'It is strange to me, in these very days, how peaceable, though still sacred and tender, the memory of my mother now lies in me. (This very morning I got into dreaming confused nightmare stuff about some funeral and her; not her's, nor obviously my Jane's, seemingly my father's rather, and she sending me on it....)' -Reminiscences.
This seems to be the first paper published about Carlyle by a psychiatrist. It appeared anonymously in the Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, and is by Dr W. A. F. Browne, the first superintendent of Crichton Royal , Dumfries, and author of 'What asylums were, are, and ought to be'. He was the father of Sir James Crichton-Browne. He died in 1885, and, following an accident, had been blind for the last sixteen years of his life.
The paper dates from 1881-1882, so was written after Carlyle's death and the publishing of the Reminiscences, but before any of Froude's biography had been published. It is savagely critical of Carlyle's personality, his loss of faith, his prose style, and his 'woolly' thinking. Browne regards Carlyle's childhood experiences as instrumental, together with his stomach complaints, in making him chronically misanthropic.
It is interesting that his son makes no mention of his father's publication or his views, so dramatically opposed to his own. They only agree in condemning Froude for publishing the Reminiscences when he did.
'
The next psychiatric study of Carlyle was published in 1895, fourteen
years after Carlyle's death, in the 'Alienist and Neurologist' , a journal
published in St Louis. Its author was Dr James G Kiernan, Professor of Forensic
Psychiatry at Kent Law School, and Professor of Nervous and Mental Diseases at
Milwaukee Medical College. He entitled it: Was Carlyle Insane? A Study of Race
Egotism.'
Dr Kiernan begins with Napoleon the Third, who after an evening at the Carlyles
asked if that man was mad; and with a remark by Jane Carlyle that she felt at
times as if she were the keeper of a madhouse. He quotes Froude on Carlyle's
personality, and Green's History on the character of the Lowland Scots, as
determined by their history. Kiernan claims that 'egotism' is endemic among
Lowland Scots, and that Carlyle was a typical example.
In support, he cites Carlyle's view that hypochondriacal tendencies are
evidence of greatness. In 'Heroes and Hero Worship' Carlyle describes
Cromwell's 'mournful oversensitive hypochondriac humor', and adds:
'Mr Cromwell was full of hypochondria, thought himself near dying, and had fancies
about the town cross. These things are significant, such an excitable deep
feeling nature in that rugged stubborn strength of his is not the symptom of
falsehood, it is the symptom and promise of quite other than falsehood. All
great men have these.'
His article ranges over Carlyle's family history, his childhood, the
Ashburton affair, his marriage, Mrs Carlyle's health, and Carlyle's 'caddish'
attitude to American and Americans. Apart from the available published sources
- the Reminiscences, Froude, and Garnett, Kiernan says that he interviewed
Carlyle's youngest sister, but does not quote her.
He concludes:
'Carlyle to me seems a pure product of his surroundings and in no sense insane.
Everything in Carlyle's career would have occurred under the same circumstances
to a Scot of the same type. Study of Scotch theological controversies reveals
scores of such minds. The destination for the pulpit set Carlyle on a pedestal
which made him early a Sir Oracle.'
Kiernan also draws attention to the illness of Carlyle's mother in 1817, saying
that it followed a 'protracted fever, probably typhoid,' that she then became
delirious, and subsequently insane, requiring to be removed from home. He does
not believe that the 'insanity' necessarily had any effect on Carlyle's
'heredity', following - as it did - physical illness.
Interestingly, in this pre-Freudian period, he finds Carlyle out in a 'Freudian
slip' about his father. Annotating his wife's letters, Carlyle explains her
reference to a 'melody dying away to an unintelligible whinner' as a
phrase used by his father about a precentor - the official who led the singing
in the days before church organs - who having lost the tune, desperately tried
several others. Kiernan notes that, when the same phrase occurs again in a
later letter, Carlyle has forgotten his earlier annotation and explains it as 'some
fool's speech to me I forget whose.'
