PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

'THE INWARD SPRINGS OF CHARACTER'

'The uttered part of a man's life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small, unknown proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others.' - Essay on Sir Walter Scott

FACTS

Some firm conclusions about Carlyle's personality and health can be made from the information provided on this site.

He was hypochondriacal to an extreme degree throughout his adult life.
He had associated anxiety symptoms in his late teens and twenties.
He had a depressive personality, but did not suffer from mood swings or depressive illness, despite a likely family history of affective illness. Nor did his depressive outlook seriously affect his ability to function effectively at any time.
He had sexual difficulties at the beginning of, and probably throughout his marriage.
He had an abnormal personality. He was bad-tempered, selfish, egocentric, emotionally childish, and generally 'difficult' and unrealistic about daily life, especially in his marriage.
He was abnormally attached to his mother( Oedipus complex)
He admired and feared his father.
He was intellectually gifted, both verbally and mathematically, and had a retentive and almost photographic memory.
His neurotic conflicts made him constantly inconsistent in his behaviour, both domestically and in his writing.

DIAGNOSIS

These psychiatric labels, such as hypochondriasis, anxiety state and depressive personality, enable comparisons to be made between Carlyle's case and what knowledge psychiatrists have of these conditions.
His hypochondriasis can be related to his depressive outlook, most likely learned behaviour, related to his relationship with his mother, to being the oldest child of a large family, competing for attention with the succession of annual arrivals. In later life he and his mother found health an ever-interesting topic, and they had a doctor in the family to share their interest and to consult.
The anxiety symptoms during his prolonged adolescence can be related to his many problems at the time. He abandoned the church career his parents had planned for him with many sacrifices, and must have had considerable guilt at the pain this caused them. He then had years of painful indecision about a future career, changing course several times, and fearing failure much of the time. During these years he experienced poverty, and spent most of them persuading Jane to marry him, culminating in sexual failure on the honeymoon.
The depressive personality is probably a mixture of genetic and environmental factors. His father was a serious man with a grim Border humour. Family and friends were all staunch members of a strict Calvinist sect. His mother had a psychotic illness, most likely affective in nature, and depressive personalities are common in those with such a family history. His gloom did not exclude a keen sense of humour, and the ability to laugh at himself from time to time.
He showed Irritability as an infant - his earliest memory - and it persisted through his life. It was a family trait on his father's side, so likely to have been inherited rather than learned.
The sexual problems. A large and controversial topic since Carlyle's death. He was raised on farms, and his mother was in childbed annually for many years, so he cannot have been ignorant of sexual matters as, for example, John Ruskin was. His Oedipal problems provide a more convincing explanation.
These last problems, his personality, and his neurotically inconsistent behaviour require some kind of unifying explanation. For this we must turn to psychodynamic theories of the 'inward springs of character'.

THEORY

Eric Berne and Transactional Analysis

In his book, Games People Play, the American psychotherapist Eric Berne laid the foundations of transactional analysis. He used a game model to analyse interpersonal manoeuvres - transactions - which have both an apparent manifest motive and a concealed one, hidden from those involved. He also introduced the concept of ego states, used to describe sets of related behaviours, thoughts and feelings by which we show parts of our personality at differing times.
His ideas are expressed in more accessible language, and his theories are more open to experimental testing than those of Freudian psychoanalysis. This makes them more accessible to the lay reader, and less likely to provoke his or her instant rejection of them. They can be applied convincingly to explain Carlyle's personality and marriage difficulties.
Berne labelled three egostates, akin to but not identical with Freud's ego, id and superego.
If someone is behaving and thinking and feeling in an adult way in his surroundings and with other people, he or she is described as being in an Adult ego-state.
If they are behaving, thinking, or feeling in ways copied from their parents or other parental figures, then they are said to be in a Parent ego-state.
If they return to ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving they used in childhood, then they are in their Child ego-state

