Once, while writing my first book, I lived on a lush volcanic island balding with so-called civilization, lawnmowers muffling its birdsong to turn its jungles into golf courses.
I watched waves taller than factory chimneys break into cliffs black as spacetime, making mansions look like a maquette of life.
I beheld the ancient indifferent faces of turtles older than the light bulb hatching their young under the NO TRESPASSING sign on a billionaire’s private beach.
I looked into the open mouth of the volcano taunting the sky in the language of time.
I kept thinking about how those fault lines between the elemental and the ephemera of human life most readily expose our gravest civilizational foible: regarding nature as something to conquer, to neuter, to tame, “forgetting that we are nature too,” forgetting that we are taming our own wildness, neutering our very souls.
Jay Griffiths offers a mighty antidote in her 2006 masterpiece Wild: An Elemental Journey (public library) — the product of “many years’ yearning” pulling her “toward unfetteredness, toward the sheer and vivid world,” learning to think with the mind of a mountain and feel with the heart of a forest, searching for “something shy, naked and elemental — the soul.” What emerges is both an act of revolt (against the erasure of the wild, against the domestication of the soul) and an act of reverence (for the irrepressible in nature, for landscape as a form of knowledge, for life on Earth, as improbable and staggering as love.)
A century and a half after Thoreau “went to the woods to live deliberately” (omitting from his famed chronicle of spartan solitude the fresh-baked doughnuts and pies his mother and sister brought him every Sunday), Griffiths spent seven years slaking her soul on the world’s wildness, from the Amazon to the Arctic, trying “to touch life with the quick of the spirit,” impelled by “the same ancient telluric vigor that flung the Himalayas up to applaud the sky.” She writes:
I was looking for the will of the wild… The only thing I had to hold on to was the knife-sharp necessity to trust to the elements my elemental self.
I wanted to live at the edge of the imperative, in the tender fury of the reckless moment, for in this brief and pointillist life, bright-dark and electric, I could do nothing else.
[…]
The human spirit has a primal allegiance to wildness, to really live, to snatch the fruit and suck it, to spill the juice. We may think we are domesticated but we are not.
It all began by getting lost in “the wasteland of the mind, in a long and dark depression” that left her unable to walk or write, “pathless, bleak and bewildered, not knowing which way to turn.” (A decade later, Griffiths would write an entire book about that discomposing yearlong episode of manic depression.) Searching for “the octaves of possibilities,” reckoning with “the maybes of the mind,” yearning for release from the supermarket aisles of the psyche, she set out to find the savage antipode to “this chloroform world where human nature is well schooled, tamed from childhood on, where the radiators are permanently on mild and the windows are permanently closed.” She writes:
I felt an urgent demand in the blood. I could hear its call. Its whistling disturbed me by day and its howl woke me in the night. I heard the drum of the sun. Every path was a calling cadence, the flight of every bird a beckoning, the color of ice an invitation: come. The forest was a fiddler, wickedly good, eyes intense and shining with a fast dance. Every leaf in every breeze was a toe tapping out the same rhythm and every mountaintop lifting out of cloud intrigued my mind, for the wind at the peaks was the flautist, licking his lips, dangerously mesmerizing me with inaudible melodies that I strained to hear, my eyes yearning for the horizon of sound. This was the calling, the vehement, irresistible demand of the feral angel — take flight. All that is wild is winged — life, mind and language — and knows the feel of air in the soaring “flight, silhouetted in the primal.”
She lived for months with a hill tribe in the forests of the Burmese border, lost all her toenails climbing Kilimanjaro, met “cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelized them,” felt “what it is like to whimper with sheer loneliness on a Christmas Day in a jungle on the other side of the world,” learned to live in the seasons and the elements, “right within nature because there is nothing that is not nature.”
She reflects:
To me, humanity is not a strain on wilderness as some seem to think. Rather the human spirit is one of the most striking realizations of wildness. It is as eccentrically beautiful as an ice crystal, as liquidly life-generous as water, as inspired as air. Kerneled up within us all, an intimate wildness, sweet as a nut. To the rebel soul in everyone, then, the right to wear feathers, drink stars and ask for the moon… We are — every one of us — a force of nature, though sometimes it is necessary to relearn consciously what we have never forgotten; the truant art, the nomad heart.
