The Clare Spark Blog

  

In Henry A. Murray’s articles and speeches, personal history, class interest, and the images and fears of an orphaned WASP élite besieged by “Marxian” realists, united to shape a life-project: to identify the enemies of democratic capitalism, repair and restore the world shattered by the Judases of modern science, and to bring world peace without massification.  From the mid-1920s until his death in 1988, Herman Melville was Murray’s inspiration, guide, and alter ego; Murray’s “Melville,” however, resembled Hawthorne, not the author I have resuscitated in Hunting Captain Ahab.  Murray was not shy about declaring the source of atomization and dissolution: there are good Jews like the physician Alvin Barach who have helped emancipate Murray from his upper-class family; but there are bad Jews, such as ancient Hebrews who brought dogmatism and infallibility into the world, and whom Murray associates with the stubborn mechanistic thinkers who are hampering the next step in our creative evolution toward a planetary lovely family, wherein cultural opposites appreciatively quiver in fruitful Jungian tension. (Fabian Socialist H.G. Wells would show the same proclivity for social democracy/moderation.)

      As idealist thinkers, both Melville/Hawthorne and Murray try to mobilize “the heart” (psychic depths which are the repository of real fact), to counter a world which is delusive and lethal because it is, or may be, massified, leveled, and internationalized by materialism; i.e., made enjuive.  The emotional response to this fantasy of miscegenation and pollution is the fear, revulsion, and hostility of the purity reformer.[1]  Murray’s personal anxieties (partly shaped by an upper-class perspective) brought him into confrontation with the democratizing tendencies of the last two centuries: like other nativist radicals (including Irving Babbitt and other “New Humanists”), he may have found relief in the notions of social type, archetype, national character, and race (summarized in his phrase “varieties of human nature,” with race accepted as a category in his Explorations) with their clean distinctions and relative stability over time.

     In his Poe-Henry Adams style autobiographical sketch, “The Case of Murr,” Murray declared his allegiance to William James and sympathized with William McDougall (the hereditarian racist Chairman of Harvard’s Psychology Department, who followed James in 1920, said by Murray to have been vanquished by Harvard behaviorists in 1927, and whose social ideas are nearly identical to those of Lothrop Stoddard, a Harvard Ph.D., like McDougall, a supporter of Nazi eugenics in the 1930s). Here, as elsewhere, Murray (whose stereoscopic vision had been needlessly impaired by his mother’s rage for conformity and the slip of a physician’s scalpel) defends the only source of “fact” which allows him to excel, aligning himself with other victims of the ruthlessly boundary-blurring and therefore miscegenating modern world:

    [Murray:]  “William James (who was said by a later member of the Harvard department to have done unparalleled harm to psychology) had become one of Murr’s major exemplars by that time, and the young man found himself agreeing with almost everything his hero had to say–completely, for example, with the heretical statement that ‘Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen and how work is actually done.’

     “This idea that the ‘real facts’ are to be found not on the surface of the body or in the full light of consciousness but in the darker, blinder recesses of the psyche was of course anathema to the majority of academic psychologists, who were militantly engaged in a competitive endeavor to mold psychology in the image of physics, a competition in which positive reinforcements would be reserved for those who could bring forth experimental findings with the highest degree of face-validity, statistical significance, and verifiability in all cases, obtained by the most reliable and precise methods. To be among the leaders in this race [note the pun] it was necessary to legislate against the ‘blinder strata,’ to keep away from those events which intellectuals at large assumed to be the subject matter of psychology, to disregard individual and typological differences, and to approximate universality and certainty by measuring the lawful relationships of narrowly restricted forms of animal behavior, of physiological processes in general, and of the simplest sensory and sensorimotor processes of human beings in particular. In short, methodological excellence was dictating (more than it did in any other science) the phenomena to be investigated, with the result that in those days psychologists were not the experts to be consulted about problems involving varieties of human nature, as biochemists, botanists, and ornithologists, for example, are consulted about problems involving varieties of chemicals, plants and birds. [Does he mean some of us are crows, some are eagles, or some of us are flowers, some are weeds? McDougall did.] On this general issue, Murr, at variance with his contemporaries, was facing in the opposite direction with the hope of devising the best possible methods for the investigation of obscure phenomena, realizing that it is the part of an educated man, as Aristotle said, to know what degree of precision is appropriate at each stage in the development of each discipline. Although, for various reasons, Murr did not attempt any direct exposures of the blinder strata of feelings, he would in due course find ways of eliciting meaningful imagery and fantasies from which one could infer the nature of some of the components of the blinder strata.” [Italics mine. “The Case of Murr,” 60, 61].

