A First-Rate Madness (38 page)

44–45
“On several occasions, the German general attacked the British”:
Turner,
Call Me Ted,
182.

45
“We had already invested about $100 million”:
Ibid., 194–197.

46
“Confronted with a problem”:
Ibid., 21.

46
taking chances that may or may not work out:
Shelley Taylor, personal email communication, October 20, 2009.

47
Arthur Koestler called this kind of executive the Commissar:
Arthur Koestler,
The Yogi and the Commissar, and Other Essays
(New York: Collier, 1961).

48
“defined almost exclusively in terms of growth”:
“In Sickness and in Power: Hubris Syndrome and the Business World,” speech by Right Honorable Lord David Owen at the Association of British Neurologists Joint Annual Meeting, Liverpool, England, June 25, 2009, written transcript, 13. As we'll see in chapter 14, Owen thinks that poor leaders suffer from a “Hubris syndrome,” where they increasingly lose touch with reality and make harmful decisions. My view is that this outcome occurs more in the mentally healthy “normal” leader than in the mentally abnormal leader.

51
decided to test it on undergraduates:
L. B. Alloy and L. Y. Abramson, “Judgment of Contingency in Depressed and Nondepressed Students: Sadder but Wiser?”
Journal of Experimental Psychology
108 (1979): 441–485.

52
Ellen Langer and Jane Roth:
Ellen J. Langer and Jane Roth, “Heads I Win, Tails It's Chance: The Illusion of Control as a Function of the Sequence of Outcomes in a Purely Chance Task,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
32 (1975): 951–955.

53
“positive illusions”:
Shelley E. Taylor and David A. Armor, “Positive Illusions and Coping with Adversity,”
Journal of Personality
64 (1996): 873–898.

54
One study even quantified this principle:
Robert A. Cummins and Helen Nistico, “Maintaining Life Satistfaction: The Role of Positive Cognitive Bias,”
Journal of Happiness Studies
3 (2002): 37–69.

58
the “sex goddess” of Victorian England:
John Pearson,
The Private Lives of Winston Churchill
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 68.

58
Lord Randolph's son Winston had a different mental illness:
Ibid., 130. “Mrs. Diana Churchill ‘Suicided,'”
The Age
(Melbourne, Australia), October 25, 1963,
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=wVARAAAAIBAJ&sjid=EJUDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5979
, 4123402 (accessed February 26, 2011).

59
“For two or three years the light faded”:
Baron Charles McMoran Wilson Moran,
Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–1965
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 179.

59
“I don't like standing near the edge of a platform”:
Ibid.

59
“I don't like sleeping near a precipice like that”:
Ibid., 309.

60
His friend Lord Beaverbrook noted:
William Manchester,
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill; Visions of Glory, 1874–1932
(New York: Little, Brown, 1983), 24.

60
“He is a mass of contradictions”:
David Owen,
In Sickness and in Power: Illnesses in Heads of Government During the Last 100 Years
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), 41.

60
Numerous physicians who knew Churchill:
Anthony Storr,
Churchill's Black Dog, Kafka's Mice
(New York: Ballantine, 1990). W. Russell Brain, “Encounters with Winston Churchill,”
Medical History
44 (2000): 3–20. Owen,
In Sickness and in Power.

60
“the drive and vitality and youthfulness of a cyclothyme”:
Brain, “Encounters with Winston Churchill.”

60
“We are all worms”:
Quoted in Lord David Owen, “Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt: Did Their Health Problems Impair Their Effectiveness as World Leaders?” Churchill Lecture Series, Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms, May 5, 2009, written transcript, 9.

61
“You know, that was Churchill's idea”:
Frances Perkins,
The Roosevelt I Knew
(New York: Viking Press, 1946), 383.

61
The
course
of his depressive episodes:
Pearson,
The Private Lives of Winston Churchill
. Moran,
Churchill
. Martin Gilbert,
In Search of Churchill
(New York: Wiley, 1994).

62
“The PM was in a crazy state of exultation”:
John Harvey,
The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey
(London: Collins, 1978), 274.

62
“great fluctuation of mood”:
Owen,
In Sickness and in Power,
42.

62
“He felt that everything he had done”:
Pearson,
The Private Lives of Winston Churchill,
416.

62
“I have achieved a great deal”:
Storr,
Churchill's Black Dog,
19.

62
gave Churchill amphetamines:
Richard Lovell, “Lord Moran's Prescriptions for Churchill,”
British Medical Journal
310 (1995): 1537.

62
“I have taken more out of alcohol”:
Chris Wrigley,
Winston Churchill: A Biographical Companion
(Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002), 13.

62
His daily routine involved:
www.winstonchurchill.org
(accessed December 16, 2010).

63
Once, when he was hit by a car:
Winston Churchill, correspondence with Dr. Otto C. Pickhardt, January 1932,
http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5382265
(accessed February 26, 2011).

63
“In 1940 when all the odds were against Britain”:
Storr,
Churchill's Black Dog,
4–5.

64
the Duke of Westminster:
Lynne Olson,
Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England
(New York: Macmillan, 2008), 67–69.

64
“an Austrian Joan of Arc”:
Ibid., 68.

65
“a born leader”:
Ibid., 69.

