Psychology and Afro-American Biography

Secondly, the biographer working in Afro-American culture must not curtail his or her work out of a sense of protectiveness either toward the subject or toward the race—a natural sense, given Afro-American history, but one that should be overcome in this instance. The example of Alain Locke (the influential Howard University professor and one of the major presiding figures of the Harlem Renaissance as a mentor of younger artists and as editor of The New Negro) is helpful here. Often peevish and even vindictive, Locke nevertheless carefully preserved for posterity even those documents that appear to show him in a poor light. Similarly, the black biographer can hardly allow himself or herself to imagine that the reputation of the race can be affected by what he or she writes about a particular subject. In time, everything will out, and the concealing biographer merely postpones the inevitable. No topic is too intimate for treatment by the biographer—whether that topic is sexuality or political or racial apostasy. A free and frank investigation, within the bounds of reason and the basic rules of evidence, is needed.

The biographer working in as controversial an area as the Afro-American literary tradition, or in any area, should set the highest standards of evidence. In one aspect in particular, the oral tradition, this may be a truly significant point. Much has been made, and deservedly so, about the value of the oral tradition to black culture. It needs to be remembered that a biographer must deal in specifics—and that the strong suit of the oral tradition, whatever it may be, is not the specific but the gloriously general. Gossip passed down through the generations is not superior to gossip passed over a telephone line, and is hardly the same as the oral tradition. The biographer must be on guard to distinguish one from the other, and on guard to save the reader from that most dangerous of interviewees—the person who knows little or nothing but is eager to help.

As for the basic question of overall form, I believe that there is certainly no one design that would accommodate the lives of black writers who cover the entire spectrum of human personality, politics, sexuality, and artistic sensibility. By form I mean, for example, the epic, in which the subject is a hero; or the approach of scientific, Zola-like detachment; or the novelistic; or even the approach taken in certain commercially successful biographies—though not of blacks—in which excerpts from interviews form the entire biography. The most tempting form in the context of black or minority culture in general is that of the epic, in which the hero or heroine advances his or her fortunes simultaneously with those of the race against almost insuperable odds that are usually identified with racism. There is indeed a deadly undertow that pulls many biographers of black subjects (or of subjects belonging to other politically and culturally aggrieved groups) toward propaganda and hagiography. But the most casual acquaintance with the lives of black writers should tell us that few of them—certainly few of the major ones—have been centrally impelled in their careers by a desire to champion the race. Many, indeed, have worked against the racial grain, and attempted to prove in their art the unimportance of race by showing their art to be somehow “above” race. A few have even detested the race, even as their careers have been taken, ironically, as triumphs of the race.

The black biographer, like any other biographer, must gather as much evidence as possible, and remain as open and pliable as possible—and think vigorously and independently all the while. Only then is he or she likely to be rewarded with the emergence of the form that is inevitable to the particular biographical situation. In this respect, biography is a passive exercise; in other respects, it is anything but passive. The biographer has a smaller range of choices than one perhaps imagines; the material, I think, chooses the form—when the form is well chosen. The suggestion by a friendly critic to me that there may be a form akin to and attuned to the rhythms of jazz and the blues and other predominantly black artistic achievements, and that the black biographer should seek it out, is charming but not likely to be very useful. In fact, it is likely to be useless unless one is approaching biography as if it were an art itself. But biography, even the biography of an artist, is definitely not an art; it is only in part an art. Nor is it a science; it is only partly a science. There should be no doubt, however, that the biographer must face his or her subject more like a scientist than an artist. Without an attempt to pursue the elusive and unattainable truth within recognizable rules of evidence—the heart of the scientific method—the biographer is a menace to literate society.

Hence my particular interest in the subject of the role of psychology in Afro-American biography. To many people, psychology still raises the specter of a flagrant violation of the intimate. In one of the finer novels written by an Afro-American, John A. Williams’s Sissie, the attitude of a black man to a certain doctor might be instructive as we look at this subject. The man, Ralph, is meeting Dr. Bluman, a white psychiatrist, for the first time. After some verbal fencing the doctor asks:

Many of us, faced with a psychoanalytic or a psychotherapeutic initiative—not to mention a psychiatrist—respond as Ralph does: We “feel a little defeated . . . finding it necessary to come here.” The same quality of reticence is noticeable when we look at the field of black biography—by which I mean the biographies of black Americans by anyone—and try to determine the extent to which books in the field have been influenced by, or have taken into account, the insights, discoveries, and methods of psychologists. If biographies of important blacks have not been so influenced to a marked degree, should they be? And what are the major problems and difficulties involved in the incorporation of psychological approaches in the field in general?

