Robert M. Young Online Writings
LINCOLN, MANDELA AND THE DEPRESSIVE POSITION
by Robert M. Young
I assume you are here because you are intrigued by my title. I want to take the Kleinian concept of the depressive position and test it against the lives of my two greatest heroes – not just their public, mythical, clichéd lives but their whole lives.
In Kleinian psychoanalysis, the depressive position is as good as it gets. This may seem a bleak prospect, but one of my purposes this evening is to try to persuade you that it’s not such a bad deal, as life in the real world goes. Moving from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position, according to Irma Brenman Pick, is the goal of every analytic interpretation. Getting people to ‘take back the projections’, i.e., dwell more of the time in the depressive position, is one way of describing the goal of therapy. Resolution of the Oedipus complex and the recurring Oedipal situation is considered to be synonymous with moving from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position. These two positions are considered by Kleinians to be the basic psychological modes of all of unconscious life. Indeed, Bion thought we oscillate so often and so quickly between the two basic positions in everyday life that he put a double-headed arrow between them.
The depressive position is not just a lacuna in the arcane vocabulary of Kleinianism. Winnicott wrote of it as follows in his assessment of ‘The Kleinian Contribution’ two years after Melanie Klein died:
Working along Kleinian lines one came to an understanding of the complex stage of development that Klein called the “depressive position”. I think this is a bad name, but it is true that clinically, in psycho-analytic treatments, arrival at this position involves the patient in being depressed. Here being depressed is an achievement, and implies a high degree of personal integration, and an acceptance of responsibility for all the destructiveness that is bound up with living, with the instinctual life, and with anger and frustration.
Klein was able to make it clear to me from the material my patients presented, how the capacity for concern and to feel guilty is an achievement, and it is this rather than depression that characterizes arrival at the depressive position in the case of the growing baby and child.
Arrival at this stage is associated with ideas of restitution and reparation, and indeed the human individual cannot accept the destructive and aggressive ideas in his or her own nature without experience of reparation, and for this reason the continued presence of the love object is necessary at this stage since only in this way is there an opportunity for reparation.
He continues with high praise: ‘This is Klein’s most important contribution, in my opinion, and I think it ranks with Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex.’
Before moving on to characterize the concept further, I offer a sneak preview of things to come. I will argue further along that we admire our heroes because they managed to attain and sustain that species of integrity which is akin to Stoicism and is the external world, role-playing expression of the depressive position – to behave well in spite of everything, including especially dreadful personal vicissitudes in the midst of pursuing admirable goals, doing one’s duty, bearing heavy responsibilities and making unwelcome sacrifices. Gary Cooper in ‘High Noon’.
Turning now to definitions, I offer you John Steiner’s characterizations of the two positions.
As a brief summary: in the paranoid-schizoid position anxieties of a primitive nature threaten the immature ego and lead to a mobilization of primitive defences. Splitting, idealization and projective identification operate to create rudimentary structures made up of idealised good objects kept far apart from persecuting bad ones. The individual’s own impulses are similarly split and he directs all his love towards the good object and all his hatred against the bad one. As a consequence of the projection, the leading anxiety is paranoid, and the preoccupation is with survival of the self. Thinking is concrete because of the confusion between self and object which is one of the consequences of projective identification.
The depressive position represents an important developmental advance in which whole objects begin to be recognized and ambivalent impulses become directed towards the primary object. These changes result from an increased capacity to integrate experiences and lead to a shift in primary concern from the survival of the self to a concern for the object upon which the individual depends. Destructive impulses lead to feelings of loss and guilt which can be more fully experienced and which consequently enable mourning to take place. The consequences include a development of symbolic function and the emergence of reparative capacities which become possible when thinking no longer has to remain concrete.
What has happened in the subsequent research on the relationship between these fundamental positions and the equally fundamental matter of the Oedipal dynamic is that these ways of thinking have been brought into relationship with one another. As David Bell puts it,
The primitive Oedipal conflict described by Klein takes place in the paranoid-schizoid position when the infant's world is widely split and relations are mainly to part objects. This means that any object which threatens the exclusive possession of the idealised breast/mother is felt as a persecutor and has projected into it all the hostile feelings deriving from pregenital impulses.
If development proceeds satisfactorily, secure relations with good internal objects leads to integration, healing of splits and taking back projections.
