A First-Rate Madness (15 page)

Frank's views, influenced by Freud, ran counter to King, who disliked Freudian ideology. King understood what Freud and Frank did not—that nonviolence is not pacifism; King and Gandhi had found a way to use aggressive impulses to resist injustice without hurting others. Where did the aggression go? The answer, as King would later tell Poussaint, was this: into the courage needed to resist without fighting back physically. Gandhi had clearly seen nonviolence this way (one of his followers termed it “war without violence”). For instance, Gandhi said, “My creed of nonviolence is an extremely active force. It has no room for cowardice or even weakness. There is hope for a violent man to be some day non-violent, but there is none for a coward. I have, therefore, said more than once . . . that, if we do not know how to defend ourselves, our women and our places of worship by the force of suffering, i.e., nonviolence, we must, if we are men, be at least able to defend all these by fighting.”

King felt similarly: he called nonviolent resistance one of three options in response to injustice, along with violent resistance and passive acquiescence. If given a choice between violent resistance and passive acceptance, King and Gandhi both accepted violence. But they saw nonviolent resistance as a better alternative. Like violence, it was aggressive, but it was spiritually, not physically, so. It was active, refusing to accept evil, standing up and resisting without inflicting harm. King stated these ideas many times and in slightly different ways. Here is one example from a 1956 sermon: “The nonviolent resister is just as opposed to the evil that he is protesting against as a violent resister. Now it is true that this method is nonaggressive and passive in the sense that the nonviolent resister does not use physical aggression against his opponent. But at the same time the mind and the emotions are active, actively trying to persuade the opponent to change his ways and to convince him that he is mistaken and to lift him to a higher level of existence. This method is nonaggressive physically, but it is aggressive spiritually.” King did not reject violence per se.

Freud and Frank were right, I think, that violent reprisal is a more natural response to injustice. When one fails to respond violently, he pays a psychological cost. Alvin Poussaint, who was fully committed to King's movement, came to the same conclusion in a 1967
New York Times Magazine
article. Poussaint observed that the civil rights marchers—constantly fearing attack, abidingly alert to danger, with orders not to fight back—were angry; they wanted to fight back, but were taught by King not to do so. “I used to sit there and wonder,” wrote Poussaint, “ ‘Now what do they really do with their rage?' ” What they did was fight each other: “After a period of time it became apparent that they were directing it mostly at each other and the white civil-rights workers. Violent verbal and sometimes physical fights often occurred among the workers. . . . While they were talking about being nonviolent and ‘loving' the sheriff that just hit them over the head, they rampaged around the project houses beating up each other. I frequently had to calm Negro civil-rights workers with large doses of tranquilizers for what I can describe clinically only as acute attacks of rage.”

Another black political leader, also a psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, argued that to overcome psychological servitude, blacks must violently attack their white oppressors. Fanon, a favorite of Black Power advocates, saw violence not only as political necessity but as psychological imperative. Violence was the cure for the disease of racism. Poussaint was inching toward that view in his article, expressing the standard psychiatric view (shared by Fanon and Freud) that it is better to express one's aggression than to repress it; otherwise depression ensues. The Black Power movement was an expression of these psychiatric facts, Poussaint concluded.

To remain allied to King, Poussaint needed a way out. He called it “constructive assertiveness”: “James Meredith . . . said: ‘If Negroes ever do overcome fear, the white man has only two choices: to kill them or let them be free.'... Since this assertive response appears to be growing more common among Negroes, the implications for American society are clear: stop oppressing the black man, or be prepared to meet his expressed rage.”

Shortly afterward, when King visited Boston, he complimented Poussaint on the article, expressing agreement with it. Here we see the coming together of apparent irreconcilables: rage and peace, violence and nonviolence, Frantz Fanon and Martin Luther King. But seeing this convergence as a paradox reflects misunderstanding of King's philosophy. King did not advocate an attitude of peaceful beatitude toward others; he was an angry man, affronted by injustice; he just advocated expressing that anger in a nonviolent way. As King's close friend Harry Belafonte said, “Martin always felt that anger was a very important commodity, a necessary part of the black movement in this country.” Thus as documented above, King's nonviolence is not about being nonaggressive; it is about being aggressive in a nonviolent way. Rage is natural, part of being human; one cannot deny it without painful psychic consequences. But rage can be channeled in a constructive manner, going outside insofar as it resists injustice, and going inward insofar as it supports the higher courage needed to suffer rather than inflict suffering. This cure for racism benefits both the oppressed and the oppressor.

 

 

LIFE IS FULL OF EVIL, King believed. All of us have to decide, again and again, how we are going to react to the plethora of evil in the world. The two most common reactions are violent resistance or passive acquiescence. Either approach is conformism; the masses of men acquiesce all the time to all kinds of evil and injustice; some resist violently, only adding more evil to the evil that already exists. King's advocacy of nonviolence was a third way that required, above all, nonconformism with the other two accepted paths. This is why King emphasized the need for nonconformism, not just as a feature of leadership, but for everyone, as a basic human attitude. These ideas are expressed most directly in a sermon that interprets the biblical phrase “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Said King:

Psychiatrists ask: Where does the aggression go? By trying to repress it, we become maladjusted, unhealthy, abnormal. We must, above all, be normal, mentally healthy. King disagreed: we must accept unhappiness, suffering, depression, even—God forbid—becoming maladjusted. His friend Reverend Joseph Lowery understood. To achieve social change, he remarked recently, “you have to be a little crazy. All the leaders of the movement were a little crazy. Including Martin.”