Pulsating beneath the passionate poetics is an indictment and a beckoning. A decade after Maya Angelou channeled the selfsame polarity of human nature in her staggering space-bound poem “A Brave and Startling Truth,” Griffiths writes:
There are two sides: the agents of waste and the lovers of the wild. Either for life or against it. And each of us has to choose.
Reclaiming our wildness emerges as an act of courage and resistance amid the conspicuous consumption by which late-stage capitalism drugs us into mistaking having for being, anesthetizing the urgency of our mortality — that wellspring of everything beautiful and enduring we make. What Griffiths offers is a wakeup call from this near-living, a spell against apathy, against air con and asphalt, against our self-expatriation from our own nature:
What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary. In wildness, truth. Wildness is the universal songline, sung in green gold, which we recognize the moment we hear it. What is wild is what drives the honeysuckle, what wills the dragonfly, shoves the wind and compels the poem. Wildness is insatiable for life; neither truly knows itself without the other. Wildness… sucks up the now, it blazes in your eyes and it glories in everyone who willfully goes their own way.
It never ceases to stagger that some stroke of chance in the early history of the universe set into motion the Rube Goldberg machine of events that turned atoms born in the first stars into you — into this temporary clump of borrowed stardust that, for the brief interlude between not having existed and no longer existing, gets to have ideas and ice cream and orgasms, gets to yearn and to suffer and to love.
Perhaps the most hopeful thing about being alive is that we are never finished and complete. Perhaps the most exasperating is that we are never entirely new, that we are nested with every self we have ever been, each stage of our development shaped by the singular needs and tensions of each preceding stage, our character shaped by how those needs and tensions were met and resolved.
The influential psychoanalyst Erik Erikson (June 15, 1902–May 12, 1994), who coined the term identity crisis and readily recognized that “an individual life is the accidental coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history,” took up this tessellated question of our incremental becoming in his 1950 book Childhood and Society (public library) — an investigation of “the growth and the crises of the human person as a series of alternative basic attitudes.”
Erikson identifies eight sequential stages of human development, each marked by a particular battery of opposite psychic charges — one a positive developmental achievement that strengthens one’s self-trust, world-trust, and creative potency, the other a danger that fosters antagonism, isolation, and despair. He writes:
The strength acquired at any stage is tested by the necessity to transcend it in such a way that the individual can take chances in the next stage with what was most vulnerably precious in the previous one.
[…]
There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding, which constitutes a new hope and a new responsibility for all.
[…]
In view of the dangerous potentials of man’s long childhood, it is well to look back at the blueprint of the life-stages and to the possibilities of guiding the young of the race while they are young.
1. BASIC TRUST VS. BASIC MISTRUST (0-18 MONTHS)
The first intense experience of life is separation — infant and mother are no longer one, and the infant must learn to trust that the mother is still there even when she vanishes from view. Erikson writes:
The infant’s first social achievement, then, is his willingness to let the mother out of sight without undue anxiety or rage, because she has become an inner certainty as well as an outer predictability. Such consistency, continuity, and sameness of experience provide a rudimentary sense of ego identity.
[…]
This forms the basis in the child for a sense of identity which will later combine a sense of being “all right,” of being oneself.
This kind of trust is the foundation of confidence, for it is also training ground for the self-trust necessary to withstand separation, to have faith in one’s inherent okayness. The absence of such maternal consistency and continuity, Erikson observes, may be one of the most difficult cards to be dealt in life, predisposing people to habitual “depressive states” in later stages.
This is also the stage in which we learn to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins — the vital distinction that enables us to differentiate between the rewards of interdependence and the dangers of codependence, to navigate the myriad traps that strew the meeting ground between self and other. Erikson writes:
The early process of differentiation between inside and outside [is] the origin of projection and introjection which remain some of our deepest and most dangerous defense mechanisms. In introjection we feel and act as if an outer goodness had become an inner certainty. In projection, we experience an inner harm as an outer one: we endow significant people with the evil which actually is in us… These mechanisms are, more or less normally, reinstated in acute crises of love, trust, and faith in adulthood and can characterize irrational attitudes toward adversaries and enemies in masses of “mature” individuals.