The mother is then, so to speak, free to be involved with a third object in a loving intercourse which, instead of being a threat, becomes the foundation of a secure relation to internal and external reality. The capacity to represent internally the loving intercourse between the parents as whole objects results, through the ensuing identifications, in the capacity for full genital maturity. For Klein, the resolution of the Oedipus complex and the achievement of the depressive position refer to the same phenomena viewed from different perspectives.
Ron Britton puts it very elegantly: 'the two situations are inextricably intertwined in such a way that one cannot be resolved without the other: we resolve the Oedipus complex by working through the depressive position and the depressive position by working through the Oedipus complex'.
We are here provided with a sort of Rosetta Stone, a key to translating between the Freudian and Kleinian conceptual schemes. In the recent work of Kleinians this way of thinking has been applied to broader issues, in particular, the ability to symbolise and learn from experience. Integration of the depressive position - which we can now see as resolution of the Oedipus complex - is the sine qua non of the development of 'a capacity for symbol formation and rational thought'. Greater knowledge of the object 'includes awareness of its continuity of existence in time and space and also therefore of the other relationships of the object implied by that realization. The Oedipus situation exemplifies that knowledge. Hence the depressive position cannot be worked through without working through the Oedipus complex and vice versa'. Britton also sees 'the depressive position and the Oedipus situation as never finished but as having to be re-worked in each new life situation, at each stage of development, and with each major addition to experience or knowledge'.
This way of looking at the Oedipal situation also offers a way of thinking of self-knowledge or insight:
The primal family triangle provides the child with two links connecting him separately with each parent and confronts him with the link between them which excludes him. Initially this parental link is conceived in primitive part-object terms and in the modes of his own oral, anal and genital desires, and in terms of his hatred expressed in oral, anal and genital terms. If the link between the parents perceived in love and hate can be tolerated in the child's mind, it provides him with a prototype for an object relationship of a third kind in which he is a witness and not a participant. A third position then comes into existence from which object relationships can be observed. Given this, we can also envisage being observed. This provides us with a capacity for seeing ourselves in interaction with others and for entertaining another point of view whilst retaining our own, for reflecting on ourselves whilst being ourselves.
I find this very helpful, indeed, profound. Its hallmarks are refraining from rash action, something we call containment, and the ability to take thought about oneself, as Robbie Burns put it, the gift of seeing ourselves as others may see us. Not only does it give us an insight into maturity in ordinary individuals, it also illuminates the qualities which make leaders remarkable, one of which Bion once called the ability ‘to think under fire’. People get medals for that. Indeed, Bion did, as did my father-in-law. Coincidentally, both were young tank officers, one in the First and the other in the Second World War. Both kept cool in impossible situations, ones in which practically anyone would panic. Both saved the lives of their men and were awarded the Military Cross.
I do not find it easy to admire senior men (or even to acknowledge that I am one!). This is an obvious legacy of a bad relationship with my authoritarian and highly-opinionated father who was himself an orphan. I do have a few heroes, though, and Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela stand first among them. This is true to the degree that there are pictures of them over my bed, in my consulting room and here and there throughout the house.
There is the obvious link between them of their struggles to end the oppression of black people. My relationship with this issues goes back as far as I can remember, and family history takes it back many generations earlier. I grew up in a racist and segregated part of America. Texas was not the worst place for bigotry, but it was not good. When I was small boy I was told one day that I could no longer play with my best friend; he was black (or ‘coloured’, as was the contemporary argot). I acquiesced. Yet the person entrusted with my care throughout my early life was black. A black woman, Lucy Wilkerson, held our household together for decades during my mother’s incapacity due to depression, and another, Linda Roberts, cared for my mother in her declining years. I knew these things but was relatively successfully socialised into the prevailing prejudices. Every morning in the years before she retired to her bed, my mother took me to visit a statue of General Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate forces in the American Civil War. I was keenest to see his horse, Traveller, but the daily homage to Lee Park was important to me in ways I did not fathom. Indeed, I attended my first dances in a hall in that park before I was a teenager, a replica of Lee’s home in Virginia. Note that it was an important part of my socialisation to daily visit a park and statue and venue honouring the general who led the fight to retain human slavery in the Southern States in the mid-nineteenth century.
