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

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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.

Mainly, though, we talked, about everything, from the tyranny of governments to the tyranny of bad love affairs.

We remained close over the years. Elisabeth wrote a biography of Hannah Arendt, and then another of Anna Freud. She left academia, enrolled at Yale and became a psychoanalyst. She wrote a profound book called The Anatomy of Prejudices, to which she was just recently adding the last prejudice, the one, she would say, that she had not understood needed to be there, so that she had long felt Anatomy was incomplete. That book, Childism, about prejudice against children, is about to be published by Yale University Press. It grew out of her work as a doctor, listening to stories of child abuse and realizing that the voices of the abused, the voices of children, had not yet been heard, not been understood.

Elisabeth was as proud of Childism as anything she had ever written. We planned to throw a party for her at my apartment in January to celebrate her life, and the life of her beloved partner–”just to celebrate everything!” was what she said. Because of Christine, she felt her life was perfect. She had waited a long time to find such love–which, actually, found her, to her great surprise; she would say that she had worked hard to get to a place to be ready for such consequential, anchoring, defining love. One of my favorite of her books is Cherishment: A Psychology of the Heart–because in it she wanders into an entirely new territory in her appreciation of Eastern thinking. I think I will reread that book this weekend, though at the back of my mind lurk some unhappy memories surrounding its publication…

Our lives were so oddly interwoven. We discovered with delight one evening that our families were connected early in this country’s history; her ancestor, Brigham Young, crossed the country with one of mine, John Browning. We noted that we might have known one another through many lifetimes. When I was confronting a “management crisis” on my staff at House and Garden, with two editors who had to work together, but could not stop fighting, I sent them to Elisabeth to learn to work out their problems.

Elisabeth left New York and moved to Toronto to be with Christine. They bought a small schoolhouse in the country and made it into their country escape. It was lined with books, of course, and it was there that I dove into Christine’s trove of Iris Murdoch novels. On the wall, on a blackboard, if I recall this detail correctly, Elisabeth and Christine had chalked up a line from the Auden poem, The More Loving One: “If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.” It was there, Elisabeth explained as we laced up our boots for a hike along the Bruce Trail, to remind each of them of a path out of any argument. Naturally, I puzzled over this for months. I was entranced, though, at the thought of the conversations that led to finding this line, engraving it on their hearts. This was the kind of thing Elisabeth meant, when she talked about doing “the work” of love. She published a collection of essays called “Where Do We Fall When We Fall In Love?” and the title alone remains one of my favorite.

Elisabeth followed my trip to India through this blog, and told me that the picture she found most moving was of Gandhi’s glasses. I understood why; I had taken the picture for her. We are both terribly near-sighted, and developed a habit of inward gaze as children. But Elisabeth was as engaged with the world as anyone I have ever known. She insisted on a clear-eyed assessment of the days’ events, she was brutally truthful and frank and brave. She had become furious about the Oil Wars into which America had been led, and deeply worried about what was happening to our democracy. She had a dazzlingly synthesizing mind. And she was also a genuinely good, unpretentious, warm, person, kind to everyone she met in the course of everyday life.

Elisabeth was unrelentingly analytical, and she was funny, too. We began to talk about climate change, and I told her how I wanted to do something to fight polluters; she gave me advice about Moms Clean Air Force, sent me ideas about writers I should know, donors to call. One evening, she fixed me with that look, and said, “Well, you’ve always been drawn to messes. This is one you can spend the rest of your life cleaning up.”

Satyagraha is a term developed by Gandhi, it loosely translates as “truth force”; I think of it as an insistence upon the force of truth. It is a tenet of nonviolent resistance. Elisabeth’s entire life was Satyagraha. It is nearly impossible for me to believe she is no longer with us–and now I think her soul brushed past my cheek in farewell, on her unexpected way out of this world we shared.

Elisabeth exerted such a strong gravitational pull in my life that I was able to set my moral compass by her. I think she did this for many people.

I cannot count all the times I did things because I wanted her to be proud of me, or the times I read things that I wanted to share with her, or the times I saw things I wanted to puzzle out with her. She remained my teacher, always, and she always will be that. But she was a beloved and caring friend, an older sister with a deeply maternal bent. Elisabeth was the person who insisted I find a psychiatrist in New York when, one evening, an angry episode I had bottled up broke out of me. She sent me to Peter Buckley, who simply saved my sanity, as I worked out a tangled knot of anger, guilt and despair I felt over a previously botched round of therapy with a doctor who had lost hold of his boundaries.

How clever I felt when, at dinner one night, I urged her to start her own blog, as it would be a simple and gratifying way to share her thoughts with readers—don’t worry, it’s easy, you can do it—and she found marvelous designers to help her and launched “Who’s Afraid of Social Democracy?” Elisabeth always had several ambitious, fascinating projects going at once. She was inspiring that way because nothing intimidated her. The only defeat that ever frightened her was the defeat of lost love—and from that she was redeemed, in the love she and Christine nurtured.

I cannot even believe that Elisabeth’s steady, penetrating gaze is shuttered forever. Oddly enough, I had written her, on Thanksgiving, to tell her I knew it must be hard to be having her first Thanksgiving without her dear mother, who had recently passed–I just wanted to tell Elisabeth how much I loved her, and how important she had always been to me–not something I was in the habit of doing. How glad I am I did. Now I am scrambling madly to internalize everything I ever got from her, to remember everything, to capture it, because I will never hear from her again. Or is that right? Where do we go when we fall away from life? I would ask Elisabeth. And I can almost see her, through my tears, insisting on the force of truth that she modeled. And now I can hear her:

Cherish the time you have. Cherish this world. Be gentle, but be strong. Live in love.

Written by Dominique Browning on her blog here: In Memoriam: Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

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!

In 1996, I published with Harvard University Press a long book entitled The Anatomy of Prejudices. The plural in the title was startling –even reviewers of it kept misquoting it, making it into a familiar singular, Prejudice. It is still frequently mis-cited as The Anatomy of Prejudice in bibliographies. This is because libraries of books exist on one kind of prejudice or another and on prejudice in general –in the singular. Gordon Allport’s classic book The Nature of Prejudice (1954) still holds sway in the literature on prejudice, as does its argument that all prejudices are alike and all prejudiced people alike in their prejudices. In my book, I argued that not all prejudices are alike in their sociological or psychological dimensions, and they need to be studied comparatively. My ambition was to make out of prejudice studies a field like Comparative Literature or Comparative Philosophy.

But I was studying prejudices, not great works of literature or philosophy, or the magnificent achievements of language development. I was studying prejudices, which I considered to be the great obstacle to the ideal that I, writing as a philosopher, embraced: the age old ideal, central to my own European, or Greco-Roman, tradition but also to all the world’s philosophical traditions, of the unity of humankind, the unity of all peoples in a cosmopolis. I was studying human pathologies of divisiveness, disunification, and conflict production. The concepts I needed, I knew, were psychoanalytical, as psychoanalysis is the one human science –the one of the Geisteswissenschaften—that directly concerns itself with pathology, human pathology.

The Anatomy of Prejudices has, over the fifteen years since I finished writing it, established itself in the field of psychoanalysis as the only work on prejudices in the plural; the only comparative prejudices study. It explored and compared four prejudices that can be found in all cultures–anti-semitism, racism, sexism, and homophobia—and it presented the history of studies of those prejudices in the post-War period, starting from the time, right after the War, when anti-semitism was the chief focus of prejudice study for the obvious reason that it had been
the key prejudice manifest in the Holocaust. Psychoanalysts, particularly in the diaspora of European psychoanalysts—many of them social democrats– to America, had led that exploration, writing as victims of the prejudice. Their work then became key to studies of racism during the period of the Civil Rights Movement in America. Racism studies, then, become crucial to studies of sexism in the 1970s, and sexism studies underlay studies of homophobia in the late 1970s. The successful 1970s revolution against the pathologization of homosexuality among psychiatrists and psychoanalysts was spurred by the introduction of the word and concept “homophobia,” as powerful a word as “sexism” had been when it was coined in the 1960s.

The novelty of my work was that I had based my history and my theorizing on what the victims of those prejudices –anti-semitism, racism, sexism, and homophobia– had said and written about their victimization. I looked at what white male analysts of racism, who dominated the study of racism even during the Civil Rights era, had said about racism, but I compared their analyses to what African-Americans –and people of color in many other contexts—had written about racism. Not surprisingly, what whites had to say and what blacks had to say belonged in different worlds of discourse. Also not surprisingly, what women had to say about sexism in the 1960s –or back further, to de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949)—was quite different than what men had to say (actually, very little) about misogyny. In a feminist spirit, I was insisting that the voices of the victims, the often censored and rejected voices of the victims, were the voices to be listened to.

The alternative path analyses in The Anatomy of Prejudices were not and have not since been widely accepted in the various quarters where the book has been read, but the book’s protest, its critique, is widely enough known and enough accepted so that it cannot be ignored. But, even though I, methodologically, was definitely on a track or a train of thought, that effectively challenged an entrenched conventional wisdom, I came myself to the conclusion that the book had a fundamental flaw. And, for the last fifteen years, while the book has been growing in influence, I have been trying to remedy that flaw.

I came to the realization was that I had overlooked something fundamental. This light bulb went on while I left my academic career in philosophy and political theory and embarked on training as a psychoanalyst, learning to listen in a way that was quite different than the one I had developed as a theorist and a reader of texts. As an analyst, a therapist, I listened directly to people talking, struggling to tell the stories of their lives and experiences. And I listened to myself as I talked in my training analysis. Slowly, I came to hear that there is a type of prejudice that I had not explored –a prejudice that is built into the history of psychoanalysis as much as it is built into the histories of all the other Geisteswissenschaften. And one that is intertwined with all the prejudices I did explore. Eventually, I gave it a name: childism, prejudice against children. The people I was listening to as a psychoanalyst, and I myself as an analysand, were talking about how the adults who had raised them, taught them, been their pediatricians, devised policies that concerned them, adjudicated custody cases that had determined their family lives, a handled situations in which they had been abused, had been prejudiced against them. To one degree or another, in one way or another, consciously or unconsciously.

The word “childism” had been coined in the early 1970s, I later discovered, and it was used then by an African-American psychiatrist at Harvard, Chester Pierce, but it had never gained any traction then, it had never galvanized concern in the way that the neologisms “sexism” and “homophobia” had. “Childism” had not been taken up by adults who worked in various dimensions of child advocacy and children’s rights work, and it was not used in the emerging field of Child Abuse and Neglect, which came into organizational form in the 1970s after the pioneering work of the psychoanalysts who “discovered” the form of child physical abuse called “the battered child syndrome.” Part of the problem was that Chester Pierce had used the word “childism” to try to focus attention on racism effecting children of color; it was part of his understanding of racism. His framework was too narrow.

In 2001, when I had moved to New York and opened a practice here, I took into a three day a week analysis a young woman who had been severely abused as a child. Her story was terrifying. She had been raped as a three year old child and that abuse had continued through her childhood –in combination with a great deal of abuse that was not sexual. To help myself understand what she had experienced, I began to read the literature on child abuse and particularly on child sexual abuse.