2. AUTONOMY VS. SHAME AND DOUBT (18 MONTHS-3 YEARS)
The hallmark of the second stage is a physiological development that becomes an analogue for one of the most important psychological skills in life — to hold on and to let go, central to such fundamental capacities as intimacy, compassion, tenacity, and forgiveness. Erikson writes:
Muscular maturation sets the stage for experimentation with two simultaneous sets of social modalities: holding on and letting go. As is the case with all of these modalities, their basic conflicts can lead in the end to either hostile or benign expectations and attitudes. Thus, to hold can become a destructive and cruel retaining or restraining, and it can become a pattern of care: to have and to hold. To let go, too, can turn into an inimical letting loose of destructive forces, or it can become a relaxed “to let pass” and “to let be.”
This is the stage at which the experience of shame first emerges and we must learn to have our “basic faith in existence” not jeopardized by the embarrassments of getting things wrong. (“Shame is an experience that affects and is affected by the whole self,” the pioneering sociologist and philosopher Helen Merrell Lynd would write a few years later in her insightful take on shame and the search for identity.) For the infant at this stage, Erikson observes, shame springs from the emergence of a new developmental phenomenon: the “sudden violent wish to have a choice, to appropriate demandingly, and to eliminate stubbornly.” He writes:
Shame supposes that one is completely exposed and conscious of being looked at: in one word, self-conscious. One is visible and not ready to be visible… Shame is… essentially rage turned against the self.
With an eye to the development of these crucial capacities for holding on, letting go, and withstanding shame, he adds:
This stage, therefore, becomes decisive for the ratio of love and hate, cooperation and willfulness, freedom of self-expression and its suppression, From a sense of self-control without loss of self-esteem comes a lasting sense of good will and pride; from a sense of loss of self-control and of foreign overcontrol comes a lasting propensity for doubt and shame.
3. INITIATIVE VS. GUILT (AGES 3-5)
As we begin to take initiative in completing tasks, we develop what Erikson calls “anticipatory rivalry” — which may be another word for envy — toward those who complete the same tasks better. Here, we learn that what the world asks of us often requires the repression and inhibition of our own hopes and desires.
The danger of this, if we successfully cede desire to demand, is a sense of self-righteousness — “often the principal reward of goodness,” Erikson astutely observes a decade before Joan Didion admonished against mistaking self-righteousness for morality, a tendency painfully pronounced in our own time of virtue signaling.
4. INDUSTRY VS. INFERIORITY (AGES 6-11)
This is the stage at which our natural creativity and capacity for play begin being sublimated to our civilizational cult of productivity. School starts, forcing the child to part with earlier hopes and wishes as their “exuberant imagination is tamed and harnessed… to be a worker.”
The danger in this overidentification with accomplishment, building upon the earlier development of envy, is “a sense of inadequacy and inferiority,” which may lead the child to believe themselves “doomed to mediocrity or inadequacy.” (This, of course, is the perennial danger of all self-comparison, acute even for adults in today’s broadcast selfhood of social media.)
5. IDENTITY VS. ROLE CONFUSION (AGES 12-18)
Here begins our concern with what we appear to be to others versus what we feel we are — an integration that marks the emergence of our ego identity. Erikson considers the many guises in which the great danger of this stage — role confusion — can appear:
To keep themselves together [adolescents] temporarily overidentify, to the point of apparent complete loss of identity, with the heroes of cliques and crowds. This initiates the stage of “falling in love,” which is by no means entirely, or even primarily, a sexual matter — except where the mores demand it. To a considerable extent adolescent love is an attempt to arrive at a definition of one’s identity by projecting one’s diffused ego image on another and by seeing it thus reflected and gradually clarified. This is why so much of young love is conversation.
In a passage of far-reaching insight and extraordinary empathy for the vulnerabilities of the psyche, which most people would rather fault than fathom, he adds:
Young people can also be remarkably clannish, and cruel in their exclusion of all those who are “different,” in skin color or cultural background, in tastes and gifts, and often in such petty aspects of dress and gesture as have been temporarily selected as the signs of an in-grouper or out-grouper. It is important to understand (which does not mean condone or participate in) such intolerance as a defense against a sense of identity confusion. For adolescents not only help one another temporarily through much discomfort by forming cliques and by stereotyping themselves, their ideals, and their enemies; they also perversely test each other’s capacity to pledge fidelity. The readiness for such testing also explains the appeal which simple and cruel totalitarian doctrines have on the minds of the youth.