Yet in those same years I idolised Abraham Lincoln, America’s (though not the South’s) most admired historical figure, the man who led the nation in the world’s bloodiest civil war in the defeat of slavery and was murdered by an advocate of slavery less than a week after Lee surrendered to the Northern forces in April 1865. In my mind Lincoln stood for freedom and exemplified the principle that a man could rise from humble beginnings and reach high office. He had less than a year’s formal schooling and learned to write on a shovel with coal. In my elementary school the other brightest boy, now head of the Seattle Opera Company, claimed the aristocrat George Washington for his guiding light, while I identified with ‘Honest Abe’ Lincoln, the President who freed the slaves. On my father’s side the family came from the heartland of white supremacy, Alabama, while on my mother’s side, my grandfather’s father was a Texan slave owner Both my grandfather and father were fairly genteel but avowed racists.
The matter of Lincoln’s assassination was hugely personal to me. When I was a teenager a photo of the mummified body of the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, appeared on the cover of Life Magazine. I purloined that copy from my father’s otherwise complete file of issues of that magazine, put in a footlocker behind the door to my room, filled the trunk to the brim with papers, put a padlock on it and never opened it. I continued to fear the Frankenstein monster, the Wolfman, Count Dracula and the dreaded Mummy’s Curse, but at least I had the dastardly fanatical pro-slavery murderer of The Great Emancipator under lock and key.
A mixed heritage, then, and I was, at best, only dimly aware of its contradictions. My main carers were black women, while my upbringing was segregated. No blacks or Hispanics in my schools, separate toilets, segregated buses and public places at least until I went East to university. I did not sleep under the same roof with a black person until the summer after my third year at university when I worked on a Quaker project at a mental hospital. Our group leader and his wife were black. I did not have another black friend until I was in my thirties.
Lincoln was my most abiding hero. I made a pilgrimage to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in the summer before I went to college, and an inspiring and awesome place it is. I have also been recurrently involved in various sort of anti-racist work since I left home and even made one or two gestures against discrimination when I was still in school. I carry a large burden of racial guilt an make what reparation I can manage. I speak of these things as part of an exploration of the personal dynamics of belief and admiration and to explore my own relationship with the depressive position.
Turning now to Lincoln’s life and inner world, I read books and articles and have seen television programmes and films about him over the years. I also collected books about him, hoping one day to make a project of reading them, something upon which, thanks to your invitation, I have at last embarked. I will now draw your attention to some striking discoveries I have made, some enhancing my own appreciation of what a mixture human nature always is.
The first is Lincoln’s beliefs about black people. Born in the slave state of Kentucky, where he lived for seven years, he had grown up in Illinois, a state free of slavery, but his views on blacks were far from egalitarian. He said in 1858,
I will say… that I am not nor ever have been in favour of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, - that I am not nor ever have been in favour of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man an in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.
He also wrote,
What next? Free them and make them politically and socially our equals? Our feelings will not admit of this, and if mine would, we know that those of the great mass of whites will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment is not the sole question, if indeed it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot then make them equals.
On another occasion, Lincoln said, 'All I ask for the Negro is that, if you do not like him, let him alone. If God gave him little, that little let him enjoy'. And again, as to all men being born equal:
Certainly the Negro is not our equal in colour perhaps not in many other respects; still, in the right to put in his mouth the bread that his own hands have earned, he is equal to every other man, white or black. In pointing out that more has been given you, you cannot be justified in taking away the little which has been given him.
His preferred strategy for ending slavery was that the Negroes should be slowly emigrated to another continent or perhaps to South America where land was cheap, a policy called ‘colonization’ – ‘to restore them to their long-lost fatherland’. In fact, by the time of the Civil War only one per cent of black people in America had been born abroad.
Real politics and real history are complex, often disappointing and perplexing. Lincoln was operating in a field where many forces were at work on his decision-making, and he had to hold together an alliance of contending political forces. The only way to make sense of some of his shocking statements is to say that the ball he was keeping his eye on was the principle of republicanism (as opposed to monarchy, anarchy, oligarchy, etc). To say that ‘the Great Emancipator’ had the ending of slavery as his first priority would be flatly wrong. He wrote in a pubic statement,
I would save the Union… If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could do it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I cold save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union… I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.
I take this to mean that his presidential policy and strategies depended on political circumstances and did not reduce to his personal beliefs. Indeed, he said about a year before his death, ‘I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel’. One reason Lincoln was so adamant about ending the secession of the Southern states was a fear that they would provide the base for imperial adventures in Mexico and throughout Latin America, thereby spreading slavery through practically all of the New World. The way through the apparent contradiction in his thinking is that he abhorred slavery but was at the same time a conventional white supremacist.