In the Child Abuse and Neglect literature –both psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic –I found, with a frightening feeling of familiarity, the same situation that I had found reading through the vast literatures on prejudice that I had woven into The Anatomy of Prejudices. The voices of children were almost absent from the Child Abuse and Neglect literatures, except for a small and relatively neglected collection of papers that had begun to be produced in Budapest in the 1920s, in the so-called Hungarian School of psychoanalysis that had formed around Freud’s colleague Sandor Ferenczi. The work of the Hungarian School had had some sequels after the School itself disappeared; its survivors took it into their war-time exiles. Michael Balint and others took it to England, where Balint’s new friend D.W. Winnicott came to know it; Rene Spitz took it to France and then to America, where it influenced the work of Spitz’s trainee C. Henry Kempe, who was the discoverer of “the battered child syndrome.” The psychoanalyst and anthropologist Georges Devereux continued the Hungarian School investigations in his ethnographic studies, which have never had the audience they deserve –and many of the papers he wrote have never been translated into English from the many languages he spoke and wrote in. A Devereux paper entitled “The Voices of Children” has never, to my knowledge, been cited in the Child Abuse and Neglect literatures.

As I read the child abuse literatures and listened to my patient, I began to realize that, in her own mind as well as in the minds of all who harmed her and all who had tried to help her, she had been typed –stereotyped–as a victim of sexual abuse. This she certainly was. But her experience was much more complicated, as sexual abuse is much more complicated than the literatures on it indicate. She had also been abused in multiple ways. And she had been further traumatized by never having been really listened to by any adult. At the beginning of our work, she told me that she knew she did not know “the whole story” of her victimization and it was this whole story, she said, that she desperately needed to know. Maybe a psychoanalyst, she hoped, could help her find what she needed.

Considering what I was learning from her and from many other patients who were maltreated as children, I began in 2002 to write a book to which I gave the working title The Discovery of Child Abuse. But, as I kept listening to her and to the others, and kept reading, I realized that my framework was too narrow, and too historical –too much of a critique of existing literatures and not enough of a “whole story” itself. Slowly, as I opened my mind, I expanded my work—to the book that will appear at the beginning of 2012 from Yale: Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children.

I think that I have, with this book, remedied the flaw in The Anatomy of Prejudices. I have explored the prejudice I overlooked. The prejudice we all overlook because it is so much a part of our lives –we all, after all, began as children, we all grew up in families, we all either have children or are involved in the raising of the next generation in some less direct way. We are all, on our journeys, entwined with this prejudice and its frightening motivations and consequences.

Basically, I identified in this book a prejudice that says children are born bad, or burdensome, or wild, or rebellious. As owned by the people who give birth to them, they can be and should be molded to the wishes and desires and needs of adults for them not to be as they are born to be. I identified a prejudice that in different ways rationalizes and legitimates adult use of children for adult purposes. This is a prejudice that turns the natural dependency of children on adults for their provision, their protection, and their education into a condition of oppression. A prejudice against the free growth and development of children. It constitutes a refusal to give children what they need to become and be the people they could be if they were loved and cared for and supported and protected as they should be.

It is the great task of human beings –the essential task—to understand what adults should give children; what is –to use a legal phrase—“in the best interests of the child.” The basic needs of all children are the same; there are universal needs. And it should be the task of any and all adults to understand those needs and meet them. Children depend upon adults for this understanding, and if it is not applied, not translated into the actions of child-rearing and education, children cannot grow and develop freely and become adults who, in turn, give such understanding and action to their own children.

I think that this simple but immensely difficult project of understanding and right conduct is described well in Childism. I think the framework
of the book is adequate to challenge people to think about the prejudice it describes. But, I also came to feel as I finished it that there is something missing from this book, too –as the childism prejudice was missing from The Anatomy of Prejudices.

What seems to me to be missing in Childism is a real confrontation with the origins of the idea that children are born with something in them that must be overcome. Some think that something must be therapied away; and some think it constitutes the rationale for abusing and exploiting children, that it justifies oppressing them. Those who wish to help children by curing them of their deficit or defect, can and often do, ironically enough, share with those who wish to abuse them and exploit them this idea that children are born in some way bad or sinful or rebellious or not what they ought to be and should be made to be. Even thinkers –Rousseau, for example—who extoll the innocence of children, railing against notions like the Christian one that children are born marked by some “original sin,” are given to creating educational programs that show up the vision of innocence as a reaction formation, covering over a conviction that children are born angelic but with a susceptibility to devilish corruption.

In the history of psychoanalysis, this idea that children must be shaped and molded to an adult standard takes a very specific form: children are innately aggressive. They are aggressive toward those who give birth to them and raise them. They attack the maternal breast; they are orally sadistic. All future aggressiveness and attacking behavior stems from this innate aggression. To get over or get past this innate aggressiveness, children must be helped into loving or reparative behavior –so the therapeutic intention goes. Or, from the abusive or exploitative side, the aggression must be controlled, tamed, beaten out of them, scripted out of them, somehow gotten rid of or put to adult-approved purposes. You can use nice, Christian corporeal punishment or loving, educational anal rape–as we learn from a glance at this very day’s newspaper reports on the best-selling How To Train Your Children or on the scandal in course at Penn State– or you can find much more direct ways to eliminate children.

While I was doing the last edits and proofing on Childism, and trying to explore this feeling that I had that there was something unfinished or incomplete or unclearly focused in my way of approaching the origin of images of the aggressive child or the innocent child who born susceptible to becoming aggressive, I found myself facing an invitation.

The members of an organization called the Winnicott Trust, based in London, approached me with the proposition: that I become the General Editor of a project they had been working on since the 1980s, The Collected Writings of D. W. Winnicott. Winnicott, as I am sure most of you know, was an English pediatrician, who trained as a psychoanalyst in the years just before the Second World War, undergoing a ten year training analysis with James Strachey, the General Editor of The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, and then a second analysis with Joan Riviere, one of the chief followers of the child analyst Melanie Klein, who had been practicing in London since 1926, when she emigrated there from Berlin.

After a meeting with the Winnicott Trust in June, I decided to take on the General Editorship and immediately plunged into reading the Writings I had been hired to collect and present. I left off thinking about what more my Childism book needed from me and set out to make the acquaintance of Winnicott, whose work I knew in a rudimentary kind of way –as all contemporary psychoanalysts do—but not in any depth.

There, in Winnicott’s writings from the period of the Second World War until the late 1950’s, I found him pondering exactly the questions I had been pondering myself about the nature of aggression.

Winnicott, I discovered, had spent the years of his analytic training and the years of the War wrestling with a theoretical dilemma (which like all theoretical dilemmas, was a personal dilemma). He felt that Melanie Klein had rightly emphasized the importance of aggression in children’s lives, and he wanted, himself, to support her in this. But, on the other hand, he felt that she had fundamentally misunderstood the aggression she observed in children and tried to treat analytically. She thought children were innately destructively aggressive –their aggression rooted in what Freud had called “the death instinct.” To Winnicott, “the death instinct” was (as he wrote in a 1951 letter) “Freud’s one blunder.” He set himself the task of reconsidering the aggression displayed by the children he treated in his pediatric practice, his child analytic practice, and in the various settings where, during the War, he had worked with children and adolescents evacuated from London during the Blitz.

Winnicott did not reject the idea of innate aggression only to end up with a theory of aggression as the product of frustration or corruption. On the contrary, he thought of aggression as the child’s inborn urge to get its basic needs met –to bring its emerging motoricity and physical co-ordination to bear on getting food and care and on curiously exploring the world. The child eventually is able to use what he called “transitional objects” to adventure out into the world; that blanket or teddy that the child will not be parted from is its adventure tool, its ship for sailing to the New World, its way of bringing its fantasies into touch with reality.

In a baby’s initial condition of being merged with its mother (called “absolute dependence”), the baby begins an innately programmed maturational journey toward becoming differentiated. The mother is attuned to the baby as part of herself and must slowly and carefully let the baby she cares for grow –aggressively, creatively–out of its dependency on her; the baby must slowly create her as someone separate from himself or herself, achieving relative independence and then, eventually independence, following its innate maturational program. The baby is not innately destructively aggressive, the baby is innately creative –and all of its subsequent creativity depends upon how it was able to be creative as a baby and how its mother and then father and family were able to receive and support its creativity, not retaliating against its aggressive creativity. If the aggression the baby naturally exercises on its way to becoming a person is not tolerated, if it is repressed, forbidden –or called bad, burdensome, rebellious—the baby will either collapse into an illness or creatively seek ways to get what it needs from elsewhere, from someone or something other than its mother. Winnicott thought of stealing, for example, as a way to get what has not been given. A deprived child’s “anti-social tendency” is that child’s hopefulness –not its depravity, its badness.

It is the task of a psychoanalyst to allow a child or an adult patient a “regression to dependence,” to the original condition of its natality, and help it become the relatively independent and then independent child it was born to be. That means letting the child be aggressive and doing what the parents did not do: absorbing that aggression, receiving it, without retaliation, without repression. The analyst, as he once put it, has to survive –which also means not fearing that the child is going to damage or abuse the analyst. In all of the papers he wrote after he clarified for himself the nature of creative child aggression, Winnicott focused on how the child’s innate creativity can be fostered and preserved. (You can find these papers in the collection called Playing and Reality.)

So, here, in my new General Editor task, listening to my new teacher, is the place to explore my question as I now frame it: when adults refuse, repudiate, repress or misconceptualize and misname the natural urges of children to grow, to “go on being” (as Winnicott sometimes said), from what thwarted and distorted aggressive impulses in themselves has their refusal condition come? I have called this refusal condition “being prejudiced against children.” That is certainly an accurate description. But now I am also thinking of that prejudicial conditions like this: an adult who has stopped growing will stop a child from growing, either because the adult’s lack of maturity just immobilizes the adult and makes parenting impossible or because the adult’s immaturity has turned perversely and actively punishing –destructively aggressive–toward an active child, a child who can be the person that the adult no longer strives to be.

Winnicott offered psychoanalysts and all concerned with children a vision of creative aggression –not destructive aggression—as the child’s birthright as a human child. And he explored the many ways in which that inborn creative aggression can be destroyed or perverted into destructive aggression. Implicit in this vision is a charge to adults to be the “good enough mother” and “good enough father,” and to societies to support good enough parenting with programs and policies that are in the best interests of children; which are, in effect, programs and policies that put children and their needs first, prioritizing children. Anything less is childism.

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?

A recent issue of the rather sober establishment British journal The Economist featured a cover on which there was an ominous-looking black hole with the imperative “BE AFRAID “ in its dense center. “Until politicians actually do something about the world economy” the cover said: “BE AFRAID.”  Be afraid you are going to be sucked right down into this black hole as the world that was created with a bang is destroyed with a whimpering suction noise. The whole metaphor is apocalyptic. Is it not something to wonder at that a journal with enormous world-wide circulation and influence is charging its readership to be afraid, to move from anxiety, which everyone feels to some extent, to fear?

