I landed my first university teaching job at 28 years of age in 1972 at what was then Sangamon State University in Springfield, Illinois (now a branch of the University of Illinois). With my family, I lived on an old, decidedly non-working farm in the country. I did have chickens and horses in the barn, but otherwise things were a bit feral. My dogs fed on rabbits in the fields, there were lots of weeds, cars kept breaking down, and I never had enough money. I had a freshly minted PhD in European history from the University of Chicago and was about to begin formal psychoanalytic training at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, where Heinz Kohut developed his theory of self psychology. I was young and ambitious, perhaps a bit brash, and committed to the serious study of history from a psychoanalytic point of view. It was something of a treat to stumble onto Abraham Lincoln. Besides, what else can one do in Springfield, Illinois, but study Lincoln? I found the subject utterly engrossing and spent the next decade working on a psychoanalytic study of pre-presidential Lincoln. As I worked on it, I made a presentation on my work in a seminar that drew Kohut’s attention and led to our work together on a number of projects.
My book, Lincoln’s Quest for Union, that came out in 1982, was the first serious psychological study of Lincoln and caused quite a stir. One chapter dealt with his friendship with Joshua Speed when both were young men living in Springfield and sleeping in the same bed with each other for nearly four years before their marriages in 1842. I have never felt people understood my argument that in this complex, textured relationship Lincoln worked through agonizing issues of intimacy. Over the decades I have read any number of books arguing with me. Some say, rather tendentiously, that because Lincoln and Speed slept together they must have been gay. That literature, in turn, has prompted a slew of books that portray Lincoln as a high testosterone heterosexual male, visiting prostitutes and littering the ground with broken hearts.
It was none of the above, and a few years ago I decided to revisit the subject and develop the story of the friendship in the detail it deserves. It is the story of Lincoln’s selfobject relationship with Speed, his most intimate and only real friend, and the ways this selfobject relationship saw Lincoln through a period of crisis bracketed by two suicidal depressions. Lincoln’s letters to Speed just before and after his friend’s marriage, which are the most revealing of anything Lincoln ever wrote, reveal the personal meaning Lincoln found in Speed’s own uncertainties and the ways this meaning allowed Lincoln to move ahead in his marriage to Mary Todd. The story of Lincoln’s friendship with Speed is the story of Lincoln’s development of a cohesive self that would never again risk clinical depression and that would foster what he called at Gettysburg “a new birth of freedom” for the country.
Charles Strozier
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Chuck – Your upcoming talk (and the TRISP party which follows!) promises to be a great evening. It seems that, in going back to your study of Lincoln, you’ve had the opportunity to fine-tune your ideas and develop your understanding of Lincoln’s selfobject yearnings, expressed and received in his early friendship with Speed. It will be really interesting to hear how Lincoln’s personal development was facilitated by this relationship. It sounds like Lincoln’s story is a model clinical tale. You also give a hint about ways Lincoln’s psychological development contributed to his evolution as national leader. That will be an important discussion to have as it certainly bears on our self-psychological understanding of current-day leaders. I’m looking forward to hearing more about it all.
Aviva, I actually tried to reply to you last night on my iPhone but it got messed up. We should just talk to each other the way Lincoln and Speed did these many years ago. Yes, the relationship of these two and their close friendship can only be really understood in terms of self psychology. Scores of books have worked over the story and gotten nowhere. Sometimes theory matters, and nowhere does it matter more in this case where tired Freudian ideas about homosexuality have clouded our understanding of Lincoln and Speed. And, yes, the friendship mattered in the making of American freedom. It is truly the crucible of his greatness.
Hi Chuck,
I am looking forward to your talk about Lincoln’s friendship with Speed and the function it had in Lincoln’s self development.
Since you start out your post by describing your experience as a newly minted history PhD in rural Illinois and how you got involved in the study of Lincoln, I wondered about the selfobject relation you had/have with Lincoln as your subject of study, and the selfobject experience you are/were searching for when you were immersed in the writing of his biography.
And since you are also Kohut’s biographer, I could not help but wonder how that relationship, yours with Kohut as the subject of your study, differs from the one with Lincoln. I am struck by the fundamental difference between these two men, Lincoln, the farm boy from rural Indiana and Kohut, the sophisticated city kid from
cultured Vienna. And yet for both of them, specific friendships were pivotal in their self development.