TRANSACTIONS AND GAMES

Transactions take place when two people communicate, one responding to the other. They can be analysed in terms of the ego states of the two participants and how they interact.
For example, asking the time and being given a direct answer is a simple communication from Adult to Adult ego state. Fiercely reprimanding an employee, who then responds with an abject apology, usually is a communication addressed by the Parent of one to the Child of the other, and is responded to in the same way. These are called complementary transactions. Crossed transactions take place when the ego state addressed is not the one that responds. If, for example, the question 'What's the time?' - an Adult question - provokes the response 'Time! Time! You're always nagging me about the time!', then we are dealing with a crossed transaction. The question is treated as a Parent reprimand and brings a response from the Child ego state. Other transactions many be ulterior, when two messages are conveyed at the same time - an overt and a covert one. Usually the overt is an Adult-Adult one, concealing a covert Parent-Child or Child -Parent one.
The Games People Play are based on such ulterior transactions, and tend to be characteristic for a particular person. Thomas and Jane Carlyle constantly played such games over the many years of their marriage.

EGO STATES: CARLYLE AS CHILD PARENT AND ADULT

PARENT

He had a powerful and complex Parent ego-state, unsurprisingly, considering his parents. It is the source of his gloomy view of contemporary society, of his religious thinking, of his prophetic discourse, and of his public persona, and view of himself as a Victorian husband.
His general message that the present times were disastrous, and that the distant past was better - I simplify - is a Parental injuction: parents viewing the next generation are fond of talking to other parents about how things have changed for the worse. Carlyle takes these complaints to a higher level; see for example, Past and Present. In old age he said he hated the world around him.
His religious thinking is complicated; an attempt to come to terms with his own parents' views. In his prolonged adolescence - the time when youth rebels and breaks away from parental authority - Carlyle lost his faith in Christianity and abandoned his divinity studies, a decision which left him with a legacy of guilt about his parents sacrifices on his behalf. Simplifying again, he compromised by abandoning Christianity but not God.
In Sartor, and in his other writings, he was careful not to make these views explicit, partly because of the times in which he wrote, but more for fear of offending his parents. He retains the belief in a stern God and Father, and in a stern morality. owing more to the Old Testament than to the New. In all his correspondence with his mother he does not question her fundamentalist views, and tries to make out that he is more believing and orthodox than is the case.
His prophetic style, in public and in print, is Parental, replete with Biblical language, attempting to convince by authority rather than reasoned argument.
His behaviour in public was often Parental. Increasingly he would dominate social gatherings, brooking no interruptions while he harangued his audience with increasingly dogmatic statements. He did not behave in this way in small gatherings of friends, as Froude attests, when his conversation was reasonable and responsible: his Adult voice.
Famously he wrote premaritally to Jane, spelling out his view of the husband as total master of his house. In the early years at Craigenputtoch he would run his finger over the furniture searching for dust. He could be brutal in speech, and often turned on his wife as a strict Parent. One of the more shocking episodes occurred when she was seriously injured in a fall, and in considerable pain. Carlyle refused to respond as a caring Parent, far less a reasonable Adult, but rounded on her in his harshest Parent style, telling her she should be grateful the accident was no worse. Unable to close her mouth because of the injury and neuralgic pain, she was told: 'Jane, ye'll find yourself in a more compact and pious state of mind if ye shut your mouth.' At the time Carlyle wrote to his brother: 'She speaks little to me, and does not accept me as a sick nurse, which, truly, I had never any talent to be.'
On 21 June, 1856, Jane writes in her journal - in an entry censored by Froude -: 'the chief interest of today expressed in blue marks on my wrist.' This has often been put forward as a suggestion that Carlyle had assaulted her. It is possible that he had been restraining her, perhaps from some suicidal behaviour. She was undoubtedly depressed at the time.
And yet, well concealed, there was a good Parent. He became the virtual parent of the large Carlyle family and throughout his life was a generous one in time, attention and money, even in the early years when he could ill afford to be. He dispensed charity to beggars and to good causes., and naively helped many less deserving, who wrote begging letters to him. Childless, he became a good Parent to Froude.
Both the good and the bad sides of Carlyle's Parent were so powerful that they dominated his life and work. His parents had a powerful and lasting effect on him, as his Reminiscences attest. Froude was fully aware of this, and was the first to compare him to Oedipus, an example followed by all who have examined Carlyle's psychology since. His fear of his father and his love for his mother account for many of the inconsistencies in his behaviour throughout life.