I believe it is fair to say that, far from being influenced by psychology, black biography has kept a vast distance between itself and that discipline. If one looks at even the most acclaimed books in the field, one sees hardly any attempt to link the art of biography to what I call—if only in provocation—the science of psychoanalysis. Methodologically, insofar as black biography is concerned, we have really not advanced beyond W. E. B. Du Bois’s historic description of the black American mind in The Souls of Black Folk—the famed, oft-invoked description of the Afro-American's “double-consciousness”:

As biographers, we have hardly reached Du Bois’s second significant formulation or description of the black mind—a description of a mind like his own—which appears in his autobiography Dusk of Dawn (1940). The passage begins:

To repeat: I don’t believe that biographers of Afro-Americans have moved in psychological terms past Du Bois’s image of the two souls to Du Bois’s image of the plate glass between the races. And it goes without saying that the latter image, published in 1940, has itself been superseded by other images from the arts. Our biographers have thus lagged far behind our artists—a fact that should not be a revelation to anyone. Some years ago, I suggested that all of Afro-American literature has come out, in a sense, of The Souls of Black Folk—and most precisely from Du Bois’s image of the divided souls. I would add that the greatest of postwar black fiction, notably that of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison (and especially Wright’s “The Man Who Lived Underground” and Ellison’s Invisible Man), had as their symbolic antecedent Du Bois’s image of the plate glass and the invisible, increasingly enraged black who smashes his way out. Richard Wright, unlike our biographers—indeed, unlike even some of his biographers—had a deep interest in psychiatry, which sprang from his own relationship with Dr. Frederic Wertham (author of “An Unconscious Determinant in Native Son,” first published in Journal of Clinical and Experimental Psychology in July 1944). This relationship led to Wright’s helpful role in setting up the first psychiatric clinic in Harlem, and to his novel Savage Holiday, which is explicitly psychiatric in its approach.

If one goes beyond postwar fiction, one sees in at least one place—John A. Williams’s Sissie, which I cited earlier—the black novelist unafraid to take psychiatry seriously, and in its most proper, clinical form. The truth is that some of our best artists have forged ahead in their interest in psychology, while their biographers have lagged behind. Take Du Bois, for example. In The Souls of Black Folk, which is about a people, he borrowed the concept of “double-consciousness” from academic psychology, or what passed for it then. This concept was relatively young in academic and intellectual terms when Du Bois adapted it from the scientific currency of William James and his colleagues in the field. But Du Bois did not see fit to make a similar appeal to psychology when he himself became a biographer in his John Brown, published six years later. There he fell back on hoary methodology—the historian Hippolyte Taine’s pseudoscientific notion that the great determining factor in the emergence of a leader is the trio of race, milieu, and moment. Du Bois used this approach to explain the mind of a man who clearly, even according to his own brother, was crazy at least part of the time. Du Bois’s disloyalty to psychology was unfortunate. Double-consciousness, as a term, facilitates entry into the human mind. Race, milieu, and moment, on the other hand, are as external as dialectical materialism in explaining it—by no means completely invalid, hardly impossible of psychological application, but nevertheless almost inherently external, one might say, to the working of the mind.

One recent book by a black litterateur turned veteran social scientist has addressed this problem directly (in fact, apart from the black historian Earl Thorpe’s efforts in psychohistory, I don’t know of anyone else who has come close to the subject). That book is Leadership, Love, and Aggression, written by the late Allison Davis and published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1983. In attempting four distinct psychological studies—of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—Davis does not conceal his hostility to most of their biographers. On Douglass: “None of his biographers has studied the central paradox in Douglass’s personality—the conflicting hatred and love for a powerful father who treated him as a son at times, but never emancipated or publicly acknowledged him. Only Dr. Stephen Weissman, in a short article, has explored this early, ambivalent bond.” And later: “From the ages of seven to fifteen he had been reared by Sophia Auld and loved by her as her own son. It seems extraordinary that his biographers have ignored so central a fact in his emotional life and identity development.” On Du Bois: “He was an enigma to friends as well as to enemies. Faced with his inscrutability, his biographers have dealt only with symptoms.” On Wright (“the angriest, and yet the most influential of all black writers”): Michel Fabre, the leading Wright scholar, and author of the biography The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (1973) is “a man of good intentions but of incredible naïveté both about black life in Mississippi and about the psychology of personality. [Fabre] is not equipped to deal with Wright’s emotional development. He has no knowledge whatever of Wright’s basic emotional conflicts, and apparently no interest in learning their continual working in his behavior, his fantasies, and his writing.” On King, no such direct attack is mounted against a biographer, but we may infer Davis’s sense of the inadequacy of King’s biographers by noting that the books he praises most for their understanding of King were written by King’s widow and by a man who lived with the family for many years: Coretta Scott King’s My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. (1969) and L. D. Reddick’s 1959 study Crusader Without Violence: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (“All other biographers have depended upon Reddick’s book for a knowledge of King’s first thirty years”).