6. INTIMACY VS. ISOLATION (AGES 18-40)
This is the stage at which emotional integrity develops — we learn the particular form of self-trust and self-respect that come from making commitments and keeping them, even when it is difficult to do so. The self-permission to break promises and cancel plans stems from a failure at the developmental achievement of this stage and the price we pay for it, quite apart from disappointing and hurting others, is always an erosion of self-trust and self-respect. Erikson writes:
The young adult, emerging from the search for and the insistence on identity… is ready for intimacy, that is, the capacity to commit himself to concrete affiliations and partnerships and to develop the ethical strength to abide by such commitments, even though they may call for significant sacrifices and compromises.
Observing that this is when we first face the “fear of ego loss” in situations that may require compromise and sacrifice, he adds:
The avoidance of such experiences because of a fear of ego loss may lead to a deep sense of isolation and consequent self-absorption.
The great challenge of this stage is that “intimate, competitive, and combative relations are experienced with and against the selfsame people.” It is necessary to learn to tolerate and resolve such tensions, or otherwise we face the great danger of this stage — isolation, which Erikson defines as “the avoidance of contacts which commit to intimacy.”
7. GENERATIVITY VS. STAGNATION (AGES 40-65)
Erikson counters our culture’s hyperfocus on children’s dependence on parents with the insistence that the older generation is also dependent on the younger, for elders “need to be needed.” (A generation before him, Jane Ellen Harrison addressed this with great geniality and great percipience in her meditation on Old Age and Youth.)
Erikson terms the animating achievement of this life-stage generativity, which he defines as “the concern in establishing and guiding the next generation,” noting that it is “meant to include such more popular synonyms as productivity and creativity, which, however, cannot replace it.”
Whether generativity manifests as physically producing the next generation through procreation or contributing to the world through acts of creation, a failure to attain it results in “a pervading sense of stagnation and personal impoverishment.”
8. EGO INTEGRITY VS. DESPAIR (AGE 65-DEATH)
“One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her sixties as she reflected on the art of growing older. That we must die is precisely what impels us to render our lives valuable. We can only do so, Erikson argues, by moving through the prior seven stages toward this final fruition of what he calls ego integrity — “the ego’s accrued assurance of its proclivity for order and meaning,” built of our adaptation “to the triumphs and disappointments adherent to being.”
[Ego integrity] is a post-narcissistic love of the human ego—not of the self — as an experience which conveys some world order and spiritual sense, no matter how dearly paid for. It is the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle as something that had to be and that, by necessity, permitted of no substitutions.
One consequence of this acceptance is “a new, a different love of one’s parents.” Another is that “death loses its sting,” for the fear of death stems from the lack of a sense of cohesion and consonance with universal life — a lack that takes shape as despair. (This may be why D.H. Lawrence called death “the last wonder” and wrote: “If you want to live in peace on the face of the earth / Then build your ship of death, in readiness / For the longest journey.”)
Erikson ends with one of the most potent formulae in the science of the psyche:
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
We move through the world as surfaces shimmering with the visibilia of our accomplishments, the undertow of our suffering invisible to passers-by. The selective collective memory we call history contributes to this willful blindness, obscuring the tremendous personal cost behind some of humanity’s most triumphant achievements — the great discoveries, the great symphonies, the great paradigm shifts. This is not to say that suffering is a prerequisite for greatness — I don’t subscribe to the dangerous myth of the tortured genius. But because the engine of all creative energy is connection, suffering can serve as a mighty instrument of unselfing, of contacting that place where the spirit meets the bone of being, that common core of human experience. “It is only through the gates of suffering, either mental or physical,” a gifted young poet who wouldn’t live past 30 wrote to Emily Dickinson, “that we can pass into that tender sympathy with the griefs of all of mankind which it ought to be the ideal of every soul to attain.” People of uncommon creative vision have often touched the soul of humanity not because of their suffering but through it. Perhaps the supreme mark of greatness is leaving something of substance and sweetness in the mouth of the world despite the bitter disappointments and heartbreaks you suffer. (I wrote Figuring largely as an ode to seven such people.)
