Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, on Distractions Created by Evil Men)

“Every whisper of infamy is industriously circulated, every hint of suspicion eagerly improved, and every failure of conduct joyfully published by those whose interest it is that the eye and voice of the publick should be employed on any rather than on themselves.”—English man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), originally published in The Rambler, No. 76, Dec. 8, 1750 [How bad men are reconciled to themselves], republished in Samuel Johnson: Selected Works, edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr., Stephen Fix, and Howard Weinbrot (2021)

Samuel Johnson was born nearly a century and a half before Sigmund Freud, but in the above quote the English essayist shrewdly anticipated, from an ethical and religious perspective, what the founder of psychoanalysis termed “projection,” or the habit of attributing to others what are faults of one’s own.

This defense mechanism did not die with Johnson, or with Freud for that matter. Instead, it continues to be practiced, with various degrees of adroitness, in the political sphere.

One Presidential candidate, however, employs projection compulsively, and he’s been doing so since he first burst on the political scene.

Five years ago, CNN senior political analyst John Avlon analyzed how that candidate did so. What is so extraordinary is not the degree to which this politician tries to throw others off his scent (perhaps, given a revelation of the last few days, quite literally off his “scent”), but rather the eagerness with which so many of this individual’s diehard supporters fall for his instinctive acts of desperation.

(Dr. Johnson's relevance to current events—and, specifically, to the politician discussed above—is also stressed in Jeff Kaplan’s post on the “Conflict of Interest” blog, which contains this quote from James Boswell’s great biography of the older English writer: “It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying, that there is so much falsehood in the world.”)

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ As Barney Explains the Oedipus Complex)

Deputy Barney Fife [played by Don Knotts]: “It’s the old mother figure bit: he loves her like a mother. Sigmund Frood wrote a lot about that.” —The Andy Griffith Show, Season 5, Episode 4, “The Education of Ernest T. Bass,” original air date Oct. 12, 1964, teleplay by Everett Greenbaum and James Fritzell, directed by Alan Rafkin

I’ve always thought that no TV character could fracture the English language so often, effortlessly and hilariously as All in the Family’s Archie Bunker. But I must say, after watching numerous episodes of The Andy Griffith Show in this year of social distancing, that Barney Fife comes in a close second.

Sheriff Andy Taylor’s lovable but flummoxed deputy brings to mind nothing so much as the couplet from Alexander Pope: “A little learning is a dangerous thing/Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.” (Of course, Barney is more likely to think of the creator of those lines as a religious leader than as an English poet.)

Barney applies the principles of psychology far more broadly than simply to substitute mother figures. He is also a student of the criminal mind, concerned that any show of leniency is liable to be interpreted as a sign of weakness. Firearm use is a necessity, he believes. “There's Andy, and there's me, and baby makes three," he says, patting his gun.

Is it really his fault, then, that his gun goes off as soon as it’s placed in his holster?

The physical aspects of Barney Fife—the sneer and strut in front of no-account occupants of the Mayberry jail that inevitably precede his bulging, saucer eyes and sweating forehead—overshadow his extensive resort to malapropisms. But his misuse of the mother tongue also makes him one of the great subsidiary characters in sitcom history.

For his performance in this role—including his dexterity in mangling language in so many sidesplitting ways—Don Knotts was nominated five times for an Emmy, winning each one. By the end of that extraordinary streak, I’m not sure why the Television Academy didn’t simply throw up its hands and rename its Best Supporting Actor Award in his honor.

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on Sigmund Freud)

“Of course they called on God, but he went his way

down among the lost people like Dante, down

     to the stinking fosse where the injured

   lead the ugly life of the rejected,

and showed us what evil is, not, as we thought,

deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith,

     our dishonest mood of denial,

   the concupiscence of the oppressor.”— W. H. Auden, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” from Another Time (1940)

The death of Sigmund Freud in London occurred 75 years ago this week against the dark background of what he had called Civilization and Its Discontents: a war breaking out in Europe that would unleash the darkest impulses that human beings were capable of. It also came as a time of particular anguish for the pioneer of psychoanalysis: having left his beloved Vienna only when the Nazis who had thuggishly absorbed his country began to burn his books, he had been living in exile in London, suffering as mightily now in mind as much as in body.

Frequently, researchers will find on the Web articles that say that Freud died of cancer. This leaves out half of what happened—the more important part, even. To say that Freud was suffering from cancer doesn’t convey half of the horror he endured. As far back as 1923, he had been diagnosed with malignant oral epithelioma. The problem was that Freud could never bear to give up his cigars, which he thought made him more creative. By 1939, he was reduced to using prostheses to talk and eat, enduring repeated primitive X-rays and radium therapy, not to mention the post-op complications from 30 medical procedures.

No matter what one’s feelings about assisted suicide, it is difficult to accept the irony of a man who tried to help his patients cope with their psychic pain now battered by remorseless pain of his own—until, in a last stab of control of his life, Freud requested that his physician give him 21 milligrams of morphine. The request, fulfilled, ended his life.

The death of Freud also provided the occasion for another magnificent work, written in what might have been his annus mirabilus, by W.H. Auden. In 1939, a year of profound political and personal dislocation, Auden was inspired to write several of the poems that would be on the short list of his finest works: “September 1, 1939,” “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” “To an Unknown Citizen,” and this.

