moving leftwards, could in theory be the best party to lead the nation as a whole towards the people’s society of the future,” despite the likelihood that “The Liberals’ commendable desire to borrow the best aspects of socialism … will inevitably clash, with the [Party’s] financial interests” (Nemni & Nemni, 2011, p. 155). Equally important for Trudeau, “One should not associate one’s destiny with a single social group, such as labour unions and agricultural cooperatives, one should instead develop a policy for the entire nation, not for this or that part of it” (p. 155). During his year of dangerous and instructive travel in 1948–​49, Trudeau indulged both his curiosity about other ways of life and his love of adventure, with the aim of learning as much as he could about the world, its people, and himself. With his travels concluded as he approached the age of thirty, he had no detailed plan for how his destiny might unfold. Nonetheless, he felt he had every reason to believe that his carefully cultivated intellectual capability, now mixed with an understanding and appreciation of a diversity of cultures and ways of life, would serve him well as he anticipated a future as a political leader in his home province and nation. But first, he had to await and help to create the right opportunity for leaping into the fray of Canadian politics as an active and influential participant. This proved to be a process that was much more prolonged and difficult than he might have anticipated. In fact, he was about to begin an unexpectedly protracted and frustrating period of political apprenticeship, which lasted for almost two decades following his return to Canada.

62  Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis Further Years of Experimentation, Self-​Development, and Searching for Possibilities Upon his return home, Trudeau found himself facing the problem of exactly how he would use his newly repositioned personal and political perspectives to secure a career in Canadian political life. He had a clear sense of how his personalism could mesh with his Laskian federalism and pluralism. However, having his own political and personal philosophy did not equate with an automatic entry into political life. Back living with his mother in her Outremount home in Montreal, the most expedient path might be to pursue a political career in Quebec, but how? Two months before Trudeau’s return from his world travels, an event occurred that was to mark the beginnings of a sea change in Quebec society and politics. It began at the Asbestos and Thetford Mines on Valentine’s Day of 1949, when miners went on strike over pay, working conditions, and union rights. However, this strike came to symbolize a deeper conflict between two opposing views of the future of Quebec: as a somewhat mythical, traditional, rural, and agrarian society committed to the status quo authority of the Catholic Church and the Union Nationale Party (UNP) that had long ruled Quebec society, versus the reality of a rapidly changing and industrial society in which two-​thirds of Quebecers now lived in urban centers. The strike was bitter and violent, with the strikers beaten and harassed by the Quebec Provincial Police—​actions that turned much of the Quebec public and several leading clergymen against the Union Nationale Party and its leader, Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis, who was increasingly viewed as autocratic and undemocratic. Duplessis “defended provincial autonomy to make Quebec the paradise for monopolies, the kingdom of low salaries, and the land of slums” (Graham, 2012, p. 51). Trudeau now joined his good friend Gérard Pelletier and union leader Jean Marchand by throwing himself fully into the Asbestos fight on the side of the strikers. By the time the strike ended on June 13, 1949, Trudeau’s actions and speeches during the strike had endeared him to the strikers and their supporters and made him a public figure in his home province. Even when he took advantage of the unexpected opportunity supplied by an academic acquaintance to work for the next two years in Ottawa for the Federal government’s Privy Council Office, Trudeau shuttled back and forth between Ottawa and Montreal to continue legal work for Jean Marchand on behalf of Quebec workers. During this same time, he also founded (with Pelletier and others), edited, and wrote for Cité Libre, a new political journal. Cité Libre was devoted to the modernizing and democratizing of Quebec society by linking progressive Catholicism with commentary on political and social issues. In many articles he wrote and published in Cité Libre, Trudeau argued against the Quebec nationalism he once had embraced as a law student in Montreal. Such nationalism he now argued was out of step with contemporary interests of Catholic and French citizens

Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis  63 whose socioeconomic flourishing required a functional politics that promoted democracy and individual freedom. For almost two decades, Trudeau used the platform of Cité Libre to rail against the doctrines of Quebec nationalism and the authoritarian, anti-​democratic views of the province’s ruling elite, an elite to which he once had been apprenticed, but which now became his bête noire. The late 1950s saw the effects of Trudeau’s attempts to insert himself as something charmingly and compellingly different on the political scene in Quebec and in Canada. To some, he now appeared as “an experiment in Canadian public life, a refreshing combination of intellectual capacity and common sense … a man [with] a quiet independence of mind with a strong socially oriented sense of purpose … The result will bear watching” (Saywell, 1968, p. xiii). By this time, Trudeau had become a regular contributor and commentator on radio and television, as well as writing for journals and magazines. Whenever and wherever he could, he voiced his arguments for more and better democracy in Quebec. Nonetheless, as 1959 was coming to an end, despite his decade of preparing himself for great things, Trudeau still had not made a leap into the provincial or federal politics he wrote and spoke about. Then, with the death of Maurice Duplessis in 1959 Trudeau finally succeeded in securing a long-​sought position as a professor of public law at the Université de Montréal. Yet even then, and despite the doubts and misgivings of many of his friends and associates, Trudeau still had not given up on his dream of a career in politics. The first half of the 1960s would either make or break the possibility of a political career that Trudeau had long anticipated and prepared for. Things did not begin well when after Jean Lesage’s Quebec Liberals defeated the Union Nationale to take control of Quebec’s National Assembly, they did not extend to him or his friend Pelletier the open arms invitation they had sent to Jean Marchand to join their ranks in government. Their likely reasons for locking out Trudeau were readily apparent to him. Although he greatly admired the Lesage government’s secularization of education, improvements in social security, and adoption of a more international role, he continued to condemn its nationalism. Even if the overall agenda of Lesage was consistent with his own left-​leaning liberalism, Trudeau was unwilling to accept the new style of nationalism that many in Lesage’s cabinet now advocated. For him, nationalism and separatism were completely unacceptable in any form. In the pages of Cité Libre Trudeau accused young student separatists like those who populated his university lectures of being “unrealistic in not recognizing that they were aligning themselves with the most conservative” interests in Quebec society. “Separatism and neo-​nationalism [will] close off Quebec and cut off the breadth of true freedom.” Rather than looking only to themselves, separatists should instead open their intellectual and physical borders to prevent “our people from separating to death” (quoted in English, 2007, p. 363). By the summer of 1965, Pierre Trudeau’s total rejection of nationalist and separatist options for Quebec was increasingly separating him from old friends,

64  Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis both those outside and inside the Lesage government. He lashed out at former colleagues for what he regarded as irresponsible writings and comments that were serving to ignite acts of terrorism by separatist factions in the province. At the same time, his inveighing against Prime Minister Lester Pearson’s policy of accepting American nuclear missiles on Canadian soil had not endeared him to federal liberals. Trudeau and his version of liberalism appeared to be unwanted in both his home province and country. But few things are as unpredictable as politics. Just as Trudeau’s political ambitions seemed to be blocked at both provincial and federal levels, his well-​known opposition to Quebec separatism and a growing concern about the separatist movement in Quebec amongst members of Pearson’s federal cabinet combined to create an unexpected opportunity for Trudeau, his political mentor Jean Marchand, and his friend Gérard Pelletier. Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson desperately needed to find strong Quebec candidates to ensure victory in a federal election planned for the autumn of 1965. He already had approached Marchand, who had indicated a willingness to consider running as a federal Liberal candidate in Quebec. Marchand previously had approached both Pelletier and Trudeau to join him in representing Quebec constituencies in the forthcoming federal election, overtures that Trudeau had refused. However, with his growing frustration with separatists in the Lesage provincial government in Quebec and also mindful of his advance into middle age, Trudeau now signaled to Marchand and Pelletier that he might be willing to change his mind and join them. Finally, in what was to be their last article for Cité Libre in October of 1965, Trudeau and Pelletier announced and defended their decision to stand as federal liberals, stating that they were inspired to become associated with the pursuit of a more dynamic and progressive social policy for Canada and Quebec. Even then, Trudeau almost backed out of the deal when, despite Marchand securing the safe liberal riding of Quebec Mount Royal for him to begin his formal political career, he discovered that he would be running against his friend, political philosopher Charles Taylor, who would be representing the NDP in the same riding. Nonetheless, motivated by what he viewed as the only viable option open to him and with an awareness of his advancing age, Trudeau eventually made good on his belated jump into the political arena by being elected as the federal Member of Parliament (MP) for the riding of Quebec Mount Royal. His political life had at last begun. From Trudeaumania to the October Crisis Soon after being elected as a member of the Canadian Parliament, Trudeau was surprised to receive a telephone call from Prime Minister Lester Pearson who asked him if he would be willing to serve as Pearson’s parliamentary secretary, yet another sign of how anxious Pearson was to strengthen the roles of anti-​separatist Quebec MPs in his government. Initially unsure of his response, Trudeau told Marchand and Pelletier that “he was going to Ottawa not in

Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis  65 the pursuit of power but because he wanted a platform for his ideas.” When Marchand, who clearly was the leader of the newly elected Quebec members in the Canadian Parliament, told him in no uncertain terms to “grow up and take the job,” Trudeau did not need to be told twice to mend his ways (Clarkson & McCall, 1990, p. 93). Stung by Marchand’s wake-​up call, he threw himself with gusto into his new position as Pearson’s parliamentary secretary. In doing so, he discovered that he finally had entered an arena where he could excel and meet his own expectations for himself and his home province. Once positioned in a way that suited his talents and ambitions, Trudeau’s political ascendency was nothing short of meteoric. Realizing that in his new position he could both serve Pearson’s desires to strengthen the Quebec wing of his government and express his own constitutional views and concerns, Trudeau quickly emerged as an intellectual leader in the federal Liberal caucus. Within a year of their election as federal liberal MPs the “three wise men” (Trudeau, Marchand, and Pelletier) had complete control of the Quebec wing of Pearson’s government. “With Trudeau leading the attack in the role of constitutional expert, they beat back all talk of special status for Quebec or massive constitutional change” in response to the demands of Quebec separatists and nationalists—​and successfully urged the Pearson government to adopt positions that “Trudeau had been preaching in his writings for more than a decade” (Radwanski, 1978, pp. 91–​92). Much impressed by Trudeau and his actions, Pearson appointed him as federal Minister of Justice for Canada on April 4, 1967. Showing no signs of resistance, Trudeau immediately jumped at this new opportunity and dove into his new job with unfeigned delight, energy, and persistence. By December 1967, Justice Minister Trudeau had proposed criminal code amendments that decriminalized homosexuality, contraception, and abortion (under particular conditions), and eased and modernized divorce proceedings. On his own initiative he also veered into constitutional matters by proposing the “entrenching of a bill of rights, binding on both the federal and the provincial governments, in the constitution,” which “in turn would lead naturally to other changes, including the finding of a formula for amending and patriating the British North American Act” (Radwanski, 1978, pp. 94) The BNA of 1867 had served as Canada’s constitution but was administered through British parliamentary and judicial oversight. Trudeau had long wanted a genuinely Canadian constitution to replace the BNA and the colonial status for Canada that it represented. It seemed as if Trudeau was “succeeding in bringing the whole Pearson government around to his own constitutional theories” (p. 94). By this time, Trudeau had become the darling of the Canadian parliamentary press corps, who jumped at every opportunity to recycle his deeds and words. With his uttering of “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation” and other “Trudeau-​isms,” he was branded a gifted phrasemaker and cool, charismatic customer with superb command of facts, eloquent arguments,

66  Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis and the best interests of the nation at heart. Praise from the English-​language press intensified when Trudeau rallied the Pearson government to issue a strong rebuke (which he drafted) to Charles de Gaulle when, during a July 1967 visit, the French President called for a free Quebec (“Vive le Québec libre”) before an enthusiastic crowd from the balcony of Montreal’s Hôtel de Ville. Media gurus Peter Gzowski and Marshall McLuhan extolled Trudeau’s brilliance, toughness, good looks, and athleticism. With a federal election called for 1968 and Canada’s centennial year of 1967 running out, Lester Pearson resigned as Prime Minister because of his failing health. It seemed like the gods themselves had finally succumbed to the preternatural charms of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. It began to look like Trudeau was ordained to lead both the “backward province [Quebec] and the rest of Canada out of the Dark Ages” (Ricci, 2009, p. 33). Trudeau biographer John English captured Trudeau’s response to his positioning by media supporters and much of the Canadian public well: “Trudeau was attracting increasing attention, which he shrewdly did not exploit. The plan he had developed in the late 1930s … remained in place. He would cloak himself in mystery and be the friend of all and the intimate of none” (English, 2007, p. 442). Public opinion polls showed the Liberals and Trudeau himself gaining increasing support across almost all of Canada. Encouraged by Pearson, Marchand, Pelletier, and many others within the Liberal party to declare his candidacy for leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Canada, Trudeau entered into “the kind of cat-​and-​mouse game he was so good at, growing more deferential and coy the more people insisted …” (Ricci, 2009, p. 35). Continuing to play the part of the reluctant bride, Trudeau ensured that he would appear able, perhaps even likely, to walk away at any stage without losing face, a veiled threat that always had to be taken seriously by his supporters who were well aware of his independent wealth. By positioning himself in this way, Trudeau further ensured that those most enthusiastic about his potential candidacy would work even harder to cement his lead in opinion polls and in the minds and hearts of Canadian voters. In fact, much of Trudeau’s seemingly easy and instant charm and quickness with sound bites was carefully planned, something he had been rehearsing for years, as he honed his identity, style, and presentation. “The self-​consciousness, the presumed audience was always there” (p. 69). The spontaneous flair, quick wit, and performance art were well practiced during a life in which “self-​revelation and self-​concealment were so interwoven” (p. 69). And, the practice paid off. Trudeaumania had been launched and was to carry Pierre Elliott Trudeau to the Prime Minister of Canada’s Office in the federal election of June 25, 1968, in which his Liberal Party of Canada won a convincing majority of Canada’s parliamentary seats. Unfortunately for Trudeau, a common fate of initially successful politicians is to see public enthusiasm and support on the election trail evaporate once the hard work of governing subsequently gets under way. In Trudeau’s case he had seemed to signal rapid change and exciting reform through his carefully crafted

Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis  67 electioneering performances. However, once in power, the cautiously rational side of Trudeau took over. Bye-​bye rock-​star; hello professor! Where he had campaigned in an entertaining, charismatic way to which many voters responded emotionally, he now seemed to insist on governing in a serious, straightlaced manner, with an emotionless sang froid that surprised and disturbed these same voters. Although Trudeau had warned, on the campaign trail, that he would not govern as Santa Claus, many of his more enthusiastic supporters did not expect Scrooge to appear in Santa’s stead. Trudeau devoted much of his first two years as Prime Minister to necessary, but behind-​the-​scenes activities, such as strengthening committee systems to permit more efficient and informed deliberation and streamlining and modernizing informational and reporting channels. Such work was not easily reported or understood by a public hungry for more of the Trudeau they had voted for. Against the background of his new mantle of dedicated parliamentary business manager, his offhanded bluntness, mixed with bursts of jovial impishness, suddenly seemed more likely to give offense or betray arrogance than to attract admiration and affection. By 1970, the mid-​point of Trudeau’s first term in office, many Canadians felt that they had been had. By this time, Trudeau, in his attempts to reform and upgrade how Canada’s national parliament functioned, was increasingly coming across as “the sort of teacher almost everyone remembers having had and hated at some point” (Radwanski, 1978, pp. 255–​256). But then came the October Crisis of 1970, to which Prime Minister Trudeau reacted by invoking the Canadian War Measures Act after the kidnappings of British trade commissioner James Cross and Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte by members of the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), who were committed to what they regarded as justifiable, even if violent, means to rid Québec of English colonial oppression. Why Trudeau Invoked the War Measures Act: A Life Positioning Account Like Stanley Milgram, Pierre Elliott Trudeau was adept at oscillating between the positions of “revealer” and “concealer” in advancing his life projects. His personal armory of characteristic icy stares, sartorial and refined charm, playful goofiness, erudite intellectual oration, attentive listening, and pugnacious repartee was made even more formidable by the rapidity with which Trudeau could, and often did, flip from seeming semi-​somnolence to animated flashes of pique, from an inattentive ennui to a quick quip to dissolve or promote tension. His characteristically dismissive shrug and frown could give way instantaneously to unexpected displays of genuine interest, and vice versa. The net effect on others was to keep them off balance, continuously anticipating something unusual but not knowing what or when it might occur. As a means of holding the spotlight and maintaining dominance and control, Trudeau’s self-​presentation was

68  Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis unparalleled. With such a repertoire of positions and possibilities, Trudeau styled himself as a camera and combat ready political conjurer, choosing strategically what to reveal about himself and what to conceal. But, unlike Milgram, Trudeau experienced a major life repositioning in pursuit of what became a consistently held set of personal and political perspectives that he acquired during his graduate education and world travels—​a set of perspectives that he held firmly and unchangeably throughout his subsequent life in politics. This was a set of core values and positionings derived from his personalism, rationalism, pragmatism, federalism, commitment to equality, and pluralism. Not only did Trudeau apply these values and perspectives to his own self-​development, he also applied them to Canada as a nation and to its citizens. All members of a civil society enjoy certain fundamental, inalienable rights and cannot be deprived of them by any collectivity (state or government) or on behalf of any collectivity (nation, ethnic group, religious group or other). To use Maritain’s phrase, they are “human personalities.” They are beings of a moral order—​that is, free and equal among themselves, each having absolute dignity and infinite value. As such, they transcend the accidents of place and time, and partake in the essence of universal Humanity. (Trudeau, 1998, p. 80) By italicizing the word “nation,” in this paragraph, Trudeau is drawing attention to what he saw as an inevitable and irreparable problem of nationalism—​the erosion of individual rights and freedoms and the responsibilities that necessarily attend them by the coercive tendencies of collectives. For Trudeau, the government of a nation such as Canada should not be nationalistic but should be delivered by the state whose authority is “conditional upon rational justification; a people’s consensus based on reason will supply the cohesive force that societies require; and politics … will follow a much more functional approach” (Trudeau, 1998, p. 103). “If the people use their sovereignty badly, the remedy is not to take it away from them … but to educate them to do better” (p. 59). This core set of personal and political values and perspectives was at the very heart of Trudeau’s deep suspicion of and opposition to Quebec’s separatists and nationalists. In essence, he viewed and positioned them as doctrinaire bullies willing to override the rights and freedoms of others to secure their own cultural heritage and extend it into the future without the equal participation and input of those who occupied and positioned themselves within other sociocultural traditions and conventions. He was reluctantly willing to tolerate duly and legally elected separatist parties such as the Bloc Québécois, which were subject to the electoral constraints exercised by the citizens of Quebec. However, strongly nationalist and terrorist organizations like the FLQ, who viewed themselves as subject to no authority other than their own, were Trudeau’s worst nightmare, at both personal and political levels.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis  69 But if Trudeau’s anger during the 1970 Quebec Crisis was directed primarily to the FLQ, it was felt by many Quebecers and Canadian Francophones as an attack on them and on Quebec and French-​Canadian society and culture more generally. Moreover, Trudeau’s invocation of the WMA was considered excessive by many, if not most informed historians, political scientists, legal scholars, and human rights advocates, who were shocked at how quickly Trudeau’s and his government’s actions seemed to unleash a hitherto unsuspected streak of authoritarianism in English Canadians in general. When historian Jack Granatstein spoke at a “Rally for Canada” at Toronto’s York University and called for a more balanced consideration of events as they unfolded in Quebec, he was, in his own words, continuously interrupted by hostile shouts that conveyed a “visceral hatred of the FLQ kidnappers and murderers, and as I interpreted it, of all Québécois. … I was pleased to get off that platform and into my office before I was attacked and beaten” (Granatstein, quoted in Bouthillier, Cloutier, & Philpot, 2020, p. 16). It began to look as if many Canadians understood the invocation of the War Measures Act as a long overdue and well-​warranted punishment for what they apparently regarded as the historical and contemporary special treatment that Quebec had received from the Canadian federal government, despite much evidence to the contrary. In this climate, it was very easy for the federal government to implicitly, and on occasion explicitly, “link the FLQ and its crimes to the Parti Québécois” (Bouthillier et al., 2020, p. 25), and to anyone expressing separatist views or arguments. Was Trudeau using the FLQ crimes as a pretext for attacking Quebec separatists and Quebec separatism more generally and simultaneously promoting his own vision of a Canada in which his kind of progressive multiculturalism, individualism, and federalism would triumph over all regional differences? At least a few commentators have pointed to Trudeau’s long-​standing tendency to upbraid Quebecers for their backwardness, cultural conservativism, and unwillingness to face reality (cf. Saywell, 1968). Bouthillier et al. (2020, p. 260), quoting and adapting arguments made by Canadian social democrat Tommy Douglas, argue that “Trudeau hoped to crush the separatist movement and at the same time convince English Canadians that he was the strong man who could keep Quebec in its place.” “He very carefully cultivated the role—​as the hero who would strike at the heart of separatism and leave it, if not in agony, at least in a state of powerlessness for the foreseeable future” (p. 260). Such a purposeful self-​positioning by Trudeau “who held a long-​standing, profound hatred for the independence movement,” gave him and his government “the powerful repressive tools they needed” (p. 260). As a bonus, the plying of these tools gave Trudeau and his Liberal Party of Canada a major boost in popularity at a time when he was starting to be perceived by many Canadians as not the person they thought they had elected during the heydays of Trudeaumania in the late 1960s.

70  Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis In the two final paragraphs of Pierre Trudeau’s Darkest Hour: War Measures 1970, Bouthillier et al. (2020) repeat an argument made by Canadian professor of political science Donald Smiley in 1971. Here, they claim that the actions and words of Pierre Elliott Trudeau during the October crisis of 1970 betray all the fundamental principles he stood for—​individualism, rationalism, and pragmatism. Individualism in its personalistic rendering could not possibly countenance the mass arrests and suspension of relevant Canadian and Quebec laws that violated the freedom and rights of Quebecers during the crisis. Rationalism during the crisis was in scarce supply as Trudeau and his government appeared to be most concerned with the amount of public support their actions acquired. Pragmatism that stresses the need for a prudent balancing of means and ends is difficult to square with overreaction, misleading statements, and concealment. How ought we interpret Trudeau’s misleading remarks at the time, and later in his 1993 memoirs, to the effect that people were arrested and held behind bars only after the formal vote to invoke the War Measures Act was taken in the Federal House of Commons on October 19 at 12:10 p.m. (well after the murder of Pierre Laporte at 6:18 p.m. on October 17), when in fact the WMA was proclaimed by the federal Cabinet at 4 a.m. on Friday, October 16 and troops were already on the ground in Montreal for 38 hours before Laporte was murdered? In their closing paragraphs, Bouthillier et al. (2020) make a provocative suggestion that I believe also can be pursued productively by the application of life positioning ideas and methods to the question of why Trudeau invoked the WMA. Following Nemi and Nemi (2006), who have written about Trudeau’s holding and espousal of corporatist, nationalist, and fascist ideas during his late adolescence and early adulthood, Bouthillier et al. ask: “Is it possible that, in October 1970, in his overwhelming desire to settle scores with his political opponents in Quebec, he reverted to the same ways and means he had promoted as a young student in the 1940s?” I think a probable answer to the question of why Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act during the Quebec crisis of 1970 might well include such a possibility, but only as part of a more comprehensive historical, sociocultural, and personal life positioning storyline. Basic to such a positioning analysis are the sociocultural contexts of Trudeau’s youth—​the historical tensions between Quebec and the rest of Canada, the struggles of its predominately Francophone population to secure its cultural traditions within an ever-​increasing Anglophone and multicultural population of Quebec and Canada more generally, and young Trudeau’s indoctrination with respect to these matters during his years as a student at Collège Jean-​de-​Brébeuf. An example is Trudeau’s youthful ignorance of events in the Second World War and his sympathies with the Vichy Regime’s collaboration with Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s fascist corporatism in Italy. These were attitudinal positionings shared by many Quebecers who wanted no part of what they regarded as a war that was an outgrowth of British

Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis  71 imperialism, which they themselves were experiencing. It was for this reason that many Quebecers strongly opposed conscription of their young people in a war effort they viewed as antithetical to their own interests. Trudeau’s youthful involvement with right-​wing groups dedicated to freeing Quebecers from any such colonial attachments reflected these sociocultural, historical, political, and economic contexts and perspectives. The major repositioning of Trudeau’s perspectives on the Second World War and its aftermath that took place through his post-​war studies at Harvard and in Paris and London made him deeply embarrassed by what, by 1970, he had long regarded as youthful indiscretions that he wanted to conceal. From his days as a graduate student, Trudeau’s personal and political repositioning was built and sustained on the core positions and perspectives of personalism, pragmatism, federalism, and multicultural internationalism. Using these principles, leaders like himself and states like Canada could reject divisive nationalism and work toward the ideal of a new world order that assumed and protected the freedom, rights, and dignity of all people. One constant in Trudeau’s life that preceded and followed this major repositioning of his life and career positions and perspectives was his consistent commitment to his own self-​determination and self-​development. Encouraged by his father’s example and insistence, young Trudeau had transformed himself from a shy and sometimes sickly child to a strong and robust adult capable of modes of self-​presentation that concealed any weaknesses and highlighted his athleticism, intelligence, wit, charm, and determination. One major social, interactive consequence of these habits of self-​presentation and ongoing self-​ development was to interact with others in ways intended to impress, and overwhelm if necessary, so as to advance his own personal and political ends. During his long preparation for political leadership that followed his graduate education and youthful world travels, Pierre Trudeau honed both the content and style of his future social, interactive persona and life purposes. As he emerged into his full political life during Trudeaumania and his subsequent political career, Trudeau had learned how to position himself with both his supporters and his adversaries. With both, although to differing degrees, he cultivated an air of mystery and unpredictability, with a dash of potential contrariness that proved useful in getting a sense of what others were thinking without giving much away. Trudeau was especially formidable in adversarial relationships, which he appeared to initiate purposefully with many Quebec politicians, selected journalists, and university professors. In these situations, Trudeau seemed to delight in taunting and teasing his adversaries like a schoolyard bully, then lecturing them about their inconsistencies and errors like a haughty teacher. One outstanding example of such tactics was evident in his exchanges with René Lévesque (political journalist, TV personality, and later Premier of Quebec who almost succeeded in separating Quebec from Canada through a referendum

72  Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis in the early 1980s). As described by Trudeau biographer John English (2010, p. 449), their interactions were like watching a boxing match in which the two men “deftly jabbed, dodged, bobbed, and weaved with each other,” exchanges that Lévesque attributed to Trudeau’s “inborn talent for making you want to slap his face” (quoted in English, 2010, p. 449). In invoking the War Measures Act in October 1970, Pierre Trudeau believed he was acting consistently with his mature personal and political life positionings and perspectives that ensured equality under the law, respect for human freedom and dignity, and social order and the common good. Many of those who questioned his invocation of the WMA railed against the suspension of civil liberties and judicial rights that attended the WMA and wondered how anyone with Trudeau’s political and personal positions and values could have acted in such an authoritarian and dictatorial manner. Against such charges of hypocrisy, Trudeau viewed the criminal and murderous acts of members of the FLQ as violating his core life and political perspectives in ways that required a strong, firm, and unwavering response that he saw as consistent with these same life positionings. By their actions, the FLQ had threatened the Canada he had aspired to make available to all Canadians. Perhaps the real and immediate threat that the events of October 1970 presented to Trudeau and what he wanted at all costs to avoid was the possibility of a successful and lingering separatist revolution in the province of Quebec, one enacted outside the laws of the land intended to protect the freedom of all Canadians. Such an outcome would threaten his positionings of himself and Canada by giving free reign to the violent revolutionary tendencies he thought he had arrested in himself during his graduate school days by recognizing, confronting, and positioning himself as far away from the mistakes and excesses of his youthful enthusiasm for right-​wing corporatism and quasi-​fascist perspectives as he could. By invoking the War Measures Act, Trudeau was obliterating that past positioning from his own and other’s memories. Psychoanalytically inclined psychobiographers might interpret the foregoing life positioning dynamics in terms of defense mechanisms, such as a combination of reaction formation and projection, thus privileging hypothesized unconscious mental processes over more direct evidence from life positionings and repositionings as I am doing here. I have no objection to adding psychodynamic or other interpretations to sociocultural psychobiographical accounts so long as they don’t displace the primacy of situated life positioning analyses grounded in, and cognizant of, relevant historical, sociocultural life contexts, positions, perspectives, and projects. The aim is not to deny the inner lives of persons, but to ensure that the sociocultural constitution of our mental lives is not forgotten or diminished. For much of his political career, Pierre Trudeau plied his uniquely cultivated mixture of political philosophic and personal strategic postures and positionings

Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis  73 with devastating effectiveness in pursuit of his visions for himself and for Canada, which included his dream of a progressive Quebec fully integrated into the Canadian federation and freed from separatist agitation and upheaval. In some ways, Trudeau’s goals for Quebec resembled his goals for himself—​self-​ sufficiency within a well-​functioning, pragmatically-​oriented liberal democracy in which equality of opportunity was a primary lever for individual freedom and collective wellbeing. For Trudeau there were no lasting worries about whether he had overreacted in invoking the WMA. “The methods we used seem to have shut down the activities of the FLQ for good, which is no small thing. … With the FLQ crisis over, I was able to continue my work in a more relaxed atmosphere, and could resume my apprenticeship as prime minister” (Trudeau, 1993, pp. 151–​152). Trudeau would go on to serve Canada as Prime Minister until February 28, 1984, two years after he and his government successfully patriated the Canadian Constitution from Great Britain, with the addition of Trudeau’s long dreamt of Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Following his death in 2000, he continues to be regarded by many Canadians as one of Canada’s greatest Prime Ministers, a judgment vigorously challenged by many others. References Bouthillier, G., Cloutier, E, & Philpot, R. (2020). Pierre Trudeau’s darkest hour: War measures 1970. Baraka Books. Clarkson, S., & McCall, C. (1990). Trudeau and our times: Volume 1, The magnificent obsession. McClelland & Stewart. English, J. (2007). Citizen of the world: The life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Volume one, 1919–​1968. Vintage Canada. English, J. (2010) Just watch me: The life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Volume two, 1968–​ 2000. Vintage Canada. Graham, R. (2012). The last act: Pierre Trudeau, the gang of eight, and the fight for Canada. Penguin Canada. Martin, J. (2022). A non-​reductive “person-​based ontology” for psychological inquiry. In B. D. Slife, S. C. Yanchar, & F. C. Richardson (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of theoretical and philosophical psychology: Critiques, problems, and alternatives to psychological ideas (pp. 391–​411). Routledge. Martin, J. (2023). Peter & Pierre: The lives, battles, and political visions of Peter Lougheed and Pierre Trudeau. Jack Martin. Nemni, M., & Nemni, M. (2006). Young Trudeau: Son of Quebec, father of Canada, 1919–​1944 (W. Johnson, Trans.). McClelland & Stewart. Nemni, M., & Nemni, M. (2011). Trudeau transformed: The shaping of a statesman, 1944–​1965 (G. Tombs, Trans.). McClelland & Stewart. Radwanski, G. (1978). Trudeau. Macmillan of Canada. Ricci, N. (2009). Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Penguin Canada. Saywell, J. T. (1968). Introduction. In P. E. Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians (pp. vii–​xiv). Macmillan of Canada.