      Self-control, social control, and the moderating of radical ambition, not enlightenment, were the objectives of Murray’s dive for real fact. These “ways of eliciting meaningful imagery and fantasies” would take the form of the Thematic Apperception Test (devised in 1935 with Christiana Morgan) or the OSS operative recruitment test.

       Murray’s publications openly profess the objectives of these scientific procedures.  The tests were designed to uncover the subject’s latent redness (resistance to authority); to prove his freedom from neurotic symptoms, his proficiency at switching identities without cracking, in leading men in hierarchical “teams,” and his manliness–in part, predefined as stamina in resisting the appeals of radical movements (or, freedom from the “Icarus” complex), and the capacities of OSS operatives to endure humiliation and arbitrary discipline.  But Murray was undismayed that the disclosing subjects did not necessarily know the objective of the test, nor how the subject’s responses were to be used.  Murray, who denounced the Marxian and Freudian strait-jacket, ignored the human rights of his clients, perhaps because the testing procedures he promoted (and which Harold Lasswell admired) were to serve worthy goals and programs of “efficient” psychotherapy, “antifascism,” development, stability, and inspirational and humanistic leadership; goals and programs which were however defined and administered by the sophisticated  élite possessing, like the successful OSS operative, a “sound, moderately conservative political philosophy,”  and with whom Murray had been connected, at least since his conversion to Barach and Melville in the 1920s (rather like the conversion of the “socially responsible,” “liberal” capitalists who created the Committee for Economic Development in the 1940s).The OSS “assessment of men” test designed to recruit spies and practitioners of sabotage and psychological warfare (268),would be applied to personnel screening for other (unspecified) leadership positions.[2]

       And yet, like the helpful, protective and power-sharing modern businessmen of the Committee For Economic Development, Murray was not driven to dominate those he controlled or to seek self-aggrandizement at the expense of others.  For instance, Murr “had come to psychology with the hope of advancing current knowledge about human beings, not to raise his status on the totem pole [!] of scientists.” Murr is no grubby ambitious Head person, alienated and bookish, but a practical patrician: independent, inwardly harmonious, integrated and in touch with his nature and all of suffering humanity:

 [Murray:] “Murr’s varied intimate relations with hospital patients, ranging from a notorious gangster and dope addict to a champion world politician with infantile paralysis, together with privately experienced emotional revolutions, upsurges from below consciousness, had given him a sense of functional fitness, the feeling that all parts of his self were in unison with his professional identity as he defined it, and that he was more advantaged in these ways than were many of the book-made academics who talked as if they had lost contact with the springs of their own natures.”  [Murr, Shneidman,61]

   Murray’s social theory all-too-insistently demanded that we adjust to his facts; unsurprisingly, Murray told me that he, like Melville, had at times yielded to the irrational, and, like his “integrated” hero, had lived in the most painful ambivalence.[3]  Yet in print, Murray presented himself and his organicist fantasies of the future with images of harmony in difference (Jungian pluralism). Such escapes from social reality, from the painful disillusionments of contemporary existence in which a deceptive economic oligarchy (not peacefully competing interest groups) determines our future, must be common in readers who “love” Melville, yet cannot (publicly) face his pain and indignation at being (covertly) dominated, or his self-identification with defiant seekers like Ahab and Margoth, Pierre and Isabel: versions of the romantic Wandering Jew. More bluntly put, the “Melville” revival may be rooted in a fantasy, by no means confined to Hitler, that  the heartless, shattered and decadent modern world can be restored  to its “normal” condition of class harmony and cooperation by stigmatizing and expelling bad Jews with their coldly analytical Jewish spirit: the lethal perpetrators of the Unpardonable Sin and agitators of the twentieth-century labor movement.[4] Thus, in a wondrous Melvillean paradox, the Melville revivers would have expelled the historic figure Herman Melville/Ahab (by Martin Dies’ definition, unambiguously un-American and a commie-Jew), from twentieth-century literary criticism, a removal which had its precedents in Melville’s own praxis.  