In our first appointment, Liza barely spoke. Suffering from severe depression, she could not think or talk logically; it seemed to me she barely heard and understood every third word I spoke. Her daughter tried to explain her sixty-year-old mother's life to me.

“Mom had a horrendous childhood,” the daughter began.

I saw her depression and had read about manic periods in her chart, so I knew Liza had bipolar disorder. But since childhood trauma is not a particular cause of bipolar disorder, I was only mildly interested in starting with childhood, especially as the clock ticked along and I knew we had complex decisions to make about which medications to prescribe for her condition. But I recalled the old lesson I learned in my residency:
Meet patients where they are.
So I listened:

“Her parents moved her twenty-three times.”

I looked at Liza, who sat impassively. “Twenty-three times?” I repeated, afraid to ask why.

Liza finally spoke. “Yes. Mother couldn't keep still . . . manic, just like me.”

As a child, Liza had also endured unwanted sexual attention from siblings and other relatives. I'd heard enough about her childhood to know that it was not one any child should experience. And yet here she was at age sixty, depressed, yes, but alive and whole—a mother herself, with a normal adult daughter beside her as well as four other healthy children and ten grandchildren, none of whom suffered as she had.

 

 

THIS IS WHAT psychologists mean by resilience—“good outcomes in spite of serious threats to adaptation or development.” Resilience isn't simply something one is born with; it grows out of an
interaction
between factors that promote it (like hyperthymic personality) and harmful life events—producing a good outcome in the end. In psychology research, two lines of evidence support this notion. First, when people experience harmful events, some are injured psychologically, but others are not. Second, sometimes people even get
stronger
after such events, a “steeling” effect that protects them against future stresses.

Resilience is the mind's vaccine. Think how vaccines work: exposed to tiny amounts of virus, the body mounts an immune response; when the virus infects one later in life, the body, already prepared, kills off the infection before it can do serious harm. Just a few generations ago, a dozen illnesses often killed children or, like FDR's polio, paralyzed adults; nowadays, we routinely prevent such tragedies. Like a mental vaccine, resilience develops when, under certain circumstances, we experience harmful events, we survive, and then prosper. Nietzsche famously pointed out that what does not kill you makes you stronger. He understood resilience.

Resilience can grow out of the experience of illness, whether mental or physical. Mental illnesses like manic depression may especially promote resilience because people experience episodes that come and go. Manic depression is recurrent by nature; the episodes go away, but they always come back. Thus people have “breaks” in between the experience of illness, when they can reflect upon and try to understand what just happened, whether the severe depression that made the world seem hopeless or the ecstatic mania that made life so joyous for a while. They also know that they will go through those episodes again, and so they may learn to develop coping styles, ways to recognize the episodes when they begin, or to help control them. People with manic depression often become resilient, as we've already seen in the cases of General Sherman and Winston Churchill.

But there is another source of resilience. Some people are just born resilient; it's an inherent part of their personality. Why this is so is still open to question, but some research, which I will describe below, suggests that hyperthymic temperament is especially associated with resilience. The historical examples that follow, FDR and JFK, display perhaps the perfect cocktail of resilience: hyperthymic personality plus chronic physical illness. In Kennedy's case, this cocktail is topped off by his use of mind-altering medications (especially steroids) for a beneficial effect—enhancing physical and emotional resilience.

 

 

ALTHOUGH NIETZSCHE'S OBSERVATION is over a century old, the notion of resilience dawned much more recently upon modern psychologists. The first inklings came during the Second World War. Psychiatrists newly trained in Freudian methods began screening draftees before combat to gain a baseline knowledge of the troops' preexisting mental state. Once deployed, the troops experienced what all warriors since Achilles have encountered: intense fear, extreme physical hardship, gruesome injuries, the deaths of their brothers in arms.

These conditions had already been identified as the cause of a mental disorder that has gone by various names in various wars: shell shock (First World War), war neurosis (World War II), post-traumatic stress disorder (Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan). PTSD involves the presence of nightmares or flashbacks, meaning the physical reexperiencing of a traumatic event; these symptoms occur over and over again, and cause much anxiety and depression.

At the start of World War II, the American psychiatrist charged with minimizing this disorder was Harry Stack Sullivan, a brilliant psychoanalyst. Homosexual, leftist, probably bipolar himself, and an iconoclast in professional terms—he believed that all mental illness was ultimately about social relationships, not psychological trauma or biology—he was an unusual choice for the military brass to make. But on the basis of his clinical reputation, he was given a free hand to screen draftees carefully and remove anyone with any hint of succumbing to war neurosis. If Sullivan had applied Freudian belief in its purest formulation, namely that all people are neurotic to some degree, then he would have had to exclude everyone from the army; this was, of course, not an option, so Sullivan did as much as a good Freudian could do. Army psychiatric evaluators followed Sullivan's instructions and excluded a wide swath of potential conscripts, including “low-grade morons,” “psychopaths,” “the eccentric, the leader in subversive activities, the emotionally unstable, the sexually perverse, those with inadequate personalities that do not adapt readily and those who are resentful of discipline.” Neither the aggressive nor the passive was fit to serve, according to Sullivan's guidelines. The general attitude of Sullivan's psychiatric evaluators was “when in doubt, reject,” and 25 percent of draftees were rejected. Still, of the remaining soldiers, about half developed war-related psychiatric problems. By 1943, 112,500 enlisted men had been discharged for psychiatric reasons. General George Marshall stepped in, expressing his skepticism about Sullivan's methods: “To the specialists, the psychoneurotic is a hospital patient,” he remarked. “To the average line officer, he is a malingerer.” Sullivan was fired.