CHILD

In 1862 the 66 year old Carlyle remained at home when his wife was in Folkestone. He wrote to her: 'Nothing is wrong about the house here, nor have I failed in sleep or had a misfortune; nevertheless, I am dreadfully low spirited, and feel like a child wishing Mammy back.' (his italics)
When Carlyle is hypochondriacal, his Child ego state is in action. Taking up the sick role - learned helplessness - is a return to the helplessness of childhood and the need to be cared for, to be nursed. The sick child wants to be mothered, to have special treatment, to have special consideration. The neighbours must make no noise, silence is essential, a soundproof room must be built. The child is selfish, inconsiderate of others, demanding.
There is also a rebellious Child, who in schooldays fought back when bullied, despite his parents wishes; a child who began to read fiction, forbidden at home, and who later rebelled against his destined career by not entering the ministry. A rebellious Child in the adult was throughout life in rebellion against most contemporary customs and beliefs.
This dependent Child wanted a mother before a wife, and throughout life placed his mother before his wife. He forced his wife into a maternal role. Not only must she care for him, she must not expect him to care for her when she feels unwell. He refused to take on the usual husbandly responsibilities of marriage. When the income tax inspectors demanded his presence, his wife had to go in his stead, at that time an unheard of event.

Marrying a mother figure, the Child in him has difficulties in consummating the marriage, and has his new wife is treating him as a patient and mothering him within a day or two of their marriage.  In later years, Carlyle saw no harm in his long attachment to Lady Ashburton, despite Jane's protest and distress. To the Child in him she was only another mother figure to whom Jane should have had no animosity.

ADULT

Carlyle's Adult ego state is well hidden for much of the time because of the powerful effect that his Parent and Child have on his every thought and action. But his ability to make great immediate sacrifices for long term goals was present from his youth and is an Adult characteristic. It is powerfully evident in his work; shown by his persistence in pursuing difficult projects involving enormous amounts of reading and research, and in his ability to master and order his material. His tenacity during the thirteen years he was writing Frederick, and in rewriting the destroyed first volume of the French Revolution is an Adult characteristic. In his long rise from obscurity and poverty to fame he met many setbacks in an Adult and courageous manner. He was responsible in his dealings with his own family, excepting his wife, and made many sacrifices for them throughout his life.

MARITAL GAMES OF THE CARLYLES

One of his many nicknames for his wife was 'my poor little protectress', neatly fusing Parent and Child attitudes in one short phrase.
The games in Carlyle's life were played mainly within his marriage. They were complicated by the fact that Jane played similar games, and the two were not always complementary. He was over-attached to his mother and married as much for another mother figure as for a wife. Jane had lost her father in her teens not long before she first met Carlyle, and had a less than satisfactory and histrionic mother. She was searching for both a husband and a father figure to replace her loss. It was obvious that these similar hidden agendas would clash.
During their prolonged courtship Carlyle can be seen, in their correspondence, trying from the start to elicit sympathy for his ill-health. Shortly before the marriage he wrote to Jane giving his marital credo at some length: 'The man should bear rule in the house and not the woman.' At this time, when she confessed that she had previously been in love with his best friend, Edward Irving, Carlyle seized on the information, told her he could never make her happy, that he could no longer love, made repeated offers to release her from the engagement, and thus established a position whereby marrying him became her responsibility, with her responsible for the consequences, not him.  The bed metaphors in these letters: 'the thorny couch of pain' and 'my pillow is the iron pillow of despair,' suggest anxiety about his sexual adequacy in the approaching marriage.