For most of the prior two decades, Auden had substituted Freudian psychology and sociology for the High Anglican faith in which he had been raised. By the end of the “low, dishonest decade” of the 1930s, he was questioning whether these were sufficient for understanding a suddenly darker world. (There is a hint of this in his elegy for Freud, with the line, “Only Hate was happy,” and there seems an uncanny premonition about the Final Solution in the phrase “covering the garden with ashes.”

The following year, Auden had returned to his former religious practice.

Yet, a dozen years after his return to religion, Auden had not so much rejected Freudianism as subordinated. In a 1952 New Republic essay, he posited that, even “if every one of his theories should turn out to be false, Freud would still tower up as the genius who perceived that psychological events are not natural events but historical and that, therefore, psychology, as distinct from neurology, must be based on the pre-suppositions and methodology, not of the biologist but of the historian.”

Extraordinarily, in a way that even the man Auden called “The Master” might not have anticipated, Auden laid out the case for Freud as a figure of moral agency: “In the long run, however, the welcome given to psychoanalysis by the public is based on a sound intuition that it stands for treating everyone as a unique and morally responsible person, not as a keyboard--it speaks of the narcissism of the Ego, but it believes in the existence of that Ego and its capacity to recognize its own limitations--and that in these days is a great deal.”

This Day in Scientific History (Freud Gives 1st American Lecture)

September 7, 1909—Speaking extemporaneously in German, tossing unexpected one-liners into the mix, Sigmund Freud delivered the first of five lectures on his revolutionary method for treating mental illness—psychoanalysis—in a country that embraced his pioneering work far more quickly than Europe ever did, but which he could never bring himself to like.

In late August, Freud and disciples Carl Jung and Sandor Ferenczi had disembarked from the George Washington before traveling to Clark University in Worcester, Mass., where the Austrian physician was set to speak on five consecutive days on “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis.”

The European group had been invited by Clark president G. Stanley Hall, who, in observance of the institution’s 20th anniversary of becoming the second graduate school in the U.S., had scheduled a mind-boggling agenda of conferences featuring renowned speakers in Clark’s major areas of study: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, child welfare, and international relations.

The picture accompanying this post captures several of the participants. In the front row, from left to right, are Freud, Hall and Jung; in the back row are Abraham A. Brill, one of the earliest psychoanalysts; Ernest Jones, the biographer whom Brenda Maddox would term “Freud’s Wizard” for his role in disseminating the master's ideas in the Anglosphere; and Ferenczi.

After twenty years of patient work, Freud’s theories had still not caught fire to anywhere near the extent that he wanted. The prior year, the “First International Congress of Psychoanalysis” had been held in Salzburg.

Now, you’d think that a new psychological theory heavily reliant on interpreting sexual matters (you can almost see the delighted male faces in attendance: It’s all about sex), coupled with the chance to soak up the sounds of the city that nurtured the likes of Mozart and Schubert, would have brought everyone running to this “First International Conference.” But only 40 people showed up—an okay turnout, but, all things considered, still disappointing.

That’s part of the reason why Freud’s eyes popped when, the prior December, he received the invitation from Hall. To have him speak, the university would award him an honorary degree—the only official honor of this kind that Freud received throughout his life.

The honorary degree didn’t end up being the only inducement the university would offer to lure him over:

* Freud’s speaking honorarium was increased from $400 to $750;

* Hall promoted Freud as the star attraction of the conference; and,

* The school issued, at Freud’s request, a last-minute speaking invitation to Jung as well.

Leon Hoffman’s New York Times op-ed article last week, “Freud’s Adirondack Vacation,” notes one of the interesting oddities of the conference. Despite an hour alone together, the Viennese physician failed to win over pioneering American psychologist-philosopher William James to his ideas on the interpretation of dreams and the power of the unconscious (“They can’t fail to throw light on human nature,” James wrote, “but I confess that he made on me personally the impression of a man obsessed with fixed ideas.”)

The person that Freud did impress—perhaps more crucially, given that James would be dead within a year anyway and would therefore have little time to propagate the Austrian's ideas—was James Jackson Putnam, a professor of neurology at Harvard. Putnam invited Freud, Jung and Ferenczi to his family camp in the Adirondacks, where, amid the wonders of nature, the American and the Austrian became friends.

Within two years, Putnam would become the first president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, a post from which he proselytized for Freud’s idea that mental illness was not simply a result of “degeneration” of the brain, but that the unconscious could powerfully influence the body.

Freud could not have been more pleased by the reception of his work in the United States, writing:

“In Europe I felt as though I were despised; but over there I found myself received by the foremost men as an equal. As I stepped onto the platform at Worcester to deliver my Five Lectures upon Psychoanalysis it seemed like the realization of some incredible day-dream: psychoanalysis was no longer a product of delusion, it had become a valuable part of reality."

For all his gratitude to Hall and Putnam for spreading his ideas, however, Freud was far more ambivalent about their country: “America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success,” he would observe some years after his only visit to this country.

Maybe some of Freud’s attitude stemmed from a not-especially-healthy source: “What is the use of Americans," he remarked, “if they bring no money?'

At the time of his death in 1939, forced into exile from Austria, watching Europe plunged into another military conflagration, Freud would have been astonished to know that six years hence, the nation he scorned would lead the way in eradicating the mass psychosis of Nazism from the European body politic.