The first thing that I would like to say about Hannah Arendt is that she was not afraid; that her anxieties  simply did not go over into fear.  She lived through a time which was even more frightening than our own, but which was, also, like our own, defined by a combination of economic disaster –the Great Depression—followed by a prolonged political crisis in which some regimes went in the direction of a new form of government, totalitarianism, and some in the direction of trying to save their half-formed democracies and their political freedom. She thought and wrote as the division of the world into totalitarian regimes –chiefly in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—on the one side and struggling democracies on the other, turned into the Second World War, a war novel in its extent and in the technologies used to carry it on, including technologies used in what Arendt called “factories of death.” But she did not become fearful, or write out of fear.

I think it is chiefly this that compelled attention to her writing then and again today and that marks its relevance for today. Her courage was certainly not based on failure to grasp what was frightening in the world during and after the Second World War. Indeed, her courage came from her deep understanding of that frightfulness and her ability to describe it as unprecedented. She grasped that there were factors and forces in the world that were unprecedented in their potentiality to be lethal, for the world and for all individuals.

Courage is a virtue that actualizes in a crisis,  that actualizes –or fails to actualize–when a person realizes that courage is called for, summoned by the state of the world. A courageous person is able to call  forth courage from within herself, from within her inner world, where, I think she must feel the courage of others, internalized  in herself by identification.  A courageous person must have, in herself, both the latent virtue and the inner company and companionship of courageous individuals. If she is lucky, she will have these companions as comrades in the present as well. To say the same thing in cultural terms: a person being courageous must have the virtue of courage ready and must have examples of courage in others to draw upon  as part of her culture, existing in her memory and in the legacy she has internally.  Otherwise, there is only fear in a frightening situation. There is only fright or flight.

How is courage manifest in thinking and writing? First of all, I think, by independence of thought, by Selbst-denken (thinking for your self ) and in conversation with those internal others whom the independently thinking person has judged independent. The thinking is a conversation of independents. This is the very opposite of group-thinking or herd thinking –which is, really, a contradiction in terms. There is really no thinking in  group-thinking or herd-thinking; there is only obedient reacting.  Reacting to imperatives like BE AFRAID, or run away, or run away from thinking.

Such imperatives –BE AFRAID or RUN AWAY—when they are widely promulgated and widely accepted become what are known as ideologies. An ideology is an elaborate formulation that carries the charge DO NOT THINK. An ideology supplies answers to questions in advance. It supplies the elementary answer to questions about history, telling which people, which political group will inevitably triumph in history and telling what direction the train of history is taking and is going to take. Or it supplies elementary answers to questions about nature and human nature, telling  which racial or religious group is innately destined to be superior and exercise its natural or divine right to dominate over others or all others. The first was the ideology of Stalinists, the second of the Nazi Party of Germany. Hannah Arendt’s masterwork, The Origins of Totalitarianism, was an analysis of these ideologies and how they came to imprison the minds of those who walked into the prison of them and to determine their actions, which in both cases were actions that had the paradoxical effect of eliminating the space for political action –the space for politics. They were actions against action. In both cases, mass movements brought the ideological subscribers together and turned them, acquiescently, into citizens of totalitarian states.

Arendt wrote her book (and many shorter newspaper pieces related to it as well) while she was a stateless person, cast out of her homeland while it was turning into a totalitarian state because she was a member of one group, the Jews, deemed inferior and eventually almost completely eliminated in Germany and the German Reich.  The position, Arendt understood, of the pariah is the position of the clear-sighted, the far-sighted, the illusionless; the position of those who can raise the most thoughtful alarm and warning. Later, she could show in her report on Adolf Eichmann’s 1961  trial in Jerusalem how persons who subscribe to an ideology  –no matter how they lived before signing up to the ideology—become thoughtless persons. She wrote a biography of a state mass murderer.

Her courage in writing these books was clear in the controversies they aroused. For the ideologies she wrote about survived the defeats of both the Nazis and the Stalinists –who quite naturally  became allies during the Second World War—and continued after  the War, in the long  period that is known as the Cold War. These ideologies survived both in the defeated countries and in the countries, the struggling democracies, that defeated them but, in the process, assimilated to some of their tenets and methods. (This was so obvious in the American McCarthy period, but secret polilce forces, for example, became a normal feature of democracies in the 1950s.)  Ideologists of the Nature and History sorts, not surprisingly, made war on her and her writings, which were fundamental critiques of these ideologies and the anti-political movements that continued to support them.

The Cold War went on longer than Hannah Arendt lived. It was the context for all her later writings, of the 1960s and early 1970s. These writings inspired many in the generation born after the Second World War to understand as she did the world their parents had made, as they inspired the young readers to be suspicious of ideologies of all known sorts: the ones dictating how history is unfolding and the ones dictating which peoples are intrinsically superior and fitted for dominance. But she also alerted them to beware of any new ones that would be particularly compelling in the post-War world, which was so shaped by the existence of lethal technologies –nuclear weapons.  In “Ideology and Terror,” an essay included in The Origins of Totalitarianism’s later editions, she wrote:  “It may even be that the true predicaments of our time will assume their authentic form –though not necessarily the cruelest—only when totalitarianism has  become a thing of the past.”

Hannah Arendt died in 1975, just as such a new ideology was, in my estimation, forming while the post-War variants of the old ideologies of  History and Nature were reforming and deforming with the break-ups of the mid-20^th century imperial states.  Both the totalitarian Soviet Union and its hostile imitator in China were breaking up, as were the non-totalitarian but imperial  British Commonwealth and the American Empire.  The liniments of that new ideology were becoming clear to her, and she spoke out about them, most pointedly in the speech she made in 1975 on the eve of the 200^th anniversary of the American republic, which was in 1976.

That speech, entitled “Home To Roost,” focused on how America, with its defeat in the Vietnam War, was coming into a period of asserting itself around the world in reaction to its defeat and the loosening of its grip on its empire.  People in the country were developing an ideology of self-justification for its imperialism and blindness to the aspirations for freedom of the world’s peoples struggling –as the North Vietnamese had–to overcome their histories of being subjugated by imperial powers. And the whole mindless self-assertion was being aggravated by the sudden turn toward recession, even possibly depression,  that the American and the world economy had taken since the 1973 OPEC crisis.

She could see that this new, assertive ideology included elements from the  mid-century ideologies of  History and Nature, for it anticipated the triumph of superior peoples. But the superior peoples were not nations or nation-states in the 20^th century sense. They were people living all over the earth but linked by their dedication to growing wealthy and powerful in societies no longer based on manufacturing but based on consumption,  societies that, in her words, “could keep going only by changing into a huge economy of waste.”  Americans took the lead in formulating this assertive Economic Progress ideology, but it appealed to capitalists everywhere and to not a few socialists and communists –particularly in China–as well.

Those benefitting from the consumer society and its waste economy were and are devote believers in Progress framed more purely in economic terms than historical or natural historical.  These international or supernational ideologists invoked and served  limitless growth economies that “went on at the expense of the world we live in, and of the objects with  their built-in obsolescence which we no longer use but abuse, misuse and throw away.” She noted that: “The recent sudden awakening to the threats to our environment is the first ray of hope in this development, although nobody, as far as I can see, has yet found a means to stop this runaway economy without causing a really major breakdown.”

In the  decades since Arendt wrote those words in 1975, the runaway economy has only run more away, because to the engines of its development have been added  financial and banking means to fuel it with risky debt, with money instruments that have gotten more and more detached from the world we live in and objects of any sort. The banking and  financial means –derivatives upon derivatives–are themselves consumables.  And the dynamic of the runaway economy, advertised as a great good by public relations people serving the new ideologists, has worn away at the public realm in all nations and internationally. Key decision makers are no longer elected representatives of citizens in states; governments are hardly making economic decisions, economic institutions are (so the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are demonstrating in the right place symbolically, if not politically).  With a shrinking public realm–one not even receptive to the ray of hope coming from the environmental awakening, now grown to a movement—Arendt could imagine the ideologists of Economic Progress recommending and committing not just genocide but what she called, ecocide, destruction of the entire ecosystem on the earth.  Untramelled economic growth might take longer, but its results could be as lethal as those that can be caused in an instant by nuclear weapons. Like their totalitarian predecessors, the ideologists of Economic Progress rationalize destroying the very habitat in which they are  to be the triumphant group, that is, they rationalize destroying everything and everybody they hoped to rule over.

No one since 1975 has written The Origins of Economic Totalitarianism, but that may be as much from lack of a pariah position in a world where it is impossible to escape being an accomplice to consumerism as it is from lack of courage.  Even the wretched of the earth in a time of runaway economic inequality are deeply trapped in the system that oppresses them. The intelligentsia is easily corrupted.  But this probably means that the people who understand what has happened and offer their insights, as she did, to the public, will have to be even more courageous for not having the advantage of a pariah position to look out from and pariah company to keep.  Sheer courage will be required.  But in such a time, her example, as one of the most courageous of her émigré generation, her diaspora generation,  is nonetheless needed  in order for the thoughtful to have conversation with her in their thinking minds.

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 7^th 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.

Bea  Sutton declared many times during her life that she did not know what becomes of a human being’s soul when it departs life and this world, but that she believed that there is a Divinity who receives and welcomes that soul—and all souls. To this Divinity, she believed, belongs judgment upon how a soul chose to be while in a mortal body and on the planet earth, which that Divinity looks upon as a loving parent looks upon children and their shared habitat.  We—and all those who have lived and who still live—are the family of that Divinity, she believed, who judges how each child lived, but does not pronounce upon whether any soul should be assigned to a Heaven or a Hell. She did not believe that the loving parent Divinity was a punisher or a disciplinarian, even of prodigals. The Divinity in whom she believed was always compassionate and forgiving. She was an admirer of St. Francis of Assisi, who aspired to be compassionate and forgiving like his Divinity.

As each of you knew, each in your own way, Bea Sutton was generous in every way, but especially in her acceptance of people in their individualities and in their diversities.  Even her critical judgments upon people who were not accepting was, nonetheless, accepting.  She did not reject other people’s religious or political beliefs when they differed from her own, although she felt sorry for them when they isolated themselves from others with rigid and fundamentalist beliefs or with political ideas that cut them off from caring for the family of humankind.  I remember vividly when she made me a gift for my sixteenth birthday of the book of Edward Steichen  photographs that is entitled The Family of Man (1956) and joked with me: “Being a good member of a single family is very difficult, being a good member of the human family verges on the impossible, but you must try.” Politically, she began her citizen life as a liberal Republican and converted to voting as a Democrat in the 1960s; she was always a Christian, but she became progressively less church- or denomination-identified and more  –as it were—freelance.

She had grown up in an Eastern Shore family, on a large dairy farm in Cecil County named Brantwood, which had been in her father’s family for many generations.  He had been born in the grand wooden bed in which she was conceived and in which her mother gave birth to her and her older brother Wallace, known as Spike, a farmer, and her younger sister Corinne, known as Bunny, an artist, most of whose children are here today, along with Spike’s widow Barbara.

