This blog has been created by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and it will consist of commentaries on current affairs and reflections on contemporary political issues and questions. Occasionally, invited guests will contribute as well.
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A date has been set for Elisabeth’s memorial in Toronto. The information follows for those who wish to attend:
Sunday, April 22nd 2012
2pm-5pm
The Debates Room in Hart House
University of Toronto
The address for Hart House is:
7 Hart House Circle
Toronto, ON
M5S 3H3
416.978.2452
Please see the map below:
On Thursday night I went to a performance of Philip Glass’ opera Satyagraha, about the early life of Gandhi. I left in a trance, spellbound by the music and the puppetry. In front of Lincoln Center a large crowd had gathered; it took me a moment to recognize the barricades, the police vans lining Broadway, the gorgeous blue-green sheen of a large puppet of the Statue of Liberty, covering her eyes in shame, or was it misery? It was a peaceful demonstration; the protestors were chanting; it seemed as if sidewalk had become proscenium. The audience surged forward for another performance. Several people were standing at the entrance to the opera house, giving away copies of a broadsheet: The Occupied Wall Street Journal. I took one, and went home.
I was restless that night, even though it was late; I couldn’t sleep. Glass’s music is lyrical and lulling and I kept humming fragments that bubbled up. So I sat and read The Occupied Journal. I began thinking, intensely, of my friend Elisabeth, who has written so much about revolution and democracy. Elisabeth was due to arrive on Sunday for a week of lectures and research work in the Winnicott archives, an enormous project into which she had just thrown herself with her usual whole-hearted, single-minded absorption. I kept thinking, as I read the Occupied, how much she would enjoy the essays in the paper–the entire movement–and how much I would enjoy talking to her about its profound significance. I set the old-fashioned broadsheet on top of a pile of books and magazines I had put aside to share with her when she arrived.
Early the next morning came the terrible, choked phone call from Elisabeth’s beloved spouse, Christine Dunbar, that Elisabeth had suddenly collapsed and died as they were walking home from a concert.
I feel unmoored at this loss. Elisabeth was an anchor of my life.
I met Elisabeth when I was 19 years old; I had gone to her office to beg to be allowed into a seminar on the ancient Greeks she was giving at Wesleyan. I will never forget her piercing blue gaze as she listened to my answers to questions: what have you read of philosophy? what do you understand of Plato? what are you reading now? It was terrifying, and exhilarating. I had that rare feeling of meeting someone and recognizing instantly that the person would be very important in my life.
Elisabeth was my teacher for three years at university; together we read our way from Plato to Heidegger. Our teacher. So many of us were smitten by the life of the mind, under her tutelage. I remember someone asking, What is the point of a degree in philosophy? What happens with jobs? Elisabeth fixed that gaze on us, and said: “No matter what you are doing–even if you are washing dishes–at least you will know how to think, and have something interesting to think about.” Her friend Jerry Kohn said what is true for so many of us: “Some of the best conversations I ever had in my life were with Elisabeth.”
In those student days, I became Elisabeth’s cat-sitter (she was enthusiastic about taking in strays), her apartment-sitter, her book-sitter, when she traveled. (Elisabeth had a surprisingly strong nesting instinct.) And then, finally, I became her friend. In those days she had long hair and wore high boots with heels, and she was a terrific dancer, too; faculty often joined students at parties. Read more
The talk below was given to a luncheon meeting of the New York Institute for the Humanities on November 18, 2011 at Deutches Haus, NYU.
Being among friends, I feel that I can indulge myself a bit of intellectual autobiography and catch you up on what I have been doing in recent years –to this moment when, as many of you know, I have taken on the General Editorship of The Collected Writings of D.W.Winnicott. For me, this new task has turned out to be a continuation of an older one. Let me tell you, then, the story of this continuity –continuity being a hard thing to come by these distracted and distracting days! Read more
A talk given at the German Consulate in Toronto on October 24, 2011, to celebrate the opening of an installation of “The Hannah Arendt Denkraum” brought to Toronto from Berlin.
Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,
es ist mir eine grosse Freude mit Ihnen hier bei der Eroeffnung des Hannah Arendt Denkraums zu sein und ich bin insbesondere Frau Consul Sabine Sparwasser sehr dankbar dafür, mich eingeladen zu haben. Um über Hannah Arendt zu sprechen — erst recht in einem Denkraum! — ist es nötig, zu denken, und deshalb werde ich jetzt aufhoeren, auf Deutsch zu Ihnen zu sprechen und in der einzigen Sprache fortfahren, in der ich denken kann: in meiner Muttersprache.
So, let me begin again, in English, by saying that Frau Sparwasser has asked me to reflect on the relevance of Arendt’s thinking for today. To do that, I must first say something about today. It is obvious to all of us, I think, that we live in a time of intense, world-wide anxiety, an anxiety that is spread through the human world like a toxic mist, like a pollution, like a global warming. Every corner of the world is connected to every other by the various media of news reporting and the various forms of electronic networking, so whatever happens somewhere is transmitted to some degree everywhere –degrees of truth and distortion and spin being more or less equal in the process. In this atmosphere, which is over-stimulating, full of excitements both upsetting and exhilarating, it is very difficult to think at all –one can feel like one of those experimental animals wrapped in electrodes and shocked continuously until exhausted and spent. Overloaded. Even the torrential events of the Arab Spring strike us in one moment as world-transformational and in the next not. And Occupy Wall Street –a new youth revolt?