The Emancipation Proclamation, when it belatedly came in 1863, freed only two hundred thousand slaves and referred only to slaves in the states in rebellion. He saw it as a practical war measure, aimed at making life more difficult inside the Confederacy. The proclamation was the most unpopular act of the war. Whatever may be said, on reflection, about how paltry the Emancipation Proclamation actually was, he did also set in train the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, which unequivocally outlawed slavery, though he did not live to see it ratified by the necessary two thirds of the states. His intention in the post-war period was to be magnanimous toward the vanquished Confederacy. In his Second Inaugural Address, delivered only weeks before the war ended, his concluding passage began, ‘With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in’.
He consistently defined the war’s purpose as saving the Union, but he defined the Union in terms of freedom, not geography. He dated the country’s founding not from 1787, the date of the Constitution, but from 1776 the date of the Declaration of Independence from the tyranny of George III, which said, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’. He once said at Independence Hall in Philadelphia where the Declaration of Independence was signed,
I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the… Declaration of Independence… [which gave] liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance… If this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle – I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.
He said in his second Message to Congress in 1862, ‘In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free – honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope on earth’. He is here referring to the principle of a people governing themselves democratically, the vision that rings most movingly at the end of the address he gave at Gettysburg, where 46,000 Yankees and Rebels had slaughtered one another in late 1863. It is probably the most famous speech in the annals of oratory. It concluded, ‘…that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth’. The saving of popular government for the world was, I say again, his deepest purpose.
The war lasted over four years. Three hundred and twenty thousand men died, more than in all other American wars put together. That included a quarter of Southerner males of military age. In 1866 a sixth of the budget of Mississippi spent on artificial limbs. The end of slavery freed four million people, one eighth of the whole population of the re-United States.
What happened during Reconstruction and in the subsequent history of blacks is an advance on slavery but not – certainly not at first - a new birth of freedom. One Southerner wrote prophetically, ‘We will not be forgiven. There is a rancor in our hearts. We hate you, sir’. Ex-slaves moved onto a labour market with no owner economically motivated to keep them fit. Northern Carpetbaggers (named after their makeshift valises) invaded the South and opportunistically took their revenge. Southern whites retaliated and publicly lynched over 3000 black people, a practice which extended into my own lifetime and has current sequellae. Picture postcards of the lynchings were made and sold on the site, body parts, ropes and chains, too. The Ku Klux Klan grew up in the wake of the Civil War and still had four million members in 1925, the year 50,000 of them marched publicly in Washington. At that time the Klan controlled the political power in seventeen states.
I have tried in this section to share some interesting and perhaps less well-known dimensions of Lincoln’s ways of dealing with the complexities of a real and tragic historical situation, one of the most fraught in history. I believe that good came from an unpromising mixture of good and evil but rather less unalloyed good than is often claimed.
I turn now to his private self. Earlier this year The Atlantic monthly magazine ran a series of articles about base things alleged about Lincoln, most of them gathered by his law partner, William Herndon, including allegations that he was illegitimate, consorted with whores, had syphilis, fathered illegitimate children, was profligate and debauched and that his wife was unfaithful. Herndon was an early member of the ‘warts and all’ school of biography which is in fashion today. His view was that ‘the “fiery furnace” in which Lincoln’s character had been formed was in fact directly responsible for some of his finest human qualities’. Herndon did not publish many of these allegations but did write them in a notebook which he showed to at least one person. He wrote, ‘To tell the truth – the exact truth as you see it is a hard road to travel in this world when that truth runs square up against our ideas of what we think it ought to be’. I suggest that his motive was de-idealization and in the service of the depressive position.
If we focus now on Lincoln’s family life, we find little but trials and tribulations. His new-born younger brother died when Lincoln was about three; his mother, aunt and uncle died when he was nine. He did not get along with his father, who he felt treated him like a slave and from whom he was so estranged that he would not go to his deathbed or funeral or provide a stone for his grave. His sisters both died young, one when he was eighteen. When his girlfriend died his friends had to watch over him lest he commit suicide, a subject about which he often talked. Three of his sons died young, one at three, another at eleven. Another was disabled; only one survived to adulthood.