Bea’s parents, Wallace Williams and Elisabeth Bulkley Smith Williams had met on New Year’s Eve, 1917 at an officer’s ball held in the  palace of the royal family of Luxembourg , in the last winter of the Frist World War.  Wallace, a captain (later a colonel) in the American cavalry, and Elisabeth, who had gone to Europe as a member of a YMCA troop-entertainment orchestra, both came from large families.  Elisabeth’s was from Brooklyn, New York when Brooklyn was still a separate city, for which her great-grandfather Cyrus Porter Smith, the guiding force behind the establishment of the Brooklyn public school system, had been the first elected mayor, starting in 1840.  The Smiths had a family mansion on Pierpont Avenue that housed many generations of them. Beautiful, a gifted violinist, gracious  and refined, Elisabeth had joined the YMCA orchestra in order to carry out a mission she had resolved upon: to locate and mark the unmarked grave of her childhood friend and beloved fiancé, Norman Du Bois, who had been killed in France.  When Wallace later proposed to Elisabeth and asked her to join him at Brantwood, he was asking her to make a profound change in her life, away from her urban and urbane family whose  Anglican ancestors, prosperous merchants, were descendants  of  two Mayflower  families –the Hookers and the Bulkleys—and into the midst of Scotish Presbyterian  farmers whose ancestors emigrated to Maryland in 1700 and worked their lands with their slaves until the Civil War.  Wallace, one of nine children, had never finished school, even though his own father was an exception in his generation –a highly literate pastor with a theological degree from Princeton who became a editor of the Cecil Whig newspaper in his later years. Bea always called her father Wallace and his brothers, her uncles, “the gems –the rough gems.”

Bea Williams was born on August 30, 1922, the middle of the three Williams children.  She was surrounded as a child by women whom she deeply loved and admired. Her mother Elisabeth; her father’s mother, Mary Williams, who was known to her entire extended clan as Mother Mary Williams; and Theresa Davis, the live-in African-American housekeeper and cook, whose slave grandparents had been freed by the Williams family. Bea always said that she had learned to be an artful homemaker and a loving mother from these three women.  With deep sympathy, she would speak about how own mother, Elisabeth, had gained a mother in Mother Mary Williams, who had solaced for the great sorrow of her life, which was that she had lost her own mother, Bea’s grandmother,  when she was a child. Emily Lawrence Clapp Smith, an accomplished pianist, had suffered from what her husband called “nervous spells,” and had been eventually  committed to a sanatorium near Cornwall in the Hudson River Valley. Her children never saw her again, and Elisabeth never knew her mother’s fate, or when she had died. She vanished.

Bea Williams viewed the decision of her mother’s  father  William Bulkley Smith, not to speak of the lost Emily, his wife,  as a tragic error, an abandonment of their four children, who, in effect, lost their mother twice.  She resolved, as she grew up, to try to confront  illness and mental illness squarely and not to be secretive or stigmatizing, and she extended her resolution to anything that deserved the title “trouble.”  It is this resolution, I think, that made all who knew her sense that she was a person to whom they could confide their troubles, which she would hear acceptingly, generously–and help if she could.

Bea was educated in the Elkton, Maryland schools and then sent to the Friends School in Baltimore for her last years of high school. Her father Wallace was often in Baltimore because he, a stalwart of the Cecil County Republican Party, was a state senator and then involved in local politics in various positions. Bea then did two years of junior college at  Strattford College in Danville, Virginia, at the beginning of the Second World War. When she returned to Brantwood, she worked in a kindergarten that had been set up for the children of men and women who were entering into the American war effort that commenced after Pearl Harbor, in 1941.  She also met  the handsome football coach at her sister Bunny’s school, a  man from an old Williamsburg, Virginia family, a star athlete at Washington College, a 1936 Olympian in track and field, named  Herbert Gibbons Young,  who soon after  enrolled in the Marine Corps and began military training. They married in 1942, just before he left with his unit for the South Pacific.  Later, she moved to San Diego, the Marine Corps’ Pacific Coast base camp, and it was there that she gave birth to their first child, Herbert Gibbons Young, Jr. in November, 1944. I was conceived in San Diego, and born in March, 1946, after they had driven home across the country, back  to Brantwood .

While raising her two small children, Bea Young also took on the responsibility of helping her husband return to their familiar world after two years of service in one of the War’s most horrific theatres, where the land, sea and air engagements with the Axis took the lives of every Marine in his unit except himself. He could not speak of this.  His, of course, was not a  generation of soldier survivors to whom counseling for post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was offered or even thought of –the condition was not even named until 1981.  Bea helped him, and he helped himself with the activities for which he was most gifted –all kinds of athletic and sporting activities. Action was his antidote and anodyne. She became “the rock” –as she described it, of the family and the household.  He became a teaching golf professional at the country club in Newark, Delaware, and was often away from the family being very successful as a golfer and in every other sport to which he turned as he grew older, including hunting and deep sea fishing with a marvelous group of friends –all, now,  gone, as is he.

A third child, Lois Randolph Young, whose musical talent  you have enjoyed, was born in February, 1951, and the family, always guided and led by Bea, developed; moving from a little house to a bigger house in Newark, and into a comfortable middle class life. When all her  children were going to school, Bea felt free to take up her avocation, which was acting, a specialty of her mother’s sister Lois Smith , who had directed the Drama Department at the College Settlement in Philadelphia and her mother’s  cousin Pamela Colman Smith who had been an actress with the Lyceum Theatre group in New York City  and then a theatre designer in the atelier of Edward Burne-Jones in London, England.  Some of you had the pleasure, as we children did in our adolescences, of attending Bea’s performances. Her gift was for character study and getting into character; untrained, she was a natural Method Actor. Even when she read plays and novels, which she did all her life with great enjoyment, she had little interest in plot, but great absorption in character.  In her later life,  when she was less active, she read mystery novels, enjoying traveling and adventuring vicariously, but even then she had little interest in the mysteries or the intricacies of the plots. She chose her writers for their gifts as character portraitists.  Not Agatha Christie, but P.D. James.

In the University Drama Group  in Newark, as in all the many theatre groups she worked with for over fifty years, Bea was known for her versatility. She could do comic characters, and she could do dramatic or tragic ones.  Her favorite role, which many of her fans judged her best, and which won her a sterling review in 1965 from Otto Dekom, the best (and the most curmudgeonly) local reviewer, was Amanda Wingfield, the mother in Tennessee Williams’ 1945 play “The Glass Menagerie.”  Most theatre historians would agree that this play lifted  American theatre into its post-War flourishing, and that Laurette Taylor’s Amanda set a new standard for the finest American actresses –all Bea’s heroines–each of whom had a turn as Amanda on the stage or in the cinema: Maureen Stapleton, Jessica Tandy, Julie Harris, Katharine Hepburn, Joanne Woodward, and on and on.

For Bea Sutton, Amanda was exactly the kind of mother she did not want to be: one who, out of her own pain and feeling of abandonment when her husband left her,  aimed a suffocating love at  her two children, trying to save them from impoverishment and social shame, but destroying them because she could not confront what had happened to her when the children were small,  and could not speak of her daughter Laura’s physical disability and  and mental illness, her obsession with the fragile little glass animals in her menagerie.

During those community theatre years, in the late 1950s  and 1960s,  Bea met and worked with Ernie Sutton,  who versatiley acted, directed, built sets, and stage managed. They were friends who never, then, imagined that they would marry each other. He and his wife Janet Sutton had three young children and he had a taxing, exciting job as a chemical engineer and plant manager for Thiokol in Elkton, Maryland.  But Janet, who had an undetected brain aneurism, died suddenly in 1974, leaving  him, deeply grieving,  to finish the raising of Jane, Douglas, and Andrea, who was only ten at the  time.

In 1972, Bea and Gibby Young separated and two years later divorced. The collapse of their relationship had a long pre-history of growing apart, she into greater liberality, he into greater conservativism, but it was precipitated in 1972, when Gibby suffered a near-fatal heart attack.  For a man of  his kind of commitment to action, to sports, to physical prowess and strength, his illness was devastating. He eventually recovered, but he recovered in a mode of reckless demonstration that he was still a hale and hearty man, not a weakened or traumatized one.  Bea  was unable to help him as she had when he returned from the War physically intact but mentally traumatized. He lived, but she lost him as he step by step left their marriage. Abandoned, she lost her own way as well –for the first and only time in her life.  Suffering from sequential anxiety attacks and depression, she had her own version of “nervous spells,” for which she was hospitalized and treated psychopharmicologically.  While she was hospitalized, her own mother took a leadership role in making sure that there was no silence, no secrecy, no stigmatization about her daughter’s  illness, even though she was terrified that Bea had somehow inherited her own mother’s illness and would never return from the sanatorium-hospital. She feared Bea would vanish.

When Bea did recover, she and Ernie Sutton, both without partners, both trying to find their ways and reorient themselves, began to meet for dinner, to go to the theatre, date, share a home, and, after some time, consider marrying each other and merging their two families –their six children—thus making Bea a step-mother, a role she played as well as she had the role of mother.  A marriage of people better suited to each other is hard to imagine, and for thirty-six years theirs was an exemplary marriage. A marriage that was truly –to use an old-fashioned word— companionate.  Over the days since Bea Sutton died, Ernie has said to me many times that what he will miss most now is their talking, their shared commitment to and pleasure in talking about everything –everything joyful and good, and everything difficult and troubling. Everything, no holds barred. She cultivated this pleasure in him, drew out his capacity for it

Bea Sutton lived a life in which she never stopped growing as a person and in her relationships. She did not become an Amanda, unable to understand her past or find a future in which she could love and love more richly.  And in her second marriage, she continued to evolve –in tandem.  She was always anticipating trouble, and carefully preparing herself to meet it; although when her anxiety proved unfounded, as it often did, she had the grace and wit to flash one of her wide, warm smiles and say “false alarm!”  Or “well, it is always good to take your umbrella!”  After she began a telephone conversation with me by asking “is everything alright with you, darling?”  she would laugh at herself and say “I should just let you say if you have a problem so that, if you don’t, we can just get right to talking about the good things you are doing!”  Basically, she wanted everyone to grow and be creative in their living, their art of living and their art, as she herself had worked to do. “Ernie,” she said to me once,” was always a very, very clever man, a real scientist, and now he is also very wise. Everyone should be so fortunate.”

When her physical strength began to decline, and particularly during the last year, when she developed congestive heart failure, she prepared herself for her death –she made the memorial  arrangements we are carrying out today, writing a letter to Ernie and to the three of us, her children, saying what she wanted; she even wrote her own obituary, which, characteristically, said nothing in praise of herself, only  the conventional notation that she was “the beloved wife” of her husband.  So Ernie and I had to rewrite it a bit to gesture at why she was beloved.  Today, I have tried to say more about this, on behalf of all who loved her and respected profoundly how she endured her sorrows,  treasured her joys, and made of the mix a character of rare, uplifting  magnaminity.

This afternoon, as I surfaced after three months of immersion in the writings of D.W. Winnicott and decided to write this blogpost, I remembered that loon. How effortlessly she had gone deep lake diving, and how gracefully she had come up, as though it were nothing  to have covered three underwater soccer fields of distance in one descent.  But I also associated to her because I know that loons have lent their name to how I think I have been for three months:  loony. When they are escaping danger, loons dart this way and that before they dive, and when they come up far away they scooter here and there until they are sure they have out-swum or faked out their predators.  “Loony” has a second derivation, too, from “lunatic,” a person who darts around intrapsychically, driven temporarily insane by the movements of the luna, the moon.  But mine was the first kind of loonacy: deeply into something, deeply down into something.  And, coming up, I feel myself to be, somehow, a different person.