74  Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the 1970 October Crisis Trudeau, P. E. (1990). The values of a just society. In T. S. Axworthy & P. E. Trudeau (Eds.), Towards a just society: The Trudeau years (pp. 357–​385). Viking. Trudeau, P. E. (1993). Memoirs. McClelland & Stewart. Trudeau, P. E. (1998). The essential Trudeau (R. Graham, Ed.). McClelland & Stewart.

4 Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology by way of Human Evil

Author’s Introduction The life positioning psychobiography in this third chapter is more existential and philosophical than the others in this book. The central question posed here is not focused on why the psychobiographical subject did what was done as it was in asking why Milgram conducted his famous experiments or Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act. Instead, the focus is on attempting to understand a major change in the intellectual positioning and perspective of the psychobiographical subject—​Ernest Becker. The general approach taken, as in all life positioning studies, is to focus on the actions of people within their historical, sociocultural, and interpersonal life contexts, interactions, and relationships. However, the question asked does not call for a life positioning explanation of a particular event or series of events. Instead, the core question in this chapter requires a life positioning explanation of an intellectual process that is not obviously linked to doing something, but which nonetheless could not have occurred without the life positions, perspectives, and possibilities available to the psychobiographical subject. The question is “Why and how did Ernest Becker arrive at the conclusion that to understand human beings and the human condition, it is necessary to understand human evil?” Stanley Milgram was positioned within a tradition of social psychological inquiry that helped to explain the planning and execution of his studies of obedience to authority. Pierre Trudeau’s graduate studies and world travels helped to reposition him and his ideas, both personally and politically. Becker’s intellectual insight also required situating himself within traditions and styles of scholarly inquiry (like Milgram), as well as radically repositioning himself and his understanding of human beings (like Trudeau). However, Becker’s understanding of evil as the key to opening up the mystery of being human presents us with a much more abstracted intellectual puzzle than anything we encountered in the previous life positioning studies of either Milgram or Trudeau. As such, the psychobiographical study in this chapter is

DOI: 10.4324/9781003461715-4

76  Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology more like an intellectual biography focused on ideas and their sources than a more familiar “life and times” psychobiography or biography. I first encountered Ernest Becker’s writings as a graduate student at the University of Alberta in the late autumn of 1973 when I, at the recommendation of a fellow student, read his Pulitzer Prize-​winning book The Denial of Death. Two years later, in the autumn of 1975, I took a job as an untenured assistant professor at Simon Fraser University in Greater Vancouver, the same university where Becker had spent the final years of his professorial career and life, before dying of cancer in 1974. Impressed by Becker’s book and surprised that there seemed to be nothing at Simon Fraser University that recognized or commemorated him or his scholarship, given that he had won a Pulitzer Prize (a unique achievement in the history of SFU), I promised myself that one day I would write something that honored him. Many years later, I did so by undertaking an extended study of Becker’s life and writings that involved consulting and studying primary source materials in the Ernest Becker papers at Columbia University, the Becker folders available at Simon Fraser University’s archives, materials available in a reconstruction of Becker’s home library in a private home on the outskirts of the city of Bellingham in Washington State, additional materials made available to me by the Ernest Becker Foundation in Seattle, interviews with Becker’s wife Marie Becker Pos and several friends and colleagues, and the reading of Becker’s books and articles, as well as many articles about Becker and his work by scholars in the social sciences and humanities, theology, cultural anthropology, and philosophy. I previously have published a 46-​page monograph about Becker’s life and work at Simon Fraser University that appeared in The Journal of Humanistic Psychology (Martin, 2014) and two additional articles in this same journal (Martin, 2013; Martin & Liechty, 2016), the former of which discusses Becker’s psychology of human striving, the latter of which speculates about the nature of what some have referred to as Becker’s “dark turn” evident in his last two books—​The Denial of Death and the posthumously published Escape from Evil, the latter completed and edited by his wife Marie. Some of what I have written in this chapter revisits what is available in one or other of these previous publications. But most of this current chapter draws from, updates, and extends a previously unpublished talk I delivered to members of the Ernest Becker Foundation in October 2016. During that same year, I also published a dual biographical essay on Ernest Becker’s and Stanley Milgram’s theories of evil in the History of Psychology (Martin, 2016), some of the content of which I will comment on in what follows. Finally, before diving into this sociocultural psychobiography of Ernest Becker and attempting to understand why and how Becker’s contemplation of human being and the human condition required an explanation of the evil of which we humans are capable, I want to mention how important Becker’s oeuvre has been to me personally. As a very young child aged three to four, I became

Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology  77 terrified of the idea of death, especially that of my parents and my own. Now in my early seventies, I still can recall this awful fright and the night terrors it created, but for most of my life as an adult I have not experienced such upsets. It may be that with the luxury of having enjoyed a long and mostly happy life, death simply has lost its sting for me. It also is quite possible that reading and researching Becker and his oeuvre helped me to come to terms with death as part of the human condition that I share with every other human being, past and present. My continuing study of Becker’s life and works into my seventies has accompanied my growing acceptance of my inevitable and now much more temporally close demise. I am not a neutral commentator on Becker’s work. My own life positionings, perspectives, and projects have interacted with my Beckerian studies. One aspect of this interactivity is especially interesting to me. I am not as impressed with Becker’s work as I once was. Toward the end of this chapter, I will say more about what I now find questionable concerning Becker’s universalistic claims. The researching and writing of any biographical, psychobiographical, or life study necessarily interacts with the life positionings, perspectives, and projects of the psychobiographer. Although I continue to find Becker’s oeuvre helpful to me personally, advancing age and further reflection on social and cultural differences have contributed to a more critical reading of his work. However, the fact that the life positionings of any biographer or psychobiographer necessarily interact with those of a psychobiographical subject does not mean that it is impossible to achieve a balanced account of another’s life that is grounded firmly in relevant and available documentation. Becker’s Life and Career Before SFU1 Ernest Becker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on September 27, 1924, the son of first-​generation Jewish immigrants. His somewhat small nuclear family (his parents, his older brother Louis, and himself) was complemented and extended by the presence, in the same community, of the families of several aunts and uncles, such that Becker had many interactions with relatives, including cousins close to his own age who lived nearby. Ernest’s father Sam ran a successful grocery in Springfield. With income from the store, Sam was able to help finance the education and early career opportunities of his siblings, some of whom became lawyers. As a child, Becker thought it unfair that his father’s generosity was not appreciated sufficiently by his white-​collar uncles who tended to look down on Sam and his blue-​collar family. The industriousness of Becker’s father was matched by his mother’s gregariousness. She liked to perform and would occasionally entertain at the local Jewish community center where she would sing, tell jokes, and socialize. She was very witty and outgoing. Throughout Becker’s childhood and adolescence, his family kept in contact with relatives and events in Europe during the rise of

78  Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology fascism, the Second World War, and the Shoah. Becker himself served in the U.S. Army as an infantryman after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in the fall of 1942. While in Europe from 1943 to 1945, he saw firsthand the devastations of war. He is thought to have participated in the liberation of one of the Nazi concentration camps. Subsequently, Becker seldom talked about his war experiences, although some of his family and friends believed that his time as a soldier had affected him greatly. After the war, Ernest took advantage of the G.I. Bill to study for an undergraduate degree in anthropology at Syracuse University, a degree he received in 1950. Shortly thereafter, he was positioned as an administrative officer at the U.S. Embassy in Paris from 1952 to 1956, where he was directly involved in Cold War politics. There is some evidence that during this period of his life, Becker did some lower-​level field work for the CIA. By this time, he had become fluent in the French language and had acquired a cultured bearing and mode of self-​presentation. Upon returning to the United States following his stint in Paris, Becker pursued a PhD in cultural and social anthropology at Syracuse University. His thesis supervisor was Douglas Haring, who had consulted to the United States government during the Second World War and the Cold War that followed. Haring was a Japan expert and helped the government to understand Japanese culture and social interaction. Because of his war and European experience, maturity, and strong aptitude for his doctoral studies, Haring and others at Syracuse gave Becker considerable latitude in selecting courses and a dissertation topic. Becker’s doctoral thesis was a critical study of Zen Buddhism (as practiced in the Japanese tradition of Morita therapy) and Western psychotherapy. This was the beginning of Becker’s many writings devoted to what he, in the academic phrasing of the day, called a “synthetic science of man.” In the final sentence of the book based on his doctoral dissertation, Becker wrote: “To function creatively within [our] Western tradition is to accept the fact that neither corps of Zennists or psychotherapists will or can create tomorrow’s utopia” (Becker, 1961, p. 184). Although not actively opposed to psychotherapy, Becker believed that a broad and deep exploration of the humanities and social sciences more generally would serve our individual and collective flourishing much better, a view with which I too have developed considerable sympathy. Nonetheless, Becker was favorably disposed toward some of the ideas of Sigmund Freud and neo-​Freudians like Alfred Adler, and especially Otto Rank. Becker’s life positionings during his childhood, his European experiences during World War II and his subsequent work in Paris, and his university education back in the United States contributed to his personal development as a careful and critical observer of human beings. As Haring and others at the University of Syracuse recognized, Becker’s life positionings before his graduate studies had

Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology  79 equipped him with perspectives and capabilities of penetrating the iniquitous in human conduct alongside the good. He attended carefully to the ever-​present possibility of mayhem, lurking just below the surface of our general civility to betray our virtuousness. He had first-​hand familiarity with the ease with which righteousness could transform into evil. The breadth and depth of his unusually self-​directed graduate studies in cultural anthropology, sociology, theology, and the history of the social sciences further positioned him as a multidisciplinary scholar anxious to make his mark in the world by putting his life experience and education to work in exploring broad questions of human motivation and conduct. His life project was to understand and possibly combat the kinds of atrocity he had witnessed first-​hand as an infantryman and studied as a student of cultural anthropology. Becker’s first academic appointment was as an assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at the Upper State New York Medical School, which was part of the State University of New York at Syracuse (SUNY, Syracuse) and located just across the street from Syracuse University, where he had earned his doctoral degree. At SUNY, Becker worked with Thomas Szasz, the famous anti-​psychiatrist who objected vehemently to the practice of involuntary incarceration of psychiatric patients, a sentiment Becker came to share. Although very popular as a teacher, Becker’s support of Szasz, coupled with his own dryly caustic wit and penchant for critical commentary directed at senior university administrators, ensured that there would be little chance of him acquiring a tenured position at SUNY. Without a job after a little more than two years removed from graduate school, Becker recrossed the street separating SUNY from the University of Syracuse and worked briefly as a visiting lecturer in the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology at Syracuse University. This time he ran into difficulty with university authorities because of his opposition to corporate influence on campus. Becker was a consistent and staunch defender of academic freedom and objected to corporations influencing university decisions through their financial support for facilities, programs of study, and even professorships that they favored and funded. Once again without a job, at the urging of famed sociologist Erving Goffman, Becker applied for a position at the University of California, Berkeley. With Goffman’s strong commendation, Becker was appointed lecturer in anthropology at California’s top public university. In the summer of 1965, Becker and his family travelled across the country to the San Francisco Bay area of California. With mixed feelings, he wrote: “We left many good friends in Syracuse, and in this short life, friends are few” (Becker, as quoted in a letter to Chaplain Harry Bates of Syracuse University in Bates, 1977, p. 219). At Berkley, Becker’s lectures soon began to fill the large Wheeler Auditorium, as enrolled and increasing numbers of unenrolled students and faculty responded to his theme of attempting to understand

80  Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology experiences of human alienation that had peaked during the 1960s among many younger Americans—​alienation from ourselves, from each other, from our society, and alienation from God or the cosmos or whatever once gave people a sense of grounding and belonging. Becker spoke about anthropology and sociology relevant to his topic, but also included a much broader selection of social scientific, humanities, theological, and contemporary sociopolitical content. He also spoke directly about student unrest, the war in Viet Nam, racial conflict, and human rights. If experimentation was drama for Milgram, teaching was dramatic performance for Becker. On one occasion he dressed and acted as an aging and alienated King Lear to enact a scene from Shakespeare’s play. Becker took his teaching very seriously and spent a great deal of time and energy preparing his classes and collecting, contemplating, reviewing, and mastering his materials. For at least a half-​hour before each lecture’s performance, he was not to be interrupted for any reason as he entered into his performance persona. Unfortunately, as Time Magazine reported, none of this seemed to matter to the Berkeley Department of Anthropology, from which Becker was dismissed because of his refusal to stay strictly within the disciplinary confines of sociology and anthropology. A notable yearning of today’s college students is for broad courses that cut a swath across academic disciplines and focus on major social issues. One problem, however, is that there is rarely a niche for such freewheeling scholars in the modern, highly compartmentalized university. Berkeley Lecturer Ernest Becker, 42, who attracted overflow crowds in a 900-​seat auditorium for a wide-​ranging course embracing religion, anthropology, and sociology, was reminded of that disturbing fact last month when Cal’s anthropology department failed to rehire him. (Time Magazine, Friday, March 10, 1967) Having become very fond of the Bay Area of California and with a growing reputation for his lectures and books (e.g., The Birth and Death of Meaning, Revolution in Psychiatry, and Beyond Alienation), it did not take Becker long to arrange a move across the bay to San Francisco State College. However, this too was to prove problematic when, after sixteen months at SFSC, Becker resigned his position in protest of California State Governor Ronald Reagan’s decision to send in the National Guard to quell student demonstrations against the Vietnam War and race relations in the United States. In a short letter to SFSC President S. I. Hayakawa, Becker wrote: “I find it impossible to pursue scholarly work and teaching in the campus atmosphere as it now is … you may consider this an official confirmation of my resignation from State College” (Unprocessed Ernest Becker Papers, Columbia University Archives, 2010).

Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology  81 With his wife Marie, their children, and no job, Becker described his existential fears in an entry to a journal he occasionally kept: It is clear to me lately that I am masking my fear of finitude, of death, of being stupidly killed and ended and my life having no real weight or meaning. I am masking this by devotion to the family, what would happen to them if I were to die? Who would educate Sam and Gaby into the kind of historical-​personal perspectives that alone can help them become persons? … But goodness, man, you have got to live on the world’s terms like all flesh; you have got to travel on its roads and in its skies; you have got to take your insignificant place with all men; you have got to die. You have got to have only the teeniest weight in the destiny of man, if you have any weight at all. You have got to accept this and live it … The trouble with the creative person is that by throwing off the yoke of the people around him, he also throws off the unquestioned acceptance that daily action is right. Then he sticks out and starts to question and fear. The task then is clear; that after he has won his freedom, he has to slip back into the daily dumb acceptance that sustains all other men. There is no alternative. (Becker journal entry dated December 10, 1968, as reproduced in Kramer, 2007, p. 471) As 1969 began, Ernest Becker was 44 years old and had left or been forced to leave jobs at four institutions of higher education. Students he taught had been drafted into the Viet Nam war and returned home in body bags. He had watched other students be beaten in protests against that war and against racial and gender inequalities in America. His attempts to lecture and write about the human condition and why we humans do and experience the things we do seemed not to have had the impact he thought they deserved. He desperately needed to find a secure academic home where he could follow up new insights that had occurred to him when writing his most recent book The Structure of Evil (Becker, 1968). In this book, Becker insightfully interpreted the history of social science as it bears on a theory of human alienation potentially capable of speaking directly to our understanding of those causes of human evil that we might be able to ameliorate. It was at this crucial point that Professor Robert Harper, Director of the interdisciplinary Behavioural Science Centre at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada and a huge fan of Becker’s work, invited Becker to apply for a position in his Centre. In March of 1969, Ernest Becker became a tenured professor at Simon Fraser University. Becker, who also had contacts at the University of British Columbia in nearby Vancouver (e.g., Sol Kort, Director of UBC’s programs in Continuing Education) was delighted to accept the position at SFU, where he hoped to complete his philosophical anthropology, what he called his “synthetic science of man.”

82  Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology Becker’s Scholarship Before SFU: Framing his Philosophical Anthropology A philosophical anthropology is an attempt to discover and describe the essence of human nature and the human condition. Such a study typically involves a critical and integrative analysis of what is known about human nature using both scientific and humanistic methods of inquiry. For many philosophical anthropologists, including Ernest Becker, people differ from other animals, non-​sentient things, and computational and artificially intelligent machines. For Becker, like Spinoza and Sigmund Freud before him, the crucial difference that must be recognized is captured in the Latin phrase causa sui. This is the idea that people are distinct from other entities because they are self-​constituting—​ that is, they are able to generate causes within themselves. As individual persons, human beings are caught up in a causa sui project in that we recognize ourselves as individuals who are compelled to act within the circumstances of our lives. From the perspective of life positioning, such recognition, and the experience of this recognition, are only possible because we are social beings. We couldn’t be individuals if it weren’t for our participation in communities of others. We could not be self-​constituting without our interactions, from birth to death, with other people and the sense of belonging and doing things together that comes with such interactions. Such participation begins with our interactions with parents and guardians within historically-​established conventional, normative practices and traditions that involve social commitments and obligations—​i.e., ways of being, acting, and experiencing that are integral to our social belonging and personal being. It is through our sociocultural embeddedness, participation, and belonging that we emerge developmentally through our social experiences as persons with self and other understanding, self-​conscious awareness, and a sense of possibility, mitigated by an appreciation of our social and existential constraints. Our causa sui projects are enabled by our recognition and understanding of both our possibilities and constraints. In the language of life positioning, we are positioned in life and come to position ourselves, including our life projects, within the historically established sociocultural and existential contexts of our existence. For Ernest Becker, an essential and powerful feature of our human nature and condition is that, as persons conscious of our life experiences, possibilities, and constraints, we are the only animals who live our lives with the knowledge of the inevitability of our deaths. This is a critical component of the compulsion we experience to do or make something of our lives—​to make our lives count in some way, to take ourselves and our living and working seriously. This striving in the context of the circumstances and conditions of our lives was absolutely central to Becker’s own causa sui project (Martin, 2013). It was the social, psychological, and existential engine that drove him relentlessly to penetrate the human condition to locate the reasons we humans do the things we do, for good and ill.

Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology  83 As a child, Becker (like Freud before him) was beset by night terrors and death anxiety. How, he wanted to understand, did people live with such upset? Much of his childhood energies were spent in careful observation of those around him, to try to figure out pieces of the puzzle of how they went about their lives, given that they were doomed. He was curious about why and how people carried on in their everyday lives as if they would live forever. What were the mainsprings behind their actions? Later in his professional life, Becker came to view causa sui itself as a kind of immortality vessel. It is something that we can channel and use to make our mark in life, something that we carve into the world to testify to our existence. Becker, unlike Stanley Milgram, was never constrained by any particular approach to social science. In constructing his philosophical anthropology he felt free to read widely and deeply for nuggets he could weave into the tapestry of his synthetic science of people—​his attempt to illuminate the human experience and the human condition in all its complex glory and horror, to say something that would be as true as possible for as many of us as possible. He recognized that the answer couldn’t be in our biology. It couldn’t be solely in our socialization. It must be in our situatedness, in our being, our belonging to a world of others while we simultaneously try to be ourselves and survive to live as long and productively as possible until our deaths, or perhaps to die in the pursuit of some honorable cause or in some memorable manner. Becker came to believe that we cannot help but be concerned about our lives and our deaths in ways that matter deeply to us, even when we deny such concerns. All social scientists and scholars ought to recognize this ineluctable fact. Becker thought it was a crime, one that would be hilarious were it not so terrible, that most social science doesn’t deal with these issues in what he regarded as a serious way. He wanted all of us to be serious about our lives and deaths, although perhaps not with the preoccupation he himself practiced. There also was a religious, or perhaps a cosmic, side to Becker’s causa sui project. Occasionally referring, somewhat tongue-​in-​cheek, to himself as an Old Testament Jew, he didn’t necessarily believe in an omnibenevolent God. What he did seem to believe is that if there is a God, any human being must be able “to stand on his own two feet” to merit God’s benevolence. To Becker, this meant that he must show himself to be worthy. He must make his gift to humanity and creation. As he was about to move to Simon Fraser University, Becker was continuing to struggle with a persistently challenging problem that he viewed as central to his philosophical anthropology. In the epilogue of his 1968 book The Structure of Evil, he had written: [E]‌vil is implicated in the very conditions of existence itself. To some extent this evil can be put under human control. … [People can] shift the weight of natural happenings from the external world and its laws and randomness to the internal world of [their] decisions and execution. … This means that

84  Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology [people] must strive to have as much of a critical and self-​aware command of [their] actions as possible, exactly as Spinoza had proposed. Which is the same as saying that [people] promote the Good by promoting the organism’s capacity to dispose freely of its uniquely creative energies. … As for evil fading, the only thing that [people] can do is to strive to create more and more esthetic objects of lasting significance—​to leave a historical record of human purpose woven almost indelibly into the world of nature. (Becker, 1968, p. 380) As he journeyed north from San Francisco to Vancouver in the late summer of 1969, the problem Becker kept turning over in his mind and in his conversations with others was whether or not and how we could use our agentic and creative capabilities to work together to limit the evil of which we clearly are so capable. Becker read and wrote to clarify his ideas, oscillating between positioning himself as a learner and a teacher. He wrote to learn and to teach himself by clarifying what he thought and what others have thought. In this way, he acquired a penetrating understanding of what had gone before him and might come after him. In The Structure of Evil he sets himself the task of recreating the spirt of the Enlightenment in a society alienated and out of control. He breathes new life into the works of Comte, Leibnitz, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Goethe, Marx, Freud, and others through his sociocultural and anthropological interpretations of their classic texts. In doing so, he was forging a synthetic integration of major themes in their writings that hold promise for a fusion of social science and the humanities that contains essential humanistic and existential content concerning our lives and deaths. This is a synthesis that aims to strengthen a conception of people as responsible agents by maximizing potentials for both freedom and responsibility in the face of evil that suppresses and is corrosive to human meaningfulness, belonging, and collective creativity. By not knowing ourselves as capable of being and acting as responsible agents, we can’t stand meaningfully against the evil that flows from neglecting our responsibilities to each other and ourselves. The self-​regard we crave is impossible to achieve without embracing causa sui projects of our own that can further develop our capacity for collective, responsible agency. Our not knowing and not positioning ourselves in this way opens us to evil—​to at least the sanctioning of it, and sometimes to the doing of it. As a post-​Freudian, Becker believed that an important part of pursuing meaning and purpose in our lives is to mitigate our reliance on transference objects and face the world more directly. He understood transference objects in a much broader sense than clients in therapy transferring their feelings onto a therapist. For Becker, “transference describes the nature of the bond between leader and follower … It is a bond rooted in the regressive, individual submission to ‘power,’ in the individual need to feel awe and protection by symbolic

Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology  85 icons of power and thus deny and avoid recognition of finitude” (Liechty, 2005, pp. 18–​19). From infancy on, we gird ourselves to the demands of the world by sheltering ourselves (emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually) within that which symbolically represents “higher power.” Becker believed we have no choice but to live within the general dynamics of transference. [However,] although we never can escape such dynamics, Becker, as an Enlightenment scholar, also believed we can come to understand the nature of our transference relationships, their costs, and eventually learn to cultivate transference objects that are more beneficial than harmful. (Martin & Liechty, 2016, p. 6) Prior to coming to Simon Fraser, Becker thought that evil could be combatted by our achieving and maintaining realistic and functional levels of honest and legitimate self-​regard and capabilities of self-​maintenance to guard against false hubris. He also thought education could help people penetrate their own causa sui projects, so as to recognize, correct, and pursue them, with the support of others. Thus, Becker characterized the educational system as a great conversation carried on by communities of learners (Becker, 1967). As he came to Simon Fraser, this was his basic description of an ideal social existence in an ideally real and democratic state. For Becker, this is a state in which maximum individuality and maximum community might be achieved. This dictum was Becker’s basic form and template for human progress toward enlightenment. His message was that you need to contribute to a society; you need to take a stand; you need to say things; and if you don’t, you rob your society of your views. Doing these things is a basic requirement and benefit of a free and honest exchange of ideas and views. This is the only way to work against our alienation, our fears, and our potential for evil. But now, as he journeyed north to Canada, away from the sociopolitical turmoil in his home country, he had begun to wonder if human individual and collective agency would be enough. Would human enlightenment through the self-​strengthening and the educational and personal development he championed be sufficient to counterbalance the potential for mayhem ever present in the human condition? This was the core challenge facing him and his intellectual positioning of himself as a humanistic, existentialist, and enlightenment thinker. Becker’s Scholarly Breakthrough at SFU: Linking Fear of Death with Human Evil On March 20, 1969, the board of governors at Simon Fraser University approved the appointment of Ernest Becker to the position of tenured professor in Behavioural Science Foundations in its Faculty of Education, effective

86  Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology September 1, 1969. The Beckers moved to Greater Vancouver in the late summer of 1969. Once at SFU, Becker worked for two years in the Faculty of Education, teaching classic texts like Plato’s Republic, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, and some of John Dewey’s works, while mixing in some of his own post-​Freudian, neo-​Marxist, and humanistic existential perspectives. He also included some writings by feminists and critical theorists. On April 22, 1971, Becker relocated to SFU’s Department of Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology. By this time, he was heavily immersed in an intensive study of the writings of Otto Rank, writings that were to have a major impact on him and what he came to regard as his only truly mature scholarship. He was in the middle of laying out a plan for a large manuscript he thought would be his magnum opus, with a working title of Psychoanalysis and Marxism—​a synthesis he would advance and refine through his increasing understanding of Rank’s oeuvre, with links to relevant works of Kierkegaard, A. M. Hocart, and contemporaries like Norman O. Brown. Then, early in 1972, just as he was struggling to complete this large manuscript, Becker wrote to his department chair Heribert Adam that he was ill. After complaining to several friends and colleagues about physical ailments for much of the previous year, Becker finally was convinced by a physician neighbor, who was increasingly concerned about Becker’s appearance and symptoms, to get himself checked out. Thus began a heart-​rending series of treatments, rebounds, and returning illness that marked the final two years of Becker’s life as he completed, edited, and published part of what became his magnum opus under the title The Denial of Death (1973). Ernest Becker died of cancer at Vancouver General Hospital on March 6, 1974, at the age of 49 years. A month and a half later, he posthumously was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for The Denial of Death. Some parts of his final big manuscript that did not appear in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, were edited and published by his wife Marie in Becker’s posthumous book Escape from Evil (1975). Elsewhere, I have provided a more complete biographical account of Becker’s time at SFU (Martin, 2014) that discusses both his personal and professional life in greater detail. Here, my focus is on a more intellectual and partial psychobiography that attempts to answer the question “Why and how did Ernest Becker arrive at the conclusion that to understand human beings, it is necessary to understand human evil?” In an undated letter to a Professor Momin (circa July 21, 1971), Becker wrote that he was working on new ideas for a large book that would correct his previous work. [T]‌he main shortcoming of my previous work is that I have not really accounted for human viciousness as I should have. Man is terribly afraid of his own death and of the insignificance of his life. So his whole life is a protest that he is somebody. He takes this protest out on others. He will even kill them to show that he can triumph over death. The theoretical problem of our

Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology  87 time is to harmonize this knowledge with a humanistic science and I am now writing what I think is my most mature work toward that end. (Unprocessed Ernest Becker Papers, Columbia University Archives) At this late point in his life, Becker felt forced to confront a dilemma. If we humans really face evil in the way it needs to be faced, would it still be possible to maintain any kind of optimism whatsoever about the possibility for human enlightenment, individually and collectively? And yet, what kind of genuine enlightenment concerning our understanding of ourselves and of our condition could be gained without such a confrontation with the evil caused by our masking and denial of death? Becker described his dilemma in another letter, this one to Harvey Bates, the chaplain whom he had met at Syracuse University. “I am living on the boundary between renouncing the science of man as a bad dream of youth or a good dream, but a bad dream anyway. And on the other hand of continuing to work as though the words we put together about our condition and our hopes have some meaning for bettering our lot” (Bates, 1977, p. 225). So, what does Becker do to navigate this dilemma, given that he needs a better description and theory of evil and its powers, so as to ground his philosophical anthropology and complete his science of people? Does he abandon his previously held enlightenment goal that relies strongly on levels of self-​esteem and self-​determination that implicitly assume a core capacity for our individual and collective good? Or, does he admit that we face a perhaps insurmountable task in overcoming our arguably greater capacity for evil and self-​destruction? The first thing he sets about doing is to reformulate his anthropodicy to allow that humans can be good in the full face of the evil of which they are capable. Earlier in his career he had understood human alienation as the biggest threat to our capacity for goodness. To combat alienation, he had believed that it could be prevented or ameliorated by collective human effort in the form of a liberal education that teaches how personal freedom and responsible choice are enabled and constrained. But was it possible to extend this, or some version of it, to argue that we might bolster our individual and collective goodness by unswervingly revealing and facing the much more powerful causes of evil? At Simon Fraser, Becker becomes unsatisfied with his earlier formulation. He now realizes that he has misconstrued and underestimated the true nature of human evil—​ how it can manipulate and take all that we hold most dear to ourselves—​our core beliefs, our societies, and our loved ones—​and twist it toward genocidal madness. He begins to see how treacherous evil can be and sets about unravelling and rebuilding possible defenses against it. In his reformulated anthropodicy, Becker struggles to maintain the possibility of meaningful enlightenment and transcendence in a world where evil is so adept at coopting even our most heroic social and personal projects to undermine the good in ourselves and in our societies. When there’s a threat to us, our cultures, or our life projects, we are likely to perceive the source of such threats