 Kinky history:    Symbolists such as Jung and Murray are people ruled by fear; they walk a tightrope, manfully trying to maintain their vanguard position while suppressing the evidence of their senses to please an upper-class clientele.  One way to achieve “balance” is to eschew history with its allegedly “reductive” and “simplistic” materialist explanations for change.  The Symbolist establishes his sophistication, superior taste, and heroism by painfully accepting the unfathomable mystery and complexity of “archetypes” which teasingly surface, slither and sink, finally rendering “reality” and “truth” ineffable, mischaracterizing materialism as an arrogant Margothian reliance upon appearances, i.e., vulgar positivism.

      It is no accident that so many of the “modern” artists, critics, and political scientists who rose to prominence after 1917 have been attracted to the theories of Carl Jung, an adherent of Jacob Hauer’s racial symbolism.[5]  In 1930, Jung praised Moby-Dick as the greatest American novel; four years later, he wrote that Picasso (Ahab-ish in his analytic cubist phase) was suffering from a “schizoid syndrome” (“schizophrenia” a term he clarified in Jung, 1934, fn137). In 1936, Jung explained Nazi violence as the disruption of the German communal psyche by the Wotan archetype [Webb, 401].  Jung’s reactionary influence upon artists, alternative therapists, educators, and social theorists, is probably underestimated.

     The conservative wing of Melville criticism has stigmatized its “liberal” rivals as “subjectivist” and “Freudian”: overly romantic, myth-making, and preposterous in their treatments of Melville’s life and art.  In the next section, I will show that Henry A. Murray (one target, along with Weaver, Mumford, Arvin, and Miller) has identified himself with the Jungian tradition, but has co-opted the technique of Freudian psychoanalysis for the purpose of preventive politics and mind-management in the service of counter-revolution.  I suggest that my elegant Symbolists are possessed by Tory images of the People, that they attack these Doppelgängers which, not surprisingly, are representations of their class enemies (a process shared with the humble Martin Dies and his “populist” successors such as Joe McCarthy).  Yet the Symbolists continue to have credibility in high places as radical and rational analysts of society and of the human situation.

 “FORCING MYSELF TO ACCEPT NOTHING”

     Madame De Farge: “Why? Why? Why?Why?” [“Why” gets bigger until it produces BLOOD, in A Tale of Two Cities, 1935, William Van Dyke, director.]

      [illustrated drawing by Steadman Thompson] “She asked for it.

       “Hesitantly, uncertainly, she asked for it. The guardsmen, used to such requests from well-dressed young girls like her smirked knowingly.  The idea was not new to them as it obviously was to her.

       “When they stripped her to hang her to the flogging cross she asked them to stop short of removing her [red] panties.  They did, to her great disappointment.  She need not be so disappointed, however, for they plan to take them off, rip them off, indeed, later when they do to her certain other things she did not have the nerve to ask for but which will not disappoint her, however much she may struggle or cry out.” [Text to drawing by Steadman Thompson, dated June 19, 1946. Sadomasochism Collection, UCLA]

      [Michael J. Schaack, Captain of Police, Anarchy and Anarchists (Chicago: Schulte, 1889), 683, 686.]  The London celebration of the anniversary of the Paris Commune on the night of March 18, 1889, consisted of a small crowd of boozy, beery, pot-valiant, squalid, frowsy, sodden Whitechapel outcasts who shrieked and fought in a small hall in their district under the eye of a single policeman.

     “Better not go in sir,” the policeman said to a correspondent who entered the door of the small hall at 87 Commonwealth Road.  “There ain’t no danger, but it’s very unpleasant.”