For three months, I did very little but eat, sleep, do my household and business tasks, and read Winnicott.  Christine and I have had our usual talking times together –in the morning, reading the newspapers before work; at the end of the day, talking and watching the BBC late news; driving to our country house for the weekends—but, as she reminded me today, much of this time has been filled with talking about Winnicott.  Christine is writing a paper now, a psychoanalytic case study of someone most psychiatrists would dismissively call a “bad borderline” in need of medication rather than psychoanalysis, and her paper has, like us, become  more Winnicottian.  Her work with this patient has, also, of course, become more  Winnicottian as she has read everything that I put on her desk with a note: ”You must read this.”  The patient, too, has become more Winnicottian, although even before the summer she was in a state Winnicott called “regression to dependence.”  That has been my state, too: my loonacy was a regression to dependence on Winnicott, as though he were my analyst and I had given myself over to paying attention to him and learning from him.  But it is Christine who has had to listen to me talk, telling what I have been thinking about Winnicott.  As I have taken him in — “a good feed” in his terms -–I have been able to produce a preliminary plan for The Collected Writings of  D.W. Winnicott.

There are now drafts of tables of contents for eleven volumes.   Close to a thousand texts of varying lengths have been ordered following a chronological principle, but departing from that principle when necessary for one reason or another to get the big mosaic to make emotional and intellectual sense and not be just one damn thing after another.  Eleven stout three-ring notebooks full of printed-on-paper texts can stand together now on a shelf in my office awaiting the next step, which will be for me to read through them one after the other, going much more slowly, unloony, questioning and adjusting the order I have made and beginning to make marginal notes  cross referencing the papers.  I’ll have to make sure that my loonacy was not the wrong kind of crazy—that is, making sense only to me and only for the loony moment.  I also have to make sure that I do, in fact, have in my collection all the writings. During the last three months, I have discovered by on-line searching a few small texts –-mostly brief book reviews and letters to the editors of newspaper and journals—that have not been discovered  by Winnicott’s previous bibliographers, editors and archivists.  Each new discovery has increased my amazement at how much Winnicott wrote during the forty four years between his first pediatric publication in 1926 (when he was 31) and his last psychoanalytic one in 1970 (when he was 75). In his last decade, he produced the talks and papers that fill four of my planned stout volumes.

No psychoanalyst in the generations after Freud and Jung has written as those two did.  Twenty three volumes for Freud, plus multiple huge correspondences; over fifty volumes for Jung in the new edition that is now in progress at the Philemon Foundation in Zurich (which is projected to take thirty years to finish!)  Even the prolific Sandor Ferenczi was not in their league. The Writings of Anna Freud in eight volumes and the four volumes produced by the Melanie Klein Trust are the largest editions among the second generation Freudians, those of Winnicott’s generation chronologically, although the ladies began publishing as analysts a decade before he did. These great contributors wrote books as well as papers, but Winnicott wrote only papers and short pieces –although in 1954 he started a book, Human Nature,  that was not ready to finish at the time  (and he did not live to finish the rewrite and revision of it he started in 1967).

There was no big launch book, like Freud’s The Interpretation of  Dreams or Anna Freud’s The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense or Klein’s The Psychoanalysis of Children.  No book that said ‘this is the kind of psychoanalyst I am –here is where my passion for psychoanalytic focuses.’  Winnicott grew and shifted and experimented, taking a lifetime of work to discover himself and understand how he was an analyst; how his child, adolescent and adult patients could and did, as he put it in 1968, use him. His theory took off in spurts, his technique changed  with it, and vice versa.  At the beginning of his last decade of practice and writing, he had a key self-analytical revelation as he read and reviewed and dreamt about Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, and Reflections (1961). This analysis-by-book took him, he said, beyond what he had been able to discover about himself in his two analyses with Joan Riviere and James Strachey (the General Editor of Freud’s collected writings, the Standard Edition).  He and Jung had something deeply in common, he felt: in childhood, they had each suffered what he called a split and each had tried to heal and be healed, coming only late in their lives to an understanding of what had happened, long after they had established themselves as experts in childhood psychic splits and childhood psychosis.

Reading is such a peculiar process even when it is done normally –much less when it is done in a condition of loonacy.  As you go through the book or books step by step, finding your way, holding and ordering what you have read as you read on, and anticipating what you are going to read as you remember, you come to know the author’s mind, the author’s thinking style and writing style (that mysterious quality), and you can –as a psychoanalyst can with a patient’s dream— follow the author-leader on the trail he or she is carving.  Although with a good writer there will always be surprises, as the writer darts around in loonacy, out of anxiety or out of exuberance, who knows, there will also always be a trail, a track.  But the reading process is also deeply passive, or perhaps receptive is a better word.  It requires a little “regression to dependence” in you as a reader: you lie at your author’s breast and imbibe. Of course, there, too, you have to actively –even aggressively– suck in order to be receptive.

One of the weeks during which I was reading Winnicott, and deep into the late essays collected in Playing and Reality (1971), I was in West Seattle with my nephew Jon and his wife Erin, whose first child, Walt, was born on August 6^th.  As I am privileged to count Jon a kind of son, my visit was ‘from grandmother,’  to lend a hand. This meant that Walt sometimes came to sleep on my chest after he had had a meal from his mother, so she could have a little while to herself –to take a shower,  get dressed, make a cup of tea. Except when Walt was sleeping, life was totally organized around breast feeding and diaper changing –three adults sharing the diaper changing, but only one, of course, doing the breast feeding. And only one little guy in the condition Winnicott called absolute dependence.  I tried not to make a display of my loonacy as I kept quoting from Winnicott’s Mother and Child (1957), particularly the lovely talks for parents called “Infant Feeding,” and “Where the Food Goes,” and “Why Do Babies Cry?”

One day, while Jon was at work, Erin and Walt (in his stroller) and I walked to the nearby shopping area, where there is, conveniently, a lactation center. The purpose of our trip was to buy a breast pump.  Erin is, by American standards, fortunate to have a maternity leave of six months –we know young women who have six weeks, which is not enough to recover from the birth, much less give a baby the care the baby needs, the “primary maternal preoccupation” (in you know who’sphrase). Christine’s Canadian daughter had a year’s leave, and her husband six weeks. Erin wants to start expressing milk and freezing it now, while she can be at home with Walt, so that she can transition him slowly to a combination of nursing and bottle feeding with her own milk when she prepares to return to her job. (She  assesses wetlands for the Environmental Protection Agency, the purpose of which Agency is, of course, daily called into question by people who do not have her child’s best interests at heart).

I am happy to report that the lactation center in West Seattle –a kind of left-liberal young professional families enclave—is a very Winnicottian place.  Of course, it is a store. But there is a room for nursing and changing a baby in peace and privacy.  And the saleswoman, who is a certified lactation consultant, is a fountain of good information and helpfulness. Such a place could not have existed until this generation of parents, internet-educated, inveterate researchers as they are, who come in with a plan. The saleswoman and Erin chatted frankly, like old girlfriends, about nipple sizes, types of pumps, breast soreness, the immunological benefits of breast milk. I was so impressed with both their good sense and knowledge and their freedom from awkwardness, much less shame or false modesty.

Walt let Erin know that she was taking too long to make a decision by screaming and wiggling furiously in my arms, unsoothable.  The saleswoman was unfazed and noted, correctly, that he has no trouble making his needs known.  So Erin went off and nursed him while I did all the buying business. As I did, I was remembering my mother –Walt’s greatgrandmother–telling me that when she was a young the pediatric wisdom of the day was that babies should not be fed “on demand” (as though it is demanding to be hungry!). They should be put on a bottle-feeding schedule, with one of the new “scientific” formulas, as soon as possible, and, similarly, they should be left to “cry it out” if they could not  keep to the schedule or drop right off to sleep when put into their cribs after feeding.  As Dr. Spock was in the United States, Winnicott  in the United Kingdom was a leader in arguing against these anti-breast-feeding, sleep dictating ideas, designed to manufacture a compliant baby with factory-like efficiency.

Many features of the child-manufacture regime originated from a New Zealand doctor and medical reformer named Truby King, whose celebrated programs were bestowed on Christine’s mother’s generation in New Zealand and then exported all around the Commonwealth and into the New World.  Sir Truby King, knighted by the British King and treated to a state funeral in New Zealand when he died in 1938 , has never been adequately criticized for the enormous harm he did to the Baby Boomers born just after the Second World War.  (Like so many of his generation, he was racist as well as childist,  spouting eugenic theories and deeply hostile to New Zealand’s Maori population.) This is a large topic, and I will return to it in my next post-loonacy post.

As I flew back to Toronto, so sad to be leaving Walt, whose very existence was such an excitement and a fascination, I kept marvelling at what good parents his parents are, so conscientious and careful and patient and loving, so ready to learn but also able to do what Winnicott advocated, trust their judgment and their understanding of their unique baby and his unique version of universal baby needs. The “good enough mother” and the “good enough father.”

Here is what I wrote about Bakan’s book:

If a group of legislators or policy-makers concerned to protect children and childhood from being targeted by corporations were looking for a briefing book, a catalogue of abuses, Joel Bakan’s Childhood Under Siege would certainly be the right choice. It would inform them about the key American fronts of an undeclared corporate anti-child war. But it would not help them analyze the war’s cause, track its history, or strategize their fight.

Devoting a chapter to each, Joel Bakan takes up eight areas where corporations and their advertising departments are pushing developmentally inappropriate and unhealthy goods on kids and lobbying for anti-child policies. He explores, first, the world of video games and online “entertainments, ” offering appalling examples of calculated manipulations of children’s love of excitement and their needs for company. Then on to corporations of various sorts purveying a “curriculum” to children. Precociously, they learn about sex from explicit sexual scenes and pornography that are available without check.  Sexy clothes and gadgets can be bought by anyone; sexy chat and sexting are free. Violence and mayhem are ubiquitous. “Ninety percent of [U.S.] children between the ages of four and six are on-screen for at least two hours a day…Tweens and teens spend, on average, eight hours a day.. consuming media..”

Big Pharma has found in children the new frontier for selling psychotropics. Doctors and psychiatrists are manipulated into prescribing to children, whose brains are still developing, all kinds of meds, including anti-psychotics. Big Pharma’s marketing techniques are similar to those of food-producing corporations that market junk food, addicting children to regimes of sugar and caffeine, contributing to zooming rates of childhood obesity and diabetes and neurological disorders.

These corporations are just as oblivious to the harm they are doing to childrens’ health as the environmental polluters responsible for making asthma the leading cause of child

hospitalizations and school absences, as one in ten U.S. children suffer from it. Childhood cancers are on the rise, and the main culprits are environmental toxins. Corporations make sure that toxicity standards are made from adult data, while children are vulnerable to toxins at much lower levels.