88  Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology as evil and to respond with evil ourselves—​an evil that is camouflaged as justified, necessary, even heroic. How can we understand and possibly combat this tendency to villainize others who we perceive as evil doers and fail to recognize our own evildoing? It is here that Becker now turns to the writings of Otto Rank. Rank’s post-​Freudian work traces human anxiety and fear to two opposing tendencies that populate our human actions and condition. One is a tendency toward individuation and separateness. The other is a tendency toward collectivity and communion. Fear of life, according to Rank is animated by the need to make something of ourselves. Life is challenging and demanding. To face and survive such challenges and demands can be daunting and requires (but taxes) our creativity. Fear of death features our desire to love and keep death at bay and draws us to commune and belong with others for protection and progress. Both are on a hair trigger and can move like lightening to hate and destruction when we are challenged and threatened by others and ways of life different from our own. Our creations and loves, and on the flip side our destructions and hates, define our lives toward our deaths at both the level of the individual and the level of human societies and cultures. After reading Rank, Becker sees that entire societies and cultures just like individuals can be caught up in expanded transference phenomena. He recognizes that we all need inevitably to reach out to transference objects and projects that are not of our own constitution. So, causa sui isn’t enough. Because cultures are created by us humans, any “transference objects” they might provide cannot really offer the assurance of transcendence they might promise. Humans and human societies and projects, including Becker’s own philosophical anthropology, are idols of our own making. Our defense of them is susceptible to both dogmatism and evil. Thus, all cultural objects and projects do not really offer the transcendence of our condition and faith that we seek. They’re internal to us and our condition. They aren’t external. With this recognition, Becker opens himself up to other possibilities (spiritual and cosmological) that might elevate the enlightenment functioning of our own scientific and other sociocultural undertakings. In what he calls his mature works, Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, he thinks he finally provides the theory of evil that he requires for his unified science of the person. He hopes that this revised philosophical anthropology will be capable of both facing evil fully and achieving the enlightenment goal of learning to live better with this knowledge. Without such a theory, our uncritical, unconscious allegiances to our cultural and symbolic meaning systems will continue to unleash increasingly destructive levels and amounts of despair and evil. Becker thinks he now sees clearly that his new theory of evil must depict cultures as immortality projects, the challenging and threatening of which can release destruction and murderous mayhem. In changing the core motivational component of his philosophical anthropology from his earlier principle of self-​esteem maintenance to culture as an

Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology  89 immortality project, Becker hasn’t disavowed the importance of human striving for self-​esteem and belonging; he’s now folded this still powerful motivation into our cultural immortality striving. With the principle of cultural immortality striving Becker explains our fetishized attachments to our groups and cultures and our capacities for destructiveness and evil. The dark irony is that our highest needs and virtues, our belonging, our worth, our heroic sacrifice can be recruited in the committing of atrocities against others. All social science, and the enlightenment it seeks, will fail without an adequate ontology of human nature and the human condition, and such an ontology requires this theory of evil. “Human beings kill out of joy and the experience of expansive transcendence over evil” (Becker, 1973). “The idea of death haunts the human animal like nothing else. It is the mainspring of human activity” (Becker, 1975). A more concrete sense of Becker’s theory of immortality striving can be gained by a brief consideration of how it might explain the Shoah, the evil catastrophe of the Holocaust. For Becker, the logic of killing others to affirm our own life unlocks the puzzle about the history of evil. The highest heroism is the stamping out of those who are tainted. Thus, evil of the sort exemplified in the Holocaust is a collective and individual embrace of a fetishized heroic, a conquering of the other in a mass refusal to accept insignificance and demise. Scapegoating, dehumanizing, cultural ritualism and symbolism, bureaucratized murder are the thoughtless, stupid results of a perverted heroism in the form of a symbolically transcendent mastering of death run amok. The reality of the Holocaust is that of a nation state needing to represent heroic victory over evil and mortality. Yet, as Becker moves closer to his own death, he remains uncertain about his new notion of cultures as immortality projects. The problem is that his new theory of evil remains internal to our living and dying. But Becker also finds something else in Rank. Rank links his faith in human creativity in the face of evil to a cosmic primal force—​perhaps a commitment that Rank viewed as an existential necessity and that Becker continued to contemplate in the last days of his life. Had he lived longer would he have moved further toward the creativity and spiritual hopefulness of Rank? Perhaps. In his dying, Becker continues to do what he thought we all ought to be doing, taking our living toward our dying seriously by trying to comprehend its significance for our personal and collective strivings and how these might be turned away from evil and toward creative goodness. I think it likely that when he’s dying, Becker, like Comte and Rank before him, might have felt that our only hope for enlightened life together is a kind of cosmic heroism that might issue from a fusion of the insights of an idealized social science with the functions previously served by religion, emerging in an honest and sustained confrontation with the reality of our condition, our nature, and our limitations. His later work aimed to clarify both the nature of this confrontation and the extent of the challenge it poses to individuals and to cultures.

90  Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology Connecting Becker’s Life and Work: A Life Positioning Storyline In some ways, Ernest Becker’s most consistent and central life positioning was that of an outsider. As a mature university student with a blue-​collar Jewish background and first-​hand experience of war, he was positioned outside of conventional undergraduate and graduate cohorts and traditional disciplines, and to some extent outside the dominant American culture of his time. His experiences in his family of origin, World War II, and the American Embassy in Paris ensured that he was well acquainted with the evil of which humans are capable. His lifelong interest in why we do the things we do preceded any tutoring or indoctrination in the concepts and methods of conventional social science. All of this set him on a somewhat original search for a full and rich understanding of human nature for both good and ill. He had been immersed in the reality of human evil. Unlike Stanley Milgram, Ernest Becker felt no need to simulate it. When I wrote my extended essay about Becker’s life and work at Simon Fraser University (Martin, 2014), I did not dwell on possible connections between his fatal illness and his writing of The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil. But I now think that his knowing that he was dying motivated him to do everything he could to revise and complete his philosophical anthropology in the time that was left to him. I think he died trying to be true to himself and heroic in the face of his demise. I also think that these two books, which he considered to be his only mature work, reflected his positioning of himself as one able to look directly into the abyss of oblivion, and yet capable of a kind of triumphant transcendence. I think that Becker’s work and life, both before but especially during his time at SFU, were exceptionally interactive and incorporated each other. This dual and simultaneous positioning, in which his work reflected his life and his life expressed his work, enabled Becker to persevere with his causa sui project by continuing to work on the manuscript that would become Escape from Evil, even as he was dying. Given such a close life–​work involvement, the danger is to over-​generalize one’s own experience. I think Becker can legitimately be criticized for this. There are many assumptions and assertions of truth and universality in Becker’s writings. In his mature work, Becker concludes that we might be able to use our confrontation with the inevitability of death to inoculate ourselves against the assumption that anything or anyone that we perceive as threating our culture is necessarily evil. Hopefully, this confrontation will ensure that we will not engage and perpetuate our own evil when we think that our culture, understood as an immortality project, is threatened. But exactly how and why the common good will be ensured by such reasoning is far from clear. The fact that Becker positioned himself as a carrier of Rank’s ideas concerning the making of an artistic gift that might bestow a kind of immortality on the artist does not ensure the beneficence of the artistic gift. According to Rank, “the artist does not create

Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology  91 in the first place for fame or immortality,” but as “a means to achieve actual life, since it helps … to overcome fear” (Rank, 1989, pp. 408–​409)—​“fear [that] has led to the substitution of artistic production for life, and to the eternalization of the all-​too-​mortal ego in a work of art” (p. 430). Rank concludes by saying that the creative type capable of renouncing “this protection by art [and] devoting his whole creative force to life and the formation of life will be the first representative of the new human type” and “will enjoy a personality-​creation and expression, a greater happiness” (p. 431). Perhaps so, but again exactly how this will benefit the rest of us and society as a whole is unclear, and seems more assumed than argued. I think it also is interesting to note Rank’s emphasis on life in these closing lines of Art and Artist, in comparison with Becker’s much more sustained focus on personal and cultural death. I believe there are at least three additional reasons to challenge Becker’s neo-​ Rankian philosophical anthropology. First, fear of death may not be as universal as Becker claims. Such fear seems not only to vary across different historical times and sociocultural contexts but also differs across individuals and groups within the same or similar sociocultural contexts who are positioned therein in different ways with differing perspectives. For example, many past and contemporary cultural traditions dwell on living with dignity, responsibility, honor, and moral rectitude for the love of family, friends, collective values, and other ingredients of meaningful lives that cannot be easily interpreted as examples of inappropriate transference phenomena, without risking considerable psychological hubris. At a more individual level, many who devote their lives to helping others—​older people who have lived long and satisfying lives, those who have found ways to create meaning and creative challenges in their lives, or those who experience great misfortune and terrible living conditions—​do not experience the certitude of death as terrifying. Second, there are many well-​documented sources of evil in human life. The list is long and includes evil committed as a means to ends envisioned through greed, lust, ambition, hopelessness, and egotism; as a revenge response; as attributable to violence directed by sadistic or otherwise twisted, yet revered leaders; and on it goes (cf. Baumeister, 2001; Staub, 2011; Waller, 2007). Perhaps all such motivations derive from an underlying fear of death, but this seems unlikely. Third, Becker’s “standing on his own feet” in the face of evil bears the stamp of stereotypical masculinity that likely fits well with certain people and ways of living, but also encompasses a personal style and strategy that perhaps fits Becker’s own life experience and positioning better than the life experiences and positionings of many others. To the extent that any of us can identify with his depiction of what Becker regards as the universal human situation and condition, his work can speak to us in a highly meaningful way. Becker’s life work was a deeply personal search for meaning, experiential validation and understanding. In a letter to Harvey Bates (dated February 8, 1971), Becker wrote:

92  Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology Alas, I have left the science of man far behind, I fear. I hope that you don’t consider my growth a betrayal which is about fair speed these days. Anyway, I am out to please no one, but to save my own soul by trying really to understand this world. I don’t want everlasting life. I simply want to approximate truth in this one which is what I feel is necessary for minimal human dignity. (Bates, 1977, p. 226) When Becker is close to death, his good SFU friend Carl Peters visits him in the Vancouver General Hospital and reports that he kept saying: “I’m going to die with dignity. I’m going to die. And I’m going to do it with dignity. I’m going to do it seriously.” In his famous death-​bed interview with Sam Keen in March 1974, about a month and a half before he dies, Becker says: I think it is the task of the science of man to show us our real condition on this planet. … I don’t know where we are going to get, but I think truth is a value, an ultimate value and false hope is a great snare. … I think the truth is something we can get to, the truth of our condition and if we get to it, it will have some meaning. It is this passion for truth that has kept me going. (Keen, 1974, p. 80) More than thirty years later when interviewed on January 30, 2007, Keen says about Becker: “He was a man who thought with everything in him. He was no academic dilettante. He thought with his life” (Keen, 2007). In an intellectual psychobiographical essay of this kind, a life positioning analysis involves at least two kinds of positionings—​the positioning of the focal person with respect to everyday life with others and the positioning of the same person with respect to their intellectual undertakings. In much of his everyday life and intellectual work, Becker was an “outsider” and a “loner.” His intellectual work to fashion his philosophical anthropology and anthropodicy was his causa sui project, one that required solitary reading, study, extensive note taking, writing, revision, and editing. Even when with others in familial and social contexts, Becker was frequently preoccupied with his project—​thinking, reflecting, worrying about his intellectual labors and progress or lack thereof. His friends and acquaintances recall many occasions on which he was there but not “really there.” His occasional diary entries frequently reveal an overriding concern with his intellectual project, including reminders to himself that ordinary life must go on and that he is no different from anyone else in this respect. Yet, despite such awareness, Ernest Becker was a driven man, intent upon producing and giving his intellectual gift to himself and the world. Thus, his primary relational positioning when working and socializing was to his work, an obsession that became increasingly intense and at times desperate as his health failed and his death approached. Sam Keen (2007) described Becker as very much

Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology  93 wanting to do their famous death-​bed interview shortly before his death because he did not think “he had received the recognition that he deserved, and he felt the importance of his ideas … This was a man who lived for his ideas.” Becker displayed considerable tensions between his solo positioning as a creative existential thinker and innovator and his attempts to interest and engage others with his ideas and their reactions to them. Becker’s friends Ron Leifer and Sol Kort both recall how Becker’s social interest in others would peak when conversations moved in directions he could associate with his intellectual project, even to the point of asking the more stimulating of his interlocutors to provide him with references for some of their assertions and views, which he later would studiously pursue. But few who encountered and interacted with Becker had any doubts about where his primary focus lay. Within his intellectual and social positioning, there was a palpable tension between striving to position himself as a heroic individual within the human condition and cosmic order versus his desire to contribute to a science of persons capable of helping others to confront their mortality in ways that could clear the way for acceptance, even creative motivation, in the full face of their existential predicament. Despite his sympathies for former students in Viet Nam and his general interests in social justice, human rights, and dignity for all people, Becker seldom explicitly embraced or joined in collective causes associated with such sympathies and interests. In his work and life, he mostly was positioned, by himself and others, as “outside the fray,” reflectively contemplating the meanings and conditions of human existence and extracting what he could interpret in ways that would extend his own intellectual work. Despite his extensive knowledge of the history of sociocultural and anthropological philosophy and research, most of what is to be found in Becker’s two final, mature works may best be understood as his reflections on existential dimensions of human life, the nature of human being and evil, and the human condition writ large. Even when paraphrasing Kierkegaard, Rank, and others, Becker’s obvious intent is first and foremost to clarify his own thinking with respect to his causa sui project. Since his death, many have interpreted and applied the intellectual gift of Becker’s work to a wide variety of social causes aimed at greater social equity and justice with respect to climate change, more equitable distribution of wealth and resources, and a more diverse inclusivity in social, communal life. The best examples are the various initiatives and undertakings of the Seattle-​based Ernest Becker Foundation, initially under the leadership of Neil Elgee and more recently of Deborah Jacobs. Unfortunately, the EBF ceased its operations at the end of 2023. Yet, for many readers, past and present, Becker’s oeuvre has the more Sartrean appeal of getting to an essential existential truth about their lives and fates as mortal beings. For them, Becker’s gift is more personal—​to help them comprehend what they are up against in their search for meaning and significance during the time between their births and deaths, just as Becker was

94  Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology attempting to do for himself. I believe that understanding human evil as sourced by the pursuit of personal and cultural immortality was Becker’s “outsider” way of positioning himself and his legacy “inside” the human condition. Note 1 When not referenced explicitly in the text of this chapter, information contained in this chapter concerning Becker’s life and work has been pieced together from interviews with Marie-​Becker Pos (Becker’s wife), Ronald Leifer (Becker’ close friend and colleague at Syracuse), and others; material in the Ernest Becker papers at Columbia University and Simon Fraser University; records kept by the Ernest Becker Foundation in Seattle, Washington; and material in a recreation of Becker’s working library located in a private home on the shores of Lake Samish near Bellingham, Washington.

References Bates, H. (1977). Letters from Ernest: Correspondence between the late social critic Ernest Becker and a protestant campus pastor. Christian Century, 94, 217–​227. Baumeister, R. F. (2001). Evil: Inside human violence and cruelty. Barnes & Noble. Becker, E. (1961). Zen: A rational critique. W. W. Norton. Becker, E. (1962). The birth and death of meaning: A perspective in psychiatry and anthropology. Free Press. Becker, E. (1967). Beyond alienation: A philosophy of education for the crisis of democracy. George Braziller. Becker, E. (1968). The structure of evil: An essay on the unification of the science of man. Free Press. Becker, E. (1969, January 27). Copy of a letter of resignation to Mr. Hayakawa, President of San Francisco State College. Unprocessed Ernest Becker Papers, Columbia University. Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press. Becker, E. (1975). Escape from evil. Free Press. Becker, E. (2010). Unprocessed papers. Columbia University Archives. Keen, S. (1974, April). A sketch of Ernest Becker: A day of loving combat. Psychology Today, 73–​80. Keen, S. (2007). Sam Keen on Ernest Becker. Retrieved on July 12, 2023, from http://​rea​ lsoc​iald​ynam​ics.blogs​pot.com/​2007/​01/​sam-​keen-​fire-​in-​belly.html Kramer, R. (2007). The journals of Ernest Becker, 1964–​1969. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 47, 430–​473. Liechty, D. (Ed.), (2005). The Ernest Becker reader. The Ernest Becker Foundation and University of Washington Press. Martin, J. (2013). Revisiting Ernest Becker’s psychology of human striving. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 53, 131–​152. Martin, J. (2014). Ernest Becker at Simon Fraser University (1969–​1974). Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 54, 66–​112.

Ernest Becker’s Quest for a Philosophical Anthropology  95 Martin, J. (2016). Ernest Becker and Stanley Milgram: Twentieth-​century students of evil. History of Psychology, 19, 3–​21. Martin, J., & Liechty, D. (2016). Ernest Becker’s dark turn: A critical ‘deepening.’ Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 56, 1–​17. Rank, O. (1989). Art and artist: Creative urge and personality development (C. F. Atkinson, Trans.). W. W. Norton. (Original published 1932.) Staub, E. (2011). Overcoming evil. Genocide, violent conflict, and terrorism. Oxford University Press. Time Magazine (1967). Education: A class hires a scholar. Friday, March 10. Waller, J. (2007). How ordinary people commit genocide and mass killing: Becoming evil. Oxford University Press.

5 The Symmetrical Relationship and Conjoint Agency of Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud

Author’s Introduction I think the theory and methods of life positioning are especially instructive and helpful in the conduct and writing of dual sociocultural psychobiographies. Multiple subject psychobiographies are quite common and focus on interactions between two or more people (see Isaacson, 2005). How we position ourselves and how others position us are important and powerful constituents of our personhood and life projects. Dual life positioning psychobiographies such as the one presented in this chapter can inform us about how relationships and interactions between two focal subjects enable and constrain the development of capabilities central to our personhood, such as perspective taking, creative possibility, and individual and conjoint agency. A particularly fascinating aspect of dual psychobiographies concerns the extent to which the positions, perspectives, and possibilities that two people enact and experience in their interactions are symmetrical or asymmetrical. Typically, more symmetrical and complementary relational interactions signal more equitable sharing of power, benefits, and concerns, as well as greater capacity for the exercise of conjoint agency in the conduct and realization of life projects. Such symmetrical positioning is clearly evident in the life relationship that developed between wealthy American heiress and child advocate Dorothy Burlingham and influential child psychoanalyst Anna Freud. I studied Anna Freud’s writings and life relatively late in my own life. Over time, my lectures on psychoanalysis in my courses on the theory and history of psychology had begun to include more and more about Anna Freud and her work. I eventually obtained and studied the three book-​length biographies of her life and work by Elisabeth Young-​Bruehl (2008), Uwe Henrik Peters (1985), and Robert Coles (1992), as well as several articles and parts of books written by others about Anna’s life and work. Then, just before I retired from my position as professor of psychology at the end of 2018, I happened upon The Last Tiffany: A Biography of Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham (1989), written by Dorothy’s grandson Michael John Burlingham. Dorothy was Anna’s life DOI: 10.4324/9781003461715-5

Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud  97 partner and a psychoanalyst, writer, and child welfare advocate who worked closely with Anna to found and run several projects and programs for the education and psychoanalytic treatment of children, including the Hietzing School in Vienna and the Hampstead Clinic in London. The more I learned about Anna and Dorothy, their triumphs, and their struggles, the more I wanted to write about them and their lives. In this chapter, I focus on Dorothy’s and Anna’s relationships with their fathers and each other. I give particular attention to asymmetries and symmetries so clearly evident in these relationships. This chapter demonstrates the use of life positioning ideas and methods in the conduct of a dual sociocultural psychobiography of two women in a mostly mutually beneficial and long-​term, intimate relationship. In contrast to the “why” questions that provided a focus for the three preceding life positioning studies, the focal question in this chapter is a “how” question: “How did the mostly symmetrical life positioning relationship between Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud develop, and how did it enable the exercise of the conjoint agency so clearly evident within the life projects they pursued together”? The Early Life of Dorothy Burlingham Dorothy Burlingham was born Dorothy Trimble Tiffany on October 11, 1891. She was the last-​born child of the much-​celebrated glass artist Louis Comfort Tiffany and the philanthropist Louise Knox Tiffany. Louis had inherited a fortune from his father Charles Louis Tiffany, a master merchant and gemstone jewelry expert. Dorothy’s father further augmented the family’s considerable wealth through his extraordinary expertise in creating much celebrated and coveted glass works and designs in the art nouveau style. Dorothy and her older siblings, including three step-​siblings from her father’s first marriage, grew up in a chauvinistic household dominated by her father. Her mother’s death from bowel cancer when Dorothy was twelve affected her deeply. In the absence of his wife, Dorothy’s father became even more tyrannical. When a large philanthropic bequest to the New York City Infirmary for Women and Children, which had been supported by his second wife, did not ease his grief, he turned to drink. His frequent drunkenness “instilled in Dorothy a lifelong fear and horror of alcohol” (M. J. Burlingham, 1989, p. 116), but perhaps the greater effect on her future came with her father’s denying her and her twin sisters (four years older than Dorothy) the opportunity to go to college, simply because they were girls who he believed did not require a higher education. After their mother’s death, the three younger girls were looked after mostly by their older half-​sisters, assisted by occasional interventions by a family relative Julia de Forest, who had done charity work with Dorothy’s mother at the Infirmary for Women and Children. Julia was a spinster who lived in New York with her brother, but whose true partner-​in-​life was Dr. Eleanor Kilham, a professor at the Infirmary Medical College who had been decorated in Paris for

98  Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud her World War I work with the American Committee for French Wounded. Once she retired from the Infirmary, Dr. Kilham and Julia lived together in the de Forest family home. According to Dorothy’s grandson and biographer Michael Burlingham (1989), “This intellectual partnership very likely served Dorothy with a model recreated in adulthood. She knew, later, that she had been ‘searching for something for myself … even as a child’ ” (p. 118). After graduating from high school, Dorothy’s twin sisters were directed by their father to move from “debutancy to motherhood” (M. J. Burlingham, 1989, p. 120). Having been powerless to intervene in the lives of the twins, Julia de Forest redoubled her efforts to get Louis to allow Dorothy to attend a private high school away from home, from which she hoped Dorothy would move on to a university education. Being alone and dependent on Dorothy for company, Louis initially refused. However, eventually, with both Dorothy herself and Julia pleading her case, Dorothy was allowed to enroll at the prestigious St. Timothy’s School for Girls in Catonsville, Maryland. In doing so, she started on a road to independence previously uncharted by the women in her family of origin. The road would prove to be a rather unpredictable and bumpy one. At St. Timothy’s, Dorothy “earned the reputation of a good scholar and athlete” (M. J. Burlingham, 1989, p. 121), but she was very unhappy at boarding school and begged her father to be allowed to return to the luxury and ease of the family home. Louis responded that she had made her choice and must live with it, which she did for “five miserable years” (p. 121). Throughout this time, she continued to excel as a student and athlete, captaining the school’s basketball team and, with her magnetism and intensity, attracting considerable attention. Yet, in the Spring of 1910, with only one term remaining in her high school program, the lonely Louis gave his daughter the option of staying home rather than returning to finish her diploma and Dorothy did not return to St. Timothy’s, despite saying that she “was unhappy about it because I wanted to finish” (p. 123). Back home, Dorothy played tennis, sailed, rode her horse, painted, and (encouraged by her father) took up photography. Yet, Dorothy once again was unhappy. Even her debutante ball, attended by several eligible bachelors of her social register, did not seem to cheer her up. Nonetheless, Dorothy’s unhappiness did not prevent her from being wooed by and accepting the courtship of Robert Burlingham, four years her senior. Robert was a Harvard graduate, and at the time of their meeting, enrolled in Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. “The direct descendant of five Mayflower Pilgrims,” Robert “had been taught that one’s duties are more important than one’s rights, that public service must balance personal ambition” (M. J. Burlingham, 1989, p. 126). Unfortunately, Dorothy’s father clashed with Robert and “threw him out of his house” (p. 127). “Devoutly religious, absolute in their morality, abiding by the law to the letter, teetotaling and, above all, liberal Democratic, the Burlinghams represented a virtual insurrection

Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud  99 against Louis’s regime” (p. 128). Undeterred, Robert and Dorothy were wed in a modest ceremony in September of 1914. Once married and settled into her new life and the relative independence it afforded, Dorothy “was having fun at last” (M. J. Burlingham, 1989, p. 135). She and Robert settled into their new home a short distance from the Roosevelt Hospital where Robert had begun a surgical internship. Within two months of her wedding, Dorothy was pregnant with what was to be the first of four children. Robert Burlingham Jr. was born on August 29, 1915. Unfortunately, life for the new mother “began to fall apart in earnest” a year later when “Dorothy’s son, father-​in-​law, and husband all became sick within a short time of one another, three generations at a stroke” (p. 137). The baby developed allergies so severe that he had to be force-​fed and became dangerously thin. Robert’s father, Charles Culp Burlingham, a prominent New York lawyer, suffered a nervous collapse due to overwork. Her husband Robert’s seemingly similar collapse, initially thought to be due to the pressures of medical school and internship, proved to be a more serious and ultimately chronic form of what then was called manic-​depressive psychosis. These events and their aftermath revealed clearly to Dorothy the extent to which her husband Robert was dependent on his parents and would likely remain so. “Far from achieving real independence, in marrying Robert she had merely shifted spheres of influence, traded one paternal authority for another” (p. 138). Perhaps in a state of shock, Dorothy allowed her mother-​ in-​law to take charge of Robert’s short-​term recovery, as CCB and the baby also improved. As her mother-​in-​law gradually took control of her husband’s and first-​born’s care, Dorothy’s resentment of her in-​laws’ interference in her life grew alongside her seeming inability to do anything about it—​a condition enhanced by her three subsequent confinements and the resultant births of Mary (“Mabbie”), Katrina (“Tinky”), and Michael (“Mikey”) Burlingham. Nonetheless, Dorothy and Bob remained committed to making their marriage work. With the outbreak of World War I, Robert had been commissioned to the Cardio-​Vascular Department of the US Army’s Medical Research Laboratory on Long Island. To be closer to Robert, who was restricted to base in Long Island, Dorothy had a cottage built near Cold Spring Harbor. Physically more distant from the other Burlinghams, this arrangement might have heralded the possibility of greater independence and a new beginning for Dorothy in her married life. But, as she later recalled “This was the beginning of the end” as Bob “minded so” the separation from his father and suffered another break-​ down (quoted in M. J. Burlingham, 1989, p. 146). As one of her children followed another in entering into what she regarded as the smothering care of her in-​laws, and with herself unable to resist, Dorothy left Robert on March 16, 1920, before the birth of their last child Mikey. In her mind, she chose her children over Robert and his family. As she left, she wrote “I could not manage caring for him and doing what I should do for the children” (p. 147). “In doing so, Dorothy was abandoning a man in desperate need of her support, while, for

100  Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud herself and the children, all that loomed ahead was uncertainty” (pp. 147–​148). Her eventual flight from the Burlinghams was possible because of CCB taking over his son Robert’s care and arranging treatment for him. For herself and the children, Dorothy had recourse to funds made available from her own father’s distribution of interest from his securities to his children. Bob’s parents never understood or forgave Dorothy for leaving her husband and taking away their grandchildren. Thus began a four-​year drift to find her bearings that culminated in Dorothy’s embrace of the new science of psychoanalysis being promulgated amongst upper-​ class New Yorkers. One such devotee was her favorite cousin Alfred de Forest, an MIT professor and inventor Dorothy regarded as a genius. In desperate need of a solution to her domestic difficulties but unable to find one, Dorothy and the children flitted between the Western US and Europe, especially Switzerland, in the company of Tiffany family members and friends. When Alfred’s wife Izette de Forest was planning to undertake a training analysis with Freudian disciple Sandor Ferenczi in Budapest, Alfred invited Dorothy to the de Forests’ home in Stratford, Connecticut, where the children could attend the local schools. In Stratford, Dorothy became increasingly enamored of psychoanalysis through discussions and analytic experiences with Alfred and his friends and associates. When in 1924 Dorothy heard about Freud’s daughter Anna beginning the psychoanalytic treatment of children in Vienna, she contacted her friends Ruth and Arthur Sweetser, who had founded a small international school in Geneva. The Sweetsers invited Dorothy to join them in Geneva and enroll her children in their school. While in Geneva, Dorothy planned to visit Vienna to meet and talk with Anna Freud about the possibility of her treating Bob. On May 1, 1925, Dorothy and her children sailed for Europe, to the lasting enmity of the Burlinghams of New York and their many friends. Clearly, Dorothy Burlingham was positioned by birth as a child of wealth and privilege. Yet the many material and social advantages of such a positioning did little to assuage the social and psychological disadvantages of her positioning as the youngest and necessarily subservient female in her highly chauvinistic family of origin. With her mother’s death, Dorothy’s familial positioning became even more restricted and controlled by her increasingly erratic father. Her emerging personhood was not only constrained, but nearly imprisoned by his wishes and whims. As a feminine member of New York’s upper echelon, Dorothy’s expected interpersonal and social comportment had been modeled by her mother and included limited outlets for personal agency in household management and public philanthropy. In the absence of her mother, even these limited horizons of agentive possibility dimmed, but did not entirely disappear in Dorothy’s daydreams. “Before I was married, I had this fantasy of adopting a whole lot of children and the kind of school I would have for them. I had a horrible schooling [and] I wanted to give them something that wasn’t so horrible” (quoted in Danto, 2019, p. 11).

Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud  101 With her marriage to Robert, Dorothy escaped the social and interpersonal constraints of her family of origin, only to find them replaced by those of a different kind of male-​dominated domain, the patriarch of which was Robert’s father Charles to whom he was devoted and on whom he was dependent. With the onset and course of Robert’s chronic psychological difficulties and his increased need for his father’s ministrations, Dorothy and her children turned to her network of cousins in the de Forest family of philanthropists and progressive reformists. The de Forests believed strongly that public affairs should be directed by “the class who have the largest pecuniary stake in the good order of the city and who also command its moral forces” (Werner, 2019, p. 156). Thus, it was up to the moneyed classes to step up when governments could not or refused to intervene. With her de Forest cousins, Dorothy not only was immersed in such philanthropic perspectives, but also encountered the ideas and practices of psychoanalysis. She recalled her Aunt Julia de Forest reading to her from a copy of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (which Julia had been given by Eleanor Kilham) when she was about twelve years old. Dorothy also became immersed in the de Forest family’s interest in non-​European Indigenous art and culture, together with their enthusiasm for anthropology, art, literature, and the health sciences more generally. Their belief that “individuals are fundamentally good, but that the institutions to which individuals must adapt are far more problematic” (p. 161) came to be one that Dorothy herself would hold dear. As she and her children left for Geneva and Vienna in 1925, Dorothy, like many American devotees of psychoanalysis, was opening herself to discovery as much or more than change. She was embarking on a journey and process of repositioning herself and her children within what she fervently hoped would be ways of life and living that would be more conducive to their growth and development as good and healthy people. The Early Life of Anna Freud Anna Freud was born on December 3 in 1895, the youngest of Sigmund and Martha Freud’s six children and the only child to take up her father’s cause—​ the development and promotion of psychoanalysis. Positioned at birth within the pleasant environs of Vienna’s upper bourgeoise, Anna later was positioned and positioned herself as the primary proponent, caregiver, and defender of her father and psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud had relatively little to do with Anna’s care as a young child, duties that were left to those Freud referred to as “the two mothers” (Young-​ Bruehl, 2008, p. 32), his wife Martha and her sister Minna Bernays, but discharged mostly by Josephine Cihlarz, a nursemaid for the youngest Freud children hired when Anna was born. Anna would recall Josephine as “my old nursemaid, the oldest relation and the most genuine of my childhood” (Young-​ Bruehl, 2008, p. 35). Despite, and perhaps because of his somewhat infrequent

102  Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud early interactions with her as an infant, “Freud’s relationship to Anna … was from the very beginning approving, untroubled, and happy. Even later in life, he never complained about her or found fault with her” (Peters, 1985, p. 3). Not emotionally close to her mother, whose firm routines and rules she often objected to, Anna’s most cherished childhood memories, other than those of Josephine, were of summer holidays, especially when Papa (as the Freud children referred to their father) would join the rest of the family. Despite often feeling that as the youngest she was ignored and excluded by her older siblings, Anna nonetheless received considerable attention and protection from both parents and her siblings. She enjoyed playing with her brothers, was somewhat jealous of the good looks of her sisters, especially Sophie who was nearest to her in age, and when not at play, “was a model good girl… fastidious in her dress … she did not like to be disheveled or unstarched” (Young-​Bruehl, 2008, p. 40). However, what father Freud “adored about little Annerl was not her femininity, but [her] naughtiness.” He found her “cheeky,” “beautified by naughtiness.” According to her biographer Young-​Bruehl, “This naughty side of Anna Freud was later covered over with goodness, but it never disappeared—​especially because her father loved it” (Young-​Bruehl, 2008, p. 43). Using the ideas and language of life positioning, as a young, pre-​school child, Anna Freud learned to offset her sometimes feelings of being left out by her siblings and subjected to unnecessarily rigid routines by her mother by positioning herself as the apple of her father’s eye, prone to the kind of comportment and manner her father found charming and imaginative. Anna Freud started school in 1901, a few months before turning six. The students at the school she attended came mostly from professional families. Anna interacted with both Jewish and non-​Jewish children, but Viennese societal conventions ensured that her closest childhood friends were Jewish. Later to be renowned for her stoicism, Anna disliked and was often bored at school. The fact that she was not prepared for a Gymnasium education that would direct her to a university education bespeaks the social conservatism of her family and community. At her Lyceum, directed by Dr. Salka Goldman, she studied a basic curriculum that included French, English, religious instruction, history, geography, some science, and penmanship. Anna received “very goods” in all her subjects during her last two years at the Lyceum, reflecting how hard she tried to be what her parents and teachers desired, despite her continuing boredom with much of her schooling. To do so, she adopted what she later called a realistic perspective consistent with her desire to be accepted and treated as grown-​up at home and at school. To compensate for the tedium and restlessness she endured at school, Anna became a voracious reader and writer. In this way, she positioned herself intellectually by accommodating, but subtly skirting, her restricted educational positioning by her parents and teachers. Anna’s major biographer, Elisabeth Young-​Bruehl, opines that without a Gymnasium education, much of Anna’s inspiration for further study derived

Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud  103 not from her schooling but from the many intellectually minded visitors to her family home and the interactions she witnessed between them and her father. Lacking a Gymnasium education and the command of Latin and Greek that came with it, Anna was unable to follow many of the classical and literary allusions common to these exchanges. Nonetheless, Freud allowed her to sit in a corner and listen in on the meetings of his Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, with which she became fascinated. Recognizing her interest, Freud began introducing her to psychoanalysis in her early teens. On an after-​dinner walk through the streets of Vienna’s finest homes, he exclaimed to his daughter, “You see those houses with their lively facades? Things are not necessarily so lovely behind the facades. And so it is with human beings too” (Young-​Bruehl, 2008, p. 52). As Anna’s fascination with psychoanalysis grew, so did her love and admiration for her father. When Freud traveled, she sent him letters with hugs and kisses—​something quite absent from the family’s usual routines. Following her recovery from an appendectomy, for which she felt her mother did not adequately prepare her for fear of upsetting her, Anna was awarded her Matura diploma that marked the end of her Lyceum education. In the next few years, Anna’s brothers and sisters married and began new family lives of their own and her father fell into a morose state that he attributed to “a tragedy of ingratitude” (Young-​ Bruehl, 2008, p. 63), occasioned by the betrayal of his intended psychoanalytic heir Carl Jung and other former members of his inner psychoanalytic circle and by the departure of his older children. Within a household reduced to just Freud, Martha, Minna, and herself, Anna had relatively unlimited access to her father and his ideas—​a privileged position that afforded perspectives and possibilities that transformed her into the undisputed heir to her father’s great cause. In June 1914, Anna Freud passed an examination that was a prerequisite to entering an apprenticeship in elementary school teaching. For the next six years, she worked during the school year as a teaching apprentice and certified teacher. Dr. Salka Goldman, who supervised her work as a teacher, promoted her to head teacher of the second grade, and gave her a regular teaching contract. She was impressed by Anna’s conscientiousness and abilities as a teacher, so much so that she also employed her as her assistant, inducting her into what would prove to be a lifetime of administrative positions. While preparing for her apprenticeship examination, Anna spent a summer in southeastern England, chaperoned by Loe Kann, a former patient of her father. “Loe was the first of a number of attractive, childless older women by whom Anna Freud was adopted and who shared generously with her their worldly wisdom and sophistication” (Young-​Bruehl, 2008, p. 68). During this time, Anna also became further absorbed in psychoanalysis, translating articles in European psychoanalytic journals into English and exchanging correspondence concerning psychoanalytic concepts and the contents of her dreams. “In her fantasy life and in her dreams, Anna Freud often identified with male story characters. … But she was, at the same time, very self-​conscious about not being

104  Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud feminine or femininely attractive enough” (Young-​Bruehl, 2008, p. 75), despite having several male suitors at this time. As the Great War in Europe that had begun in 1913 gathered its terrible momentum, the Freuds were increasingly restricted to their Vienna home. Before the war ended in 1918, they had endured wartime winters with little fuel and Freud himself had been forced to barter the writing of a popular article for a sack of potatoes. In addition to her regular teaching and administration, Anna began to tutor students outside of school hours in exchange for food or cash. Near the end of the war, Anna contracted tuberculosis, with an aftermath of coughs and backaches that continued into the early 1920s. Then, in January of 1920, Sophie, the sister whom Anna had both envied and loved, died from the postwar influenza that had spread throughout Europe. Both Anna and her father buried their sorrow and grief in work. Anna’s study of psychoanalysis now included being analyzed by her father as part of her psychoanalytic training. Her joint positioning as an elementary school teacher and psychoanalyst-​in-​training presaged her future work in adapting psychoanalysis for children and becoming an internationally recognized child psychologist and advocate. While all of this was going on, Anna’s ambivalent attitudes toward her mother (which sometimes verged on dislike of her comportment if not her person) and her adoration of her father were becoming manifest in her identification with masculine positionings and perspectives in her reading and dreams. Anna’s psychoanalysis with her father began just before the end of the First World War. With his psychoanalytic practice limited during the fighting, he was able to devote an hour a day for six days a week to Anna’s analysis. After the war ended and his normal practice resumed, he saw Anna at ten o’clock in the evening after his full schedule of daily appointments. Anna’s analysis continued for four years. With no case notes remaining, what is known about it has been drawn from the correspondence, during and after the analysis, of both participants with friends, family, and colleagues (cf. Gay, 1998, pp. 428–​446). For much of this time, Freud was stricken with the cancer of the mouth and jaw that eventually was formally diagnosed in 1923, following his analysis of Anna. Freud was aware of Anna’s idealization of him. He also was aware that his desire that Anna stay at home to assist and support him and the “two mothers” presented a difficulty that must be confronted by both participants in the analysis. Although Anna had wanted to get a degree in medicine as an initial way of entering a future career in psychoanalysis, Freud did not want her to become a physician. She was one of several adherents whom he directed to careers as lay analysts. It is quite possible that in addition to wanting to protect his daughter against prejudice that might be directed at her as a female physician in training, Freud wanted to ensure her continued presence in his daily life. The unpacking and interpreting of father–​daughter relations was a major part of Anna’s lengthy psychoanalysis with her father, and frequently focused on the contents of her dreams and fantasies, including those interpreted in terms

Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud  105 of imagined incestuous relations between fathers and daughters that included a “masculinity complex,” in which daughters turned away from their incestuous love for their fathers and abandoned their feminine roles. In unraveling such psychodynamics, “Freud did not connect the female patients’ assumption of a masculine role in the fantasies and daydreams with masculinized behavior or homosexuality … he saw it as an escape from sexuality” in which “the girl escapes from the demands of the erotic side of life altogether … without becoming active in a masculine way and is no longer anything but a spectator at the event which has the place of a sexual act” (Young-​Bruehl, 2008, p. 107). Anna Freud later implied that “the spectator who communicates, who writes down what she understands, enjoys a form of pleasure—​ not masturbatory pleasure, not sexual pleasure, but the social pressure of praise” (p. 107). In these terms, Anna judged her psychoanalysis with her father to have been a success in so far as “it allowed her to transform fantasy activity and daydreaming into the social activity of writing,” which she understood as “a study of sublimation and an act of sublimation” (p. 107). During the later parts of her analysis, Anna frequently communicated with her father through letters they exchanged, and she became increasingly active in attending psychoanalytic meetings, translating psychoanalytic articles, and interpreting her own dreams and life. By this time, she had given up her post as a school teacher and was continuing to make herself into a psychoanalyst by taking on child patients, the first of whom were her Sister Sophie’s orphaned nephews. Based on her analyses of the dreams of these and other children, Anna wrote and delivered her first conference paper to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and was admitted to the Society as a full-​fledged member. In 1924, at the invitation of some of Freud’s closest colleagues, she was asked to join the inner circle of psychoanalysts. Freud and Anna now were positioned and recognized by others not only as father and daughter or analyst and analysand, but also as colleagues and members of a growing circle of psychoanalysts, in and beyond Vienna. Anna’s psychoanalysis completed and her career as a psychoanalyst launched, Freud continued to hope that her “comprehensible thirst for friendships with women” be secured to her satisfaction so that “she would soon find good reason to exchange her attachment to her old father for a more durable one. … Anna is a success in every respect except that she has not had the good luck to meet a man fit for her” (Gay, 1998, p. 437). Freud worried as Anna turned 30 that she “does not seem inclined to get married and who can say if her momentary interests will render her happy in years to come when she has to face life without her father”? And yet, despite “massive evidence across the years that his daughter’s tender, wholly unclouded association with him might well cripple her ability to find a suitable husband,” and “though he was a consummate student of family politics, he failed to appreciate fully how much he contributed to his daughter’s reluctance to marry.” “If Freud had fully recognized the measure of his power

106  Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud over his daughter, he might have hesitated to psychoanalyze her” (Gay, 1998, pp. 438–​439). Indeed, Freud’s multi-​positioning of Anna not only as daughter, analysand, and colleague, but also as companion, assistant, and nurse was becoming an increasingly difficult burden for her to manage. Nonetheless, given the unconditional affection and respect they bore each other, continue it did—​the cost being the likely loss of relationships and positions incompatible with those already undertaken. It is difficult to imagine Anna at this point in her life entering into long-​term and demanding relationships with others that would contest the many connections she now bore to her father. For better and worse, Anna and her father would remain emotionally and intellectually reliant on each other for the rest of her father’s life. Just as Antigone, first amongst the children of Oedipus, took the hand of her ailing and blinded father, Anna Freud would stand faithfully by her cancer-​afflicted father as unfailingly supportive colleague, protector, and nurse. Throughout his long illness and many operations, she “became his most precious claim on life, his ally against death” (Gay, 1998, p. 442)—​both his physical death and the death of his great cause, psychoanalysis. She typed his letters, read and defended his papers and views at meetings and on other occasions when he was unable to do so, and attended to his most intimate needs such as inserting and removing his facial prosthesis. Through all of this, the daughter became indispensable to the father, while he continued to be uniquely invaluable to her. Yet, even as she nursed and cared for her father and psychoanalysis, Anna’s accomplishments and status as a child psychoanalyst continued to grow and she was able to find her future life partner and form a mutually supportive relationship that would endure for many years after her father’s death. Dorothy and Anna Together Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and her four children arrived in Vienna in the autumn of 1925. Once in Vienna, Dorothy entered into psychoanalysis with Theodor Reik at the suggestion of Anna Freud, who also had agreed to act as a psychoanalyst for Dorothy’s children. Dorothy was concerned that her children, especially her oldest child Bob, had been adversely affected by their father’s manic-​depressive syndrome that necessitated several stints in American psychiatric institutions. According to her grandson Michael John Burlingham, in coming to Vienna, “Dorothy was abandoning a man [her husband Robert Burlingham] in desperate need of her support, while, for herself and the children, all that loomed ahead was uncertainty” (M. J. Burlingham, 1989, pp. 147–​148). Robert was left to struggle with his difficulties in the care of his father Charles Culp Burlingham, with whom, by fleeing America for Vienna, Dorothy was initiating a prolonged struggle for access to and control of her children and his grandchildren. In Anna Freud, Dorothy was to find a much-​needed confidante

Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud  107 and supporter able to help her to reposition herself and her children in what she believed would be healthier and better familial, educative, and personal circumstances. As her interactions with Dorothy and her work with the Burlingham children increased in frequency and intimacy, Anna found in these personal and professional relationships an antidote to what, despite her enduring love for her father, she had begun to experience as “her need for something for herself” (Young-​ Bruehl, 2008, p. 133). As she confessed to Max Eitingon, Anna’s favorite of her father’s colleagues, “Being together with Mrs. Burlingham is a great joy to me” (Young-​Bruehl, 2008, p. 134). Like Anna, Dorothy Burlingham was a youngest child. But unlike Anna, she had a very tense and difficult relationship with her father. Nonetheless, both she and Anna had experienced a sense of themselves as youngest children of being unwanted by their older siblings. When Anna helped Dorothy get settled into an apartment one floor above that of the Freuds at 19 Berggasse in Vienna, she told Eitingon that she was struggling with a conflict between her role as a psychoanalyst for the Burlingham children and her growing affection for Dorothy. In this initial stage of their relationship: Anna Freud could oversee and altruistically support Dorothy’s interest in men, as long as these remained Platonic and did not threaten their friendship. But she seems also to have found in her friend a version of the youngest child in need of a perfect father and angry toward a distracted, overburdened mother that she knew in herself. They mirrored each other. (Young-​Bruehl, 2008, pp. 137–​138) Indeed, years later, as their relationship developed, Dorothy and Anna came to see “twins for each other in their ideal friendship” (Young-​Bruehl, 2008, p. 139). Dorothy and her children lived in such close proximity to the Freuds that they effectively became part of the Freud family, allowing Anna and Dorothy to position themselves almost as sisters. As Freud noted in a letter to Ludwig Binswanger (in January of 1929): “Our symbiosis with an American family (husbandless), whose children my daughter is bringing up analytically with a strong hand, is growing continually stronger” (quoted in Peters, 1985, pp. 119–​120). Even as Anna became entrenched in her roles as her father’s care giver, protector, and promoter of his work and legacy, her life with Dorothy and her children provided avenues for the development of her own contributions to the psychoanalytic movement in both its practice and its politics. Anna’s extensions of her father’s work took the form of developing a psychoanalytic practice and theory of child analysis, which incorporated her belief that children in psychoanalysis required a psychoanalytically based school experience. To meet the educational needs of Dorothy’s children, Anna and Dorothy, with their friend

108  Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud Eva Rosenfeld, opened a school that was housed in Eva’s large home and garden, located in Vienna’s 13th District of Hietzing. The children who attended what became known as the Hietzing School, which opened on October 2, 1927, included Dorothy’s children and a number of others (aged seven to thirteen) who were in analysis themselves or had parents in analysis. Erik Homburger Erikson and Peter Blos were the main teachers and employed methods broadly consistent with Anna’s theory and practice with children, mixed with those of the American educational philosopher John Dewey. Instruction tended to be cross-​disciplinary and child-​centered using Dewey’s project method and drawing from Blos’s and Erikson’s humanistic and psychoanalytic leanings. However, both young men were inexperienced and later were rebuked by both Anna and Dorothy for allowing too much student freedom and too little discipline. This disenchantment was heightened when Dorothy’s older children (Bob and Mabbie) experienced difficulty in adapting to further education in American universities. Dorothy, who by that time had become a child psychoanalyst devoted to the theories and practices of Anna and her father, “characterized the school as a ‘mistake’ because of its protective milieu, which had not prepared her children for the rough-​and-​tumble of the outside world” (Friedman, 1999, p. 65). But all of this was in the future. In 1931, August Aichhorn took over from Peter Blos as principal of the Hietzing School, remaining in that position until the school closed in 1933. That Blos and Erikson were given control over the day-​to-​day running of the school reflected Anna’s attainment of a newly liberating sense of balance between her work and her personal life. Her strong attachments to her father and his cause would remain, but Dorothy’s friendship and unconditional acceptance offered Anna the support and love she required to explore other horizons. In 1930, Dorothy and Anna solidified Anna’s more balanced positioning with respect to her work and personal life by buying Hochroterd, a six-​acre farm forty-​five minutes from Bergasse by car. Here, they could be together and away from the school and their other commitments. Such physical repositioning allowed them to begin a pattern of position exchange in the sharing of everyday tasks, and in listening to each other speak about perspectives and possibilities for their future lives together. In Anna’s own words, “I like it about farm life that it brings down to a simple formula even psychic things” (quoted in M. J. Burlingham, 1989, p. 217). At their farm, their usual professional activities were transformed into those of “planting, harvesting, weaving, preserving, canning, milking: fruitful years in more ways than one” (p. 217). Dorothy’s effect on Anna was remarked by many of Anna’s family and acquaintances who noticed a new ease, authority, and maturity in her interactions with them. Of course, some of these acquaintances also began to speculate on the nature of her and Dorothy’s relationship, gossip that Anna ignored but did not welcome. For Dorothy, involvement in establishing and running the Hietzing School was a welcome relief from her familial concerns—​one that she could pursue

Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud  109 while simultaneously being directly involved with her children’s education and development. Her move to Vienna had occurred seven years after the end of World War I, when the Austro-​Hungarian monarchy was replaced briefly by the rise of a modern Vienna in which progressive social movements seemed possible before the dark clouds of authoritarianism gathered during the mid-​1930s. The Hietzing School was part of this progressive interlude and for Dorothy represented a movement away from the constantly self-​striving individualism, chauvinism, and narcissism that had defined so much of her earlier life and familial experience. This sweep of progressivism would influence both Dorothy and Anna for the rest of their lives. With new actualities and possibilities in her personal life, Anna’s main preoccupation (one accepted and shared by Dorothy) was her worry about her father’s failing health as he underwent one operation after another in an attempt to combat his cancer, only to have it spread and his suffering increase. Dorothy fitted seamlessly into the position of family friend in a way that was accepted by Freud almost as that of another daughter devoted to him and his cause of psychoanalysis. In the position of close family friend, Dorothy helped Anna juggle her multiple familial and professional positions, giving her time and space to initiate her own contributions to psychoanalysis and child development. In 1936, Anna presented her father, on his eightieth birthday, with a first edition of what would be her most influential work as his intellectual heir—​The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (A. Freud, 1993. Although delighted by his daughter’s gift and the accomplishments it contained, by this time Freud’s physical pain had become joined with stressful concern for his family and community. In January 1938, his cancer returned with a vengeance just as Austria was facing imminent takeover by Hitler’s Nazi Germany. After Vienna was occupied on March 12, Berggase 19 was visited by Nazi sympathizers who relieved the elderly Freuds of a large amount of money in return for their temporary safety. Then, Anna Freud was taken from the family home for interrogation on March 22 but subsequently, after extensive questioning about the International Psychoanalytic Association’s activities, returned later that same day. The Freuds finally decided to accept the urgings and offers of close friends to help them leave Austria for England. With the help of Marie Bonaparte, Ernest Jones, and others, Anna and Dorothy arranged for the elderly Freuds to emigrate to London on June 4, 1938. For Dorothy and Anna, the events of 1938 did much to reaffirm their need for each other and their understanding of just how much Anna meant to her father. When Anna had been taken by the Gestapo, Dorothy later was to say, “I’ll never forget … he was so dreadfully worried—​the only time I ever saw him like that—​ I realized then fully what you meant to him” (Young-​Bruehl, 2008, p. 227). The next nine years, beginning with Anna’s immigration to England with her dying father and culminating in her and Dorothy’s establishment of the Hampstead

110  Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud Child Therapy Course and Clinic in London in 1947, were the most hectic, challenging, and pivotal years of her life and work. In The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, Anna drew upon her experiences and observations as an elementary school teacher, her interactions with her father and many members of the international psychoanalytic community, and her work as a child and adolescent analyst to explain how we consciously and unconsciously avert and cope with painful experiences. Much of this book is devoted to clarifying and extending her father’s work, but it also contains many original contributions to psychoanalytic theory and practice, which reflect Anna’s enhanced understanding of herself and her increased sense of herself as an active agent in her own life and work. A particularly illuminating example of this significant social and psychological repositioning appears toward the end of Chapter 10, “A Form of Altruism,” in which she describes a kind of strength that can derive from a particular form of the defense mechanism of projection capable of warding off the fear of death: Anyone who has very largely projected instinctual impulses onto other people knows nothing of this fear. In the moment of danger his ego is not really concerned with his own life. He experiences instead excessive concern and anxiety for the lives of his love objects … whose safety is so vital to him. … When his impulses have been surrendered in favor of other people, their lives become precious rather than his own. (A. Freud, 1993, pp. 133–​134) In writing these words, “Anna Freud gave her most succinct description of her type of strength” (Young-​Bruehl, 2008, p. 233). During the Freuds’ escape from Vienna to London, Anna was a pillar of strength as she devoted herself to her family, friends, and colleagues, but especially to the care of her father. Constantly being available to secure as much comfort as possible for him meant awaking several times at night to medicate and tend to him in his severe suffering, even as she helped assist Dorothy and other friends and family members to settle into their new surroundings. Fortunately, Anna’s brother Ernst, who earlier had moved with his family to England, was able to assist her with the purchase of a “house at 20 Maresfield Gardens, located in the genteel residential district of Hampstead, near the northern limits of London,” which “was thenceforth destined to assume the role of the house at 19 Berggasse” (Peters, 1985, p. 152). By February 1939, Freud’s cancer had been declared inoperable. While German bombs fell, Londoners began to evacuate their children and spouses to the countryside and away from England altogether. Dorothy left London to escort her daughter Katrina (Tinky) to safety in New York, where her other daughter Mabbie was expecting her first child. They arrived in America to find the Burlingham family still grieving the death of Dorothy’s husband Robert,

Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud  111 who had committed suicide in 1938, a death about which Dorothy experienced considerable guilt. Only Anna’s affection for her, communicated across the Atlantic in their letters, blunted Dorothy’s guilt, making bearable subtle and not so subtle recriminations directed at her by some of the Burlinghams. In London, Anna kept her vigil at her father’s bedside and eagerly read Dorothy’s reassuring missives: “I keep imagining you, your life and your difficulties and problems—​I am really with you most of the time” (Young-​Bruehl, 2008, p. 238). As usual, the “twins” proved adept at moving effortlessly between positions of protector and protected. Finally on September 21, Freud asked his physician Max Schur to administer morphine to relieve his pain, to which Anna reluctantly agreed. Sigmund Feud passed away during the night of September 23, 1939. Dorothy finally was able to return to London on April 10, 1940. While in America, she had informed members of the American Foster Parents’ Plan for War Children about Anna Freud’s efforts to help children whose homes and families had been lost during the war. Now that organization agreed to become the chief funding agency for Dorothy’s and Anna’s Hampstead War Nursery. Their first project in October 1940 was a temporary shelter for some of these children. This was followed in January 1941 by the opening of the Children’s Rest Center, which quickly expanded to include services for babies and adolescents. In addition to their work with children and families, Anna and Dorothy offered training in childcare and psychoanalytic theory and methods to Nursery staff. Soon the training was sufficiently popular that potential workers had to be placed on a waiting list and many worked without wages when Nursery finances became stretched. Anna continually made efforts to find more permanent placements for many Nursery workers in guidance centers and hospitals in the U.S. and Britain. A majority of Nursery children eventually were returned to their parents and Anna corresponded with them, often with small gifts attached, for many years afterwards. Throughout the war years and their aftermath, Anna and Dorothy maintained frantic schedules in the service of others while they themselves struggled with recurrent health problems—​Dorothy’s tuberculosis and Anna’s recurrent pneumonia. The former was alleviated to a considerable extent by new drugs that became available in the mid-​1950s; the latter eventually became less severe but still resulted in attacks of bronchitis most winters. For Anna, the post-​war years of the late 1940s were also painful on an emotional level as she learned more about the fates of family members and friends from Vienna and elsewhere in Europe. The 1950s saw Dorothy and Anna splitting their personal lives between Hampstead and their cottage in Walberswick, where they often were joined by friends and one or more of Dorothy’s children. Like their lost farm at Hoschroterd near Vienna, Walberswick, on England’s Suffolk Coast, provided a sanctuary where the two women could balance work with relaxation, public with

112  Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud private life, and indulge their penchants for play and escape. At Walberswick, Dorothy dabbled in painting watercolors and Anna delighted in riding horses on the beach. With the death of her mother, whom Anna had helped care for, in November 1951, Anna and Dorothy were finally together with little interruption and free to pour their energies into their most cherished projects—​their Hampstead Nursery and the new training program in psychoanalysis and child development being offered through their Hampstead Course and Clinic. As the Clinic grew, so too did its output of papers and books that were eagerly consumed by European and American readers. The Clinic, like Anna and Dorothy, was “modest in appearance and style, but ambitious in function.” In Anna’s words, “I am very careful and even restrictive where the use of money is concerned [even though] I am an adventurer, always branching out in more directions” (Young-​Bruehl, 2008, p. 339). By the mid-​1950s, with the accumulated insights from almost a decade of work with Dorothy at the Hampstead Nursery and Clinic, Anna was ready to take on a major new writing project: Normality and Pathology in Childhood. The writing of this book was to occupy her for the next decade. On May 6, 1956, Anna presided over celebrations marking the centenary of her father’s birth, which she handled with sensitivity, dexterity, and seemingly inexhaustible energy. Now the doyenne of both psychoanalysis and the multigenerational Freud family, Anna directed arrangements that included large celebratory conferences in both Europe and America. In the decade after the Centenary, Anna and Dorothy kept a hectic schedule of work and travel that they realized they could not maintain much longer, given their advancing age and the magnitude of the work in which they were now engaged. This realization brought questions about the future leadership of their Clinic, and the psychoanalytic movement more generally (especially the future of child psychoanalysis), to the forefront of their concerns. As Anna turned sixty-​five, unlike her father’s passing of the baton to her, there was no young Anna Freud waiting in the wings. When Normality and Pathology in Childhood (A. Freud, 1989) finally appeared in 1965, it marked not only Anna’s continued promotion of her father’s work, but also her further emergence as an original theoretical and practitioner voice in psychoanalysis. “To her father’s method of working from explorations of psychopathology to conclusions about normality, she added one for working from a complex description of normal development to assessments of psychopathology and techniques for treatment” (Young-​Bruehl, 2008, p. 361). She insisted that children are in an ongoing developmental process. Thus, great care must be taken not to pathologize them, as many potential symptoms will prove to be transitory. Anna suggested that her father’s traditional methods should not be applied without careful consideration and necessary alteration to children. With Dorothy’s support and encouragement, Anna was increasingly stepping out from her father’s enormous shadow to embrace and champion her own contributions to the psychoanalytic world.

Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud  113 The following years saw the deaths of many of those family members and colleagues within the psychoanalytic community with whom Anna had spent so many wonderful moments during her long life. Three particularly poignant deaths were those of Dorothy’s daughter Mabbie, a favorite of both women, from an overdose of sleeping pills, Anna’s dear brother Ernst, while Anna was lecturing and fundraising in America, and her older sister Mathilde, who perished in terrible pain after a failed operation. In her mid-​seventies, Anna’s conversations and correspondence were increasingly sprinkled with reflections on illness and death. Remarking on a statue of her father that had been placed in a park close to her Hampstead Clinic, Anna called it “a presence and image of him of greater permanency than either nature or fate can bestow on human beings” (Young-​Bruehl, 2008, pp. 402–​403). As Anna’s and Dorothy’s thoughts turned to plans for Hampstead after they were gone, Anna continued to urge the psychoanalytic community to pay greater attention to what she referred to as one of the great unknowns of psychoanalysis—​normal development, especially concerning the ways in which adults’ and children’s perspectives and experiences differed and the implications of such differences for families and societies, particularly in the emerging field of child and family law. In her final years, in collaboration with Albert Solnit and Joseph Goldstein, Anna wrote three joint volumes about family law that were to have a long-​lasting impact on American, and to a lesser extent British, law and social services, work which gave her tremendous pleasure. In her old age and despite her many painful losses, Anna’s super conscientiousness and some of her occasional public stiffness gave way to more frequent displays of ironic humor of the sort enjoyed and displayed so much by her father. In their country house in Ireland, she and Dorothy founded what they called the County Cork Psychoanalytic Society, which they described as a brilliant scientific initiative with two permanent members. Their more relaxed schedule, as successors took over more of the work and responsibilities of their professional lives, also made possible new habits such as Anna’s detective story addiction that had Dorothy supplying her with stacks of second-​hand thrillers. But old age continued its relentless march. By this time, Anna had borne a chronic iron deficiency anemia for several years that sapped her endurance and necessitated blood transfusions administered during hospital stays, a regimen that reminded her of the years during which she cared for her father as his cancer advanced. Then on November 19 of 1979, after a year suffering a variety of illnesses and not being able to journey to Ireland for their annual vacation month, Dorothy died, leaving Anna numb with bereavement. Once again drawing parallels with the death of her father, Anna used similar words to express her devastation: “Perhaps one should also say that it is a boon to be quite oneself until the very end … But it is not so easy to be grateful to fate when one really feels the opposite” (Young-​Bruehl, 2008, p. 443). Following the November of 1981, a month that Anna dreaded since Dorothy’s death, she felt surprisingly well after

114  Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud another of her blood transfusions. But on March 1, 1982, Anna suffered a stroke, which she accepted as finally giving her permission to dispense with the banes of the professional sides of her life. After that, even her humor turned inward. When her hands could no longer knit, she scolded and analyzed them as angry because she had controlled such indications of the state of her being for so long. Anna Freud spent several months in hospital before dying on October 9, 1982, declaiming like her father that “I cannot stand it anymore” (Young-​Bruehl, 2008, p. 452) and then passing away in a restless sleep. A Dual Life Positioning Storyline Although Dorothy and Anna reacted very differently to their domineering fathers, both grew up in homes rife with chauvinism and patriarchal authority, if not outright male narcissism, and both were directly affected by being positioned by their cultures and fathers in ways that limited their educational and professional opportunities because they were female. Yet, both women eventually found ways to position themselves in professional, creative, and altruistic ways in the service of children—​each of them “shared an intellectual, and certainly deeply personal, fascination with the meaning and effects of childhood attachment, [although] each woman would write about it in her own way” (Danto, 2019, p. 11). Professionally, each of them positioned herself at the nexus of psychoanalysis, education, and child development, a positioning within which Anna was able to develop her ground-​breaking work on defense mechanisms and child psychoanalysis, while Dorothy contributed important practices and writings concerning disadvantaged, traumatized, and blind children. Both, despite their privileged backgrounds, developed a strong sense of social justice that emphasized the rights of all children to be respected and assisted through education and social participation. “Anna Freud and Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, separately and together, dispelled outmoded narratives of childhood and empowered educators to do the same” (p. 12). Esther Menaker (2001) has taken a particularly critical perspective on Sigmund Freud’s positioning of Anna as his analysand: “As a young person needing … to develop a life of her own, and to become an independent, free-​ thinking self, she was entrapped in the web of her father’s grandiosity, of his narcissistic need and of his power and distrust of colleagues” (Menaker, 2001, p. 92). Menaker also claims that in his analysis of his daughter Freud placed blame on Anna for refusing to pursue her own independence as a “free-​thinking self,” while failing to see that “his role in her dependency was as important as hers” (p. 93). In this context, Menaker positions Dorothy Burlingham as Anna’s savior in helping her to find “an expressive, creative niche for her life” (p. 94), a possibility that otherwise might not have materialized despite her undoubted love for her father and his for her.

Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud  115 Grete Bibring, a female psychoanalyst who had been part of Freud’s circle and who knew Anna and followed her life and career, also positions Dorothy as essential to Anna’s development as an independent, creative agent: To call their relationship complex is to underline the obvious … I don’t think, however, that it takes a psychiatric wizard to figure out that Anna Freud found it much easier and more appealing to get close emotionally to women than men, and that her initially professional relationship with Mrs. Burlingham and her children became familial in nature … the two women were also colleagues and collaborators; they worked together, pursued research projects jointly, co-​authored articles. … [Anna] was no “old maid” left to wither because she was victimized by a neurosis. She found love in her life. That she was unconventional, that she did not marry or become a mother—​that is true. … What are we to do with all of this—​maybe just accept it, appreciate it for what it was: an unusual “moment” between two unusual people—​and plenty of good came out of it. (Quoted in Coles, 1992, pp. 11–​12) With Dorothy, Anna’s life positioning was primarily as an active agent with her own loves and purposes, professional and personal. Perhaps it took her father’s death for her to transition from her position as the great Freud’s daughter and all that such a positioning entailed, but eventually Anna was up to the task. By repositioning herself in life and work through perspectives and possibilities that emerged in her relationship with Dorothy, Anna was able to go beyond promotion of her father’s work and cause to make original contributions to psychoanalysis and child development. Her insistence that young children are unable to benefit from adult forms and techniques of Freudian psychoanalysis and her development of methods more appropriate to their age and experience are testimony to her development as an active intellectual agent. Bibring surely is correct that “plenty of good” came from the intimate friendship of Dorothy and Anna. In his fascinating biography of his grandmother Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, Michael John Burlingham (1989) reports a moving vignette told by psychoanalyst Susan Vas Dias about encountering his grandmother and Anna Freud toward the end of their lives, while driving through the Irish countryside close to the old women’s cottage retreat. Stopping to enjoy a particularly pleasant view: Mrs. Burlingham and Miss Freud stood next to their white Mini, which was stopped almost in the centre of the road. I was concerned that they might have run into difficulty, pulled over and asked if they needed any help. Miss Freud smiled and said, No thank you. We’re just two old ladies who both

116  Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud want to see. We take turns, one drives, one sees. This is our changeover point. Beautiful, isn’t it? I agreed, and feeling almost an intruder, said good-​bye and left them standing together in the stillness. (p. 313) The metaphorical stillness that Vas Dias observed on this occasion was a life-​ time achievement for Anna and Dorothy—​one marked by their positioning of themselves and each other as altruistically attuned to each other’s personal development and needs. Unfortunately, their love for each other and psychoanalysis sometimes verged on a shared and restrictive view of what was good for others whom they also loved dearly. Perhaps most dramatic, were the consequences of their strongly shared perspectives and projects concerning psychological health and wellbeing for Dorothy’s children and other members of her Burlingham family. In his biography of his grandmother, Michael John Burlingham acknowledges that “the life that Dorothy and Anna shared together made [for them] everything else acceptable” (1989, p. 313). But their life together also had many negative consequences for others, perhaps most notably Dorothy’s daughter Mabbie, who, while staying with Anna and Dorothy at 20 Maresfield Gardens in the winter of 1974, took an overdose of sleeping pills that ended her own life. In recalling this tragic event, Michael Burlingham writes: At 20 Maresfield Gardens nothing and no one was more important than psychoanalysis. … Mabbie was adored, but helped only insofar as she fit Anna Freud’s temporal, spatial, and ideological schedule. That had of course always been the case. Anna Freud was a busy woman with an enormous burden of responsibility. In retrospect, what should have been handled differently was Mabbie’s analysis. Anna Freud should not have been the one analyzing Mabbie, or Bob, or possibly any of Dorothy’s children. (p. 305) The deaths of Mabbie and her older brother Bob (who lived a troubled life and perished in 1970 from an asthma-​induced heart attack) severely strained Dorothy’s relationships with some of her grandchildren in the last decade of her life. … what remained was a nagging image: that instead of, or perhaps in addition to, having received a golden key, Bob and Mabbie had been loaded with an enormously heavy cross, and bear it they did, to the very alter of psychoanalysis. There remains the ironic conclusion that psychanalysis had been foisted upon them unnecessarily, and when dependent upon it, had not helped them. (M. J. Burlingham, 1989, p. 311)

Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud  117 Yet Anna remained forever in Dorothy’s deepest admiration and affection: She [Anna] loves to give pleasure … She is an amazing person [with] a talent like her father’s to see things clearly, to see further than others, and to follow what she believes in without reservations. She loves to fulfill needs. She can enjoy so much too, beauty of the intellect as well as the soul. I have been so lucky. (Dorothy Burlingham as quoted in M. J. Burlingham, 1989, p. 312) But, any sense that Dorothy was unconsciously controlled or manipulated by Anna for ends of her own is dispelled by a positioning style of analysis that Michael Burlingham (1989) supplies earlier in his biography of his grandmother. After the war, Dorothy and Anna each seemed to adopt something of the other’s former identity. The protector and protected exchanged roles, the pressures of duty and fame driving Anna Freud crablike into a shell, and Dorothy emerging from hers. … There was great mutual concern for each other, each knew exactly what each wanted and needed. (p. 292) And yet: Anna Freud’s directorial style was no doubt part of her attraction to Dorothy. And whether by reason of sheer force of personality, coincidence with Dorothy’s maternal image, or both, that attraction was fierce. … Dorothy was … sensitive to her surroundings, but for her Anna’s magnetism conquered all. (pp. 292–​293) In 1991, two years after publishing his biography of his grandmother, Michael John Burlingham wrote a brief article in which he took “the opportunity of reviewing my [previous] thinking on the subject of Dorothy Burlingham’s relationship with Anna Freud” (p. 612). In this informative piece, he considers the inevitable oppositional tendencies between the life positions of altruism and self-​interest in terms of Anna Freud’s theorizing about the defense mechanism of altruistic surrender. He then proceeds to revisit his thinking about Dorothy and Anna by considering Anna’s positioning by both herself and Dorothy as an “analytic stepparent” of Dorothy’s children. “The young Burlinghams … were the closest she [Anna] came to having children of her own” (p. 616). Like any parents, Anna and Dorothy were far from perfect. Yet the two women who had become as entwined with each other as some of the twins that Dorothy studied in her own psychoanalytic research and writing, “remained to the end vital, active, and the closest of friends, making the best of circumstances

118  Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud and contributing to society and to their own happiness” (p. 617). In their commitments to psychoanalysis and to each other, “Theirs was an unshakable, seemingly impenetrable faith, at times infuriating but ultimately admirable. In a world of half-​measures and relative standards, their belief in the application of reason to irrationality was absolute” (p. 617). Throughout their lives together, they oscillated between protecting each other and being protected by each other, an ongoing position exchange capable of bridging altruism and self-​interest, at least for the two of them—​a kind of frequent repetition that psychobiographer Irving Alexander (1990) recognized as of primary importance and usefulness to the life writer. Reflecting on what I have written in this chapter, I think it extremely important to recognize that the various positionings, position exchanges, and repositionings I have noted in the lives of Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud would not have been available for most women during the twentieth century. Because of their familial wealth and social standing, both women (despite growing up in male-​dominated households and communities) had recourse to progressive social and political ideas and movements that typified some corners of upper class American and Viennese society and culture during the early and later parts of the twentieth century. These included reformist interludes in anthropology, art and literature, and health sciences that challenged the dominant nationalism and moral, cultural absolutism that had dominated America and Europe in the late 1800s and would reassert themselves with such terrible consequences in the 1930s and 1940s. Dorothy’s de Forest relatives and Anna’s psychoanalytic acquaintances embraced wide-​ranging and progressive sociocultural and intellectual practices and ideas that crossed many extant cultures and orthodoxies. Consequently, both women were immersed and participated within life contexts that afforded them unusual avenues and possibilities for creative life positioning and development. That they both directed their advantages and creativity to the service of children and families suffering traumas and disabilities is testimony to their shared commitments to improving the lives and wellbeing of a wide variety of less fortunate and more vulnerable others. Having read, researched, and written several dual life positioning studies, I find the study of the life positionings in the relationship between Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud to be as clear and compelling an example of symmetrical interpersonal positioning as I have come across. As described by Michael John Burlingham in his biography of his grandmother, the two women were twin-​like in their ability to read and react to each other’s positions and perspectives in ways that opened up, clarified, and advanced positive and fruitful life possibilities for each of them. Theirs was an intellectual and interpersonal intimacy that freed and allowed their individual and conjoint agency to flower. The fact that most of their joint activities served progressive and altruistic ends speaks to the moral as well as the functional consequences of their partnership. Of course, it is not difficult to argue (with some justification) that their mutual

Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud  119 positioning with and of each other sometimes worked to the potential or actual disadvantage of others, including Dorothy’s children. Certainly, Robert’s family suffered greatly from the frequent and extended absence of his and Dorothy’s children in their lives. Although Anna’s treatment of colleagues who strongly disagreed with some of her psychoanalytic arguments and practices was not as wildly dismissive as her father’s treatment of those whom he felt had betrayed him, she could be, and often was, unflinching in advancing her own professional and intellectual directions. In preparing this life positioning study of Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud, I have experienced considerable hesitation concerning my ability to understand and present some of the wider context (i.e., the complex sociocultural surrounds) of their relationship. This challenge is one of experiencing concern in the face of difference that manifests in uncertainty about speaking across differences in time, context, relationship, and life experience. In an attempt to temper such uncertainty, I have tried to include, as I have done in the other case studies in this book, quotations from others who knew, interacted with, and wrote about Dorothy and Anna. In this sense, any life study is necessarily parasitic on other life writings that the psychobiographer can access and use to complete the psychobiographical study. In the case of sociocultural psychobiography, this task is especially demanding, given the necessary inclusion of important situational details in a chapter of limited space and size. I hope what I have said here helps readers to understand how the mostly symmetrical life positioning relationship between Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud developed, and how it enabled the exercise of the conjoint agency so clearly evident within the life projects they pursued together. By focusing primarily on their mutual life positioning of and with each other, I hope to have avoided some of what I regard as the perils of mentalistic explanations that privilege purported interior structures and processes as likely causes for actions and interactions to be explained. This is not to deny the reality and sometimes the importance of such mentalistic postulations, but hopefully to ensure that they do not masquerade as explanations when they are in fact part of what needs to be explained to avoid circularity and pseudo causal assertions. I will have more to say about these matters in the concluding chapter of this book. References Alexander, I. (1990). Personology: Method and content in. personality assessment and psychobiography. Duke University Press. Burlingham, M. J. (1989). The last Tiffany: A biography of Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham. Atheneum. Burlingham, M. J. (1991). The relationship between Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 19, 612–​619. Coles, R. (1992). Anna Freud: The dream of psychoanalysis. Perseus.

120  Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud Danto, E. A. (2019). Introduction: Built by the community of Vienna. In E. A. Danto & A. Steiner-​Strauss (Eds.), Freud/​Tiffany: Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and the ‘best possible school’ (pp. 1–​14). Routledge. Freud, A. (1989). Normality and pathology in childhood. Routledge. (Original published 1965.) Freud, A. (1993). The ego and the mechanisms of defence. Karnac Books. (Original published 1937.) Friedman, L. J. (1999). Identity’s architect: A biography of Erik H. Erikson. Scribner. Gay, P. (1998). Freud: A life for our time. W. W. Norton. Isaacson, K. (2005). Divide and multiply: Comparative theory and methodology in multiple case psychobiography. In W. T. Schultz (Ed.), Handbook of psychobiography (pp. 104–​111). Oxford University Press. Menaker, E. (2001). Anna Freud’s analysis by her father: The assault on the self. Journal of Religion and Health, 40, 89–​95. Peters, U. H. (1985). Anna Freud: A Life dedicated to children. Schocken Books. Werner, P. (2019). Young Dorothy Burlingham. In E. A. Danto & A. Steiner-​Strauss (Eds.), Freud/​Tiffany: Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and the ‘best possible school’ (pp. 148–​164). Routledge. Young-​Bruehl, E. (2008). Anna Freud: A biography (2nd edition). Yale University Press.

6 The Asymmetrical, Manipulative Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner Jack Martin

Author’s Introduction In the immediate aftermath of Jim Thorpe’s outstanding athletic performance at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden, which saw him post dominant gold medal victories in both the men’s pentathlon and decathlon, Thorpe basked in international and national acclaim as the world’s greatest athlete. A year later, Jim was stripped of his medals and his phenomenal accomplishment was significantly tarnished when it was revealed that he had competed as an amateur Olympian when he previously had played semi-​professional baseball in North Carolina. “How did Thorpe go from admired sports hero to vilified sports cheater in such a brief span of time?” The answer to this question that is supplied in this chapter is that Thorpe’s downfall was in large part a consequence of the asymmetrical and manipulative positioning he experienced in his relationship with his famous football and athletics coach Glenn Scobey (“Pop”) Warner. The social, educational setting within which Thorpe and Warner first met and interacted was the United States Indian Industrial School located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. This was an educational and training institution founded on the racist premise that the only way to deal with Indians like Thorpe was to enforce an educational regimen that would “Kill the Indian, [to] save the man”—​the motto of the founder and first superintendent of the Carlisle boarding school, Richard Henry Pratt. This chapter provides a sociocultural psychobiography of the asymmetrical power relationship between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner that contrasts dramatically with the symmetrical relationship between Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud. The sociocultural psychobiography presented in this chapter provides a dramatic example of how interpersonal interactions are grounded in and enact broader sociocultural orientations and contexts. Interpersonal interactions that embody and perpetuate prejudicial practices, positionings, and perspectives limit the life possibilities of some (like Thorpe) by unjustly and inequitably privileging the life practices, positionings, and perspectives of others (like Warner). DOI: 10.4324/9781003461715-6

122  The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner My interest in Jim Thorpe began on Christmas Eve of 1961 when, as an eleven-​year-​old, I opened a gift from a cousin that contained a copy of a children’s book entitled “Champions All the Way” (Meyers, 1960). These turned out to be stories of outstanding men and women in the world of sports, one of which was about Jim Thorpe, “The Greatest of Them All” (pp. 54–​77). I already was a devotee of everything about sports, encouraged by family stories about the athletic prowess of my maternal grandfather, who according to family lore almost qualified for the Canadian Olympic team in 1916, and who often raced horses and early automobiles at small town summer fairs. The fact that Thorpe, in addition to athletics, excelled at sports like football and baseball, which I also played, cemented my enthusiasm. From then on, I was attuned to and delighted to come across anything about Jim Thorpe. When I first wrote about life positioning analysis (Martin, 2013), the example I used to illustrate my text was drawn from the life story of Jim Thorpe. What follows is a more detailed and contextualized account of Thorpe’s interactions with his school and Olympic coach Pop Warner that focuses on their asymmetrical relationship and how it played out in Thorpe’s 1912 Olympic victories and subsequent loss of his cherished Olympic medals. It is a sociocultural psychobiography about two mismatched men and the very different life contexts and circumstances that enabled and constrained their personhood and life experiences. Carlisle: The Sociocultural and Institutional Positioning of Native Americans When the first Europeans arrived in what is now the United States, there were approximately 10 million indigenous people occupying that land mass. By 1900, following the American Indian Wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, their number had been reduced to under 300,000 through intentional acts of violence amounting to genocide, including the purposeful spread of disease, bounties, warfare, massacre, murder, hunger, and mistreatment. As the ever-​ growing white population moved inexorably westward in search of new lands, opportunities, and riches (Stannard, 1992), the life situations of indigenous peoples became increasingly dire. Treaty after treaty was broken and more and more lands were amassed by the newcomers. Indigenous people were forced into government reservations on territory mostly too poor to serve the interests of their usurpers. As the Indian Wars drew to their ignominious ending, US government officials turned to a new policy of attempted assimilation of native peoples through the education of their young in American culture and values. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was opened in 1879 as the first all-​Indian residential school. It was founded and run by Richard Henry Pratt, who had participated as an officer in the wars, but also was a “progressive” reformer who thought he could help his former foes to assimilate and integrate into white American culture and society.

The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner  123 Carlisle eventually was joined by 25 additional non-​reservation boarding schools spread throughout the United States and run by the US Government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. Thousands of indigenous children, many barely into their teens, were transported to these schools, where they acquired new English names, were expected to learn English, and forced to change their appearance and customs to accord with those of mainstream white America. At Carlisle, Pratt’s disciplinary practices were strict and unyielding. Military-​style discipline, comportment, and routine were commonplace at the Carlisle school. Forcing students to wear US military-​style uniforms as they engaged in quasi-​military drills was a constant reminder of the defeat and subjugation of indigenous people and their ways of life. Those who could not adjust eventually were returned to their families, many of whom had thought they were sending their children to a school that would benefit their future wellbeing and who were shocked at their altered appearance and manner. Some indigenous elders and groups initially consented to send their young people to Carlisle and negotiated concessions such as the right to send their leaders to inspect happenings at the school. Others who struggled to recover from the genocidal practices they had experienced and witnessed were more skeptical. Once at Carlisle, students were virtually without any means of interacting with their communities. Indian Agents often did not forward letters, including announcements of children’s deaths. After 1891, with the passing of a “compulsory education” law, US government officials forcibly removed children from homes and reservations for cultural retraining at places like Carlisle. Even then, Pratt succeeded in convincing some native leaders, especially in the western states, to continue to voluntarily send their children to Carlisle, which they often did so that the children could escape the cold and hunger prevalent on the reservations. After five years of attendance, Carlisle granted degrees of graduation to “successful students” in elaborate ceremonies, regularly attended by senators, Indian commissioners, college presidents, and clergy, not to mention the townspeople of Carlisle who had become proud of their contributions to improving the appearance, comportment, and conduct of the graduates. Part of a Carlisle education arranged for students to be placed in a Summer Outing Program where they worked as domestic servants on area farms, for local businesses, and in large corporations like the Ford Motor Company. Typically, limited wages were paid to the students who were required to send letters and some of the money earned to their families. Placements varied considerably, as did those providing them. During the regular school year, great emphasis was placed on athletics programs and teams for as many students as could participate and be accommodated. Carlisle teams were encouraged to excel, and when they did their success brought considerable and mostly favorable attention to the school and its programs. Carlisle also benefitted from an explosion of interest in native culture and art during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Superintendent Pratt

124  The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner ran an active promotional campaign that included a photographic display of his modern school for purposes of publicity and historical record. Graduating students often received mixed welcomes upon returning to their communities, feeling caught between two cultures and not fully accepted by either of them. Many Carlisle graduates and students who served in the US military in World War I felt this cultural tension especially acutely. On the day before Jim Thorpe arrived at Carlisle, a poem written by A. O. Wright, an educator and administrator for the Indian Bureau, appeared in the Carlisle school newspaper, Red Man. In mawkish verse, it summarized Carlisle’s educational philosophy of dissolving indigenous Americans into white society: Soon the last wild Indian pagan Will forsake the tribal rule All the reservations opened All the children in some school; White and Indians then united Made one nation, great and free One alone will be their country One their speech and flag shall be. (as quoted in Maraniss, 2022a, p. 43) The solution to the “Indian Problem” envisioned in Wright’s rhyme reflected a plan pursued by Pratt and his friend Senator Henry Dawes. The Dawes Act of 1887, also known as the General Allotment Act, authorized the President of the United States to break up communally held reservation land into small allotments owned by individual members of reservations. Pratt, Dawes, and their supporters claimed that the combination of individual property ownership and assimilative education was a noble undertaking that eventually would result in the full integration of natives into white American traditions and values. Throughout the Indian Wars, indigenous peoples had been pushed out of their ancestral home areas. Now, their individual land allotments could be sold and bought in the American marketplace like any other goods and services. Carlisle students had supposedly received sufficient education so that they could live comfortably and manage their lives productively within this marketplace economy. In fact, “Carlisle was neither a high school nor a college. It was an industrial school that offered academic courses, but most of all it was a school of assimilation” (Maraniss, 2022a, p. 44). Most Carlisle students were teenagers, although some were as young as seven and others were in their twenties. Students were expected to spend five years in the upper grades of the school to graduate. The primary criterion for graduation was to be sufficiently assimilated to fit into white society. However, most graduates were unable to do so. The reality was that Carlisle graduates were precariously positioned, through their removal from

The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner  125 their communities and their Carlisle education, to struggle to locate themselves in either indigenous communities or white society. A particularly unique aspect of a Carlisle education was a simultaneous immersion in white culture and white mythology concerning native life and customs. With the genocidal Indian Wars concluded, some “military officers turned educators,” like Pratt, had begun to romanticize indigenous Americans as “noble savages,” extolling their valor, honor, and pride, even as they worked daily to erode these same qualities in their students. One offshoot of this exotic positioning of Carlisle students was easily visible in the Carlisle athletics programs. Having convinced himself and Carlisle supporters that he was a “reformer … helping save a race” (Maraniss, 2022a, p. 55), Pratt always was anxious to promote his cause at every opportunity. For him, the idea of a successful Carlisle football program, in which his Indian students (on their way to becoming full members of white society) could demonstrate their natural ferociousness and physical prowess in a violent sport that metaphorically invoked past battles on the Western Plains, was irresistible. To further such aspirations, in 1899 Pratt recruited Pop Warner from Cornell University to coach the newly formed Carlisle Indians football team. While at Cornell, Warner had established a reputation as a strategic wizard of the game. Although Pratt was removed as Superintendent of Carlisle on June 30, 1904, just a few months after Jim Thorpe arrived at the school on February 6th of that same year, Thorpe and Warner were soon to bring Pratt’s promotional anticipations to fruition. Pop Warner Before Carlisle Glenn Scobey “Pop” Warner was the first-​born son of William Warner, a Civil War cavalryman and Adaline Warner, née Scobey, a schoolteacher. Born in the family farmhouse in Western New York on April 5, 1871, Glenn and his family moved to Springville, New York when he was ten. A plump child, Glenn was frequently bullied about his size, until he “discovered that a show of strength and fearlessness sent a message to … would-​be bullies” (Miller, 2015, pp. 5–​ 6). As a young teenager, Warner showed an aptitude for both art (painting in watercolors) and sport (especially baseball). On the baseball diamond, he excelled as a pitcher and catcher and displayed a fierce competitiveness. After Glenn graduated from high school, he moved briefly with his family to a ranch in the Texas town of Iowa Park, before enrolling in Cornell University’s Law School in upper state New York. How Glenn decided to become a Cornell student illustrates the penchant for deception that became a consistent theme in his adult life. Having returned to Springville on a summer vacation in 1892, Glenn decided to play in a series of baseball games with the Springfield team against a team from a much-​hated neighboring town. In celebration of Springfield’s victory, young Warner then gambled away the money that was intended for his return trip to Texas. Without

126  The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner funds, Warner records in his autobiography that he “became depressed and was forced to do some serious thinking” (Warner, 1993, p. 42). He goes on to describe the plan that emerged from his contemplation of his difficulties at that time. “Knowing that my father wanted me to study law, I sent him a letter … explaining that I had decided to pursue a career in law [but] that the expenses to begin law school … were somewhat more than I could raise. Being a good son, I wasted no time in asking him for some help” (p. 42). When his father sent him the money he had requested, Warner congratulated himself on his cunning, saying that his father’s money allowed him “to enroll at the Cornell University Law School soon thereafter,” but “More importantly, it allowed me to escape the embarrassment of having to admit to my parents the fact that I had lost my vacation money while gambling” (p. 42). This would not be the last time that Warner purposefully used deception to get himself out of trouble by repositioning himself from culpable to laudatory at the expense of others. While completing his legal studies at Cornell and subsequently passing the New York State bar examination, Warner became involved in what would become his lifelong passion—​the game of American football. Never having played the game before, Warner (at 6 feet and 215 pounds) proved to be an exceptionally proficient lineman for the Cornell team and was elected team captain for the 1894 season. When the team’s coach left Cornell for several weeks during that season, Warner, as team captain and the oldest player on the squad (thus his nickname, “Pop”), took over the coaching duties as well. For the rest of that season, he applied himself to developing a number of “trick plays” and developing strategies and techniques that would “eventually revolutionize the game of football” (Miller, 2015, p. 18). The following year, after having accepted and begun work with the law firm of Scott & Scott in Buffalo, New York, Pop Warner received an offer from the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanics (now Iowa State University) to coach their football team. Never one to hide his light under a bushel, Warner then initiated a series of deceptions characteristic of his professional and personal life. Encouraged by Iowa State’s offer, he wrote to several other colleges and universities to inquire about opportunities as a football coach at their institutions, eventually receiving yet another coaching offer from the University of Georgia at a better rate of pay than that promised by Iowa State. Pop then informed Iowa State that he already had accepted an offer at the University of Georgia, but that he would be willing to help train and prepare the Iowa State team for their forthcoming season in August. After that, he would head to Georgia for the September start of their football season. Iowa State agreed. With jobs at both Georgia and Iowa State looming, Warner’s short career as a lawyer was coming to an end. Over the next two years, Pop coached successfully at both Iowa State and Georgia, leading Georgia to its first undefeated season. Some of the trick

The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner  127 plays designed and deployed by Warner included previously unknown on-​ side kicks, unusual (and to opponents, befuddling) offensive formations, and “hidden ball” shenanigans for which rules had not been devised to disallow. Suddenly, Pop Warner was the most creative, up-​and-​coming football coach in America. Having strategically, and at times deceptively, positioned himself as a much in demand football guru, another more nostalgic and romantic side of Warner became evident. He decided to return to his alma mater Cornell University as head coach of the team that had introduced him to the game of football when he arrived there as a 21-​year-​old college freshman. Nonetheless, Warner, being Warner, still found time to fit in a summer training stint with Iowa State before the Cornell football program began in earnest in September of 1897. Warner’s first year back at Cornell was only moderately successful. It was the following year that changed his life in a completely unexpected way. When the Carlisle Indians football team rolled into Ithaca, New York to play Cornell on October 6, 1898, Warner had his ironically named Cornell Red Men off to a 5–​0 win–​loss record. But, unbeknownst to Warner, his assistant coach was scheming to replace him as head coach. Although, and perhaps because, Warner was fond of scheming on his own behalf, he was particularly incensed by the machinations of others against him. On gameday, the crowd was overflowing with both numbers and excitement in anticipation of what their Red Men would do to the exotic Carlisle team. Carlisle was capturing nationwide attention for its successful deployment of speed, agility, and deception against the typically much greater size and brawn of its adversaries. As the game unfolded, Warner had trouble keeping his focus on his own team as Carlisle’s athleticism, quickness, and innovative play constantly drew his attention and admiration. Cornell eventually prevailed 23–​6, “but Warner had seen enough of the Indians to know that a team like this could ultimately change the way the game was played. They were the perfect team to run the types of plays Warner had been formulating” (Miller, 2015, p. 32). When the scheming of his assistant coach Tommy Fennell to replace him continued as his second football season back at Cornell ended, Warner wrote to Richard Pratt at Carlisle, expressing interest in coaching the Carlisle football team. In a subsequent face-​to-​face meeting during which Warner met Pratt for the first time, their mutual respect and admiration were immediate. “After hammering out a few details, the two shook hands and the deal was done” (Miller, 2015, p. 34). But it would be a mistake to conclude that Warner, as happy as he was to move on to Carlisle, did not begrudge Fennell’s duplicitous betrayal. Never again would he forego a healthy dose of suspicion in his dealings with both friends and enemies. Indeed, deception and suspicion, along with opportunity and possibility, became foundational perspectives in his future life positioning.