He had to preside over the worst kind of war, brother against brother in their own homeland. He spoke of himself as the most miserable man living and the loneliest man in America. He had a slew of epithets about hell, including saying that if Satan’s job was as tough as his, he could pity him. During the war he wrote, ‘If there is a worse place than Hell, I am in it’. He was throughout his adult life burdened with depressive episodes, what one called ‘a sadness so profound that the depths of it cannot be sounded or estimated by normal minds’, while another said that ‘he had the saddest expression I have ever seen in a human being’s eyes’. His biography is replete with times when he wept, nay sobbed, with his whole self.
His wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, whose mother died when she was seven, was a harpy, a shrewish woman, and their marriage was, to put it mildly, stormy. Their married life was called ‘a domestic hell on earth’, and she was referred to as a tigress, a wildcat, a she-wolf, hellian, she-devil. When he displeased her, she beat him on the head or in the face with anything which came to hand, usually a broom. He spent many a night sleeping on a friend’s floor. Once, when asked if his wife was away, he replied that no, he was away. She had uncontrollable rages. He was hen-pecked, and his friends were mortified on his behalf. Her excesses did not remain indoors. She chased him in the streets. She was violently jealous of his having any contact, even conversation at official functions, with other women and once made this dramatically clear in public in front of a slew of army officers. She interfered in patronage, i.e., public appointments, and badgered him to sack valued colleagues to the point that he said that if he listened to her he would have no cabinet. She was extravagant, buying gloves by the dozens and lots of dresses and soft goods she didn’t need. She misappropriated substantial funds and falsified records. She shop-lifted, forged documents, perjured herself and ran up a bill for $64,000 at a jeweler without her husband’s knowledge which was presented after his death. A sympathetic friend of Mary Todd Lincoln describer her as ‘willful, impulsive, imprudent, superficial, vain, childish, stingy, jealous, emotionally unstable, tactless, gossipy, malicious, materialistic, sharp-tongued, acquisitive and indiscreet’. Enemies said worse, e.g., insolent, mean, imperious, a she-wolf, according to Lincoln’s law partner. Lincoln apparently thought her somewhat deranged and treated her as a child. He once gave her a book with a passage marked which said a marriage could deteriorated from happiness ‘to a fountain of misery, of quality absolutely infernal’. A decade after his assassination. she was committed by her son Robert to mental hospitals for thirteen months
There is, as there must be, another side to this story. Lincoln is said to have had little capacity for intimacy, never confided, was abstracted and cool. One student of the marriage concluded that ‘over the slow fires of misery that he learned to keep banked and under heavy pressure deep within him, his innate qualities of patience, tolerance, forbearance, and forgiveness were tempered and refined’. It is my impression that many public figures are not properly available as private people, even though they may have immense charm and presence. It might even be suggested that this is one characteristic of the psychodynamics of charisma.
Let’s now peruse assessments of him and his place in history. He took literally the designation of the President as Commander in Chief of the armed forces and moved and removed his generals at will until he found one, Ulysses S. Grant, who had the grit to get the job done. A recent biographer has said that in this role, which combined ‘military perception with political vision and the skilful handling of personalities, Lincoln had no superior in American history’. William Tecumseh Sherman, Lincoln’s most audacious general, the one who drove his army to the sea and struck at the heart of the Confederacy, said of his commander that of all men he seemed to combine more the elements of greatness and goodness. The diarist and Union soldier, Elisha Hunt Rhodes, said that in the field when they learned of Lincoln’s death it was as if each soldier had lost a personal friend. The poet, Walt Whitman, worked as a hospital orderly during the war and said that Lincoln had an almost superhuman tact. Frederick Douglass, a leading black figure, felt treated honorably by Lincoln, greatly admired him and said he had infinite wisdom, even though he often disagreed with Lincoln. In her reflective book on his reputation, Jan Morris describes Lincoln’s as ‘a life of hopeful fatalism’, called him ‘a great man who was also good’ and claims that he is better remembered in the world at large, his image more vivid and his reputation more generally revered, than any other politician of history’. He is ‘widely regarded as the greatest of all Americans’. His name is commemorated everywhere. His profile is on the American cent and the five dollar bill. Thirty-five towns and cities and twenty-two towns are named after him, as are an expensive American car and the centre where I did my postgraduate training as a psychotherapist.
No higher praise is possible for a mortal, you might say. He was also a much-admired raconteur and jokester with an irresistible charm. His gawky six-foot four cadaverous frame, augmented by a tall stovepipe hat, and his unkempt appearance made him look like a scarecrow. People smiled just at the very sight of him. The attribute I would point to is stoicism, a philosophy of life which I offer as a synonym for the depressive position, a topic to which I will return. Lincoln bore what he had to and continued to do his duty as he saw it in the face of all the vicissitudes I have sketched in the public and private spheres, in his outer and inner worlds. I now know a lot more about his limitations and admire him all the more for all that. I may idealize him less, though, which I believe is an advance in Kleinian terms.