Early in the marriage, Jane began to compete with Carlyle using his own methods. She had frequent and lengthy colds and chest infections, migraine, and other more serious ailments later in the marriage. She too took advantage of the sick role, seeking to be cared for and 'fathered'. In 1846 she writes to Helen Walsh: 'I am too like himself in some things - especially as to the state of our livers, and so we aggravate one another's tendencies to despair.'
So complicated games developed. In ostensibly Adult to Adult transactions between husband and wife, Carlyle would often be appealing as a Child to her Parent. When she responded in a caring motherly way all would be well. When she put herself in the role of a sick Child, he would sometimes respond in a caring nurturing way, but this happened less often, and he was more often the stern Parent.

LIFE AND WORK

Carlyle never became a fully autonomous adult; never integrated the Child and Parent aspects of himself into a coherent whole with his Adult; and as result remained throughout his life a prey to irrational thoughts and behaviour from these parts of his personality.
While it is useful to explain his marital difficulties and personality problems in this way, it is more important to recognise how his neurotic problems determined all of his thinking and writing. All his work is dominated by an attempt to solve these problems. In Sartor he presents a lightly disguised autobiography in the BIldungsroman section. Throughout the book he uses the device of an 'Editor' for his fictional protagonist, Professor Teufelsdroeck, to avoid taking responsibility for, and to 'split' his opinions. Carlyle's more extreme views - those of Child and Parent - are put into the mouth of Professor Teufelsdroeck, balanced by more reasonable and Adult views, put forward by the Editor. In this, his most autobiographical work, the author shows insight into these divisions in his own personality, and exploits them in a distancing fictional device unusual at the time.
Writing his essay on Sir Walter Scott, Carlyle described the age as ‘at once destitute of faith and terrified of scepticism.’ It could be applied to himself. His religious views, both in Sartor and elsewhere, show most clearly his compromises and inconsistencies, and expose what David Daiches calls 'the inadequate intellectual foundation of his faith.'  In effect, he rejects Christianity except for God the Father, retained as a stern Parent figure, more Old Testament than New. He would admit this freely in private, but his public and published views were deliberately vague and difficult to establish, partly because of the times he lived in, but also from fear of offending his parents, especially his mother, to whom his letters are models of evasion on religious matters. His ambivalent feelings for his own father made him unable totally to reject religion.
The cult and search for the hero, which dominates many of his writings and lectures, can also be explained by his lifelong search for a strong, all-powerful father, his own father the model. But his standards for a suitable hero were excessively high and he had pleasure in finding many potential idols had feet of clay. He revered but feared his father, and this conflict of feeling made his search for the perfect hero, as for a satisfactory religious position, a nigh impossible task.
His gloomy views of society - constantly invoking 'the sick society' metaphor he had borrowed from his youthful explorations into German philosophy - were combined with a condemnation of 18th century and contemporary materialism. He had retained the ethical values of the religion he had largely abandoned, and preached the need for a return to old ways. His views on the dignity of labour derived directly from his father. He died believing that he had not been listened to.
His mixed feelings for his father permeate all his thinking. Men for Carlyle were either good or bad with no shades of grey. Most of his contemporaries with claims to importance in any field he regarded with contempt; 'nichts zu bedeuten', he would say. In the search for the Hero, most fell by the wayside. In this way he could split his feelings for his father into those he revered - 'gey few, and they're a' deid' as the Scots saying has it - and those many more he despised. He was never able to face up directly to any hostile feelings towards his father.
It is as Prophet that we see Carlyle most typically as a Parent. The style is totally different from that he employed in talking privately to friends. Hectoring, authoritarian, dogmatic, it is full of Parental characteristics. Carlyle stated explicitly that his style came from his father - his mode of speech, and the humour from his mother. And from his childhood background came the Scottish style of preaching, the sermonising and the biblical language.

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