     It was the fumes of scores of dirty pipes and a thousand other causes that made the air almost unbearable.  About two hundred people, a fourth of whom were lushed, soggy Whitechapel women, were in the low-ceilinged hall, while a long-haired Pole was screaming an address from the platform.  He cursed and swore with frantic blasphemy, and called upon his hearers to arm themselves and wade to liberty through blood.  Whenever he uttered the word “blood,” the muddled and maudlin crowd set up a shriek of “Blood, blood, blood!” that was deafening.  All of the women and most of the men had soiled red flags and handkerchiefs, which they waved in the air as they shrieked, “Blood!” in chorus.  Then they would sink back into drunken indifference till the word “blood” was mentioned again.

    Two women and a man, says the correspondent, lay in senseless stupor, with the crowd treading on them.  One woman’s rags did not half cover her.  An illiterate Englishman pushed the Pole aside and began to harangue the people from the platform.  It was the most shameless, ribald, and obscene harangue imaginable.  In the midst of it one woman struck another with a piece of a broken beer glass, and the two females began to fight like cats.  Faces were cut and bleeding.  No one paid the slightest attention except the policeman, who looked indifferently on.  Presently one of the women ran sobbing from the hall with her face streaming blood.  Another woman started after her, when a man made a sign to a policeman and she was restrained.  Then a neighbor plucked the correspondent’s sleeve:

      “Don’t let that nasty scene deceive you,” he said shortly, “it doesn’t mean that Socialism is dead in London.  It means that it is more intelligent.  They’ve left off shouting in public and begun to work under cover.  This thing tonight proves it.”

              ……………..

     Are we prepared, or are we even preparing for the shock?

     Let none mistake either the purpose or the devotion of these fanatics, nor their growing strength.  This is methodic–not a haphazard conspiracy.  The ferment in Russia is controlled by the same heads and the same hands as the activity in Chicago.  There is a cold-blooded, calculating purpose behind this revolt, manipulating every part of it, the world over, to a common and ruinous end.  Whether the next demonstration of the Red Terror will occur where its disciples are goaded to desperation under despotic measures, as in the land of the Czar, or in our own country, where they are allowed to preach their bloody doctrines under a broad construction of the American constitutional right of free speech, time alone can tell.  [end, Schaack excerpt] 

     “The rightful place for women…is the home, and not the world of commerce or industry. Marriage is her true career and one for which she is trained from infancy. Needless to say a society which is of this nature is totally unlike our proletarian, mass-minded society of the year 1953 which is concerned with social security in the form of government handouts and has no conception of beauty or appreciation for anything worthwhile….

     “We instinctively prefer a restrictive, aristocratic sort of life in which all of the essentials of a true aristocratic society are present. We love privacy and by nature are esthetes and hedonists who seek beauty and pleasure from the restrictive environment  in which we live. Our pleasures are those of the refined, cultured, sensuous lady or gentleman. In our choice of bizarre costumes and unconventional, prohibited dress, we are not only unconsciously protesting against the proletarian manners and dress of contemporary society, but we are likewise exhibiting a preference for all that is unproletarian, hence at heart we thoroughly hate and abhor all that is contrary to our conception of an ideal society. The real truth of the matter is that we, the majority of the readers of “Bizarre,” are patricians or aristocrats by nature who would be happier living in Victorian days than in the present atomic age.

     “As a student of sociology, I can proudly and thoughtfully say that the proletarian society of 1953 has not supplanted the aristocratic, genteel society of 1893.  The spirit of Victorian days not only still lives but many of the customs, dress and manners yet flourish among a selective few, who wisely refuse to yield to that proletarianization of society which people of the masses mistakenly refer to as progress….” [Fred S. Mac, defending tight-lacing and hobble-skirts in “Bizarre.” Box 54, Sadomasochism Collection, UCLA]

 “Young, professional man, interesting but submissive personality, seeks dominant lady of any age, race, or nationality.  I am 30 years old, tall, have excellent position and income. Have many varied interests such as psychology, collection of rare and unusual books and pictures, female wrestling and judo.  Never married, free to travel anywhere….” [Justice Weekly, April 23, 1960, p.8, Sado-Masochism Collection, UCLA]

 “…I have long wanted to draw but apparently my drawing, like my writing needed a strong compelling urge and conviction that nobody would ever see it except me [,] to make it come.  Only because I have absolute assurance that my drawing and writing will never see the light of day do I lack the fear that they should be found unworthy.  Writing that is for myself alone can be vile if it merely suggests its content to me.  Drawing that is terrible is adequate if it brings to mind the perfect picture I copied when I drew it.