Child labor is slowly being reinstated, particularly in agriculture. Corporations are taking over the field of public education, which was supposed to have become universal with the institution of anti-child labor laws in the early 20^th century. Charter schools are subsidized with tax payers’ money for their profit-making enterprises.

In a corporation, which is a “person” in U.S. legal terms, the bottom line rules absolutely. Making the maximum for shareholders is a corporation’s legal raison d’etre, explains Bakan, a professor of law in Vancouver.  So by its very nature, a corporation will not serve the people or “the commons” that belongs to everyone. This was the theme of Bakan’s 20…best-selling book The Corporation and of a very fine documentary that was made from it. Children Under Seige is an off-shoot of a long section in that book on “the nag factor”—that is, on how corporations set children at odds with their parents, who become powerless as their children are turned into consumers.

Because it focuses on children, the current book is more limited than The Corporation was by the way Bakan thinks and by the ‘child saver’ role  he wants to play. He is given to utterly simplistic historical and causal statements: The targeting of children can be dated precisely to 1980, he announces, when neoliberalism triumphed and governments stopped regulating corporations. With that, the entire history of child abuse and neglect disappears from view. What is left is a Manichean face-off between Bad Corporations and Good Parents, who have only good intentions toward their children. Swallowed up in the bad “person” of the corporation, CEOs and managers are not persons, and are incapable of personal responsibility. But as parents those same people will be full of love and caring—and just as helpless in the face of their corporation’s power as any other Good Parent. All parents, he implies, are like the Bakans, who are described in embarrassingly schmaltzy terms in the Acknowledgements. They would never do any harm!

In the Good Parents/Bad Corporations fantasy Bakan operates with, the Good are rendered powerless by the Bad, and the Bad is unstoppable because it is not made up of any real people who have real choices and real responsibility toward children and toward the future children represent. And there are no other adults: no citizens, no legislators, no children’s rights advocates. No political process. In Bakan’s world, no group of legislators or policy makers would ever gather to read Childhood Under Siege and use it to try to protect children from the anti-child practices it investigates so well.

In The Corporation, Bakan’s activist message was: a corporation is a legal entity constituted by a government for a limited period of time; that means a government can dissolve a corporation, particularly if it is behaving destructively, harming the people who are not its shareholders and devastating “the commons.” As the very least, governments can regulate corporations, as they once, to a certain extent, did. So Bakan was calling upon citizens to get their elected representatives to protect them from corporations. He could, therefore, leave unasked the question: but what about the people inside the corporation, the leaders and the shareholders, have they no insider responsibility? Are they just functionaries?  What sense does it make to say “the corporation did this or that harmful thing,” as though a corporation really were a person making a decision, doing harm.

The personal responsibility question left unasked in The Corporation is even more muted  in Childhood Under Siege: How Corporations Callously Target Children.  The primary audience for this book seems to be parents, in their role as parents, not in their role as citizens who might act politically against corporations that are turning children into consumers or in their role as insiders in corporations. Without meaning to, I am sure, Bakan is sending parents, whose goodness and good-will he assumes,  the message that they have been  rendered powerless as parents by the corporations. The vicious and sexually debased video games your child is viewing on his electronic device are available to him no matter what you might try to do to block his access. The food regime you institute at home is no protection against the junk food available everywhere –or the junk added to what you think is good, nutritious food. Environmental toxins are in and around you; you are trapped.  Corporate advertising has gotten to your kids and turned them against you, making them into kids who nag you until you give in and buy whatever it is they have been convinced to crave. Family unity has been undermined. This is not a call to action.

The great weakness of Bakan’s book, which is very valuable as docmentation, is that he is confused about personal responsibility –he does not know how to think about it or how to write about it.  He is right that corporations, as legal entities, encourage people to give up, as it were, their personhood and subsume themselves in the “person” of the corporation, which –metaphorically, but also in actual legal terms—is supposed to make decisions that maximize shareholder profits. So corporate leaders are encouraged not to consider the impact of their decisions on their customers, or on the environment from which they draw their materials and into which they put their waste products, or on their workers. They are rewarded for considering only the bottom line and for displaying loyalty to the corporate purposes; and, in doing so, they are law-of-the-corporation abiding. But this does not mean that they are not personally responsible; it just means they have chosen not to be personally responsible.

An authoritarian regime headed in the direction of being a totalitarian regime operates like a corporation: it rewards people who abide by its laws, even as those laws morph into laws which make harm and then murder legal and normal and which eventually sanction state-sponsored massacres, administrative massacres (which we now call crimes against humanity). The bottom line is loyalty to the regime and its interests. But anyone who will not be such a faithful servant has other options: whistle-blowing, sabotage, becoming a resister and –if possible—helping organize a resistance.  What people suffer to say no is often dreadful, but they have chosen that form of suffering rather than the suffering of going along in crimes against humanity.

This brings me to the second piece I wrote last week:

A book would be required to report how “the banality of evil” has become  banal over the decades since Hannah Arendt published her controversial Eichman in Jerusalem: A Reprot on the Banality of Evil (1963). Her enemies thought she had absolved Eichman of responsibility either by describing him as a “cog in the machine” or (worse) by saying that his deeds were banal; her supporters thought she had said there is an Eichman in all of us, ready to do evil.  Worn away by these kinds of misinterpretations,  the phrase became like an ancient hieroglyph, portentous but illegible.

So, what was she trying to convey?  First, and most immediately, that the man she saw and heard in the Jerusalem court room in 1961 was not a Richard III sort, not a man who had set out to “prove a villain.” His testimony revealed  no deep motivation like revenge  or lust for power—two words, perhaps,  for the same thing.  In the bureaucratic German he spoke there was no trace of psychopathy, no sadistic pleasure from inflicting pain. Some Nazis undoubtedly were “radically” evil in the sense that their deeds grew from a deep or twisted  root,  but Eichman’s motives  seemed to Arendt banal –superficial. He talked in court about his desire to move up in the Nazi bureaucracy, for example. His ideal was  to be a good servant to his Fuhrer’s ideas and programs.

Arendt consistently used the word “thoughtless” to explicate Eichman’s banality.  He could recite moral rules; he could even, when asked to do so in court, recite Kant’s famous categorical imperative. But for him all rules referenced “the Fuhrer’s will,” they were all the Fuhrer’s commandments.  Eichman could neither ask himself nor think through the question that Arendt considered essential to moral experience, one that she (very challengingly) held was not at all a matter of following rules or serving  any leader’s will: “Could I live with myself if I did this deed?”

She was prompted to a question by Eichmann’s careerism and his thoughtless conformity: Can banal motives  block or stifle human fellow feeling and make a person inhumanly thoughtless,  that is, unable to think?  In her trial report, Arendt was laying the factual foundation for a psychological  exploration of this question. For example,  she described the moment when Eichman  dedicated himself without hesitation to obeying the Fuhrer’s will: it was  four weeks after the head of the S.S. intelligence service, Reinhardt Heydrich, informed him, on July 31, 1941, that a Final Solution of the Jewish question–that is, extermination of the Jews–had become official policy. For a month,  Eichman was “on the ground” (as we now say) observing firsthand the grisly preliminary killing operations in Poland, and feeling repelled by them. But after that period, his feelings of repulsion disappeared and he was, simply, the transport officer, conscientiously carrying out the policy. Arendt remarked: It is of great political interest to know how long it takes an average person to overcome his innate repugnance toward crime, and what exactly happens to him once he has reached that point. . . Yes, he had a conscience, and his conscience functioned in the expected way for about four weeks, whereupon it began to function the other way around.”

In Arendt’s reconstruction of  “what exactly happened to him,” there were three key ingredients. First, he never heard a word of questioning much less political debate among his peers or superiors. Second, he received a clarifying idea, a ‘truth,’‘ from the S.S. head Heinrich Himmler.  Mass killings, Himmler said, were  a heroic task requiring great courage, loyalty to the Führer, and ability to bear the suffering involved in being an executioner.  A state executioner is a hero, tough, loyal and brave.  Third,  Eichmann  adopted a “different personal attitude” (in his own words). He became  inured to seeing dead people all around him: “We did not care if we died today or only tomorrow.” Having redefined executioners as heroic sufferers and having stifled his empathy for human suffering, including his own,  Eichman was numb enough to follow his new conscience.

True villains and true psychopaths are, fortunately, rather rare; but, in the right circumstances,  becoming  unfeelingly obedient and inhuman in this way  can become a common condition. When political life atrophies and debate and questioning cease, while thoughtful moral experience is blocked internally, the resulting capacity for evil can spread  like an epidemic.  Before she went to Jerusalem, Arendt had feared that thoughtlessness –“the headless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of ‘truths’ which have become trivial and empty,” as she described it in The Human Condition (1958)– had become  “among the outstanding characteristics of our time.” Eichman convinced her of the rightness of this judgment. And the thoughtlessness of the controversy over her book seems to me further evidence.

As of  today, Monday the 1t of August, this Tea Party platform has won the day in the insane debt ceiling debate that has gripped Washington for weeks. Supposedly, we are saved from the August 2^nd catastrophe scenario. But, instead the Tea Party’s main propagandistic catastrophe scenario has been installed in Washington. There is, so this scenario goes, a civil war in the country in which the  Tea Party , allied with like-minded virtuous anti-tax small government Republicans, is facing down President Obama and  the big government, “tax and spend” Democrats.  Had the Democrats gotten their way, so this image implies, the beast of government would have become ever more of a Leviathan. We would be continuing our slide into socialist totalitarianism. We would have become ever more trapped by the debt such a regime has run up with its overbearing tax policy –keeping taxes high and then over-spending the revenue anyway. But, praise be, the Tea Party held firm and beat back the force of evil.

One thing is obvious in this ridiculous situation and that is that “taxes” has become a shibboleth. If you say the word “taxes” with sufficient contempt in your voice, you are identifiable as a small government advocate; if you say the word neutrally or fail to express fear of taxes, you are a socialist. Things have changed little since the 13^th century BCE when, as the Book of Judges (chapter 12: 5-6) informs us, the Gileadites asked their neighbors the Ephraimites, whom they had conquered and banished to the far side of the River Jordan, to pronounce the word “Shibboleth” when they applied to cross back over the river and return to their homes. If the refugees had lied on their applications, denying they were Ephramites, their inability to pronounce the Hebrew word for an ear of corn in the proper Gileadite fashion would expose them, whereupon the Gileadites would kill them. Forty two thousand Ephramites were slaughtered at the Jordan River’s ford, the verse in Judges informs us matter-of-factly.

So, here we are in a Washington moment in which everyone who is not a Tea Party or Republican anti-tax zealot is afraid to say the word “taxes” at all lest they and their re-election chance be dead on the Potomac’s ford. Even saying “we must end tax breaks for the rich” has become dangerous, much less “we must tax the rich.”  And yet, at the same time, out in the country at large, “beyond the beltway,” a recent Washington Post-ABC News Poll (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/poll) has found that for 72% of Americans the most popular reforms to deal with the deficit are increased taxes on those making more than $250,000; nearly as many want increased taxes for hedge fund operators and oil and gas companies. Almost 75% of Americans oppose cuts in Medicare. Majorities reject raising the eligibility age for Medicare or cutting the Social Security inflation rate, two reforms President Obama seems to have accepted in principle in order to get his deal with the Republicans and Tea Partyers.