128  The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner Jim Thorpe Before Carlisle Compared to Pop Warner’s rather conventional early years, those of Jim Thorpe were anything but. Both of Jim’s parents were of mixed indigenous and white ancestry and lived in the Indian Territory of central Oklahoma. Jim’s father Hiram Thorp (the “e” was added to the family name at a later date) had five wives, of whom Jim’s mother Charlotte was the third. Hiram and Charlotte had eleven children, only five of whom lived to adulthood. Jim and his twin brother Charles were born on May 22, 1887, in a log house on the Sac and Fox reservation, near the village of Bellemont. Jim’s indigenous name was Wa-​tho-​Huk, which his most recent biographer David Maraniss (2022a) translates as Path Lit by Lightning, a name bestowed by Native American tradition that described the scene outside the Thorp home during the births. Although born in Oklahoma, the Thorp parents and children were not considered to be Americans. Instead, they were designated as wards of the United States government. Jim competed for the American Olympic Team in 1912 as a non-​citizen. He and other indigenous athletes (like all Native Americans) did not become eligible for US citizenship until 1924. Today, many indigenous people assert their allegiance to their own sovereign nations. At Jim’s birth, the Sac and Fox reservation included half a million acres between the Cimarron and North Canadian rivers in central Oklahoma. Two years later, three-​quarters of that land was owned by white Americans, following the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889—​a travesty made possible by the Dawes Act that allowed private ownership and sale of reservation land and the subsequent Indian Appropriations Act of 1889, which allowed white settlement on large swaths of Indian land. Jim’s youth was marked by his positioning within a vulnerable culture and a volatile family, with increasing pressure to conform to the dominant white society and its practices. Like many who are torn between cultures by birth and circumstance, the Thorp family struggled to find a place and way of life that could weather the social, economic, and racial turbulence that engulfed them. For the rest of his life, Jim would wrestle with the question of where he belonged—​ how to position himself within his own life and the lives of others. Much of Jim’s childhood was spent in rigorous outdoor activity—​hunting, fishing, rough-​and-​tumble play, and hard work. He and Charlie could walk, run, and ride the family horses for days without signs of weariness. When they were six, their parents’ relationship deteriorated, and the twins were boarded at the Sac and Fox Indian Agency School a few miles south of the new town of Stroud. Of the two, Charlie proved the more tractable student, while Jim was frequently in trouble and often absent. “Family members considered Charlie the more thoughtful and inward of the twins, while Jim was spontaneous and physical, more like his father, ruggedly charismatic” (Maraniss, 2022a, p. 23). Hiram was strong and agile, considered by many who knew him to be “an athletic marvel” (p. 23). Jim often watched his father defeat all comers in wrestling, horse riding,

The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner  129 and other athletic pursuits. “Mayhem was a part of daily life” for Hiram, who along with ranching and horse trading, was “an inveterate bootlegger… usually one step ahead of the law,” who “had a taste for liquor and for women” (pp. 24–​25). But, “intellectually, Hiram was no match for [his wife, Charlotte] who unlike him could read and write and had a knack for languages … allowing her to negotiate different cultures” (p. 26). When the twins were nine, Charlie died of pneumonia, leaving Jim, a depressed and “twinless twin” (Buford, 2010, p. 27) who refused to stay in school. With repeated and unauthorized returns home, Hiram threatened to send him “so far away you’ll never find your way back,” and enrolled Jim in the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas (a training school for Indians). In the Haskell elementary program, Jim effectively started his education over again. His grades improved and he became a successful student athlete. In addition to working on the school farm, he learned to read, write, and do arithmetic. Haskell also introduced the 11-​year-​old to the game of football, which was to become his calling card before and after his Olympic experiences of 1912. “It was at Haskell I saw my first football game and developed a love for it. … Too young to take part in the football games at school, I organized a team among classmates my own age” (quoted in Maraniss, 2022a, p. 36). Jim had never thought about his future before Haskell. But at Haskell, he began to wonder if “someday he might want to be a football coach” (p. 36). Two years later, Jim’s mother died during the birth of her eleventh child and Jim returned home to help care for his younger siblings. Back at home, Jim continued his schooling at Garden Grove, a newly built school only a mile away. There he met teacher Walter White who encouraged and coached Jim as a student athlete in baseball and track and field. Locals began to talk frequently about “the prowess of ‘that young Indian’ [and] Jim discovered in these rudimentary organized games a pattern of effort his body and mind seemed already to know” (Buford, 2010, p. 31). White told Jim and Hiram, who now were engaged in almost daily conflict, about opportunities for talented student athletes that were available at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. When Jim learned more about the famous Carlisle football team, his immediate future was secured. He would follow his imagined career in football. The rest, in the words of Walter White, was “like a tale from Homer” (p. 31). Hiram died of a fatal poisoning, probably from a snake bite, only a few months after Jim’s departure for Carlisle. For all his faults, through his physical example, he had instilled in Jim the desire to “show other races what an Indian can do” (quoted in Buford, 2010, p. 15). Jim and Pop at Carlisle Pop Warner’s first stint coaching Carlisle’s football team lasted from 1899 to 1903. He then returned to Cornell yet again to coach his alma mater’s football

130  The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner and baseball squads for three years before once more heading back to Carlisle for a second coaching stint at the Indian Industrial School, which lasted from 1907 to 1914. While Warner was back at Cornell from 1904 to 1906, Carlisle had acquired a new Superintendent, Major William A. Mercer, another army officer who loved athletics. Knowing about Warner’s high football intelligence and creativity, when the forward pass became part of the game in 1906, Mercer invited Pop to come to Carlisle to share his thinking and plans about how best to utilize this new offensive weapon with Carlisle’s coaches and team. Impressed by how quickly the Carlisle athletes adopted and implemented his ideas, when things once more began to sour for him during the 1906 football season at Cornell, Warner was happy to accept Major Mercer’s invitation to return to Carlisle. In his second stint at the Indian Industrial School, Pop coached football and track and field, and directed the overall athletic program at the school. When Jim Thorpe arrived at Carlisle in 1904, he was a skinny five-​foot, five-​ inches, 115-​pound boy of sixteen. However, by the time Pop returned to the Carlisle campus for the football season of 1907, young Thorpe was a sturdy five-​ ten and 145 pounds, after three summers of manual labor on local farms in the school’s Outing Program. One of the most famous stories in Carlisle’s history is how Warner first heard about Thorpe unofficially breaking the school record for the high jump. Crossing the track oval to meet some friends for a pickup baseball game in the Spring of 1907, Jim stopped to watch some of the school’s high jumpers attempting to clear the bar set at five feet, nine inches. After asking if he, dressed in his everyday clothes, could give it a try, to the amazement of all present Jim used the scissor style modeled by the jumpers to easily clear the bar and set an informal university record. After hearing about Jim’s jump, Warner later recalled sending for Jim so that “I could see who this mystery athlete was” (Warner, 1993, p. 120) Upon arriving, Jim asked “You wanted to see me, Coach. Have I done something wrong?” Warner responded, “Son, you’ve only broken the school record in the high jump. That’s all.” With a sigh of relief, young Thorpe responded, “Pop, I didn’t think that very high. I think I can do better in a track suit.” “Putting my arm around his shoulder, I told Jim that we’d make sure he got a track uniform because beginning that afternoon he would be on the Carlisle track team” (p. 120). Thorpe’s less folksy version of the story was that when he reported to Warner’s office, Pop looked carefully at him and asked, “Are those the clothes you had on yesterday when you made the high jump?” After Jim nodded his assent, Warner said “I want you to go to the club house, take those overalls off, and put on a track suit. You’re now on the track team” (quoted in Maraniss, 2022a, p. 63). When Warner’s attention shifted from track and field to football in the autumn of 1907, he was surprised and upset to see Jim show up for tryouts. Having watched Jim perform well in the high jump and the 110-​yard hurdles in intercollegiate meets and knowing the seemingly unlimited potential of young Thorpe for track and field, Pop had no intention of seeing his star athlete brutalized on

The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner  131 the football field. What followed was another exchange between the two that became part of Carlisle lore. After ordering Thorpe from the field on at least two occasions without any compliance from Jim, Pop decided to change tactics. He allowed Jim to stay on the field but only to participate in drills involving as little physical contact as possible. One drill consisted of running the length of the football field and attempting to dodge would-​be tacklers who were positioned at five-​yard intervals along the route. In Warner’s colorful autobiographical account, he records how, on his first attempt, “Jim ran through the Carlisle varsity defense and made them look like a bunch of old maids. … Afterwards, he jogged back to where I was standing and tossed the ball to me. He had a big grin on his face. ‘I gave them some good practice, right Pop?’ ” (Warner, 1993, p. 121). After successfully completing the drill for the second time, Warner claims that Jim “tossed the ball to me and proudly noted: ‘Sorry, Pop. Nobody going to tackle Jim!” (p. 122). Jim Thorpe was actually well spoken, yet Warner often reported what Jim purportedly said as if his star athlete was semi-​literate. To one of his assistant coaches, Warner remarked, “He certainly is a wild Indian. Isn’t he?” (p. 122). Shortly thereafter, Warner promoted Jim Thorpe to Carlisle’s Varsity football squad. For the next five years, Jim competed for Carlisle and Pop Warner in track and field and in football. On the football field, he played as a running back, defensive back, punter, and placekicker. He was named a first-​team all-​American in 1911 and 1912. In 1912, the same year as Thorpe competed in the Olympic Games, the Carlisle football team ended the season with an 11–​1 win–​loss record, enough to capture that year’s national collegiate championship. During track and field seasons, Thorpe added field events like the pole vault, shot put, and discus, hammer, and javelin throws to the running and jumping events in which he excelled. Having qualified for the 1912 Olympics in both the decathlon and pentathlon, Jim became focused on winning gold medals: “I wanted to win those events for one reason. It was not to be acclaimed the greatest all-​around athlete in the world … I wanted to win so that it might serve as a diploma to get me a job as an all-​around coach at some university” (quoted in Maraniss, 2022a, p. 147). This was a career goal that Jim had been nursing since his days at Haskell. Unfortunately, it was a goal that was not shared by Warner for reasons that were both blatant and subtle. At Carlisle, Jim was much more than a talented athlete. He was a popular student leader, adept ballroom dancer and ice skater, and a sought-​after friend. His initial academic struggles were overcome with the status and confidence he acquired through his on-​the-​field triumphs. In some ways, Jim’s athletic prominence insulated him from the confusion and turmoil that attended much of the everyday life positioning of most Carlisle students as they were initiated into white society, yet simultaneously celebrated and exploited for their indigenous heritage. However, in other ways, Jim’s sports heroics made such a positioning even more difficult. One of college football’s greatest games provides a good

132  The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner illustration of the social psychological experience of such a contradictory life positioning. This was the Carlisle versus Army game played at West Point during the 1912 college football season. In the locker room prior to the game, Warner got his team ready by invoking memories of the American Indian Wars. “These men playing against you today are soldiers. … You are Indians. Tonight, we will know whether or not you are warriors” (Buford, 2010, p. 146, italics in original). Throughout the season, Warner had been practicing a new and complex double-​wing offense that thrived on deception, with lots of fake and double reverses, sleight-​of-​hand ball transfers, and passing options. When asked by Warner earlier in the season to which team on their schedule they wished to unveil their double-​wing system, the team unanimously chose Army. What ensued was an extremely violent game, fueled in part by Army’s desire to neutralize Thorpe’s talent and leadership. During one memorable play, two Army cadets (one being future US President Dwight Eisenhower) who had been harassing Jim all game long, closed in on him, one aiming for his chest, the other for his knees. When Jim gave them one of his famous swivel moves, the two collided so hard that neither could continue to play. On another occasion, as recorded by famed sportswriter Damon Runyon, “Jim gave out the shrill … notes of the enraged Redskin, [while] going through … whole companies of soldiers” (quoted in Buford, 2010, p. 147). The Times called Jim’s resulting touchdown “one of the greatest ever seen on the plains of the academy” (p. 147). After the game, Army captain Leland Devore said “That Indian … is superhuman, that is all … There is nothing he can’t do” (p. 148). The foregoing account illustrates the contradictory and confusing social psychological positioning that Jim Thorpe encountered and experienced throughout much of his life—​celebrated as the world’s greatest athlete, but also as an exotic creature endowed with mysterious talents somehow traceable to his racial profile in ways that created fascination and acclaim, but also seemed to warrant caution and distance. Jim was treated by many as an American hero who was not, officially and unofficially, a real American and could not be trusted to act like one—​a classic outsider who could be made to fit in when it served the purposes of his positioners, but only then. The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner

The relationship that evolved between Pop Warner and Jim Thorpe at Carlisle was a particularly complex version of outsider–​insider positioning, one in which Warner acted both as Jim’s savior and accuser, elevating and deflating Jim as Pop’s own interests and self-​presentation demanded. In his interactions with Pop Warner, Jim experienced oscillating social, psychological positions and perspectives of being lauded and dismissed, helped and manipulated, befriended and rejected, supported and betrayed, depending on how Warner read particular situations and acted in his self interest within the historical and contemporaneous

The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner  133 culture of racism, deception, manipulation, and maltreatment that typified white American dealings with indigenous people. Despite his athletic accomplishments and fame, as a non-​citizen Jim’s income from the rental of his Oklahoma land allotment was administered by agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, who often relied on information they received from Coach Warner and new Carlisle Superintendent Moses Friedman. This was an arrangement that further ensured Jim’s control and his compliance with Carlisle norms. Even then, Jim’s occasional acts of defiance led to a variety of punishments, from confinement in the school’s Guard House as a young student to constraints placed on his activities and possibilities as an adult student. Although Jim often would be asked by school instructors to teach the occasional class when their educational duties conflicted with other Carlisle social and administrative responsibilities, he (even when elected captain of the football team by the other players) was seldom placed in a coaching or mentoring role by Warner. After his experience of an assistant’s insubordination at Cornell, Pop seemed especially suspicious of the popularity and loyalty that Jim received from his indigenous teammates. Otherwise, however, Warner mostly tolerated the oftentimes exuberant comradery of Jim and his friends—​friends with whom he practiced and played through pain and injury and experienced the glory of victory and the torments of defeat. Yet even Warner’s watchful eye could not prevent occasionally excessive partying and pranks. In his later life, Jim often sought out his college friends and teammates for hunting and fishing getaways or sought their involvement in his post-​Carlisle athletic and other ventures. Position exchange theory highlights the importance of direct experience in reciprocal roles and phases of interactivity (such as hider and seeker or leader and follower) in facilitating integration and understanding of oneself and others, and in promoting human agency and creativity. For example, experiences of being both a teacher and a learner help a person to better understand and value the difficulties and challenges that often occur in each of these positions and take these into consideration when engaging in formal or informal educational exchanges. In this light, Warner’s interactions with Jim Thorpe take on a particular importance and poignancy. Warner consistently alternated between extolling and impugning Jim as a wonderful athlete who nonetheless required the guidance and constant motivation of a protectively controlling, benevolent father figure. Implicit in Warner’s positionings of himself and his prize athlete were perspectives that assumed indigenous ignorance, laziness, simplicity, unpredictability, and cockiness, set against conditioned assumptions of white wisdom, work ethic, maturity, consistency, and even-​handedness. Such facile and demeaning contrasts ensured and authorized white control and inequitable treatment of indigenous people. To these prejudicial positionings, Warner added his ingrained suspicion of others and his love of deception. With such interpersonal positionings and perspectives in mind, it is easy to understand why Pop seldom gave Jim opportunities to assist him during practices or games in

134  The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner any kind of coaching role. Warner taught Thorpe relatively little about game planning, strategizing, and tactics, or how to study the habits and tendencies, strengths and weakness of opposing teams and players—​knowledge that could have positioned Jim to take better advantage of later opportunities to succeed as a college or professional coach. In Jim’s life after leaving Carlisle, it is possible to discern recurring patterns of asymmetrical positioning that secured his life as a famous outsider with little experience of more positive, symmetrical, and consequently helpful position exchanges in key relationships in his life—​such as that between his father and himself as a child, that between Warner as a coach and himself as a star player, or those that he experienced in demeaning and frustrating subsequent life experiences as a “Hollywood Indian” or as a loving but unreliable spouse and parent. Though Jim would look back on Carlisle as the scene of his happiest years, he would also take away the psychic gap between his own attempts at positive self-​positioning and the models of assimilative positioning he was required to take on at the school (cf. Buford, 2010, p. 41). In his autobiography, Warner comments repeatedly on Jim’s tendency, one that in his opinion was shared by many of the Indian students at Carlisle, to be a natural observational learner but limited in what he could learn from more formal, direct instruction and therefore limited as a potential teacher of others. While at Carlisle, I had developed a theory that the Indian boys had been trained by their forefathers to be keen observers. Often when the Indian boys were exposed to a new sport or game they would usually refuse to participate. Instead, they would stand and watch the older, more experienced Indian boys, who were participating in the new sport or game, demonstrate how it was to be played. Then after having studied the play or actions of their elders, they would attempt to mimic those same actions, or motions, and would usually be almost as accomplished as those who they had just observed. (Warner, 1993, p. 125) Warner (1993) linked this preference for observational learning to a culturally induced pride that made the indigenous student athletes at Carlisle extremely sensitive to verbal criticism and ridicule, and to what he regarded as their preference for play over work. There certainly can be little doubt about Jim Thorpe’s pride and sensitivity to criticism, aspects of his personality that continuously irritated Warner. Pop liked to believe that he himself was especially adept at learning from his failures. In contrast, he thought of Jim as at best misguided and at worst lazy and truculent in foregoing such opportunities for improvement. But Jim was far from lazy. He would spend many hours preparing himself, through strenuous practice and careful strategizing, for his athletic competitions. Yet, it seems clear that he practiced and preferred ways of learning, in life and in sport, that were

The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner  135 more performance oriented than didactic. He admired the trickery and deceptiveness Pop displayed in his game plans but soon tired of the lengthy drills and instructions that accompanied them. Like many great athletes, he needed only the briefest of demonstrations and descriptions to grasp what was being asked of him and to master the task at hand. In his interactions with Jim, Pop was careful not to alienate his star performer, but he also did very little to help Jim participate actively in creating and planning game strategies or participating in white society more generally. In fact, the experience of most indigenous students at Carlisle was one of being expected to act white, while simultaneously being treated as inferior. Jim and other students were seldom accepted as equals or allowed to participate fully in educative experiences that were designed, implemented, and evaluated without their input. In a later life interview with Al Clark, a writer for the Patriot-​News in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Jim recalled how one of Pop’s Carlisle assistant coaches called him “a smart Indian but a dumb White man” (quoted in Buford, 2010, p. 359). Acting requires Being but does not equate with it. To be, in the sense of belonging, requires full and equal positioning and participation in the community and society in which one exists. Such positioning and participation were denied to Jim, his classmates, and his teammates. His relationship with Pop Warner was embodied within an asymmetrical and far from reciprocal relationship in which Jim was the outsider looking in, while Pop pulled the strings from inside. Nowhere is this life positioning dynamic more evident than in the sorry tale of Jim’s loss of his 1912 Olympic gold medals. The Sordid Saga of Thorpe’s Olympic Medals: A Life Positioning Storyline of Racism, Privilege, and Injustice The 1912 Olympics

Jim Thorpe and the rest of the US Olympic team departed for Stockholm, Sweden on Friday, June 14, 1912. Pop Warner also boarded the S. S. Finland as Jim’s coach and guardian, having been asked by Carlisle superintendent Moses Friedman to accompany Jim and Carlisle’s other Olympian, distance runner Louis Tewanima, as both were wards of the US government. Although some reporters and writers at the time claimed that Jim refused to exercise and train while aboard the Finland enroute to Stockholm, several US Olympians on board “remember running laps and doing calisthenics with Jim every day on the ship” (Wheeler, 1979, p. 100). Future president of the International Olympic Committee Avery Brundage, another member of the US 1912 Olympic team, added that “Jim’s own coach, ‘Pop’ Warner was hand-​picked by [team trainer] Mike Murphy to take great pains to ensure that Thorpe and Tewanima … would be in perfect condition” (p. 102).

136  The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner After a ten-​day ocean voyage to Antwerp, the team tuned up for three days before embarking on a further four-​day journey to Stockholm for the 1912 Olympic Games. Even then, it wasn’t until several days later that Jim Thorpe began the first event of the men’s Olympic pentathlon competition. In the pentathlon, athletes competed in five grueling events—​the running broad jump, the 200-​meter dash, the javelin throw, the discus throw, and the 1,500-​meter race. Jim won four events, placed third in the javelin, and took the gold medal with a score that tripled that of his closest competitor. Six days later, Thorpe competed in the second of the men’s multi-​event track and field contests, the Olympic decathlon. Under a heavy rain during the first three events (100-​meter dash, running broad jump, and shot put), Jim managed to win the shot put, but his performances in the broad jump and dash (typically among his best events) were for him sub-​par, second-​place finishes. The second day of competition was a lovely sunny day that saw Jim win both the high jump and 110-​meter hurdles, the latter with a world record-​breaking time, and put in decent efforts to finish third in the discus and fourth in the 400-​meters. On the third and final day of competition, Jim placed third in the pole vault and fourth in the javelin (events with which he was relatively inexperienced) before running a personal best to win the 1,500-​meter event and clinch the gold medal. In doing so, he scored 8,413 points out of a possible 10,000—​a total that would set a record not beaten for the next 20 years. Warner exclaimed that “All through the Olympic Games, Jim was the topic of most conversations. No one had ever seen an athlete with such strength, speed, endurance and competitiveness” (1993, p. 135). With Lewis Tewanima’s silver medal in the 10,000-​meter race, the two Carlisle athletes earned more Olympic points for the United States at the 1912 Olympics than were earned by athletes from any other American educational institution. King Gustav of Sweden, when awarding Thorpe with his medals said to him in English, “You sir, are the greatest athlete in the world,” to which Thorpe replied with a humble “Thank you”—​not the much reported “Thanks King” that appeared in many American newspapers at the time (Maraniss, 2022a, p. 179). The Aftermath

In the immediate aftermath of the 1912 Olympics, Jim Thorpe was a worldwide sensation. Back home, his first public appearance was in Boston where he was met with enthusiastic applause and asked by a local newspaper to pose as the Indian on the reverse side of the then American nickel. U.S. President William Howard Taft declared that Thorpe’s Olympic triumphs would “serve as an incentive to all to improve those qualities which characterize the best type of American citizen” (quoted in Maraniss, 2022a, p. 5), conveniently forgetting or perhaps not knowing that Thorpe had no citizenship status in America. In city after city, Thorpe was paraded with his medals and trophies. When he

The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner  137 received a message from Warner to return to Carlisle for his “homecoming” celebrations, the entire town turned out to welcome and applaud their hero. A “marching formation of ninety-​one Indian students militarily attired in their cadet uniforms” (p. 8) was accompanied by the superintendent of the Carlisle School. Moses Friedman, who never had been well disposed to Jim, now hailed him and Tewanima as “real Americans” whom the Carlisle school had helped to advance in civilization and as men. “By your achievement you have immeasurably helped your race. By your victory, you have inspired your people to live a cleaner, healthier, and more vigorous life” (pp. 8–​9). Warner then spoke at some length, lauding Thorpe and Carlisle, before turning the podium over to Jim who very briefly thanked those present for turning out. In the midst of all this hoopla, Jim seldom showed much enthusiasm. “I heard people yelling my name,” he said, “and I couldn’t realize how one fellow could have so many friends” (quoted in Buford, 2010, p. 137). “To be famous for Jim, was to feel alone in the middle of a mob. … The white culture insisted on parades, speeches, and crowds … Jim didn’t need them, didn’t want them. Public adulation was antitribal, taking the glory away from others” (p. 137). As American news outlets fed their public’s thirst for more information about Jim Thorpe, Warner called him “a promoter’s dream” and continued to feed the frenzy, even as Thorpe told Pop that “I don’t much like celebrations … I like to stand on the sidewalk and see a parade go by. There’s something to see then. … But like that Olympic parade in New York that I had to lead, why I was kind of lonesome” (p. 138). Unfortunately for Jim, having been put through the wringer of celebration, he was even less prepared for the upheaval that followed in the year after his Olympic triumphs. On Tuesday January 28, 1913, the main headline on the front page of the New York Times shouted “Olympic Prizes Lost: Thorpe No Amateur.” The story that followed, which had been reported five days earlier in the Worcester Telegram, was that Jim Thorpe had played semi-​professional baseball during the summers while attending Carlisle, which violated the Olympic rule that only amateur athletes were eligible to compete in the Olympic Games. In consequence, Thorpe could be disqualified, his Olympic medals might need to be returned, and his records erased. An investigation was launched and soon thereafter the American Athletic Union issued a statement that included the following: The Team Selection Committee of the American Olympic Committee selected James Thorpe as one of the members of the American Olympic Team, and did so without the least suspicion as to there having been any act of professionalism on Thorpe’s part. … Thorpe’s act of professionalism was in a sport over which the Amateur Athletic Union has no direct control; it was a member of a baseball team in a minor league and in games which were not reported in the important papers of the country. That he played under his own name would give no direct notice to anyone concerned, as there are many of his name.

138  The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner The reason that he himself did not give notice of his acts is explained by him on the ground of ignorance. … The American Olympic Committee and the Amateur Athletic Union feel that while Thorpe is deserving of the severest condemnation for concealing the fact that he had professionalized himself by receiving money for playing baseball, they also feel that those who knew of his professional acts are deserving of still greater censure for their silence. … The Amateur Athletic Union … will do everything in its power to secure the return of prizes and readjustment of points won by him, and will immediately eliminate his records from the books. (Quoted in Wheeler, 1979, pp. 145–​146) The Cover-​Up

Although never as strong a baseball player as he was a football and track and field star, Jim Thorpe loved the game of baseball and hoped someday to play in the major leagues, which he did post-​Olympics with limited success for six years between 1913 and 1919, mostly with the New York Giants. But it was Jim’s play with the Rocky Mount Railroaders and Fayetteville Highlanders of the semi-​ professional Eastern Carolina League during the summers of 1909 and 1910 that led to the loss of his 1912 Olympic medals and records. Unlike most of the many college athletes who played in such leagues across America to supplement their incomes, Thorpe signed on under his own name and never tried to hide the fact of his summer pastime. Many Carlisle athletes and teammates had played minor league baseball for years, and frequently talked openly about spending their summers doing so. Interestingly, “the preponderance of evidence indicated that [Jim] was recruited to play minor league baseball by close associates of Pop Warner” (Maraniss, 2022a, p. 203). Given the tight rein that Warner kept on “his boys,” there is little doubt that he was fully aware of how Jim spent some of his summers during his time at Carlisle. “The evidence is equally strong that Moses Friedman knew” about Jim playing semi-​professional baseball (p. 204), given that Jim had asked Friedman for a leave of absence from school so that he could do so. Friedman even tried to prevent Jim from returning to Carlisle after the 1910 summer baseball season, but when Warner intervened on Thorpe’s behalf, Friedman relented. Interestingly, the Carlisle baseball program was dropped soon thereafter because of Warner’s and Friedman’s mutual concern that too many of their student athletes were playing minor league baseball during the summer months. Even representatives and employees of the Sac and Fox Agency in Oklahoma and the federal Indian Bureau had documentation of Thorpe’s professionalism in the form of letters from Jim requesting payment of portions of his land royalty income that contained explicit references to his summer baseball in the minors. It also would be very odd if James E. Sullivan, the most powerful administrator of amateur athletics in America, a central figure in the Amateur Athletic Union,

The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner  139 and a good friend of Pop Warner who visited Carlisle several times a year, did not know of Jim’s semi-​professional status. Apparently, the AAU’s statement of its belief that “those who knew of [Jim’s] professional acts are deserving of still greater censure for their silence” was merely self-​serving bombast. In the days after the New York Times headline and story of January 1913 appeared, both Warner and Sullivan defended Jim and proclaimed his innocence. In his autobiography, Warner claimed that “After hearing the accusations I went to see Jim, and asked him if the story was accurate. Without hesitation he told me, ‘Yes, Pop. It’s true’ ” (Warner, 1993, p. 143). But, as David Maraniss (2022a) argues, “Given all the evidence establishing that Warner knew what Jim had done, … it is probable that he saw no need to ask Jim about it right away and was lying, trying to buy time to figure out what to do next” (p. 207). What eventually happened was that Jim almost immediately confessed to the truth of the Times story, saying that he had played baseball in the Eastern Carolina League for about $2 a day, later adding that his confession “lifted, as magic, a great load from my mind and shoulders” (p. 208). Warner, on the other hand, claimed complete ignorance of Thorpe’s transgression and drafted a confession letter on behalf of the now 26-​year-​old Jim—​a letter that “placed all the blame on the athlete, while falling back on patronizing, racist language as a half-​hearted excuse. ‘I was simply an Indian school boy and did not know all about such things’ ” (quoted in Maraniss, 2022b). The letter of confession was sent to Sullivan, who also received an accompanying letter from Superintendent Friedman to the effect that the Carlisle Superintendent knew nothing about Thorpe playing baseball in Carolina. Sullivan then wrote to the Swedish Olympic Committee, promising to do everything he and the Amateur Athletic Union could to return Jim’s prizes and nullify his records. Ironically, by the time Jim’s medals had been returned to Sweden, the Swedes had decided that because 180 days had passed without protest since the Stockholm games, they did not want the medals back. Both the Norwegian athlete Ferdinand Bie who had finished second to Thorpe in the Olympic pentathlon and the Swedish athlete Hugo Wieslander who had finished second to Thorpe in the decathlon said that the medals were Jim’s not theirs and that they would not accept them. But the damage was done. Pride and humility were essential components of Jim’s athletic life and personal being. Now they had been undercut by humiliation (Updyke, 1998, p. 63). To understand Jim’s decision to join teammates and others playing semi-​ professional baseball in the summers of 1909 and 1910, it is useful to know some facts about the socioeconomic context of Jim’s life at Carlisle at that time. “As a landowner, heir, Sac and Fox tribe member, Thorpe had been accumulating small amounts of capital in Oklahoma and Carlisle which were kept out of his reach … That feature of civilized life called spending or pocket money was one the Indians were introduced to with authoritative caution” (Newcombe, 1975, p. 102). At the same time as Jim was earning $2 a day playing summer