John James Audubon (April 26, 1785–January 27, 1851) was eighteen when he arrived alone in America with a fake passport, fleeing conscription in Napoleon’s army. Born Jean-Jacques Rabin, he was the illegitimate son of a French plantation owner and a Creole mother who had died in a slave rebellion when he was a small boy. The love of birds that had buoyed him through a lonely childhood became the guiding passion of his new life. Despite having only rudimentary portraiture training, he taught himself to draw nature and set out “to complete a collection not only valuable to the scientific class, but pleasing to every person.” He winced at his first attempts — “My pencil gave birth to a family of cripples.” — but her persisted. Every year, he would burn entire batches of bird drawings that didn’t satisfy him and start all over, often spending fourteen continuous hours on a single bird.
All the while, struggling to support his family, he tried his hand at various businesses — indigo, a saw mill, a steamer — all ending catastrophically, costing him more than he had put in. Accepting that he had no gift for business, Audubon leaned on his creative gifts: He gave dance lessons, drew portraits in black chalk for $5 each, wrote to President Monroe in the hope of getting an appointment as artist and naturalist on a government expedition. (He never heard back.)
The hardships kept coming. While traveling down the Mississippi, a bottle of gunpowder exploded in his chest, damaging 200 of his bird drawings. He had left another 200 in storage with a friend, only to discover upon his return that “a pair of Norway rats had taken possession of the whole, and reared a young family among gnawed bits of paper, which but a month previous, represented nearly one thousand inhabitants of the air!”
Despite the biochemical blessing of a bright disposition, Audubon felt at times that his spirit would break from the weight of disappointment, and yet his passion for the work buoyed him, saved him. From the fortunate platform of his old age, he would look back on one especially dispiriting period early in the project:
The world was with me as a blank, and my heart was sorely heavy, for scarcely had I enough to keep my dear ones alive; and yet through these dark ways I was being led to the development of the talents I loved, and which have brought so much enjoyment to us all.
Throughout the struggle, Audubon kept at his vision. He worked tirelessly, with fiery passion bordering on possession. In the journal later edited by his grand-daughter Maria, he writes during on particularly flaming stretch in the autumn of 1829:
I wish I had eight pairs of hands… still I am delighted at what I have accumulated in drawings this season. Forty-two drawings in four months, eleven large, eleven middle size, and twenty-two small, comprising ninety-five birds, from Eagles downwards, with plants, nests, flowers, and sixty different kinds of eggs. I live alone, see scarcely any one, besides those belonging to the house where I lodge. I rise long before day and work till nightfall, when I take a walk, and to bed.
When he pitched his book of birds to publishers, he got only rejections. And so, like Whitman would a quarter century later, Audubon decided to self-publish his magnum opus, relying on subscribers, asking for a pledge of $1,000 for the full body of work. It took him four years to complete the first volume, by which point he had lost more than a third of his subscribers.
America, too unrefined in its art and too young in its science, did not seem ready for him. So Audubon headed to Europe in search of subscribers, painting the ship’s cabins to pay his passage, drawing portraits of a shoemaker and his wife to acquire proper shoes. The trip was his wife’s idea. While his friends thought him a madman to keep laboring at something doomed to failure, Lucy’s encouragement sustained him. “My wife determined that my genius should prevail, and that my final success as an ornithologist should be triumphant,” he would later reflect.
An American born in England, Lucy had helped Jean-Jacques become John James not only on paper but in his mastery of the new language that eventually made him one of the most lyrical nature writers humanity has produced, writing about birds the way he felt about them: with reverence, tenderness, and poetic ardor.
To assist with the publication of her husband’s work, Lucy began teaching — tirelessly, taking on more and more students, until she was earning a staggering $3,000 per year: more than $100,000 today. An epoch before Arthur Rackham revolutionized the business of book art with his Alice in Wonderland illustrations, printing books with text and color images was an expensive and laborious process. By the time Audubon completed his Birds of America, the final work — an immense four-volume “Double Elephant Folio” — had cost him $115,640 to print: more than $2,000,000 today. It had taken him fourteen years. “Few enterprises, involving such labour and expense, have ever been carried through against such odds,” the great naturalist John Burroughs exulted in his short and splendid biography of Audubon.