Peter, Now that is an interesting question. As you know, when I knew and worked with Kohut I was his much younger colleague. I would say he was a vital idealizing selfobject for me, though in the course of writing my biography of him over 19 years he changed for me from the “Heinz” I knew into the “Kohut” I sought to understand. The distance was important. Lincoln of course is only symbolically a selfobject for me. I think I felt a twinship when I first wrote about him at an age he was during the most intense period of friendship with Speed (28 to 33). Now some 40 years later I have gone back to young Lincoln and probed his tale from a very different place in my life cycle. It takes me back to my youth, and his, from the perspective of my old age. Thus do selfobjects change.
Chuck:
Your talk sounds fascinating, especially in relation to your prior psychoanalytic biography of Lincoln. Focusing on the self-selfobject relationship between Lincoln and Speed as a focus for your study is unique, as far as I know, among psychoanalytic works. However, I would be interested to get your thoughts on other psychoanalytically-oriented works like Bruce Mazlish. When I was still in graduate school, I co-authored a book chapter with my dissertation adviser, D. Wilfred Abse, a medical psychoanalyist, on Jim Jones and his followers in Jonestown. We entitled it, “Charismatic Political Leadership and Collective Regression”.
It was in the process of doing research for this book chapter that I first came into Kohut’s at the time still unpublished papers on different forms of leadership, namely charismatic vs. messiantic.
This is a long way of asking you about your thought on the effect of Lincoln’s self-selfobject relationship with Speed, its “curative” effect on helping Lincoln overcome his “suicidal depressions,” and the impact of the latter on his leadership style viewed in terms of Kohut’s dichotomy?
Richard, Yes, Kohut was intrigued with messianic leadership, which he explored in a number of places but most especially in the book I put together with him and was published posthumously in 1985, “Self Psychology and the Humanities.” Kohut was chiefly concerned with charismatic leadership of the kind you mention (Jim Jones). Hitler was his special fascination. Lincoln offers nearly the opposite kind of example, a many of deep empathy, creativity, humor, and wisdom. In fact, those criteria of Kohut’s that determine psychological health are nowhere better illustrated than with Lincoln. But as a young man he was troubled. In the period I discuss, 1837 to 1842, he was twice clinically depressed and actively suicidal, his friends were on a kind of suicide watch, etc. His friendship with Speed in those years–sleeping in the same bed for nearly four years, sharing their intimate secrets–provided emotional succor but also postponed the resolution of the issues of intimacy with which he struggled. That delay risked collapse into a life-time of despair. But it was then through Speed and his vicarious identification with Speed’s courtship and marriage with Fanny Henning that freed Lincoln from his own tortured confusions about intimacy. He could reach out to Mary Todd and within months get married. He remained moody but never again went off the rails. The Lincoln we know was forged in the crucible of his friendship with Joshua Speeds
Chuck:
In your response to my blog, you cite Jim Jones as a charismatic(as opposed to a messianic) leader, and simultaneously
cite Lincoln as also charismatic. I have two observations/questions. First, I think that, based on my work on Jim Jones, I would describe him as more messianic than charismatic. I say that because I believe that he was organized around unconscious megalomaniacal fantasies of changing the world, hence Jonestown and his followers. Lincoln, on the other hand was far more charismatic than he was messianic. I don’t detect any strong evidence in your description of Lincoln of underlying, unconscious megalomaniacal fantasies. However, I think we have to be very careful not to draw too sharp a distinction between Kohut’s notions of charismatic and messianic types of leaders. I suspect that leaders always combine both.
Second, you portray Lincoln as suffering from episodes of suicidal depression, which presumably were “cured” by his self-selfobject relationship with Speed. You then go on to indicate that Lincoln, later in life, possessed all of the characteristics that Kohut attributes to mental health. Is it not possible that Lincoln never fully recovered from his mental illness, and suffered throughout his life from severe melancholia, which had a profound effect on him during his presidency?
Richard, Very good questions. I would agree about that distinction between charismatic and messianic leadership styles and that Lincoln fits better in the first and Jones in the second, while recognizing they tend to blur. One doesn’t have to be crazy likes Jones to be messianic. Most of those leading the antislavery crusade in the US before the Civil War were messianic, e.g. William Lloyd Garrison. Your second point about Lincoln’s health is well taken. I don’t think Speed cured him as such but rather that he allowed him to begin a process that led to resolving key issues of intimacy in his life. In some ways, Speed led Lincoln to postpone that resolution and that deepened the crisis. All very interesting. I loved the seminar the other day and hope you found it useful as well. Chuck