The article takes a poor view of Carlyle the man, described as egotistical,
philistine, a domineering husband, subject to mood swings, and regarding
himself as an oracle and infallible. It was written before the suggestion of
Carlyle's impotence became the subject of hot debate, and shows that concern
about Carlyle's general failings as a husband, rather than about possible impotence,
was a source of concern and debate following Froude's revelations. Unusually
for the period, Kiernan attributes Carlyle's difficulties to his social
background, and to the Scottish Calvinist tradition, rather than solely to his
parents' influence, and dismisses heredity factors.
This first psychoanalytical study, by another American, Jackson Towne of
Michigan State College, appeared in 1935. and begins with the quotation from
the Reminiscences that heads this section.
Towne draws attention to the plethora of publications about Carlyle, continuing
unabated since his death, and laments the fact that so many take a 'morbid
interest' in the fact that he 'did not get on with his wife.' He hopes to solve
the 'enigma' of Carlyle's career so that these speculations can be put to rest.
He shows how Froude, 'with a curious, unconscious foreshadowing of
psychoanalysis,' demonstrates Carlyle's strong attachment to his mother
throughout his life. He claims that Froude shows a prejudice against Carlyle,
resulting from an unconscious infatuation with Mrs Carlyle. After a summary of
Carlyle's life and a review of the long controversy over his sexual abilities,
Towne bluntly concludes that the Reminiscences tell all: 'A man who
dreams that his mother sends him to his father's funeral is assuredly a
sufferer from an Oedipus complex. In support he adds an excerpt from Carlyle's
Journal , when, writing of the night when he learned that the first volume
manuscript of the French Revolution had been destroyed, he recalled:
'I dreamed of my father and sister Margaret alive; yet all defaced with the
sleepy stagnancy, swollen hebetude of the grave, and again dying as in some
strange rude country: a horrid dream, the painfullest too when you wake first.'
And finally he adds Carlyle's remark to his wife about his restlessness in
London:
'Such children who long now for this, now for that, are not well off
anywhere. The thing they so want, I suppose, is to get to sleep well on their
mother's bosom.'
This Oedipus complex, he concludes abruptly, with no further discussion, is
the heart of Carlyle's mystery.
This 1949 book was written by James Halliday, a Glasgow physician who took
an early interest in psychosomatic, and what he called 'psychosocial medicine'
- he published a book with that title. His interest in a 'sick society' may
well have drawn him to his fellow Scot, who first coined the phrase.
But 'Mr Carlyle, my Patient' has dated badly. Halliday was interested in
gastro-intestinal complaints, and especially in peptic ulcer, which he regarded
as psychosomatic and psychosocial in origin. He did not live to learn that it
had an infective cause.
His book is an account of Carlyle's life and work, with Carlyle as his imagined
patient, full of confident but far-fetched interpretations of his life and
works - especially of Sartor, which he treats as if it were completely
autobiographical. One example of his interpretations will suffice.
When Carlyle writes : 'The accursed hag, dyspepsia, had got me bitted and
bridled,' Halliday tells us that Carlyle 'significantly identifies his
dyspepsia.....with the bad mother-figure of his earliest infancy who interfered
with his oral, anal, and locomotory pleasures so that his days became a
nightmare. The equating of his dyspepsia with a 'hag' becomes understandable
when we recall our surmise that as an infant he had, in a psychological sense,
eaten up and incorporated his mother.' Little wonder, that faced with this and
much more, Carlyle critics have been less than kind to Halliday, and that there
have been few attempts to analyse Carlyle's behaviour since.
The exception is a fine paper, 'Grecian Destiny,' by John Clubbe, which
appeared in 1976. Clubbe studies Froude's biographical approach to Carlyle.
Froude believed that epic and tragedy were the best models for writing
biography, and Clubbe shows how he structured his Life of Carlyle using
mythological models - especially Spencer's Faerie Queen, Iphigenia, and the
Sophocles Oedipus trilogy.
In the Life, Froude hints at the model of Greek tragedy when he writes that
'the functions of a biographer are, like the functions of a Greek chorus,
occasionally at the important moments to throw in some moral remarks which seem
to fit the situation.' He does not compare Carlyle to Oedipus directly in the
text, but talks of the 'Fates doing their worst to Carlyle.'