     “My writings and drawings are partly memory keys, a glance at a page, not even reading the words, brings whole stories into my mind, stories which, because they are expressed to the full extent of my mind at the time, are uncriticizable, my mind not being greater than they to look down on their wording and grammar and style.  The pictures I draw in air are perfect, colored, balanced, harmonized, more perfect than anything ever done in oils by Titian.  If my pencil sketches can return these to the forefront of my mind instead of letting them slide off into oblivion, they have served their purpose, no matter how contemptible they may be as art.

     “I told Blanche that the pictures and the stories are mood-builders.  That is all they are.  I seek a thousand channels to the same pleasure.  I build a thousand carved entrance gates to a single court of joy.  My pleasure, much as the pleasure of music, is single and unvarying but the outward forms are myriad.

     “I have beat the boundaries of my soul to find the extents and limits of my desire and pleasure, forcing myself to accept nothing, merely asking, “Does this please you?”  “Does that?”  Without ever limiting myself in the future I have found the present bounds and set out forthwith, having fenced the woods to examine all its shady pathways and ultimately to know and catalog every tree.

     “I can only say that I have no regrets.  I do feel slightly soiled and tired when I arise and I hasten to clean up myself and the room but throughout all my regular life I am not ashamed and I take a great positive joy in it when I throw myself into my private life.  [Steadman Thompson, ms. ,June 5, 1946.Sado-masochism Collection, UCLA]

“LITTLE MAN, WHAT NOW?”

      What do Jungian psychologists and other romantic conservatives mean by “individuation”?  Surely not that you, the once conflicted Pierre, but now the rectified and integrated patient, having dredged up the “shadow” are entitled to reject your parents’ values and to think for yourself (a process that could challenge the legitimacy of ruling élites and the versions of social reality they propagate).  Au contraire, the cured Pierres, having eyed the dragon, retreat to ever more firmly drawn boundaries and hole up in towers: their erect postures, military and correct, signify victory over temptation: they have resisted the merger with  Mammon: “the least erected Spirit that fell/ From heav’n.”  We will never see them bent over (like Melville’s “invalid Titan”), rifling “the bowels of their mother Earth/ For Treasures better hid”: treasures connoting enlightenment and the illicit power to pursue “perfection” in this world: the outcome of labor, creativity, self-direction, the rejection of “servile pomp” and the demystification of God and Heaven. [Paradise Lost, I,675-690; II, 229-283]  Perhaps Murray was dismayed by Ahab, Pierre and Isabel, because such characters have merged with nature (the digging “lower orders”) to meet the insatiably curious, joyfully seeking, constantly reformulating self (“Pierre just emerging from his teens”).  For Pierre, incestuously bound to Isabel and not yet a disenchanted Mortmain, is seeing grey, a color so deranging to  his class and family, he will retrogress to flashy conservative black and white: Look not to exploitative institutions to find the source of Evil, but beneath the skin; evil originates within our bodies (or matter) and its deceptive and self-deceptive imagination: “…when there is no author, they fear those evils that they themselves have feigned,” wrote Filmer of the People and its natural disposition to believe its self-serving fantasies.

      Perhaps Melvilleans who follow Murray’s critique of Pierre are interested in projective identification, not because they want  more rational social organization,  but to rationalize the escape from political commitment: by “checking our projections” (accepting the dragon within ourselves, living with the eternal bipolar opposites in “unity”), we “free” ourselves from the heavy tasks of structural transformation, positive social action and social responsibility; like Murray’s mother (a babe in arms in his unanalyzed dream), we cough up history and swallow Jung’s reified, static “opposites” as real: “light/dark, above/below, white/black, male/female, etc.” [140]. With Melville, we successfully defend our chimneys; inwardly we are crushed and wasted.  Symbolist-style conservatism (which defines itself against Jewification: Red Terror, anarchy and dissolution) depends upon pervasive social and psychological constrictions which, as we have seen, only undermined the stability of every social relationship through the fear of “pain” and the pursuit of impassibility.