Dear Relatives and Friends, Ladies and Gentleman,
My step-father Ernst Sutton has honored me by requesting that I eulogize his wife Lois Sutton, who departed our family, our community, and our world on the 7th of October in this year 2011.
We who are gathered here at her last home, Jenner’s Pond, each knew her differently: as her husband, her children and step-children, her grandchildren, and –in absentia—her two little greatgrandchildren, and as her friends of diverse vintages. We each knew her partially, through a part or parts of the eighty-nine years of her life. So I think –and Ernest Sutton agrees—that the appropriate way to speak well –to eulogize—her is to draw a biographical portrait which each of you may contemplate differently, from your different knowledges of her, but all recognize in it the same person. Coming together in recognition of a person is a pleasure, and a pleasure of the sort in which Bea Sutton excelled –a pleasure of hospitality. We wish to provide an opportunity for reflection on her whole life and on her convictions about how a life can and should be lived well and death, inevitable and inexorable, faced with courage and forbearance.
Last June, I sat on the veranda of the Arowhon Pines Lodge in the Algonquin National Park –Canada’s largest nature conservancy–watching through a pair of binoculars as a small loon on the far side of Little Lake Joe swam along peacefully and then, suddenly, dove out of sight. I waited for her to surface. She was gone for so long that I thought I must have missed her reappearance. Then, three hundred yards or so off to the west, she came up, shook the water off her beautiful black and white head, and paddled on, munching on the plant that drooped down from either side of her beak.
Last week, I wrote two short pieces –750 words were allowed for each–for newspapers. One was a reflection on Hannah Arendt’s concept “the banality of evil” for a series that The Guardian of London is doing on “Big Ideas.” The installment of the series on “the banality of evil” was meant to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, about which Arendt had written her controversial Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil (1963). The second piece was a book review for Toronto’s main newspaper, The Globe & Mail, of a book entitled Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Callously Targets Children, which appeared last week from Penguin/Canada. The author is Joel Bakan, a law professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who is well-known in Canada and in the U.S. for a best-selling earlier book, The Corporation (2004), on the basis of which he and a big production team made a terrific award-winning documentary, also called The Corporation. This co-incidence of writing tasks made me think from two different directions about the topic Arendt once called “personal responsibility under dictatorship,” and in this blog I would like to share those thoughts with you –and the two texts as well.
It astonishes people who live in the European social democracies and here in Canada that in America a major party, the Republicans, and its smaller unofficial ally, the Tea Party, not only claim that taxes are too high but that there should never be –no matter what—any increases in taxes, for anybody. The Tea Party members invoke with their name the Boston Tea Party and the precipitating slogan of the American War of Independence: “No taxation without representation.” But they are not really concerned with representation, they are focused on taxation itself, which they reject. They want to “starve the beast” of government, so voracious for revenue, and thereby shrink it into the “small government” –the smaller the better—they tote as an ideal. That tiny remaining government should, they think, be controlled by them as the grateful people’s triumphant representatives: the people will have representation without taxation.
As I noted in the Welcome to this blog, it will occasionally feature posts by colleagues that relate to its whosafrasidof social democracy themes. This week, I asked two psychoanalyst colleagues, Laswrence Blum., M.D. of Philadelphia and Leon Hoffman, M.D., of New York (co-director of the Pacella Parent Child Center: theparentchildcenter.org) if I could offer you a piece they wrote earlier this year and published on Psychology Today’s blog: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beyond-freud/201104/our-children-our-future.
Our children and our future are at stake in today’s Congressional budget wars. The current temporary government funding bill passed by Congress will soon expire, and the battle will resume with the House pursuing a budget that will make devastating cuts to programs for children. Even programs that save the government money are threatened. That our leaders can propose this, with so little public outcry, requires explanation. We suggest that there are psychological reasons for this state of affairs. Read more
In my last blog (#57), where I presented some of D.W. Winnicott’s post war reflections on the word “democracy” and what he called the “innate democratic tendency” in societies, I indicated that he thought in terms of a basic analogy between individuals and societies. Both have developmental courses, growing –if they are lucky and well-supported—into maturity or adulthood. Mature individuals want to feel free, be free, live in freedom, and democratic societies permit that, or even — the best of them– foster it. He offered some examples of people living in adolescent societies where they could not be free and were actively prevented from coming to any consciousness of what they were doing. So many, as Hannah Arendt said of Adolf Eichmann, acted without thinking. thoughtless; they lived like adolescents in an ultra-peer-pressure gang or peer cult with a charismatic adolescent leader; a formula for commiting atrocities. This was Winnicott’s assessment of the Nazi-dominated, Hitler-led German society Britain was fighting against in 1940, when he wrote his “Discussion on War Aims.” He was imploring the British to be more mature than their enemies, and not to block themselves from acting maturely by self-righteously embracing an image of themselves as better, or as good people facing off against people who were just evil.