But Towne shows from other sources that Froude had Oedipus in mind. In My
Relations with Carlyle, written in 1887, but only published posthumously in
1903, he writes: ' ...for the first time I realised what a tragedy the life in
Cheyne Row had been - a tragedy as stern and real as the story of Oedipus.'
And in his journal on 25 2 87 he wrote : ' It was a tragedy, and as terrible as
Oedipus, nor was the character altogether unlike. His (Carlyle's) character,
when he was himself, was noble and generous; but he had absolutely no control
over himself. He was wayward and violent, and perhaps at bottom believed
himself a peculiar man who had a dispensation to have things his own way.'
Froude was struck by the fact that Carlyle 'had said in his journal that there
was a secret connected with him unknown to his closest friends, that no one
knew and no-one would know it, and that without a knowledge of it no true
biography of him was possible. He never told me in words what the secret was,
but I suppose he felt that I should have it from the papers.' Froude was also
impressed by the change in Carlyle after Jane's death. He felt that before
Jane's death Carlyle was 'apart from the rest of the world, with the mask of
destiny upon him, to whom one could not feel exactly as towards a brother
mortal.'
After the death Carlyle changed and their relationship changed. He had 'a
repentance so deep and passionate that it showed that the real nature was as
beautiful as his intellect had been magnificent. He was still liable to his
fits of temper. He was scornful and overbearing and wilful; but it had become
possible to love him - indeed, impossible not to love him.' This may tell us as
much about Froude as about Carlyle - he had become the loving son that Carlyle
never had.
Towne is suggesting, convincingly, that Froude used the Oedipal myth to
structure his book, comparing the death of Jane to the blinding of Oedipus,
showing the hubris and the hamartia that led to these key events, and the
repentance that followed in each case. With this in mind it is interesting to
look again at the remarks Froude makes in the biography about Carlyle's
relations with his mother:
'after his mother he loved his wife better than anyone in the world.'
'a special and passionate attachment of a quite peculiar kind'
'C...thought always first of his mother.'
'He and his old mother drove about in the gig together, or wandered in the
shrubberies, smoking their pipes together, like a pair of lovers - as indeed
they were.'
'His mother, whom he regarded with an affection "passing the love of
sons".....'
The completed Carlyle quotation from the Reminiscences is:
'It was the earliest terror of my childhood " that I might lose my
mother"; and it had gone with me all my days. But, and that is probably
the whole account of it, I was then sunk in the miseries of 'Friedrich' etc.,
etc., in many miseries; and was then fifty-eight years of age. It is strange to
me, in these very days, how peaceable, though still sacred and tender, the
memory of my mother now lies in me. (This very morning, I got into dreaming
confused nightmare stuff about some funeral and her; not her's, nor obviously
my Jane's, seemingly my father's rather, and she sending me on it, - the
saddest bewildered stuff. What a dismal debasing and confusing element is that
of a sick body on the human soul or thinking part.'
Clubbe is careful to say that there will be nothing in later volumes of the
Collected Letters to add to the information available, and that any future
writer should not infer more than Froude did. But not all of Carlyle's journals
have been published, and one of those - a late journal - might add to our
knowledge of his feelings in old age. They remain in private hands and seem
unlikely to be made public; a curious story reviewed by Campbell(1970).
Clubbe believes Froude may have distorted his portrait by inferring too much;
that his use of these mythical models led to a bias in his biography,
emphasising some aspects and shaping the story to fit the Oedipal model. It is
more likely that Froude used the Oedipus myth because he recognised how well it
accorded with Carlyle's life. It must be remembered that Froude was writing in
pre-Freudian times, or more accurately at a time when he would be quite unaware
of Freud's early views on the subject, with no idea of the implications,
especially the sexual ones, that would follow from Freud's formulations of the
Oedipal myth. This makes his analogy independent and remarkable.
Add to all this the likelihood that Carlyle was impotent, as Froude himself
believed, or at least had sexual difficulties in his marriage, and the argument
for using the Oedipus complex to explain many of Carlyle's problems becomes a
cogent one.
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