So,  how did this debt deal, which makes no economic sense and which is profoundly undemocratic come to pass?  What are these anti-tax Tea Partyers thinking? It seems to me that they are not thinking. The word “taxes” has become a test word for them, and has no connection to any ordinary citizen’s daily experience. It functions like a piece of hate speech, a prejudicial word for a group, the tax advocates, the socialists.

I think that the poll indicates that the majority of Americans want to live in a country in which they can have a daily experience that is not now possible. They want to have the experience of hearing people say with satisfaction when they look at a public school:  “our taxes built that so that our children can be educated and enabled to live in the world.”  They want to say as they look at the hospitals and clinics that serve their community “our taxes built these places so that we and our children have medical practitioners nearby, practicing preventative and therapeutic medicine, ready to help us even if we are temporarily fallen on hard times.” They would like to join other working people each workday morning in saying: “our taxes paid for this road, this railway, this bus, this train, these engineers and those drivers, and I am able to get to work as cheaply, efficiently, and eco-sustainably as possible thanks to that.” They do not want to feel delusional if they say “Ah, I have clean water coming out of my kitchen faucet because of the water authority and the water system my taxes are paying for.”  Teaching their children how things work, they think it would be good to say:  “Well, about half of our income goes to taxes so that needs we have which no individual can meet alone or through a family are met by government projects, while the other half of our income is for us to spend as we chose or to save for the future. People who have more or earn more pay more in taxes than people who have less. This way we do not need a Robin Hood to make sure no one is without food, shelter, medical care.”

But these kinds of statements are not part of our daily experience. We do not live in Norway, a country where the people, if they get shocked by an explosion of insanity from a person who rejects their  commitment to creating a well-functioning, shared national household, pull up and recommit to that vision. No, in our midst we have, instead, an on-going opposition to the very idea that tax-paying can provide the resources to make a well-functioning, shared national household. And that opposition routinely explodes into anti-tax frenzy. The simple idea that taxes are necessary to run the national household is obliterated.

I certainly know that governments can mis-spend the tax revenue they get, and that governments can fill up with corruption, spending tax money illegally or using it to subsidize crony projects at the expense of ones that serve the people. Taxes are not moral currency, they are money, and where there is money there is corruption. Political oversight is always needed –and if the political oversight is itself corrupt, a country is in serious trouble. That is a very short way to summarize the recession of 2008 and how wasteful and wrong-headed was the use of tax revenue to bail out a bunch of tax evaders.

What the citizens who want taxes to be paid and paid equitably –more by the rich, less by the poor—and honestly supervised are much more likely to hear around them than appreciation of taxes is: “Why should I pay taxes? I am going to hire an accountant who will shelter my money or reduce my tax bill to zero. I think my money should be my money, I earned it, I worked damn hard for it.” That is the anti-tax harangue of the entitled individualist, the narcissist. But there is also the anti-tax snarl of the paranoid:   “My money is my money, I do not want to give any of it to a government that gives it to undeserving people or to programs I despise because they are undermining the country’s strength.”  Or there are the unrealistic fantasy-mongers: “Look, if people who make good money did not have to pay any taxes they would be able to hire more people. They would immediately expand their businesses, and serve their country by being successful.” Let our unemployment problem be solved by Good People who do not pay taxes!  Tax evasion is not for personal gain, all these sorts of folks ratonalize, it is to support individualism, to oppose any scheme for redistribution of wealth, to contribute to a growth economy ultimately benefiting everyone.

In such a sea of hypocrisy it is very difficult to remember that paying taxes can be a means of acting communally, in concert; you put your money in a common pool that sustains the common habitat in which everyone lives, the national household.  If that national household is well run, if there is good governance, we are free to do other things than sweat over the national checkbook and the national bank balance. But in America now, the feeling that taxes are the government’s means of robbing the people is growing more common –and it is this feeling that the Tea Party taps into and then reinforces, guides. Why?  Because for it to be otherwise people have to talk about good governance, not  only about big government or small government. To tax or not to tax. Our choice, the Tea Partyers argue, is that simple.

To me it seems that this is the kind of choice is conjured up by people who have been profoundly neglected or feel themselves to have been profoundly deprived. They are fighting back in  the way that a juvenile delinquent does by stealing to make up for past deprivations –of money, but more deeply of love. Listening to the “no more taxes!” advocates, there comes before my mind a conversation I once had with a client who makes a tiny salary doing admirable work with children. She is single, childless herself, and now past child-bearing age. Bitterly, on April 15^th,  she said: “I think it is really unfair that I have to pay school taxes when I don’t have children and am never going to have children –the people who have children should be responsible for them by paying the school tax.”  I asked her if she wanted to live in a society in which children –all children–got a good education at a preschool as good as the one where she works. “Of course,” she said. But she did not make the connection: so everybody has to do their part, as the result is for everybody, including her. That connection does not make her feel any better about herself or diminish her sense that she has been left out, deprived, never included.

My client spent her unhappy, neglected childhood in the years when the Republican Party was morphing into what it is today from what it was up to the 1960s.  It was states’ rights in it orientation, skeptical about all things federal and big government, often (although not consistently) isolationist, and fiscally conservative. But, on the other hand, its members had accepted the fact that the American military had needed a huge build-up to fight in the Second World War –and  that meant a huge increase in the size and reach of the federal government. During the Cold War, that build-up was thought necessary and the Pentagon continued to grow.  Lo and behold, the economy benefited –despite the occasional little recession. Nonetheless, the Republican Party was, still, a party that could be led by an Eisenhower, a staunch anti-communist who could, nonetheless, warn about the domestic  “military-industrial complex” and its dangers.

The old Republicans could understand that the war-time build-up, the post-war economic boom, and the post-war increase in the size and reach of the federal government had pulled America out of the Depression. And they understood, too, that the so-called entitlement programs –like the Social Security and medical insurance support for senior citizens that came with the 1935 Social Security Act—were necessary to prevent the growing impoverishment of the elderly. But addressing the growing impoverishment of the lower classes and their children  –including so many southern African-American migrants to northern cities– was not, basically, something they wanted the federal government to be involved with. To the extent that poverty was to be addressed at all, it was to be addressed by the states, using state taxes and as little federal revenue as possible.

I disagree with this position completely, but it is at least a position, not a piece of insane propagandizing of the sort many current Republicans and the Tea Partyers engage in.  Thinking about it today, my grandfather came to my mind. He, who had been a Republican state senator in Maryland, argued his version of the old Republican world-view over our dinner table, with vehemence, but also with–after his fashion—reason.

My memory went to an evening in1962, when I was a teenager enormously inspired by John Kennedy’s election and reading all the time about politics, economics, international affairs. Our dinner table topic was Michael Harrington’s classic study The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962), about which I made a little book report type speech to my elders. At the time, my grandfather, known to his friends as Colonel Williams (he had been a decorated cavalry officer the First World War), was preoccupied politically with the threat of Communism in southeast Asia. He had tried to use his influence to press President Kennedy (who, needless to say, he had not voted for) to send American officers to South Vietnam so that they could support the Vietnamese who were fighting against Ho Chi Minh and against China.  The Chinese Communists, so he thought, were creeping down into Southeast Asia on their way to world conquest. Harrington –“that Commie bleeding heart” in the Colonel’s judgment– had written about what seemed to him just a soluble practical problem, which state governments and local communities should take  on.  Personally, my grandfather put his local energies into getting funds from Baltimore for a housing project on the upper Chesapeake Bay that was to be–to the horror of his Republican cronies—integrated. His motivation horrified me when he made it crystal clear, instructing us over the dinner table:  ”If you let the Negroes just live on the streets, they’ll steal and tear down our communities; if you let them live together in a ghetto, they’ll organize and make a revolution –just like the Communists everywhere else do. The best thing is to keep them like ours.”

By that “like ours,” he meant like his cook and caretaker, a couple who lived in an annex of the Williams family home which had once been occupied by their slave forebearers.  The Colonel was for a transformation of the plantation slave system into a housing project servant system so there would be no poor and all would be free citizens (and educated, as his housing project had its own school, so that the Negroes would not be forever child-like).  For this solution to work, he knew there had to be taxes to support it –as there had to be taxes to support our national military, which would keep us safe from our external enemies. On this point, he agreed with Kennedy and later with Lyndon Johnson whom he otherwise hated for his federal War on Poverty. In the Colonel’s opinion, taxes were comparable to the tithe people should pay their churches to support the church and pay for good works amongst the poor.

Ah, those were the completely contradictory and patronizing southern Republicans of yore. They were not insane, they were simply provincial men of their time who viewed themselves as pragmatists and could not in any way reflect on their prejudices–either their racial prejudices or their prejudice against socialists, whom they thought were either National Socialists or Communists, the kind of people our country had gone to war against not so long before.  These men were householders, who viewed the nation as the big household in which they knew best as the paterfamilias class.

I fought with the Colonel over almost every facet of his worldview, but I recognized that he was a thoughtful man, a respect-worthy enemy. Trying to figure out why he thought what he thought was a good education. Some of his attitudes surprised me and were, thus, particularly instructive. For example, he had no respect for people who were, as he put it, “filthy rich.” For a nation to have a sizeable group of people who were “filthy rich,” he said, was dangerous. Why? His answer startled me:  “You learn in the Army that any officer who thinks he is different than his men because at home he has a lot of money, and behind the lines he has an aide de camp who shines his boots, will get his men and himself killed.  Money aristocrats do not make good decisions, they are preoccupied with their money.” How, I wondered, could he understand this but not understand that people have all kinds of preoccupations that make it impossible for them to think of the common good, or to think politically in the true meaning of that word.  He had a democratic sensibility but he had trouble holding to it because of his own preoccupations, which were all about federal institutions being robbers and the vengeance he assumed the wretched of the earth would exact from the law-abiding and good is they were not managed.

The common denominator of the kinds of preoccupations that keep people from being able to think politically, I have come to think, is a sense of having been injured and slighted and deprived and threatened; a sense of having been left out in the emotional cold. So the common denominator solution is to become as  invulnerable as possible –let no one tax you! —and then make yourself a member of the new ruling class, the new dictatorship. My grandfather had inclinations toward this solution, but he never went there –his suspicion of hate politics always checked him. His democratic sensibility always reasserted itself in a crisis. When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, I was so touched that he said to me, full of grief: “There is something wrong in the way people hated Kennedy and what he stood for, something that made that madman think he would be praised for shooting him. Something wrong in the Republican Party. I feel ashamed that Kennedy is dead.”

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.

The United States was born in our War of Independence and weaned on the Frontier spirit. Personal independence and self-reliance are the paramount virtues of American culture. As psychoanalysts, we know that relationships with other people are important foundations of physical and emotional health. Yet, many Americans believe that attaining personal freedom is best accomplished by sacrificing relationships; and many suggest that such an approach to life is the recipe that we should all follow. This radical individualism has both personal and serious cultural side-effects. One of those side effects, we propose, is a societal hostility toward, and neglect of, our children.

