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Psychoanalysis
Defending Lincoln Against Psychoanalysis
A 1931 paper turned into a media event.
Posted October 18, 2014
In 1931 a New York State senator named William L. Love threatened to introduce a bill to ban psychoanalysis from the state as a fraud “akin to hypnotism.” Try to imagine New York without psychoanalysis. In that alternate history Woody Allen would have had to fulfill his parents’ wish for him to become a dentist.
What raised Senator’s Love’s ire was a paper that had just been presented at the American Psychiatric Association meetings in Toronto. The author was A.A. Brill, the past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association and honorary president of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. Brill was Freud’s first English translator and brought psychoanalysis with him to America from Vienna in 1908. By 1931 he was Freud’s favorite American (which isn’t saying much), and the unchallenged leader of the American psychoanalytic movement.
For some reason Brill chose as his respondent another immigrant from Vienna, my dad, the psychodrama founder J.L. Moreno. It was an odd choice and turned into a stage for J.L. to defend the Great Emancipator from psychoanalysis, a tale I tell in my book, Impromptu Man: J.L. Moreno and the Origins of Psychodrama, Encounter Culture, and the Social Network.
In his paper, “Abraham Lincoln as a Humorist,” Brill diagnosed Lincoln as a “manic schizoid personality” whose depressive moods stopped short of mental illness. “What is very peculiar about Lincoln’s stories and jokes,” said Brill, “his own and those he appropriated from others is that many if not most are of an aggressive and algolagnic nature, treating of pain, suffering and death, and that a great many of them were so frankly sexual as to be classed as obscene.” Despite the many privations and struggles of his life, including a cruel father, deep poverty, an unrequited love affair and a troubled marriage, “he attained the highest ambition of any American. Nevertheless thruout [sic] his life he was unable to disburden himself of his depressive moods.”
Responding to the paper, J.L. said it was unfair to psychoanalyze the dead. “Dr. Brill’s conclusions are based on the statements of friends and contemporaries who may have had all kinds of motives to relate all kinds of stories about Lincoln. Had a contemporary psychiatrist made a study of Lincoln, Dr. Brill would have been justified to some extent in accepting the findings. But as no scientific study of the great American emancipator has been made during his life-time there was no justification for any attempt to analyze his personality from what is related by laymen.”
J.L. went on to turn the tables on Brill by psychoanalyzing his need to attack Lincoln. He suggested that Brill had developed a “transference” to Lincoln, the psychoanalytic term for unconsciously redirecting feelings about one person to another. Brill, he argued, “was building himself up to appear before the world, the American public, in a great role, the role of the psychoanalytic emancipator and liberator. Seeing him in action, I could not help comparing him with Lincoln, the object of his analysis. He is little more than five feet tall. Lincoln was a giant, way above six feet. Both have a beard and both have the first name, Abe….Brill had waited patiently for a chance to measure up to that other Abe today, in this hall, before all of us, he had this opportunity – the President of the American Psychoanalytic Society versus the President of the United States.”
J.L.’s criticism was the most flamboyant but a number of more senior psychiatrists also objected to the paper. L. Pierce Clark of Manhattan State Hospital said he planned to write his own book defending Lincoln. Frederick Peterson of Columbia and Chicago psychiatrist Francis Gerry also harshly criticized Brill. Edward E. Hicks filed a protest about Brill’s speech with the association president Walter M. English after he saw an advance abstract. According to an Associated Press story Hicks described Brill’s statements about Lincoln as “insulting to right thinking Americans and to the memory of one of the two greatest presidents of this republic.”
The media had a field day with the psychiatrists’ infighting, with headlines like “Lincoln Analyzed by Psychiatrist” and “Savants Clash Over Lincoln’s Vulgar Stories,” the confrontation between Brill and the upstart J.L. was covered in every major and most minor newspapers and was the subject of a movie theater newsreel. The day after the session the New York Times ran a story headlined, “Dr. Brill Describes Lincoln as ‘Manic—Dr. Moreno is Skeptical.”
Brill was furious. “In a histrionic manner Dr. Moreno tries to show that we don’t know anything about anybody who is dead,” he said after J.L.’s critique. “We know a lot about Lincoln. If his friends and contemporaries tell us about him we have a right to accept what they say as facts.” But J.L. had a bigger target than Brill in mind. As the author of J.L.’s academic biography writes, J.L.’s real target was not Brill but Freud and psychoanalysis itself. His career in psychiatry was from then on marked by a continual hectoring of psychoanalysis, and the analysts reacted in kind.
But the judgment of history seems to favor J.L. A 2003 historical note in Psychiatric News said that “Moreno tore apart Brill’s paper as being based on unproven and unsubstantiated conclusions.”
A postscript: Perhaps the Brill-Moreno incident had something to do with the 30-year delay of the publication of a psychoanalysis of Woodrow Wilson by Freud and U.S. statesman William C. Bullitt. Written in the 1930s but only published in 1967, this time the elderly J.L. was joined in his criticism by many others, including Erik Erikson, who called it “a disastrously bad book.”