I will say less about Nelson Mandela on the assumption that you are likely to be better informed about him. He is as universally admired in out time as Lincoln was in his. It won’t surprise you to learn that Lincoln was a hero of Mandela’s. He read his biography in prison, but we find his spirit in the earlier anti=apartheid ‘Freedom Charter’, largely drafted by Mandela - ‘no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people’ - and in a press release while he was on the run. He said that the apartheid government should ‘make way for a democratic government of the people, by the people for the people’.
Nelson Mandela was born in 1918 into the tribal aristocracy. His place was a hereditary counselor to a tribal chief, one whom the government deposed for insubordination. He was always stately and had a regal bearing. When he was young this was seen as arrogance, but it matured into a profound natural authority. When he entered a room, no matter who was there, a sense of presence came with him and people deferred.
His biography is easily told from village life to school to the city (where he was shocked and humiliated by the contrast between how he had previously been treated and the insults of city life. He entered law practice with Oliver Tambo. It was the first black firm of lawyers in South Africa. He became a member of the African National Congress and rose steadily through its ranks, significantly due to the patronage of Walter Sisulu, who saw in him a natural leader. What struck me in reading Anthony Sampson’s truly excellent biography and Mandela’s autobiography is how little he had actually done – as opposed to what he said – before he went underground and was caught and imprisoned. It is true that he had set up the underground military organization, Spear of the Nation, but he had only just shot a gun for the first time and had a little guerrilla training in Algiers before he was caught, imprisoned and while there retried for treason in the infamous Rivona trial. It could perhaps also be said that he did not do all that much after he was elected President of South Africa in his late seventies, given that he quite soon handed over all but ceremonial roles to Thabo Mbeki, who became his successor.
My main point, however, is that the central event of his life was that he served twenty-seven and a half years in prison. That’s 10,000 days. What we learn from his autobiography and Sampson’s authorised biography that this was the crucible for the maturation of his character. He was hot-headed and intemperate before prison; there he learned self-control. From the moment he set foot on Robben Island he marched to his own drummer, literally refusing to walk at the pace prescribed by the warders and refusing to wear the regulation short pants. They controlled his whereabouts and confined his body, but he was the master of his soul. I cannot hope to convey in a short talk his self-containment and his authority over both the warders and his comrades. He gained the deep respect of his jailers, one of whom attended his recent wedding. He also learned about the Boer mentality from them, and this was immensely important in his later negotiations, since he could grasp and empathise with their insecurities. He even learned Africans in an effort to gain greater insight into the minds of his opponents. Discipline, calmness, dignity, simplicity, integrity, forgiveness, compromise – these are some of the terms I noted from accounts of his character: ‘the unselfconscious emanation of uncluttered humanity’, as a poet put it. One of those who negotiated with him said he ‘came across as a man of Old World values, as an old Roman citizen with dignitas, gravitas, honestas, simplicitas’. He refused on several occasions to be allowed out of jail, because he would accept no conditions about where he would live, nor would he renounce violence, the comradeship of communists or the principle of majority rule. In the event, he was released unconditionally and embarked on long negotiations in which he held all the cards and none, leading to the 1994 election in which he was elected President. He stood down after one term and now lives in the village where he grew up.
While he was incarcerated a fellow prisoner taught him W. E. Henley’s poem ‘Invictus’, which ends,
It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.This expression of stoical philosophy is alluded to at least five times in Sampson’s biography. During his incarceration his inspiration was colossally important in gaining support from abroad, including all sorts of sanctions against apartheid. In the end, his endurance became a world symbol for principled resistance to injustice. The collaborator in his autobiography, Richard Stengel, said in an interview,
What happened to him on Robben Island, in a way, is that he began to see things in the round, in three dimensions. He began to see things that it was both ways. Nobody’s all good or all evil. Nobody operates purely out of selfish motives, or purely out of unselfish motives. It gave him a more rounded view of humanity and life.