One of the most extraordinary things among all these adverse circumstances was that I never for a day gave up listening to the songs of our birds, or watching their peculiar habits, or delineating them in the best way that I could; nay, during my deepest troubles I frequently would wrench myself from the persons around me, and retire to some secluded part of our noble forests; and many a time, at the sound of the wood-thrush’s melodies have I fallen on my knees, and there prayed earnestly to our God.
This never failed to bring me the most valuable of thoughts and always comfort, and, strange as it may seem to you, it was often necessary for me to exert my will, and compel myself to return to my fellow-beings.
In the end, every artist’s art is their coping mechanism for the soul-aches of living, and what we make of our creative potential is largely a matter of how we bear our suffering, of learning to save ourselves by finding and feeding those things that most reliably nourish our strength and our sanity — friendships and forests, song and sea, and above all the tug of wonder.
In the late morning of the first day of August in 2023, exactly twenty summers after I arrived in Philadelphia as a lone teenager from a country thirteen centuries America’s senior, I experienced that wonderful capacity for self-surprise as tears came streaming down my face in a windowless government office. I had taken the naturalization ceremony to be just the final checklist item on a long and tedious bureaucratic process. But standing there between an Ethiopian family holding a newborn and a beautiful Burmese woman older than my grandmother, born just after women became citizens of mankind, I found myself profoundly moved, a shaky voice in the chorus reciting the Oath of Allegiance — all these beautiful people from every corner of the world, who had left behind everything they knew of home to partake of this imaginative experiment in freedom, flourishing, and dignity for all.
In preparing for my first election — an election so historic it may be the litmus test for the experiment’s success or failure — I was reminded of an uncommonly insightful investigation of democracy not as a political but as a psychological phenomenon by the reliably revelatory pediatrician turned psychiatrist Donald Winnicott (April 7, 1896–January 28, 1971).
In a 1958 essay found in his posthumous essay collection Home Is Where We Start from (public library), Winnicott examines the meaning of democracy in a way that may “give unconscious emotional factors their full import.” He writes:
An important latent meaning [is] that a democratic society is “mature,” that is to say, that it has a quality that is allied to the quality of individual maturity which characterizes its healthy members.
[…]
In psychiatric terms, the normal or healthy individual can be said to be one who is mature; according to his or her chronological age and social setting there is an appropriate degree of emotional development… Psychiatric health is therefore a term without fixed meaning. In the same way the term “democratic” need not have a fixed meaning… In this way one would expect the frozen meaning of the word to be different in Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, and yet to find that the term retains value because of its implying the recognition of maturity as health.
The full realization of democracy, Winnicott argues, requires the study of society’s emotional development beneath the political machinery of democratic election, which is itself rooted in a fundament of our psychological experience as persons:
The essence of democratic machinery is the free vote (secret ballot). The point of this is that it ensures the freedom of the people to express deep feelings, apart from conscious thoughts. In the exercise of the secret vote, the whole responsibility for action is taken by the individual, if he is healthy enough to take it. The vote expresses the outcome of the struggle within himself, the external scene having been internalized and so brought into association with the interplay of forces in his own personal inner world. That is to say, the decision as to which way to vote is the expression of a solution of a struggle within himself. The process seems to be somewhat as follows. The external scene, with its many social and political aspects, is made personal for him in the sense that he gradually identifies himself with all the parties to the struggle. This means that he perceives the external scene in terms of his own internal struggle, and he temporarily allows his internal struggle to be waged in terms of the external political scene. This to-and-fro process involves work and takes time, and it is part of democratic machinery to arrange for a period of preparation. A sudden election would produce an acute sense of frustration in the electorate. Each voter’s inner world has to be turned into a political arena over a limited period.
In a sentiment evocative of Toni Morrison’s magnificent 2004 commencement address, in which she celebrates true maturity an achievement that is “a difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory,” Winnicott offers a perspectival definition:
A democracy is an achievement, at a point of time, of a limited society, i.e. of a society that has some natural boundary. Of a true democracy (as the term is used today) one can say: In this society at this time there is sufficient maturity in the emotional development of a sufficient proportion of the individuals that comprise it for there to exist an innate tendency towards the creation and re-creation and maintenance of the democratic machinery.
