Post-Mortem Analysis

PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES OF FAMOUS AMERICANS, edited by Norman Kiell. 302 pages. Twayne. $6.

When Robert E. Lee launched 15,000 Confederates against a firmly entrenched Union Army of several times that number at Gettysburg, was he being exceptionally courageous? Or exceptionally foolhardy? Or exceptionally bullheaded (his generals to a man had advised him against a frontal assault)? None of these, according to Psychologist Norman Kiell, an assistant professor at New York's Brooklyn College. He was responding instead to what one study of group psychology called "the early ego identifications of childhood" that exist between "the group and the group leader."

When John Wilkes Booth stepped into the presidential box that night at the Ford Theater and shot Abraham Lincoln, was he trying to avenge the South, as he is said to have shouted? Of course not. He was working out a basic Oedipal conflict, and his final words, "Mother, I died for my country," can be translated, "Mother, I killed my father because of you."

"We cannot get our Luthers, Wagners and Napoleons on the couch," writes Psychologist Kiell, "but we know some of what they could have revealed there." In fact, thanks to sophisticated new techniques in "psychobiography" (analysis of handwriting, paintings, drawings, dreams), "psychology and biography have become almost inseparable." To demonstrate what a psycho-biographer can do when he sets his intuitions to work, Psychologist Kiell presents a series of post-mortem analyses of famous Americans as seen by an array of psychologists and psychiatrists. Most of them read like psychiatric small talk overheard at a literary cocktail party.

Omnipotent Leaders. Lee's problem, as extrapolated by Ezra G. Benedict Fox from Freud's "postulate of the defense mechanism of identification in the relationship between the group and the group leader," was one that is common to all leaders "exercising a type of paternalism with the group." The group conceives of the leader as omnipotent, and the leader in turn "embraces the gratifying role of omnipotence" that every parent cherishes. Under some particularly trying circumstance, this illusion of omnipotence may "sweep the leader along to his destruction." The trying circumstance in Lee's case was that he was suffering from diarrhea, naively assumed by Southern historians to have been caused by the eating of fruit "in the fertile Pennsylvania countryside," but more probably "it was psychosomatic, caused by his manifested worry over absence of any word for several weeks from the missing Jeb Stuart and his cavalry." His "debilitated physical condition" made Lee "all the more susceptible to psychic influences."

In Booth's case, reasons Psychiatrist Philip Weissman, his murderous rage was directed not only against his father but also against his older brother (and rival actor) Edwin, who had been publicly praised by Lincoln. Hence the significance of the remark in his diary after the assassination that he had "the curse of Cain" upon him. Still, Booth might not have acted out his "paranoid delusions" if his mother, who doted on him, had not repeatedly told him of a dream she had when he was an infant, visualizing him carrying out "an act of brave but bloody violence in the name of the country." Thus, with one bullet, he was able to remove his two most hated rivals and secure his mother's love.

Slivers of Bone. Lincoln himself, according to Psychiatrist Edward Kempf, suffered from a mother fixation, accentuated by her death when he was nine. Other psychiatrists agree that it was largely responsible for his periodic, almost schizoid, bouts of depression, for his eagerness to pardon military deserters (the mothers of the country, he argued, should not be made to suffer more than they had), and for the "exhibitionistic and self-destructive impulses" reflected in a recurrent dream that he would be assassinated before his second term was out. As for Walt Whitman, he would never have poured so much sexuality into his poetry and realized it so imperfectly in his life (he was impotent, with strong homosexual inclinations) if he had not been so strongly attached to a mother who was illiterate and unable to understand him or his literary ambitions.

The game, it would seem, is inexhaustible. Why did Julius Caesar love oysters? Who was Teddy Roosevelt really aiming at when he plugged a Tasmanian tiger? But it is a bit like reconstructing a mastodon from a toenail or a sliver of bone.

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