140  The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner baseball and his meagre income from his land in Oklahoma was being handled by agents of the US Indian Bureau and tightly supervised by Carlisle authorities, Warner’s annual Carlisle salary was approximately $2,000, with room, board, and a generous travel and perks budget tacked on. Asymmetrical Legacies

In the chapter about Jim Thorpe that was in my childhood book Champions all the way, Jim’s reactions to the loss of his Olympic medals and trophies is described and “explained” with the following words: Thorpe was a simple person, and the complications that beset the upper bracket of the athletic world were beyond him. He seemed more puzzled by the whole matter than anything else. … The simplicity of his heritage and training contending with the elaborate and complicated rules of the sports world was the handicap which finally conquered Jim Thorpe, but not before he left his mark as the greatest athlete of all. (Meyers, 1960, p. 73 and pp. 76–​77) These are lines replete with stereotypically racist innuendo and nuance, for Jim was hardly simple, although he was often puzzled (as opposed to confused) by the duplicities, deceptions, and manipulations of mainstream US culture. Throughout his life, Thorpe’s accomplishments and missteps were described in the racist context and vocabulary of early twentieth-​century America. After Carlisle, Jim played major league baseball for six years before playing professional football. He was selected to the first all-​star team of the nascent National Football League in 1923. After that, he worked as a Hollywood extra, on construction crews, as a bouncer and security guard, and as a ditchdigger, briefly joining the US Merchant Marine during World War Two. As his alcoholism worsened, Thorpe’s money and life ran out and he died on March 28, 1953 of cancer and heart failure. Upon hearing of Jim’s death, Pop Warner said, “I certainly regret to hear it. … I’ve never seen an athlete to compare with Jim Thorpe. … Although we had not seen much of each other in recent years, I always thought of him as one of my closest friends” (quoted in Maraniss, 2022a, p. 540). Unfortunately, Warner’s professed friendship for Jim did not extend to setting the record straight about his self-​serving and manipulative counsel to Jim when Pop dictated what Thorpe should write in his letter of confession to Sullivan and the AAU. Nor did his purportedly high regard for Jim cause Pop to retract his frequently repeated, self-​serving claim that he had no prior knowledge of Jim’s playing in the Carolina baseball league. Unlike Jim’s life of hardship after Carlisle, Warner’s was full of success and its comforts. Yes, there was a slight dip in his public regard when he resigned from his Carlisle position

The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner  141 in 1915 after a student petition led to a 1914 Congressional investigation that revealed fiscal irregularities and questionable treatment of students by Carlisle administrators, including Warner—​events that contributed to the closing of the Carlisle Indian Industrial school in 1918. However, Pop quickly rebounded with highly successful seasons as head coach of dominant college football teams at Pittsburgh, Stanford, Temple, and San Jose, before retiring comfortably in Palo Alto, California as one of college football’s winningest coaches. Today, Glenn “Pop” Warner’s name continues to be promoted and celebrated in the activities of the US-​wide, non-​profit organization Pop Warner Little Scholars, which sponsors football and other programs for nearly half a million American youth. It wasn’t until 2022, well past the time when Pop might have suffered any loss of reputation associated with his lies and manipulations of Thorpe following the 1912 Olympics, that Jim Thorpe was finally reinstated as the sole winner of both the 1912 Olympic pentathlon and decathlon events. A Summary, Dual-​Life Positioning Storyline Jim Thorpe’s primary life positioning was that of an indigenous athlete within the historical and sociocultural contexts of late nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​ century white America’s violent conquest and displacement of native peoples and subsequent attempts to assimilate indigenous peoples within white culture. As the physical agility, speed, and strength Jim began to exhibit during his adolescence blossomed into exceptional performance in natural surroundings and on the playing fields of a sports-​crazed society, Jim was revered for his athletic accomplishments. He also was viewed with a mixture of fear, suspicion, and exotic attraction as a physically talented, mixed-​race Indian, who was assumed to be much less capable in everyday life than in athletic competition. As such, he was positioned through sociocultural practices of manipulative exploitation and instrumental usage as a performer of extraordinary athletic feats for the entertainment and benefit of “his superiors.” Glenn Warner was one of those “superiors” who was especially adept at exploiting Jim’s talents and abilities for his own gain and advancement as a successful, innovative, and much-​ in-​ demand college athletic director and coach. Warner’s positioning of himself as Jim’s coach, teacher, benefactor, and paternal friend likely blinded him to the extent of his instrumental use of Jim’s abilities and talents. Nonetheless, any sense of genuine altruism in Warner’s self-​positioning was belied by his cowardly and self-​serving manipulation and betrayal of Jim during the scandal and turmoil that descended upon him in the aftermath of his glorious 1912 Olympic victories—​victories that established him beyond any doubt as the world’s greatest athlete. Often prone to suspicion and deception in his dealings with others, these qualities in Warner’s life positioning not only helped to secure his place in history

142  The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner as one of America’s most outstanding coaches, but to cripple any possibility of Jim benefiting from his Olympic feats in ways that might otherwise have been possible. Considered in this way, the coach–​athlete relationship between Pop Warner and Jim Thorpe was a particularly vivid example of asymmetrical positioning—​one from which Warner benefited greatly and Jim suffered for the rest of his life. In this sense, Jim Thorpe was not only positioned to be used and abused by white society in general, but by Warner and several of his assistants and associates in particular. Unlike the relationship between Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud that enabled both individual and conjoint agency and self-​determination, that between Warner and Thorpe advanced the agency and life-​positioning primarily of Pop Warner. A good example of the foregoing dynamic between the two men concerns Jim’s long-​standing dream of a career in coaching when his playing days were over. Although Pop did support Jim in pursuing a college football coaching position at Indiana University, he had done little to prepare Jim for such a position. Warner was very wary of Jim’s popularity among his Carlisle teammates, and having had the experience at Cornell of being undermined and eventually replaced as head coach by an ambitious and unscrupulous assistant, was not about to mentor Jim in the finer points of game planning and strategy. Racism also was a factor in limiting Pop’s tutelage of Jim as a possible future coach, especially in the Carlisle context in which all the football players were indigenous. The unlikely possibility of some kind of “uprising” against him led by Jim was never far from Warner’s imaginings. When Jim Thorpe arrived in Indiana, one of his primary coaching techniques was to model how he wanted things done. Yet another story of mythic proportions arose in the context of Jim’s coaching of a young punter on the University of Indiana team by demonstrating how to get extra distance on a kick. As Jim boomed punt after punt nearly the entire length of the 100-​yard football field, it is easy to imagine the student punter becoming more and more intimidated by the unrealistic model being set for him. That Jim’s preparation for coaching was purposefully limited by Pop is attested by the fact that many other star players coached by Warner after his Carlisle days were actively involved in Pop’s pre-​ game and practice preparations. For example, Warner positioned non-​indigenous star player Ernie Nevers during his Stanford coaching days as a possible future coach by involving Ernie in drawing up trick plays, planning game tactics, and selecting players to execute them. Lacking a similar immersion in the pedagogical practices of coaching, Jim’s approach was primarily one of demonstration and attempted comradery in place of actual teaching and mentoring, of which he had experienced very little. At another level of life positioning, the relationship between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner is perhaps best characterized as that between an insider (Pop) and an outsider (Jim), in the sense of someone who belongs and is at home and someone who does not belong and is not at home. Many Carlisle students

The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner  143 found themselves belonging nowhere after their Carlisle educations—​neither indigenous nor white societies felt comfortable. Their life positioning became a kind of not-​belonging-​anywhere. Their physical appearance marked them as outsiders in white society; the social consequences of their educations marked them as outsiders in their indigenous communities. In early twentieth-​century America, you were either white or not-​white; there was no readily available societal middle-​ground that held any promise of belonging. Both before and after Carlisle, Jim was an outsider, perhaps less so within indigenous communities prior to Carlisle, but certainly not after Carlisle. The fact that Jim was famous for his athletic achievements made it relatively easy for him to achieve a minimal level of belonging in both white and non-​ white society. Unfortunately, much of his post-​Carlisle life became littered with relationships with others who were comfortably inside white society and whose awe, acclaim, and surface friendships with Jim never went much below that surface. Consequently, other than when camping, hunting, fishing, and socializing with a few close friends from his pre-​Carlisle and Carlisle days, Jim was essentially alone, simultaneously suspended between the white and non-​white worlds of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. Pop, on the other hand was the ultimate insider in the good-​old-​boy, home-​spun hero manner so well known to most Americans. It now is common to use the phrase: “There are no winners and losers.” But it always was clear, to perhaps everyone but Jim, that Pop was the winner and Jim was the loser in their relationship. Jim and his talents were of great benefit in opening life possibilities for Pop. In return, Pop and his talents did little but limit further the few possibilities that might otherwise have been available for Jim. Nonetheless, just as Pop’s name lives on in the Pop Warner football leagues for children, Jim’s feats, legend, and tragic life continue to receive considerable attention. Today’s National Football League offers an annual Jim Thorpe Award for the best defensive back. The never-​ending polls and listings of great athletes unfailingly include Jim’s name at or near the top. With the recent restoration and celebration of Jim’s Olympic medals and records, a new generation of Americans and others worldwide know something about the life and times of Jim Thorpe. Pop may have been the insider, but Jim’s outsider life and feats are still remembered and celebrated. References Buford, K. (2010). Native American son: The life and sporting legend of Jim Thorpe. Knopf. Maraniss, D. (2022a). Path lit by lightning: The life of Jim Thorpe. Simon & Schuster. Maraniss, D. (2022b, August 8). The damaging myth of Pop Warner as Jim Thorpe’s savior. Washington Post. Retrieved online on August 30, 2023, from www.was​hing​ tonp​ost.com/​spo​rts/​olymp​ics/​2022/​08/​08/​jim-​tho​rpe-​book-​pop-​war​ner/​

144  The Relationship Between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner Martin, J. (2013). Life positioning analysis: An analytic framework for the study of lives and life narratives. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 33, 1–​17. Meyers, B. (1960). Champions all the way: Real life stories. Whitman. Miller, J. J. (2015). Pop Warner: A life on the gridiron. McFarland. Newcombe, J. (1975). The best of the athletic boys: The white man’s impact on Jim Thorpe. Doubleday. Stannard, D. E. (1992). American Holocaust: Conquest of the New World. Oxford University Press. Updyke, R. K. (1998). Jim Thorpe: The legend remembered. Pelican. Warner, G. S. (1993). Pop Warner: Football’s greatest teacher—​The epic autobiography of major college football’s winningest coach (M. Bynum, Ed.). Gridiron Football Properties. Wheeler, R. W. (1979). Jim Thorpe: World’s greatest athlete. University of Oklahoma Press.

7

 evisitings, Reflections, and Critical R Considerations

Author’s Introduction Prior to my retirement at the end of 2018, I spent my entire working life as a professional and academic psychologist. My first psychology-​related job was as an institutional attendant at the large psychiatric hospital located on the outskirts of my hometown of Ponoka, Alberta, Canada (Martin, 2020). I worked in this capacity while attending the University of Alberta in Edmonton during the summers of 1968 and 1969. In 1973, I completed my doctoral studies in the Social Psychology of Education at the University of Alberta and worked for the following two years in the Child Development Centre located in St. Stephen’s College on the university campus, while also employed as a post-​doctoral fellow. After accepting a position as an assistant professor in educational and counseling psychology at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia in 1975, I spent four months during the summer of 1976 completing a clinical internship at the Cape Breton Psychiatric Hospital just outside of Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada. Upon returning to my job at Simon Fraser University, I also worked as a part-​time educational and counseling psychologist in a private practice with an SFU colleague. In 1983, I moved to the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada, where I taught and pursued research on counseling and psychotherapy until the Spring of 1991. At that time, I returned to SFU as a professor of educational psychology before moving full-​time to SFU’s Department of Psychology in 2007, where I worked as a professor of the theory and history of psychology until my retirement at the end of 2018. From my return to SFU in 1991 to my 2018 retirement, I pursued studies in the theory and history of applied and academic psychology. In a recent memoir (Martin, 2021), I describe how my interests changed quite dramatically over the course of my academic life. Not only did I move from research and practice as an applied psychologist to work in the history and theory of psychology, but my theoretical and methodological approach to my psychological studies changed from that of a committed behaviorist to that of a sociocultural psychobiographer and theorist of personhood, with a particular emphasis on human agency and life DOI: 10.4324/9781003461715-7

146  Revisitings, Reflections, and Critical Considerations positioning. This book on the sociocultural psychobiography of life positioning discusses and illustrates my post-​retirement work, which has been devoted to developing this new approach to psychobiography. In this final chapter, I elaborate its theoretical premises and the methodological flexibility I understand as consistent with these premises. I then revisit the five psychobiographical studies I have presented, adding some critical reflections to what I have tried to do in this book. I conclude with a brief articulation of a possible vision of a psychology focused on the life positioning of persons. The Basic Premises of Life Positioning as Sociocultural Psychobiography Positioning theory in psychology dates from the pioneering work of Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harré (1990), and tends to focus on speech acts, discourse, and beliefs (e.g., Van Langenhove, 2021). In this book, I have emphasized the importance of the real-​world sociocultural contexts and interpersonal interactions within which such discursive acts and beliefs arise and are situated. In doing so, I have tried to move beyond a consideration of positions defined as collections of individual beliefs regarding rights, duties, and obligations, and positioning theorized as a mechanism through which roles are assigned or resisted by individual interactors. Life positioning as I have developed it focuses directly on what we do in our interactions with others and what others do in interacting with us. Positions in such a framework are locations within the contexts and interpersonal exchanges that constitute our lives and life experiences. Positioning concerns the sociocultural and psychological ways in which we are embedded within our worldly interactivity with others. This is the primary focus of life positioning theory and method. Our personhood (which includes the moral beliefs about rights, duties, and obligations emphasized by Harré and his colleagues) develops through our positionings, position exchanges, and repositionings within the historically established, yet ever shifting, sociocultural interactivities, practices, and contexts of our lives. As a method of inquiry, life positioning is an attempt to describe and understand how the sociocultural contexts and practices, within which we are located and live, help us to develop as persons. As a form of sociocultural psychobiography, life positioning offers both a theoretical and methodological framework for studying the lives of persons in ways that can help to explain personhood and the life possibilities and projects of persons. Like all psychobiography, life positioning studies (including the five sociocultural psychobiographies in this book) usually are parasitic on the extensive birth-​to-​death research and writing about individual subjects undertaken by biographers. Yet, psychobiography also extends the work of biographers by adding insights, interpretations, and possible explanations that make use of the theories and methods of psychology—​in this case, the sociocultural psychology of life positioning. Psychobiographers tend to focus on important events in, and

Revisitings, Reflections, and Critical Considerations  147 unresolved questions about, the lives they study. They use psychological theories and methods to interpret these events and answer these questions. In doing so, they inevitably test the strengths and weaknesses of the psychological ideas and methods they use for these purposes. The most basic premise of any sociocultural approach to psychobiography is that human beings develop core attributes and characteristics of persons because they are embedded and come to occupy and act within historically established, sociocultural life contexts. Active participation within the life practices of such contexts is essential to the development of our sense of ourselves, our understanding of others, and additional attributes of personhood such as rational and moral agency, coordination and planning of life projects, autobiographical identity, perspective taking and intersubjectivity, and creativity. Without such participatory interactivity and intersubjectivity, we would not develop as mindful, socially capable, and morally and rationally reflective beings. Although psychology often tends to hypothesize about and privilege our interior mental lives, there would be no such mental lives to attempt to study and comprehend were it not for our developmental participation in our historically established cultural and social contexts and the life practices they include. We are capable of such developmental participation because of how we have evolved as neurophysiological, biological human beings, but our personhood and its attributes require more than our biophysical makeup. Without our interactivity and resultant development within sociocultural contexts, we would not exist as the persons we are. Consequently, if we want to understand ourselves and others as persons, it is necessary to ensure that our psychological studies include our personal development within our life contexts. Studies of life positioning that examine our location within life contexts, the relational interactivity within sociocultural practices afforded by these contexts, and the perspectives, possibilities, and projects that emerge through this interactivity are important and necessary for a meaningful psychology of personhood. Why LPA Uses a Flexible Methodology One striking feature of the five sociocultural psychobiographies of life positioning in Chapters 2 to 6, is the absence of a standardized methodology for their conduct. Psychologists historically have been very concerned about methodology, whether engaged in quantitative or qualitative inquiries. Indeed, it probably is no exaggeration to say that for many research psychologists, rigorous methodological procedure is equally, if not more, important than substantive yield in the way of increased knowledge and understanding of whatever aspects of human action and experience are being studied. While arguably defensible in certain areas of psychological research, the difficulty with methodological proceduralism for a psychology of personhood is that persons and

148  Revisitings, Reflections, and Critical Considerations our lives tend to defy revelation through standardized procedures. We persons develop within a great profusion of sociocultural and psychological ways of life, much of which cannot be squeezed into, or captured by, methodological tools and routines developed within a much smaller subset of these life traditions that comprise the disciplinary ideas and practices of contemporary psychology. When I first proposed life positioning as a theoretical and methodological approach for studying the lives of persons (Martin, 2013), I suggested a five-​ step procedure to guide such inquiry: (1) the identification of particularly influential others (e.g., parents, colleagues, friends, and partners) and “generalized others” (a term that roughly equates with sociocultural contexts); (2) an analysis of positions and perspectives occupied and exchanged with these others within relevant interactions, relationships, and sociocultural contexts; (3) a thematic analysis of positions and perspectives (and changes to these positions and perspectives) across different phases of a focal person’s or persons’ life experience; (4) an analysis of the manner and kind of integrations of positions and perspectives that the focal person or persons achieved through their life experiences, with an emphasis on processes such as intersubjectivity and identification, “together with existential themes of alienation and personal meaning/​ significance” (added in Martin, 2015, p. 251); and (5) the construction of a life positioning summary depicting the person’s or persons’ embeddedness within the positions and perspectives that constitute their life experience, in a way that is relevant to the focuses and/​or questions guiding the overall inquiry. I still think it can be helpful to apply some variation of this five-​step framework in the conduct of many life-​ positioning psychobiographical studies. However, I also think it is vital that any such framework be adapted to the individual or individuals whose lives and life contexts are being studied, and that considerable flexibility be allowed to ensure that what is done methodologically fits with the questions and purposes of the life positioning analyst. My reason for not emphasizing standardized steps, procedures, or rules in any of the five studies I have presented in this book is two-​fold. First and most importantly, I do not want to encourage any life positioning study or other kind of sociocultural psychobiographical inquiry to be done in accordance with restrictive, procedural recipes, the following of which might be falsely equated with the quality of the inquiry undertaken. Instead, I want to encourage others to work out for themselves, while carefully researching subjects of interest and their lives, methodological variations that accord with the basic theoretical premises of life positioning analysis, but which are fine-​tuned to the specific purposes of particular studies and the lives examined. Secondly, I want the development and execution of future studies of life positioning to be an open project that welcomes, critically considers, and adopts helpful methodological innovations and extensions made by others. Just as there is no one way to research and write a biography or psychobiography, there is no one or best way to research and write a life positioning study.

Revisitings, Reflections, and Critical Considerations  149 The relevant criteria for the quality of any life writing project are to be found in the substantive yield that issues from the expertise, understanding, and breadth and depth of inquiry that characterize the execution of the study. What of importance and possible relevance has been gained in understanding the person, life events, and questions that are the focus of a particular psychobiographical life study? What useful ideas and criticisms related to the conduct of life positioning analysis and/​or sociocultural psychobiography more generally have come from undertaking this study? What contributions to our understanding of personal development and personhood through sociocultural psychobiography has this study made? These are the kinds of questions that I think merit our attention in what I hope will be, and I think already is becoming, a progressive growth in contemporary sociocultural psychobiography that shares some version of the theoretical premises I have attempted to articulate here. My best advice to any student of lives and life writing is to read extensively from the wide corpus of past and present life writing in its various forms, be these full biographies of the lives and times of individuals or groups, autobiographies, personal memoirs, and/​or psychobiographies. With this background in place, the likelihood of making sensible choices of inquiry methods in support of any project of life writing, in this case life positioning psychobiography, cannot but be enhanced. Revisiting the Five Life Positioning Psychobiographies Each of the five life positioning studies I have presented in this book attempts to answer a specific question about the life or lives of one or two individuals by emphasizing ideas and methods of life positioning analysis (LPA). In Chapter 2, the research question was “Why did Stanley Milgram conduct his famous experiments on obedience to authority?” In answering this question, I used position exchange theory to emphasize the relevance and importance of Milgram’s tendency to selectively and purposefully reveal and conceal his motivation to and from others (and perhaps himself) to further his career, reputation, and legacy. In Chapter 3, I asked why Pierre Elliott Trudeau invoked Canada’s War Measures Act in the Canadian province of Quebec in October of 1970. In answering this question, I emphasized a repositioning of Trudeau’s personal and political positions and perspectives that occurred during his graduate education, which required a strong condemnation of his youthful flirtation with radical right-​wing nationalism, to explain his possibly overly aggressive reaction of invoking an act of war in a time of peace. In Chapter 4, I asked why existential humanist Ernest Becker found it necessary to understand human evil to complete his philosophical anthropology. The answer I proposed made use of both a repositioning of Becker’s core ideas concerning human motivation and his life-​long positioning as a “loner,” obsessed with his life project of understanding the human condition and offering this understanding as an existential gift and

150  Revisitings, Reflections, and Critical Considerations legacy. In Chapters 5 and 6, I studied dual-​subject relationships with a focus on asking how a symmetrical positioning between two partners (Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud) led to an enhancement of their conjoint agency and life projects and how an asymmetrical positioning between an athlete and a coach (Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner) led to advantage and agency for the coach and disadvantage and loss of agency for the athlete. To draw together certain aspects of these life positioning analyses and add some critical reflections on their possible strengths and weaknesses, I think it helpful to compare and contrast the first three studies of Stanley Milgram, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and Ernest Becker in terms of the position exchanges, repositionings, and life projects of the subjects of these studies. A second comparison and contrasting of the final two dual-​life positioning psychobiographies will allow a summary analysis and critical consideration of the nature of symmetrical and asymmetrical life positioning in these studies. Reflections on the Single-​Subject Studies

Stanley Milgram, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and Ernest Becker were positioned by their life experiences and positioned themselves to pursue ambitious life projects that they hoped would give meaning to their lives and legacies. This said, the nature of the renown that each sought differed considerably across their three lives. Of the three, Milgram’s pursuit of psychological truths about human nature seems to have been the most self-​serving life project, with those of Trudeau and Becker apparently more directed at the achievement of a common good—​the political health and wellbeing of Quebecers and other Canadians for Trudeau and, for Becker, the philosophical and anthropological uncovering of causes of human evil and its implications for individual and collective human wellbeing. At first blush, it may seem somewhat arbitrary, even biased, to differentiate the life project of Milgram as more self-​absorbed and self-​aggrandizing than that of Becker. After all, weren’t both these social scientists trying to advance their careers and personal renown? For me, the key to uncoupling their respective goals and intentions can be found in the ways in which they were positioned by and positioned themselves within their academic communities and within their vocational histories. It also is instructive to note that Becker had direct, firsthand experience of World War II and its atrocities, while the younger Milgram was safely in America with his parents and brother, surrounded by aunts, uncles, and cousins—​albeit with direct exposure to immigrating relatives who shared their own suffering and talked about the suffering of others at the hands of the Nazis. One of the distinctive features of life positioning analysis is that it privileges actual over vicarious experience by emphasizing the fact that the impact of the latter never can capture the full experiential weight of being immersed in the former. To be personally located within and occupy the real settings in which such atrocities occurred is different from hearing, reading about, and imagining

Revisitings, Reflections, and Critical Considerations  151 them. As I have said previously in this book, we tend to exaggerate the reach of our imaginative and other thought processes if we believe they can substitute for direct physical and social positioning and experience. When Becker returned to the United States following his wartime experiences and later entered graduate school at Syracuse University to study sociocultural anthropology after a second European stint working in the American Embassy in Paris, he was a very different graduate student from the young Milgram who undertook his graduate studies at Harvard University. During his doctoral program, Milgram was initiated into a tradition of social psychological research practices that aimed to simulate as closely as possible real-​life dilemmas—​for example, being the only one in a group who does not conform to an otherwise common judgement (as in the conformity experiments of Solomon Asch) or being asked to inflict physical harm on others (as in Milgram’s studies of obedience to authority). Becker, having had direct experience of human evil in actual war conditions, felt no need to simulate evil. He knew firsthand what it was. Having been a participant in warfare, part of Becker’s motivation for attending graduate school was to understand what he had seen and experienced when located within actual evildoing. Milgram’s social psychological positioning was significantly and importantly different. In recognition of this difference, it seems reasonable to interpret Milgram’s theatrical staging of his shock experiments as serving very different personal ends from those of Becker’s attempts to comprehend how what he had witnessed directly could possibly have happened. Further testimony to such a differential life positioning is found in Milgram’s mostly compliant acceptance of the graduate curriculum and research practices into which he was inducted during his doctoral studies at Harvard. He positioned himself as a creatively innovative researcher, but his creativity was exercised within an accepted tradition of neo-​Lewinian social psychological experimentation. Even when he was criticized for ethical lapses in the conduct of his studies of obedience at Yale and later denied tenure at Harvard, Milgram continued to work within this same tradition of research. He spent the rest of his professional life at the City University of New York Graduate Center defending his provocative studies of obedience and conducting other studies that made use of his penchants for deception and “stage-​craft.” Conversely, Ernest Becker’s peripatetic professorial career included real instances of rebellion against university authorities—​his defense of academic freedom, his outspokenness about corporate funding and influence on university campuses, his support for Szasz’s fight against the involuntary incarceration of psychiatric patients, and his objections to the war in Viet Nam and to racial injustice—​the consequences of which would be difficult to interpret as self-​ serving. It certainly is possible that Becker’s pursuit of a philosophical anthropology that would deal adequately with human evil and the consequences of human fear of death can be viewed as self-​absorption. However, if so, this was a kind of self-​absorption that was not tethered primarily to self-​interest, but more

152  Revisitings, Reflections, and Critical Considerations readily interpretable as aimed at helping us all to come to terms with inevitable existential anxieties and fears. I think, under the influence of the writings of Otto Rank, Becker understood his last books, especially The Denial of Death, as a gift to humanity—​perhaps a tad grandiose, but still different from blatantly self-​serving self-​aggrandizement. I believe that he was positioned by his wartime experiences, his exposure to political realpolitik during his Paris years, and his turbulent academic odyssey, to continue and (when close to his own death) accelerate his search for an understanding of human being and existence. I also think that Becker overgeneralized his conclusions and failed to consider life experiences very different from his own. However, once again, I think such failings were a far cry from Milgram’s deceptive, theatrical, and celebrity seeking self-​promotion. And what might be said of Trudeau’s life with respect to how he positioned himself, especially in relation to his 1970 invocation of the War Measures Act, but also in relation to his self-​positioning as a personalist and federalist in his life and work? Stanley Milgram specialized in moving between positions of revealing and concealing to stage his theatrical and deceptive experiments and defend his reputation as an innovative and cutting-​edge social psychologist. Ernest Becker’s experiences, especially when positioned as a foot soldier and embassy attaché, fueled his lifetime project of attempting to understand the things we humans do and how human evil is paradoxically linked to a sense of our cultures as immortality projects through which we strive to overcome death. Trudeau, like Milgram, positioned himself through theatrical self-​ presentation, selectively revealing and concealing his actions. However, like Becker, Trudeau was deeply committed to a lifetime purpose that went well beyond self-​interest—​in his case, to position himself as a political leader able to encourage Quebec and Canada to adopt more liberal, democratic, and progressive policies. These included a new Charter of Rights and Freedoms that was unveiled during the patriation of Canada’s constitution from Britain in 1982, and which Trudeau regarded as his crowning achievement. In my interpretation of Trudeau’s invocation of the War Measures Act in 1970, I emphasize how his childhood education positioned him as a future political leader, but also immersed him in right-​wing perspectives and practices. Through his subsequent graduate education at Harvard, in Paris, and in London, Trudeau underwent a major life repositioning that led to his purposeful concealment of his adolescent and young adult political involvements—​a repositioning that played a role in his decision to invoke the War Measures Act in Quebec in 1970. This brief revisiting and comparative analysis of the three single subject life positioning psychobiographies in Chapters 2 to 4 demonstrates the centrality of somewhat distinctive forms of positioning associated with each of these three studies—​position exchange (between concealing and revealing) as a life positioning strategy of self-​presentation for Milgram; repositioning, sprinkled with concealment, for Trudeau; and life positioning within a seemingly necessary

Revisitings, Reflections, and Critical Considerations  153 and irresistible intellectual and existential quest for Becker. Common to all three studies is the inheritance and adoption of overall life positions and perspectives available within life contexts, and the pursuit of strategies and projects aimed at finding meaning and purpose in life and legacy. I think these aspects and types of life positioning are common to many of us, subject to the particular possibilities and constraints that attend our life circumstances. However, I am less confident about exactly how they might manifest in sociocultural settings and life traditions very different from those occupied by these three twentieth-​century middle to upper class, white men. Life circumstances are critically important to our life positioning because it is the way in which we are located and come to locate ourselves within the contexts of our lives that sets everything else to do with life positioning in motion. If our life contexts are impoverished in ways that place heavy constraints on what we can make of ourselves through limited or inadequate resources, lack of opportunity, and oppressive conditions, mere survival and self-​maintenance often overwhelm other life considerations. If our life contexts contain resources, opportunities, and conditions conducive to personal and collective development, possibilities abound for societal, other, and self-​positioning in relation to what we might do and become. Within contexts in which life positioning possibilities exceed life positioning constraints, it still matters greatly how possibilities and constraints are distributed and realized. For example, all three subjects of the three single-​subject studies in this book were males born into life contexts that afforded them life positions of considerable advantage and possibility. Of the three, Trudeau’s life circumstances were especially affluent. He had financial and social resources at his disposal to do pretty much whatever he wanted to do. Such resources do not by themselves guarantee successful lives. However, the developmental positionings and advantages they contain and enable are almost impossible to access for those born into significantly more restrictive and impoverished life contexts. A legitimate critical concern about the single-​subject case studies of life positioning in this book is that the subjects of these studies do not represent a sufficiently diverse selection of sociocultural and sociopolitical life contexts. It is important to recognize how this factor alone limits what can be learned about life positioning in general or in particular contexts and circumstances that differ greatly from those in these case studies. Marginalized people and communities encounter more constraints than possibilities in their life circumstances. Nonetheless, there are many examples of the exercise of conjoint and collective agency directed at improving the everyday lives of others in communities and sociocultural settings that encourage life positionings that are not represented in these case studies, or in many other collections of biographical, autobiographical, or psychobiographical studies. I believe there is no reason in principle why the various tenets and methods of life positioning discussed and applied in this book cannot be altered, extended,