Out of this insight can arise a kind of formula for predicting the fate of a society:
It would be important to know what proportion of mature individuals is necessary if there is to be an innate democratic tendency. In another way of expressing this, what proportion of antisocial individuals can a society contain without submergence of innate democratic tendency?
The danger of that proportion is what Whitman contoured a century before Winnicott in his own reckoning with democracy, admonishing that “America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without.”
The antisocial, Winnicott observes, come in three main psychological varieties: the overt kind, who “show their lack of sense of society by developing an antisocial tendency”; those “reacting to inner insecurity by the alternative tendency — identification with authority,” whom he calls “hidden antisocials”; and “indeterminates who would be drawn by weakness or fear into association with [the antisocials].” Of these, he highlights the hidden antisocials as the most dangerous, for their motives are most unconscious. (In every region of life, down to our most intimate relationships, the most unsafe people are those most lacking in self-awareness, most governed by unconscious complexes.)
He considers the psychological peril of the hidden antisocials:
This is unhealthy, immature, because it is not an identification with authority that arises out of self-discovery. It is a sense of frame without sense of picture, a sense of form without retention of spontaneity… Hidden antisocials are not “whole persons” any more than are manifest antisocials, since each needs to find and to control the conflicting force in the external world outside the self. By contrast, the healthy person, who is capable of becoming depressed, is able to find the whole conflict within the self as well as being able to see the whole conflict outside the self, in external (shared) reality. When healthy persons come together, they each contribute a whole world, because each brings a whole person.
In an insight of staggering pertinence to our present political climate, not just in America but throughout the so-called democratic world courting totalitarianism under the guise of individualism, he adds:
Hidden antisocials provide material for a type of leadership which is sociologically immature. Moreover, this element in a society greatly strengthens the danger that derives from its frank antisocial elements, especially since ordinary people so easily let those with an urge to lead get into key positions. Once in such positions, these immature leaders immediately gather to themselves the obvious antisocials, who welcome them (the immature anti-individual leaders) as their natural masters.
In the remainder of the essay, Winnicott goes on to explore the creation of that necessary “innate democratic factor,” which begins with “the ordinary man and woman, and the ordinary, common-place home” — the work of parenting. (The morning after the 2016 presidential election, fearing my new home might come to resemble the dictatorship I was born into, I reached out to the wisest elder I knew — a 100-year-old Holocaust survivor — for perspective and consolation. Reminding me that the grimmest crime against humanity began with a legal election, she insisted that abating the unconscionable cannot be done purely on the level of politics — it must begin, she said, deeper and earlier: by laying the moral foundation of the young.)
In a passage of astonishing prescience, Winnicott considers the staggering gender disparity in political leadership over history and its root in our developmental psychology:
In psychoanalytical and allied work it is found that all individuals (men and women) have in reserve a certain fear of WOMAN. Some individuals have this fear to a greater extent than others, but it can be said to be universal. This is quite different from saying that an individual fears a particular woman. This fear of WOMAN is a powerful agent in society structure, and it is responsible for the fact that in very few societies does a woman hold the political reins. It is also responsible for the immense amount of cruelty to women, which can be found in customs that are accepted by almost all civilizations.
The root of this fear of WOMAN is known. It is related to the fact that in the early history of every individual who develops well, and who is sane, and who has been able to find himself, there is a debt to a woman — the woman who was devoted to that individual as an infant, and whose devotion was absolutely essential for that individual’s healthy development. The original dependence is not remembered, and therefore the debt is not acknowledged, except in so far as the fear of WOMAN represents the first stage of this acknowledgement.
With haunting foresight into both the fault lines and the opportunities of our time, he adds:
As an offshoot of this consideration, one can consider the psychology of the dictator, who is at the opposite pole to anything that the word “democracy” can mean. One of the roots of the need to be a dictator can be a compulsion to deal with this fear of woman by encompassing her and acting for her. The dictator’s curious habit of demanding not only absolute obedience and absolute dependence but also “love” can be derived from this source.
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