65
“It was no business of ours”:
Ibid., 66.

65
“When Winston was born”:
Martin Gilbert,
Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 155.

66
“In spite of the hardness and ruthlessness”:
Robert C. Self,
Neville Chamberlain: A Biography
(Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 573.

66
“How could honourable men with wide experience”:
Gilbert,
Winston Churchill,
234.

66
“Winston has always been a ‘despairer'”:
Storr,
Churchill's Black Dog,
16.

68 Lincoln's Melancholy:
Joshua Wolf Shenk,
Lincoln's Melancholy
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

68
“In early January 1841”:
Ibid., 56.

69
“Lincoln ‘told me that he felt like committing suicide often'”:
Ibid., 19.

69
“was the victim of terrible melancholy”:
Ibid., 22.

69
“often got the ‘blues' ”:
Ibid., 12.

69
“His great-uncle once told a court of law”:
Ibid., 12–13.

70
Regarding the
course
of his illness:
Ibid., passim.

70
Dr. Anson Henry:
Ibid., 57.

70
“The Doctors say he is within an inch of being a perfect lunatic”:
Ibid., 58.

71
prescribed mercury tablets . . . also bled Lincoln:
Ibid., 59.

71
“I am now the most miserable man living”:
Ibid., 62.

71
“fun and hilarity without restraint”:
Ibid., 23.

71
“As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘
all men are created equal
'”:
Sean Wilentz, ed.,
The Best American History Essays on Lincoln
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 139.

73
“I would like to have God on my side”:
Ibid., 219.

73
“you and we are different”:
Ibid., 76.

74
“Here comes my friend Douglass”:
Ibid., 80.

74
Some historians think the war changed Lincoln:
Ibid., 79.

75
“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery”:
Ibid., 81.

75
“Both read the same Bible”:
Lincoln's second inaugural address, transcript of original manuscript,
http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=38&page=transcript
(accessed February 26, 2011).

76
General James Longstreet:
William L. Richter, “James Longstreet: From Rebel to Scalawag,”
Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association
11 (1970): 215–230.

80
the English translation . . . captures this usage:
E. B. Titchener,
Lectures on Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes
(New York: Macmillan, 1909).

80
Karl Jaspers made empathy central to psychiatry:
Karl Jaspers,
General Psychopathology
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

80
Thomas Insel and associates at the National Institute of Mental Health:
T. R. Insel and L. E. Shapiro, “Oxytocin Receptor Distribution Reflects Social Organization in Monogamous and Polygamous Voles,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
89 (1992): 5981–5985.

81
The next hint about empathy came from studying macaques:
Reviewed in V. Gallese and A. Goldman, “Mirror Neurons and the Simulation Theory of Mind-Reading,”
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
2 (1998): 493–501.

82
Similar research has since shown:
One British study, also using PET scanning, involved two conditions: either the research subject received a painful stimulation through an electrode on the back of her hand, or the same painful electrical stimulation was given to the subject's partner, seated next to her. The brain regions that became more active with the subject's own experience of pain were the somatosensory cortex (neurons directly connected to pain receptors in the hand), as well as the mirror neurons of the insula, and the cingulate gyrus. When observing her partner's painful stimulation, the subject's brain activity increased in the same mirror neuron regions (insula and cingulate gyrus), but not the somatosensory cortex. T. Singer et al., “Empathy for Pain Involves the Affective but Not the Sensory Components of Pain,”
Science
303 (2004): 1157–1162.

82
Psychologists divide empathy into different parts:
S. G. Shamay-Tsoory, “Empathic Processing: Its Cognitive and Affective Dimensions and Neuroanatomical Basis,” 216–232, and C. D. Batson, “These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena,” 3–16, both in Jean Decety and Willam Ickes, eds.,
The Social Neuroscience of Empathy
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

83
It is generally estimated that at least one-half of human communication is nonverbal:
Albert Mehrabian and Susan R. Ferris, “Inference of Attitudes from Nonverbal Com-Albert Mehrabian and Susan R. Ferris, “Inference of Attitudes from Nonverbal Communication in Two Channels,”
Journal of Consulting Psychology
31 (1967): 248–252.

83
severely depressed patients had much higher scores:
L. E. O'Connor et al., “Guilt, Fear, Submission, and Empathy in Depression,”
Journal of Affective Disorders
71 (2002): 19–27.

84
patients with various psychiatric illnesses:
E. Knott and L. M. Range, “Does Suicidal History Enhance Acceptance of Other Suicidal Individuals?”
Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior
31 (2001): 397–404.

85
patients' ratings of their psychotherapists' empathy:
D. D. Burns and S. Nolen-Hoeksema, “Therapeutic Empathy and Recovery from Depression in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: A Structural Equation Model,”
Journal of Consulting Clinical Psychology
60 (1992): 441–449.

87
identification with his mother:
Erik H. Erikson,
Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence
(New York: Norton, 1969), 153–158. While Erikson's analysis is more extensive than presented here, it never engages with Gandhi's depression.

88
“I watched day after day”:
Karen E. James, “From Mohandas to Mahatma: The Spiritual Metamorphosis of Gandhi,”
Essays in History
28 (1984): 5–20,
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/area-studies/SouthAsia/gandhi.html
.