All of us, children and adults, have a need to be taken care of, and to take care of, other people. This powerful human need is the basis of  much charitable and communal activity. Yet many Americans strive for radical personal autonomy, which can only be maintained by a posture of denial of their own real inter-personal needs and by denying any inclination to take care of others.  Those who obviously need the most care, of course, are our children, our sick, and our poor.  People in obvious need make us uncomfortable by challenging our idealized image of perfect self-sufficiency.  To alleviate this discomfort we as a society then tend to ignore them.

Consistent with this idealization of self-sufficiency and intolerance of need, United States cares less for its children than any other developed country.  We are last in leave from work for new parents, we lag in support for early childhood education, and twenty-eight nations now have lower rates of infant mortality than we do.  The needs of our children have been buried in our drive for personal independence.

Although our children remain a low priority in our social hierarchy, it is no mystery what we should do for them.  Research has confirmed what common sense tells us.  We have evidence that children who are fed do better than those who are hungry.  We know that dollars spent on early child care and education save many more dollars from being spent on special education and the criminal justice system.  We have increasing evidence that hitting children, corporal punishment, which is now illegal in many other countries, contributes to behavior problems, encourages children toward violence, and can even lower intelligence.  We know that people with insurance stay healthier than those without, and that healthy children do better than sick children.

Even though founding father Ben Franklin reportedly said “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang separately” we have gone so overboard with “independencism” that any collective good is now regarded by many as objectionably socialist.  Many proposed budget cuts are clearly not about saving money.  The ideological ax threatens programs such as Headstart and WIC (Women Infants & Children), which for every dollar invested demonstrably save taxpayers many dollars elsewhere.

Why is there so little public outcry, no “March for Children”?  Maybe the same psychology is at work.  Perhaps children, like adults, should be able to take care of themselves; like John Henry of American myth, they should be born big, strong, and independent.  They shouldn’t need help.  Part of the appeal of the small government movement is that when government is small enough there will be no communal endeavor, no objectionable help for anyone.  It may be that poor and helpless adults also identify with the power elite, those who are clearly not needy, thus inhibiting them from “marching” for their own interests and their children’s interests.

First Lady Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity is commendable, but who will champion the efforts to help children be safe, loved, cared for, fed, and educated in the first place?  Children are not self-sufficient, and childhood deprivation does not build character; it leads to misery and anger.  As a society we need to temper our radical individualism, and nurture all of our care-giving impulses, to make sure our children get the foundation they need, and that they, and we, can look forward to a future of opportunity instead of deprivation.

The analogy Winnicott was working with –a very important one, in my view—contains the danger that people might use it to think self-righteously, as though they held the position of  “good,” mature  persons already. But it could also be used dangerously by anyone harboring a prejudice against adolescents. Such a person might unknowingly hold a prejudice that adolescents are bad, wild, or rebellious beings, not-good or no good, by nature thoughtless or capable of atrocities. They could opine that adults have every reason to fear and ought to control adolescents by any means necessary. Disciplining them requires a firm hand –even firmer than the hand used with children because adolescents are bigger and stronger and closer to being able to take over than children are. (In terms I have introduced in earlier blogs, this would be childism against adolescents.)

Winnicott was not prejudiced in this way. For him, an adolescent was an older child en route by some route to adulthood, and not someone intrinsically fearsome or somehow of less value than an adult. He was concerned in his sociopolitical analyses with adolescent adults who had not gotten through the transition to adulthood, but remained stuck en route.  Adolescence is a phase, a universal phase, different in one cultural location or another, but neither good nor bad. Winnicott was analyzing not the phase itself, but the phenomena of fixation –stuckness–in that stage or regression into it.  Every adult is to some degree susceptible to regression into adolescence, but not everyone experiences such a regression or, once regressed, cannot get back on progressive course. On the social side of the analogy, he was concerned with societies where a significant portion of the population gets stuck in the adolescent developmental phase or regressed into it, and thus blocks the “innate democratic tendency” from flourishing, thinking and acting maturely.

The analogy is of no help in assessing an individual or a society if the person using the analogy, or thinking with its help, has no clear, carefully developed and researched idea what maturity or mature adulthood is. By “researched,” I do not mean in a laboratory or through the application of a ‘maturity questionnaire’ of some sort: ‘have you ever done or thought X [immature deed or thought]?’ or ‘do you consider X a mature way of behaving in this circumstance?’ or ‘do you consider yourself a mature person?’  I am referencing the kind of research Winnicott did: working clinically with children and adolescents and adults suffering from varieties of stuckness and thinking about why they could not move (by their own accounts), what they were prevented by themselves or by others from attaining developmentally. And thinking, too, about the stuckness in himself, by being analyzed and analyzing himself.   There is no one-size-fits-all definition of maturity, within a culture or across cultures.

But there is, it seems to me, a key –perhaps the key—ingredient of maturity or manifestation of it that is the same across cultures and in different historical circumstances (although the expression of this ingredient varies from place to place, time to time). Winnicott pointed to it. A mature person is able to take on the responsibility of parenting or caretaking (not necessarily as a biological parent or an adoptive one) a child  or children, and thus raising the next generation, as every child is a member of a next generation and also a representative of the next generation. Winnicott’s many papers and articles about the person he called “the ordinary devoted mother” –who could be a father, a grandparent, a caretaker, a teacher, any adult taking responsibility for a child—were all about how she is a person with the maturity to be devoted, meaning to be able to put the child’s needs and developmental requirements before her own needs. When, exhausted or frustrated in the unsatisfaction of her own needs or thwarted in her efforts to satisfy her child’s needs, she temporarily feels hatred for her child her capacity is (as he wrote in the 1947 piece called “Hate in the Transference” that I cited in blog #56) “able to tolerate hating her baby without doing anything about it.”  She does not have a rigid, unfree, self-referenced emotional life.

A society cannot be healthy, and it cannot be democratic, if many of the people who make it up are not other-oriented and future-oriented in this way. Self-sacrificing, if that is what is required, but under happier circumstances, self-restrained and far-sighted for the sake of the children. The higher animals obviously understand this (at least in the span of a generation if not through the generations with a human time-sense). So do all people who have not become denatured –not just dehumanized, but denatured–in some way. People of completely different political visions can share this idea. In all kinds of cultures, there will be people who step up to speak about their responsibility for providing their children (or at least some of them) and grandchildren with a better world or at least with a world (sometimes represented by an inheritance of place or things).

I think that this feeling for children and their meaning, this devotion to children, underlies that Rule that is (in the West) called The Golden Rule, which says: do unto others as you would have them do unto you; or (in the Confucian variant), do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you.  Underneath or behind these formulations, it seems to me,  is a thought that goes: do unto the children as you would have had done unto you when you were a dependent child by your parents and your society and as you would have your children and society do unto you when you are old and need their help in your return to dependency in its old age form. It is a feeling for the cycle of life.  For the “Seven Ages of Man,” to note just one image-system known from ancient times in various cultural traditions, which tracks human life from dependency in infancy to dependency in old age, from new beginnings to deterioration, from dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

These reflections have to do with maturation, not morality. The Golden Rule is so basic and so universal because it formulates a universal maturational principle, not a culture-specific moral principle. The adults must care for the young and they must do so according to their best understanding of what the young need not what they themselves need, for if they do not act this way their young will not survive and flourish and grow into adulthood so that they can carry their society forward, freely, and care for the next generation.  When people get around to moral and religious pronouncements, they very often lose their clear, basic footing in the maturational principle, which has an imperative in it but not a moral imperative. Generally, moralizing, they fall into self-interest, which they do their best to disguise as not really self-interest –indeed, they often do their best to describe their moral ideas as self-less or self-sacrificing and devoted to the interests of others or selected others. No wonder it has been so difficult for thinkers to describe or analyze altruism  –what they so often end up talking about is how self-interest can be served by altruism. It seems to me that if you hear adults saying ‘we must take good care of  the children or we will die out (or so we won’t die out),’ you are not hearing altrusism speaking, but narcissism.

I have been thinking about these things this week while reading, day after day, about the many adolescents (and a few frustrated adults) going to meetings in Washington where they discuss our society’s “debt crisis” (a misnomer) and then go  posture before the news media on the topic of how we must think about the world we will leave to our children and grandchildren. There was John McCain yesterday saying we must not “mortgage our children’s future” or saddle them with the debt now accumulating.  We must scale down our government and its expenditures. Others over in his neck of the woods go on about how we must repair the deteriorated social fabric with all its horrifying promotion of perversion, abortion, lack of family values, or our children will inherit this chaos!  Across the aisle are those who say we must maintain the programs and safety nets and environmental protections without which our children have not a prayer of a good life, or perhaps even of survival in a world overheating in every possible way from temperature to new arms races.

And this debt and debt ceiling matter must be decided before August 2^nd, people of both persuasions say, for that is when the United States of America could do something unprecedented: default on its debt, to who knows what consequence for the country and the interconnected economic world. That this is, in all seriousness, the way the rhetoric is flowing in Washington and that this is our situation, is simply appalling. And I think the vast majority of Americans find it appalling –even if they join in the pseudo-argument on one side or the other, finding these to be the only sides staked out and not wanting to feel completely powerless or lonely, without a team to play for.  In the last several days, as the debt ceiling deadline day approaches, more voices appear in the news saying this is a stupid adolescent game of chicken or an adolescent display of bullying vs. bullying. This morning in the Times, columnist Paul Krugman went further and said that the extremist Republicans, which includes now almost all the Republicans, are crazy.

The diagnosticians are searching for the right diagnosis.  And many are realizing how frightening it is to say, as the old Pogo cartoon from Earth Day, 1971 put it:  “we have met the enemy and he is us.”  It is always psychologically easier, as Winnicott pointed out, to have the enemy be flying toward you in airplanes, dropping bombs in your backyards, sheerly evil, than it is to say something like: we do not know how to care for our children.

A two tier society of the ultra wealthy and the rest, with the ultra wealthy paying ridiculously little in taxes or none at all, supported in their privilege by a party that says “there will be no new taxes, period” is an adolescent society that attacks children, cuts off the prospects and the growth of the next generation. And that party is a party that transparently rationalizes its no tax policy with appeal to the future of children. So it is setting up the conditions for a youth rebellion, should the party last long enough to be saved by a youth rebellion. Listening to the Republicans, one feels we are in the United States of Saudi Arabia, minus the super-rich hereditary monarchy.

But those in Washington who argue on the progressive side, although they are not directly attacking children for the sake of adult privilege, adult “individualism” and the freedom to be narcissistic, are not articulating the principle they ought to be following.

You cannot just say you stand for the future and give priority to the needs of the young; you have to, in detail, concretely, articulate programs and policies that do that. It will not do, for example, to say all children must have health insurance if there are no “good enough” enough health services, even for a child who has insurance, and you are willing, further, to chop away at medical insurance programs to placate your political opponents in “the debt crisis.”  Too many of the progressives are rationalizing their bids to stay in Congress or the White House with appeals to the future of our children. But, really, the thinking needs to go in the other direction: start with the principle, and then find ways to follow it, really, realistically. The audacity of maturity.