A journalist said of the outcome, ‘What Lincoln was to America, Mandela is to Africa: the liberator’. He was also like Lincoln in having a homely and earthly style of speaking, a winning countenance and the intention to be magnanimous in victory. All have noted with astonishment his lack of bitterness and his refusal to be vengeful. Reparation was literally written into the South African constitution: ‘a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for Ubuntu but not for victimization’. He set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Tutu in which the guilty could obtain immunity in return for telling the whole truth.
Mandela paid a colossal price for all the things for which we so admire him. He described himself at a number of points as ‘the loneliest man in the world’ and said that as his fame grew he became more lonely and isolated, not physically but in a deeper way. During his presidency he confided to a colleague, ‘I have no friends’. Many, even those who worked intimately with him, including his biographers, say that one cannot really get inside a certain barrier, not of aloofness but of reserve. He is at his most apparently accessible in public. One is reminded of Lincoln.
Of course, his imprisonment had estranged him from his children and grandchildren, all of whom suffered from his martyrdom. His wife, Winnie, had been a bulwark over a considerable time, but she was not cut out for the torments rained on her by the authorities - banning, isolation and much more. She eventually became seriously delinquent and probably deranged. She had indiscreet affairs, was intemperate and headstrong, publicly advocated the barbaric form of killing known as ‘necklacing’ (a tire with petrol set alight around an enemy’s neck), misappropriated and embezzled money (sometimes for a lover) and was convicted for involvement in one brutal murder and known to have been involved in several others. Mandela stood by her as long as he could bear it, but he eventually could no longer (e.g., her lover once answered the phone when Mandela rang her in New York). He separated from her and when he announced it said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen I hope you appreciate the pain I have gone through’. Five years after his release he began divorce proceedings. He asked his lawyer not to compel him to reveal the ‘even more serious reasons why I left home’ but did say, ‘not once has she ever entered my bedroom whilst I was awake’. To the judge he said, ‘Can I put it simply, my Lord? If the entire universe tried to persuade me to reconcile with the defendant, I would not… I am determined to get rid of this marriage’. As you may know, he has since found marital happiness and has married Graca, the widow of Samora Machel, the former President of Mozambique, who has helped him reconstruct his relationships with his children and grandchildren.
As with the outcome of the Civil War, I do not want to make extravagant claims for post-apartheid South Africa. However, they did avoid civil war, thanks significantly to Mandela, along with the collective leadership of the African National Congress. Building a truly egalitarian society with government officials, many of whom were part of the old regime, is proving a huge task, and there are many, many falterings and some backsliding from democratic principles and practices. Rape, murder, burglary, theft, fatal car accidents are all indictably high, and 10% of the population of 43 million are HIV positive. But as African revolutions have gone, this one is a lot better than most, especially in maintaining multiracial government.
In closing I want to return to a term which I have mentioned several times – Stoicism. This philosophy was extolled by thoughtful Ancient Romans, e.g., Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, in the worst of dictatorial times. The Stoics knew a thing or two about what Winnicott called, as part of his definition of the depressive position, ‘acceptance of responsibility for all the destructiveness that is bound up with living, with the instinctual life, and with anger and frustration’. Other aspects of this position are relating to others as whole objects, i.e., people of value. Another is containment of self and others. I suggest that the American Civil War and the quarter of a century of Mandela’s imprisonment were crucibles for the forging of two characters which in their mature years dwelt remarkably, enduringly and stoically in the depressive position. To be more precise, it is said by many scholars that the forging of Lincoln’s mature self occurred between 1849, when he was seen as a political hack, and 1854, when he emerged as a mature and magnetic personage of 45 and was set on a trajectory which led him to the White House, of whom it was said that ‘the esteem in which he was held for truthfulness and integrity was a priceless possession… without precedent or parallel’ in American history. Both were regularly and genuinely self-deprecating, a view which Mandela summed up in saying that a saint is ‘just a sinner who keeps on trying’.
The central proposition of Stoicism is that one should hold on to one’s own virtues no matter what circumstances or vicissitudes come one’s way. Stoics believe that one has an inner essence which determines one’s real being and that one must remain true to that. You might say that it was proto-Kleinian in arguing for the primacy of the inner world in maintaining one’s integrity. I hope I have given you reason to admire my own heroes, as you may already but only more so, and that you may be attracted to the reflections of Klein and the Stoics, as well. Epictetus wrote, ‘First say to yourself what you would be; then do what you have to’. He also said to learn the difference between what you can and cannot control and act accordingly.
This is the text of a talk delivered to the Bristol Psychotherapy Association on 20 October 2000.
Copyright: The Author
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