154  Revisitings, Reflections, and Critical Considerations and elaborated in ways that might make them applicable to the study of radically different kinds of lives and/​or life writing. There certainly are examples of sociocultural psychobiography being used to study lives within a wider array of cultures, societies, and people, using a variety of psychological ideas and methods (e.g., Mayer et al., 2023). I think that life positioning psychobiography, with its focus on the sociocultural constitution and development of people within the contexts of their lives, is especially well suited for more widespread use by psychobiographers experienced and knowledgeable about different ways of life. Indeed, the theoretical and methodological adaptability of life positioning psychobiography to a diversity of life contexts is another very good reason to resist hegemonic theorizing and methodological proceduralism, and to encourage ongoing critical reflection, in the conduct of psychobiographical studies of life positioning and psychobiography more generally. There are many ways of life that merit biographical and psychobiographical study on their own terms, within traditions, practices, and circumstances very different from those experienced by the subjects of the three single-​subject studies of life positioning in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this book—​or experienced by this author. Reflections on the Dual-​Subject Studies

The two dual-​subject studies in Chapters 5 and 6 make use of position exchange theory and other ideas and methods of life positioning within interpersonal and close relationships. The dual-​life study of Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud focused on the ways in which they positioned themselves within their personal and professional relationship in a symmetrical and mostly equal partnership that benefited each of them and enabled their exercise of a conjoint agency in their life projects. In contrast, the dual-​life study of Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner revealed an asymmetrical pattern of interactive positioning within which Jim was used, manipulated, and betrayed by his coach and self-​declared friend and protector Warner, in the wider context of racist perspectives and practices of early to mid-​twentieth century American society. These last two studies demonstrate how important position exchange can be to mutual understanding, support, and productivity within close relationships. The fact that Anna and Dorothy could move easily between positions of protecting and supporting each other and being protected and supported by each other helps to explain the importance of their relationship in overcoming the much less symmetrical relationships they had with their parents, especially their fathers. One of the primary tenets of position exchange theory is that symmetrical movement between reciprocal positions such as these helps greatly to allow each partner in a relationship to understand the perspectives, possibilities, and constraints experienced by the other. There simply is no substitute for taking on and enacting some of the key reciprocal positionings within the interactive patterns and exchanges that constitute a close relationship. The self and other

Revisitings, Reflections, and Critical Considerations  155 understanding that flow from such symmetrical positioning go a long way to fueling the conjoint exercise of rational and moral agency so evident in the careers and life projects of Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud. Think carefully then about the relationship between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner. Jim and Pop were of different ages, backgrounds, and were placed in interactive positionings such as coach and athlete, teacher and student, boss and servant—​all of which are by definition and sociocultural practice non-​reciprocal relationships. Some limited position exchange certainly is possible within such role-​defined interactions and their contexts. For example, many teachers learn things from their students and sometimes coaches are receptive to input from their players concerning possible tactics and ways of working together. Now think about the vast differences in life positioning and experience and the rigid boundaries constraining interactivity across life positionings of white and indigenous occupants of the historically racist sociocultural contexts of early twentieth-​century America. Under these conditions, anything remotely resembling the symmetrical dual life positioning of Dorothy and Anna seems inconceivable in a relationship like that between Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner. Given the way in which the sociocultural, developmental tenets of position exchange and life positioning analysis assume the sociocultural constitution of our personhood (including our self and other understanding and capabilities such as perspective taking and agency), there can be no question about the extremely asymmetrical positioning in the relationship between Jim and his coach. To claim that friendship, protective understanding, and genuine concern could possibly exist in such a relational context, as Warner (1993) repeatedly does in his autobiography, is folly. The most that might have been expected of Carlisle authorities and teachers under such conditions was a limited regard for the personhood and wellbeing of students, perhaps coupled with a felt responsibility to care for them and to educate them. Unfortunately, Warner’s own life positioning immersed him in the interpersonally devious arts of suspicion and deception, which he embraced as central to his way of being and acting. The net result would not be overstated by saying that in consequence Warner effectively interacted with Jim as if he were a non-​person, even while attempting to convince himself that he had Jim’s best interests at heart. I find it difficult to claim that any kind of psychology currently has the resources necessary to satisfactorily capture the lived dynamics that operate within historically established sociocultural contexts dedicated to inequality. Biography, on the other hand, I think has a chance of conveying something meaningful and perhaps potentially influential with respect to moving towards recognition and possibly reconciliation of institutionalized inequality, in that it, almost by definition, must consider the life contexts and personhood of those it studies. I also believe that psychobiography, especially a sociocultural form of psychobiography such as life positioning, can succeed in contributing to such an outcome if it can avoid or limit the reductive individualism and methodological

156  Revisitings, Reflections, and Critical Considerations proceduralism so evident in much extant psychological theory, inquiry, and practice. Further Critical Considerations One frequently voiced concern about biographical and psychobiographical studies is that different biographers and psychobiographers often perceive, understand, and adopt different attitudes and interpretations concerning those whose lives they study. For example, Sigmund Freud’s biographers run a gamut from viewing their subject as a genius who discovered the vast therapeutic potentials of psychoanalysis to the benefit of his and future generations (e.g., Gay, 1998) to those who view him as a fraudulent self-​promoter whose psychoanalytic theories and ministrations did more harm than good (e.g., Crews, 2017). All of them provide detailed documentation from original sources to support their interpretations. Given such great discrepancies, what, if any, value can biography have in understanding people? Having read several biographies of Freud, I believe that I have learned much more about him, and to some extent people more generally, precisely because his biographers offer a range of perspectives concerning his life and character. The fact is that the lives of people are complex. Most of us are perceived in different ways by different others. Knowing and considering different perspectives concerning a person, and contemplating their relevance, merits, limitations, and plausibility, deepens and broadens one’s understanding of the life of that individual. Even when interpretations differ, it usually is safe to assume that if the biographer is reputable and the biography produced is credible, well-​sourced, and well-​reviewed, it captures some truth about the biographical subject. The purpose of any serious contemporary biography is to provide a well-​rounded, open portrait of the subject. In general, the more one knows about different perspectives taken by different biographers, the more one knows about the subject of these perspectives. Further, the more one knows about the biographies of different people, the more one might know about people more generally, at least those sharing similar life circumstances and contexts to those about whom one reads. There is no substitute for thorough biographical research and writing when it comes to understanding individual people, short of living alongside them and sharing their life situations and experiences. Psychobiography often is even more prone to different interpretations about focal people and their lives because psychobiographers use different psychological theories and methods to inform their interpretations of the people and lives about which they ask questions and hope to understand. For example, clinical psychologists turned psychobiographers who are convinced that Freud’s psychoanalytic methods are not helpful for most clients may be less likely to look upon the founder of psychoanalysis in a positive light—​although even here one needs to be careful about assuming too much, for serious psychobiographers are aware of the

Revisitings, Reflections, and Critical Considerations  157 necessity of thinking very carefully about their personal orientations, preferences, and value predilections when doing psychobiographical work. For example, I know that my positioning of Stanley Milgram as self-​promoting and morally suspect is not shared by some others who have studied Milgram, his work, and his life. Indeed, many knowledgeable social psychologists consider Milgram to have been a pioneer in advancing a world-​relevant and scientific way of conducting social psychological research. Milgram’s biographer Thomas Blass (2004) likely would agree with both assessments (my own and those of these others). Milgram was a complicated person who led a multifaceted life. Different portraits of such a life are not only possible but almost inevitable. When researching and writing about Milgram’s life, I felt both sympathy and distaste for his tendency to engage in self-​promotion, perhaps reflecting similar leanings of my own. Psychobiographers using different methods (for example those applying a taxonomy of personality traits to interpret a life versus those using a sociocultural positioning method like my own) will appeal to different evidence and arguments in support of their interpretations—​evidence and arguments that may reveal and conceal different aspects of a life or different characteristics of a person. Even if in agreement about some facet of a particular life, how they understand and explain this event or characteristic may vary considerably. For example, I tend to privilege real-​life positioning over purportedly innate personality traits or dispositions. However, some other psychobiographers I know are quite happy to use both approaches if they think doing so is appropriate and advances their understanding of the questions they entertain about events in the lives of their focal subjects. Despite my misgivings about the ontological status of personality traits, I have found some such multi-​method studies highly informative if I interpret personality traits as nothing more than descriptions of certain habitual ways of behaving. One example of using LPA in combination with other theoretical and methodological approaches is a recent sociocultural psychobiographical study by Heather Macdonald (2023). In this study, Macdonald uses LPA and post-​ colonial theory (Mbembe, 2001) to answer the question of how Nelson Mandala was able to withstand almost three decades of imprisonment for his resistance to the apartheid policies of the South African government during the 1960s through the 1980s. Macdonald concludes that Mandela used his time in prison on Robben Island to interact with a variety of prisoners, guards, and officials (Xhosas, Zulus, Indians, Africans, Afrikaners) with different life experiences and different perspectives on possible futures for South Africa. In this way, Robben Island became a collective social matrix for political experimentation and exploration of perspectives and possibilities for a post-​colonial, democratic South Africa free from apartheid. This was a vision that sustained him and gave meaning, purpose, and hope to his prison life. I see no reason to think that inclusion of post-​colonial ideas and interpretations cannot be consistent with the basic tenets of life positioning psychobiography as

158  Revisitings, Reflections, and Critical Considerations I have presented them herein. I also think that life positioning psychobiography can make good use of more traditional techniques of psychobiography such as Irving Alexander’s (1990) indications of saliency, William Todd Schultz’s (2003, 2005) prototypical scenes, or ancient Roman ideas about alter egos, as expressed by Cicero and others. My only insistence is that the use of these and other ideas and techniques not privilege the inner experiences of individuals to the detriment of a careful consideration of possibilities and constraints afforded by their historical, sociocultural, and interpersonal positionings and life contexts. Noted psychobiographer James Anderson (2005) argues that “Showing a connection between the theorist and the theory does not invalidate the theory” (p. 205) and that “Psychobiography helps us to understand theories better” by providing detailed accounts and examples of their use that can help “us to find a theorist’s blind spots and limitations” (p. 206). Detailed, well researched psychobiographies also help guard against overgeneralizations because they often expose aspects of people’s lives that contain paradoxical, even contradictory, actions and perspectives. As a result, Anderson believes that one of the greatest benefits to psychology of psychobiographies of psychologists is that they encourage “us to be discriminating in making use of psychological theories” (p. 208). Critical pluralism that joins clarity of rationale and purpose with carefully considered and open interpretation is a hallmark of good biography and psychobiography. Consequently, I encourage such thinking and application to the historical, sociocultural psychobiography of life positioning I have described and illustrated in this book. I want others to think critically about its tenets, terms, and methods with an aim to improving and creatively extending what I hope to have begun in this volume. Psychology as the Life Positioning of Persons I believe that psychobiographical studies of life positioning can contribute positively to a psychology that takes persons and their lives as its primary subject matter and strives to develop theories and methods up to the task of doing so. This is something about which I have written a great deal since I dedicated myself to taking on this task in my own psychological research and writing. In my professional memoir (Martin, 2021), I argue that from its inception as a proposed laboratory-​based, experimental science much psychological experimentation that is used to justify the scientific basis for professional psychological interventions in health care, education, business, and other walks of life has not been about people and their life contexts. Physicists can create experimental conditions in their laboratories that can tell us a great deal about the building blocks and forces active in the physical world outside their laboratories. However, persons do not exist in the sociocultural world in the same way as physical things exist in the physical world. Things are insentient, incapable of feeling or understanding themselves and how they are located and exist

Revisitings, Reflections, and Critical Considerations  159 within the world. People are sentient, capable of self, other, and life-​space understanding, and act and react within their life locations and positionings in ways that affect and alter these conditions and themselves. Persons are active agents who cannot be reduced to their constituent parts in the manner of physical objects. When people are removed from the quotidian situations in which they exist, to be placed in unusual and unfamiliar settings like psychological laboratories, they cannot be expected to act as they do within their comparatively known, understood, yet still open to change, life worlds. Experimental psychologists use psychological laboratories and experimental apparatuses and procedures to curtail, direct, and control the behavior of participants in their studies. Psychological laboratories are artificial settings created by experimental psychologists laboring under the idea that such settings have direct relevance to understanding how people act in and experience their everyday lives. The purported scientific study of human thinking, emoting, behaving, and experiencing under laboratory conditions is best understood as the creation of artificial findings under artificial conditions. It is worth noting that even under restrictive and supposedly controlled experimental conditions, it has proved difficult for experimental psychologists to replicate results of their studies, especially in the more social areas of psychology. Yet it is precisely these areas of psychological experimentation that are relevant to applied and professional psychologists who work with people in real-​world contexts such as schools, clinics, and workplaces. Why would anyone think that these artificial inquiry practices warrant the use of terms like “scientist-​practitioner” to describe what educational, clinical, and industrial-​organizational psychologists actually do in their non-​laboratory workplaces? What they do may in many cases be very effective. However, any such effectiveness ought not be linked to psychology practiced as an experimental laboratory science, but to the commitment, sincerity, and expertise of psychological practitioners who work in the real-​world contexts in which they ply their trade. It is the personhood of professional psychologists and their clients that matters. Unfortunately, it is our personhood as enacted in our everyday interactivities and sociocultural contexts, together with the individual and collective agency it yields, that is mostly absent in laboratory psychological science. Applied psychologists work with people as they exist in the world, not in the experimental imaginations and confined, theatrical settings created by psychologists like Stanley Milgram. Life positioning psychobiography, like other methods of life study and writing, focuses on people as we are located and positioned to act and exist within our life contexts and undertakings. There is a good reason that biographical and autobiographical studies and writings have captured the interest of centuries of readers. When we read about the lives of others, we cannot help but find something we can associate with our own lives. No matter how different from us in locations, contexts, perspectives, possibilities, purposes, and projects, when

160  Revisitings, Reflections, and Critical Considerations we read a well-​researched and well-​written biography we recognize struggles, challenges, plans, attempts, and failures that we understand as ways of existing and attempting to cope with the inevitably unpredictable events that attend living as a human person. Within our communities, we interact with others who may be disposed to us in a wide variety of complex ways—​ways that can be understood only by experiencing them directly, or to a lesser extent vicariously through our reading of various kinds of life writing and listening to life stories. As persons, we inevitably develop some autobiographical sense of our own life stories. These may take very different forms in different settings, but an ineluctable fact about living is our interest in stories that confirm, reinvent, or enlighten some aspect of our life experience. In this way, biography, psychobiography, and life writing more generally contribute to an understanding of personhood—​ the most central feature of a psychology that matters. References Alexander, I. (1990). Personology: Method and contexts in personality assessment and psychobiography. Duke University Press. Anderson, J. W. (2005). The psychobiogaphical study of psychologists. In W. T. Shultz, (Ed.), Handbook of psychobiography (pp. 203–​209). Oxford University Press. Blass, T. (2004). The man who shocked the world: The life and legacy of Stanley Milgram. Basic Books. Crews, F. (2017). Freud: The making of an illusion. Picador. Davies, B., & Harré, R. (1990). Positioning: The discursive production of selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 20, 43–​63. Gay, P. (1998). Freud: A life for our time. W. W. Norton. Macdonald, H. (2023). The life of Nelson Mandela: A life positioning analysis. Unpublished manuscript. Fielding Graduate University. Martin, J. (2013). Life positioning analysis: An analytic framework for the study of lives and life narratives. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 33, 1–​17. Martin, J. (2015). Life positioning analysis. In J. Martin, J. Sugarman, & K. L. Slaney (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of theoretical and philosophical psychology: Methods, approaches, and new directions for social sciences (pp. 248–​262). Wiley Blackwell. Martin, J. (2020). Hometown asylum: A history and memoir of institutional care. Friesen Press. Martin, J. (2021). From scientific psychology to the study of persons: A psychologist’s memoir. Routledge. Mayer, C-​H., van Niekerk, R., Fouch, P. J. P., & Ponterotto, J. G. (Eds.). (2023). Beyond WEIRD: Psychobiography in times of transcultural and transdisciplinary perspectives. Springer. Mbembe, A. (2001). On the postcolony. University of California Press. Schultz, W. T. (2003). The prototypical scene: A method for generating psychobiographical hypotheses. In R. Josselson, A. Lieblich, & D. P. McAdams (Eds.), Up close and personal: The teaching and learning of narrative research (pp. 151–​176). APA Books.

Revisitings, Reflections, and Critical Considerations  161 Schultz, W. T. (2005). How to strike psychobiographical pay dirt in biographical data. In W. T. Schultz (Ed.), Handbook of psychobiography (pp. 42–​63). Oxford University Press. Van Langenhove, L. (2021). Positioning theory. In V. Glaveanu (Ed.), The Palgrave encyclopedia of the possible (pp. 1044–​1050). Springer. Warner, G. S. (1993). Pop Warner: Football’s greatest teacher—​The epic autobiography of major college football’s winningest coach (M. Bynum, Ed.). Gridiron Football Properties.

Index

Note: Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by “n” and the note number e.g., 15n1 refers to note 1 on page 15. Adam, Heribert 86 Adler, Alfred 78 Adorno, Theodor 27, 29 Aichhorn, August 108 Alexander, Irving 118, 158 Allport, Gordon 4, 22–​24, 26–​27, 40 alter egos 158 Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) 137–​140 American Psychologist 33–​34 Anderson, James 4, 158 Arendt, Hannah 27, 29, 30, 36 Asch, Solomon 20, 26–​27, 29, 32, 40; social conformity studies 18, 23–​24, 151 asymmetrical life positioning 9–​11; Rogers 9; Thorpe and Warner 9, 121, 134–​135, 140–​143, 150, 154–​155 Axworthy, Thomas 59 Bamberg, M. 15n1 Bates, Harvey 79, 87, 91 Baumrind, Diana 33–​34, 39 Beauvoir, Simone de 58 Becker, Ernest 10, 75–​77, 90–​94, 149–​153; causa sui 82–​85, 88, 90, 92–​93; death 82–​83, 86–​92, 151–​152; The Denial of Death 76, 86, 88, 90, 93, 152; Escape from Evil 76, 86, 88, 90, 93; evil 79, 81, 83–​91, 93–​94, 151–​152; family 77, 79, 81, 86; life before SFU 77–​81; Milgram comparison 17; San Francisco State College (SFSC) 80; scholarship

before SFU 82–​85; Second World War 78, 89–​90, 150–​151; Simon Fraser University (SFU) 76, 81, 85–​90; State University of New York at Syracuse (SUNY) 79; The Structure of Evil 81, 83–​84; Syracuse University 78–​79, 83, 87, 151; transference 84–​85, 88, 91; University of British Columbia (UBC) 81; University of California, Berkeley 79–​80; Vietnam War 80–​81, 93 Bernays, Minna 101, 103 Bernier, Father Jean 50, 51 Bibring, Grete 115 Bie, Ferdinand 139 Binswanger, Ludwig 107 Bjork, Daniel 7 Blass, Thomas 18–​21, 23, 26–​27, 32, 34, 36, 38–​39, 157 Bloc Québécois 68 Blos, Peter 108 Bonaparte, Marie 109 Bouthillier, G. 69–​70 Brown, Norman O. 86 Brown, Roger 23–​24, 27, 40 Brundage, Avery 135 Brundtland, Arne Olay 25 Bruner, Jerome 23 Burlingham, Dorothy 11, 96–​97, 114–​119, 150, 154–​155; early life 97–​101; family 97–​101, 106–​111, 113–​114, 116–​117, 119; and Freud 100, 106–​119; Hampstead Nursery and Clinic 109–​112; Hietzing School 108–​109

Index  163 Burlingham, Michael John 96, 98–​100, 106, 115–​118 Bush, George W. 4 Camus, Albert 58 Carlisle Indian Industrial School 121–​125, 127, 129–​143, 155 Carlson, Rae 4 Caro, Robert 11–​12 Cicero 158 Cihlarz, Josephine 101 Clarkson, Stephen 56, 58 Coles, Robert 96 Comte, Auguste 84, 89 Cross, James 44, 67 Davies, Bronwyn 146 Dawes, Henry 124 Dawes Act (US, 1887) 124, 128 de Forest family 97–​98, 100–​101, 118 de Gaulle, Charles 45, 66 Delisle, Esther 53 Devore, Leland 132 Dewey, John 86, 108 Douglas, Tommy 69 Duplessis, Maurice 62–​63 Eichmann, Adolf 30 Eisenhower, Dwight 132 Eitingon, Max 107 Elgee, Neil 93 Elms, Allan 4 English, John 53, 66, 72 Erikson, Erik Homburger 4, 108 Ernest Becker Foundation (EBF) 93 ethics, and Milgram’s obedience studies 18, 26, 28, 31–​32, 36, 40, 151 experimental psychology 158–​159 Fennell, Tommy 127 Ferenczi, Sandor 100 Fischer, Bobby 4 Freud, Anna 11, 96–​97, 114–​119, 150, 154–​155; and Burlingham 100, 106–​119; early life 101–​106; The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence 109–​110; family 101–​115; Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic 109–​110; Heitzing School 108; Normality and Pathology in Childhood 112; Vienna Psychoanalytic Society 103, 105

Freud, Sigmund: and Anna Freud 101–​115, 119; and Becker 78, 82–​84; biographers’ views 156; and Burlingham 100–​101, 108–​110, 117; Leonardo da Vinci biography 4–​5 Friedman, Moses 133, 135, 137–​139 Fromm, Erich 27, 29 Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) 44–​5, 67–​69, 72–​73 Gandhi, Mahatma 4 General Allotment Act (US, Dawes Act, 1887) 124, 128 Georgakopoulou, A. 15n1 Gillespie, Alex 5–​7, 34 Glăveanu, Vlad 7 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 84 Goffman, Erving 79 Goldman, Salka 102–​103 Goldstein, Joseph 113 Granatstein, Jack 69 Grandpré, Jean de 56 Gustav, King of Sweden 136 Gzowski, Peter 66 Hamilton, Nigel 13 Haring, Douglas 78 Harper, Robert 81 Harré, Rom 14n1, 34, 146 Hayakawa, S. I. 80 Hnatyshyn, Ray 54 Hocart, A. M. 86 Houde, Camillien 45, 47 Iglauer, Edith 50 Indian Appropriations Act (US, 1889) 128 Indian Wars 122, 124–​125, 132 Jacobs, Deborah 93 Johnson, Lyndon 11–​12 Jones, Ernest 109 Josselson, Ruthellen 4 Journal of Personality 4 Jung, Carl 103 Kann, Loe 103 Kant, Immanuel 84 Keating, Nasta 4 Keen, Sam 92–​93 Kierkegaard, Søren 86, 93 Kilham, Eleanor 97–​98, 101

164 Index Korn, James 32 Kort, Sol 81, 93 Laporte, Pierre 44, 46, 67, 70 Laski, Harold 59–​60, 62 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm 84 Leifer, Ron 93 Leonardo da Vinci 4, 5 Lesage, Jean 63–​64 Lévesque, René 71–​72 Lewin, Kurt 20, 26, 29 Liberal Party (Canada) 61, 63–​66, 69 life positioning: five-​step procedure 148; methodological flexibility 147–​149; nature of 2–​3; and psychobiography 3–​5; sociocultural psychobiography 10–​14; storyline 8; see also asymmetrical life positioning; symmetrical life positioning life repositioning 7–​8; Trudeau 56–​61, 67–​73, 149–​150, 152 Locke, John 84 Lougheed, Peter 44 Lunt, Peter 26, 27, 29 Luther, Martin 4 Macdonald, Heather 157 Mandela, Nelson 157 Maraniss, David 128, 139 Marchand, Jean 62–​66 Maritain, Jacques 58, 60, 68 Marx, Karl 84 McAdams, Dan 4 McCall, Christina 56, 58 McLuhan, Marshall 66 Mead, George Herbert 6, 7 Menaker, Esther 114 Mercer, William A. 130 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 58 Milgram, Stanley 9–​10, 17–​18, 34–​40, 149–​153, 157; agentic state 30, 35–​36; City University of New York 32, 151; confusion and conflict 35–​36; early life 20–​22, 34–​35; evil 76; family 20–​22, 40; Harvard University 22–​24, 32, 151; higher education 22–​27, 34–​35; obedience studies 18–​19, 27–​40; Princeton University 26, 27; Queens College 22, 26; reveal and conceal 19–​20, 32, 34–​35, 39, 152; social conformity studies 18, 23–​26,

34–​35; Yale University 18, 19, 25, 26–​40, 151 Milk, Harvey 4 Mounier, Emmanuel 58–​60 Murphy, Mike 135 Murray, Henry 4 Mussolini, Benito 70 National Science Foundation (NSF, US) 27, 31 Nazi Germany: Becker 78, 89, 150–​151; Freud 109; Milgram 18–​21, 27, 30–​32, 36, 40, 150; Trudeau 57, 70 Nemni, Max and Monique 50–​51, 53–​54, 58, 60, 70 Neumann, Franz 57 Nevers, Ernie 142 Obama, Michelle 4 Parsons, Talcott 23 Parti Québécois (PQ) 45, 69 Pearson, Lester B. 64–​66 Pelletier, Gérard 52, 62–​66 Perry, Gina 36, 38 personologists 4 Pétain, Philippe 53 Peter, Carl 92 Peters, Uwe Henrik 96 Plato 50, 86 Pos, Marie Becker 76, 81, 86 Position Analysis 15n1 position exchange 5–​7, 34, 154; Burlingham and Freud 154; Milgram 17, 19, 34–​40, 149–​151; Trudeau 56, 60; Warner 133 positioning theory 14–​15n1, 60, 146 post-​colonial theory 157 pragmatist tradition of research, and Milgram 26, 27, 40 Pratt, Richard Henry 121–​125, 127 prototypical scenes 158 psychobiography 3–​5; critical considerations 155–​158; dual 96; sociocultural 10–​14, 119, 145–​147, 154 psychology: experimental 158–​159; as life positioning of persons 158–​160 Radwanski, George 48, 50, 52–​53, 65 Rank, Otto 78, 86, 88–​91, 93, 152 Reagan, Ronald 80

Index  165 Reik, Theodor 106 Rogers, Carl 9 Rosenfeld, Eva 108 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 84, 86 Runyan, William 4 Runyon, Damon 132 saliency, indications of 158 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 58, 59 Schultz, William Todd 7, 158 Schur, Max 111 Sherif, Muzafer 26, 29 Skinner, B. F. 7, 9 Smiley, Donald 70 Social Science Research Council (US) 24 sociality 7 Solnit, Albert 113 Spinoza, Baruch 82, 84 Stevenson, Robert Louis 4 Sullivan, James E. 138–​140 Sweetser, Ruth and Arthur 100 symmetrical life positioning 9–​10; Burlingham and Freud 96–​97, 118–​119, 150, 154–​155; Milgram 9; Skinner 9 Szasz, Thomas 79, 151 Taft, William Howard 136 Taylor, Charles 64 Tewanima, Louis 135–​137 Thorpe, Jim 10, 11, 121–​122, 141–​143, 150, 154–​155; Carlisle Indian Industrial School 125, 130–​143, 151; early life 128–​129; family 128–​129, 134; Indiana University 142; Olympics 131, 135–​143; outsider 132, 142–​143 Tiffany family 97–​98, 100–​101 Tomkins, Silvan 4 total football 7 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott 8, 10, 43–​44, 67–​73, 149–​150, 152–​153; Catholicism 43, 47, 52–​54, 58–​59, 62; childhood 46–​49; Cité Libre 62–​64; Collège Jean de Brébeuf 44, 47, 49–​52, 54–​55, 57–​58, 60, 70; educational and personal repositioning 56–​61, 71; experimentation, self-​development, and search for possibilities 62–​64,

71; family 43, 46–​49, 53–​55, 71; federalism 59–​60, 62, 64–​65, 68–​69, 71, 152; globe-​trotting and self-​testing 60–​61; Harvard University 44, 52, 56–​58, 71, 152; liberalism 61, 63–​66; London School of Economics (LSE) 44, 56, 59–​60, 71, 152; nationalism 45, 50–​51, 53–​54, 62–​63, 65, 68, 70–​71; October Crisis of 1970 44–​46, 67, 69–​72; personalism 58–​59, 68, 70–​71, 152; pluralism 60–​62, 68; right-​ wing corporatist revolutionary 52–​56; schooling and adolescence 46, 49–​52; Sciences Po 44, 56, 58–​59, 71, 152; Second World War 45, 52–​54, 57, 70–​71; separatism 45, 51, 54, 63–​64, 68–​69, 72–​73; Trudeaumania 64–​67, 69, 71; University of Montreal (UM) 44, 46, 52–​55, 57, 62–​63; War Measures Act (WMA) 8, 44–​46, 67, 69–​72, 152 Union Nationale Party (UNP, Quebec) 62–​63 Vas Dias, Susan 115–​116 Vietnam War 151 War Measures Act (Canada) 8, 44–​46, 67, 69–​72, 152 Warner, Glenn Scobey “Pop”, 10–​11, 121–​122, 141–​143, 150, 154–​155; Carlisle Indian Industrial School 125, 127, 129–​142, 155; Cornell University 125–​127, 129–​130, 133, 142; family 125–​126; insider 132, 142–​143; Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanics 126–​127; Olympics 135–​142; University of Georgia 126–​127 Weber, Max 27, 29 White, Walter 129 Wieslander, Hugo 139 Williams, John 37–​38 Wright, A. O. 124 Young-​Bruehl, Elisabeth 96, 102–​105, 107, 110, 112