     For Jung as for other organic conservatives since the Greeks, the Delphic oracle’s adjuration to “know thyself” was a warning against the narcissism of democratic egos: with “self-knowledge” one accepted personal limitations and the descriptive accuracy of received categories.  The “beaten boundaries” of rural England (where officials ritualistically struck the earth with a switch to trace the borders of the local parish’s domain) may be seen as expressing the self-abuse inflicted through tight-lacing: modeling one’s body and soul to fit the property relations of rigid class societies and their bizarre formulations of reality.[6]

    Jung had warned of the dangers to the questing, probing, dissecting, boundary-blurring Picasso: “this inner adventure is a hazardous affair and can lead at any moment to a standstill or to a catastrophic bursting asunder of the conjoined opposites” [140].  In his Picasso prognosis, Jung sounds like Ishmael or Henry Murray contemplating the dangers posed to Ahab and Pierre by their shadows: Fedallah, his tiger-yellow Filipino crew, and dark Isabel:

 “The strident, uncompromising, even brutal colours of the latest period reflect the tendency of the unconscious to master the conflict by violence (colour=feeling).” [Jung,140]

     Here is Filmer’s image of the People again: Jungians seem to find their lost equilibrium in Mumford’s golden, sedate and well-regulated patriarchal families; not in flapping constitutional democracies, with their “narcissistic” players filled with sinful self-regard, hence (as Lasswell would say) concocting “grandiose” and “chimerical” visions of Utopia.  These unhinged Ahabs and Claggarts are dangerously free to “rise,” to take advantage of the emancipatory possibilities in a new world where “the masses” have (or want) political rights and accountability, have limited the rights of property, and where they have fought for, and (to some degree) attained freedom of expression.  And like Ishmael in the crow’s nest, flooded with pantheistic longing to unite with  nature, the narcissist will slip and fall: the “factions” produced by the unchecked ardor of the legislative branch were as dangerous to the Federalist Ship of State as “the syren song of equality” was to foolishly self-scrutinizing Pierre, or “romantic” Rousseau to New Humanists following Irving Babbitt in the 1920s.

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            [1]Or, good fences make good neighbors. See Derrida, Critical Inquiry, Spring 1988 on Paul De Man’s view of decadent Europe as Jewified or enjuive.

            [2] The TAT subjects were told “this is a test of literary imagination….” Henry A. Murray, “A Method For Investigating Fantasies: The Thematic Apperception Test,” Shneidman,391; The OSS Assessment Staff, Assessment of Men: Selection of Personnel for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (New York: Rinehart, 1948), 20,60-61,440,462-466 and passim.

          [3] But he could have treated Melville’s mental illness. Personal interview, Nov.4, 1987. Cf. the harmonious and uxorious Murray presented by Salvatore R. Maddi and Paul T. Costa, Humanism in Personology: Allport, Maslow, and Murray (Chicago and New York: Aldine-Atherton,1972).

            [4]Burton Hendricks, The Jews in America (New York: Doubleday, 1923). Carey McWilliams is the only writer on anti-Semitism I know to have mentioned this important best-seller. Hendricks’ claim was that the Sephardic and German Jews were no threat to America; only the “Polish Jews” were the problem because they insisted, unlike American radicals, that there were irreconcilable antagonisms between labor and capital. Immigration must stop at once. Cf. the arguments of the Protocols. Hendricks explained that the German Jews were too individualistic to comprehend the team spirit that had built capitalism in America, the achievement of Protestants, not Jews, as some were claiming. Hendricks’ book was part of the campaign against immigration.

            [5]James Webb, The Occult Establishment, 1976. Cf. Henry A.Murray, Explorations, 738, “Jung’s…racially determined sequences of fantasy….” hypostatized “the collective unconscious.”

             [6]My account of “beaten boundaries”  is a gift from John Seeley, sociologist and psychoanalyst, May 1989, who commented on the materials I had gathered from the Sadomasochism Collection at UCLA. His insight about “the lesson of the beaten child” (the terminal weakness of the oppressed) was gleaned from his clinical experience in the treatment of former abused children.