As far as I can tell, Davis’s book is the first to attempt a psychoanalytic reading of black leaders. If it isn’t required reading for any other reason, it should be for that reason. A published psychological study of a black leader is an act of courage in itself—so entrenched is the opposition to such work. (The fear of theory runs deep, as I found out some years ago, when after a mildly Freudian analysis of an aspect of Langston Hughes, I was publicly rebuked by two senior black scholars—one who asserted that his only interest was in the work, not the life, and another who urged me to leave Freud alone and instead consult the African gods for my insights. To the first scholar, protested that biography i s about the life first and foremost; to the second, I should have said, among other things, that his statement was Olympian.)

Davis’s model in Leadership, Love, and Aggression is more than mildly Freudian; it is strongly so. Originating in a paper first delivered before a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, it depends heavily on Freud’s discussions of aggression—which takes many forms, of which anger is “the simplest, most normal.” Davis’s model distinguishes between “realistic anger” and the nourishment of resentment, most often by the conflict between “the wish to be loved and an angry desire to avenge a lack of love.” The handling of aggression falls into three basic types: sadistic, masochistic, and affiliative or “reality-oriented.” Davis cites Freud’s “War and Death” on the closeness between the human desire to kill and the drive to love; anger must be vented or it will destroy. He also cites Freud’s “On Narcissism”: “In the last resort we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill, and must fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we cannot love.”

Davis’s book received scant attention. As far as I can tell, it went unnoticed by the New York Times; no academic literary journal reviewed it. To some extent, this treatment was deserved. For example, Davis undertook to discuss Martin Luther King, Jr.’s toilet training without, to say the least, sufficient evidence. And in treating Richard Wright, he defied the many indications that the autobiography Black Boy was in a number of ways (as Michel Fabre showed conclusively) an unusually wide manipulation of the facts of Wright’s life, quoting Wright’s words there as evidence of the truth. He therefore takes it as a fact that Wright was reared in “a clan of obsessively religious and sadistic women,” in “a family of infinite sadistic inventiveness.” “I have never read,” Davis writes, without irony, “of so violent a clan of women.” On the other hand, it was on something akin to first-hand experience (they had known each other in Chicago) that Davis declares of Wright that “he never enjoyed life among Negroes,” and he also asserts, on ground justifiable by an intelligent reading of Wright’s work, even though none of his biographers noted it, that “Wright hated blacks as deeply as whites did.”

At least two of the few reviews of Leadership, Love, and Aggression were wildly contradictory. One, in the Library Journal, thought the book “not likely to change history’s view of these men.” On the other hand, the School Library Journal believed that it filled “a giant gap in the knowledge and understanding of these men.” The latter may be overstated, but I think it errs, if it errs, in the right direction. To those who say that to impose psychoanalytic thought on the black mind is to extend European hegemony over blacks I would answer, first, that any analysis is better than none, and anti-Freudian blacks have offered no countersystem or antisystem worthy of the name; secondly, that the Freud-Erik Erikson model does not so much declare itself as final truth as it raises questions of enormous value to ourselves. We need to remember, in examining our reservations about psychiatry and psychobiography, that as scholars we have no real hope of reconstituting the past, and therefore should have no immobilizing fear of utterly misrepresenting it. We investigate and re-create that past, ultimately, in order to understand our lives and our society better. For that reason alone, we should proceed with less caution.

In his essay on King, for example, Davis’s intention is to uncover how King was able to turn hate into affiliative love. If one does not make this psychiatrically inspired attempt, fraught with danger as it is, the consequences can range from simple dullness as a biographer to a range of error—the greatest of which would be to suppose that such a turning of hate into love is really impossible, and that the love-gestures of King were superficial and strategic, like the advertising campaigns of our ambitious, image-building politicians. We need to approach our leaders not with reverence for them but with a degree of reverence for complex methodology—or at the very least without the Primitive fear of complex methodology that assails many of us. (One of the great ironies here is that, as Davis points out, the most anti-intellectual black position, that of the cultural nationalists, was most effectively fueled in the 1960s by a psychiatrist, Franz Fanon, notably in his The Wretched of the Earth.)

In King’s case, as seen by Davis, psychology reinforces our sense of his goodness by demonstrating that that which made him good to the point of greatness was also psychologically possible. In the case of Du Bois, the observation is different. Du Bois is seen as the grand crusader that he was, but the will to crusade is linked to the force of aggression within him, which itself is linked to other factors. These include his almost impenetrable loneliness, his fear of women, his early anxiety about illegitimacy, and his guilt over the fact that he hated his mother for, among other things, bringing upon him the stigma of illegitimacy. I mention Davis’s treatment of Du Bois and King to underscore a point—that politics (or a basic position concerning power and people are involved here. Freudian psychology is conciliatory and integrationist; I hasten to add that I do not think it, for that reason, sinister. Neither does Davis. And it is not necessarily authoritarian as a methodology. Davis prizes King’s reconciling qualities of forgiveness and love over Du Bois’s scourging hatred, but he is never so haughty or so foolish as to ignore the fact that Du Bois was an extraordinary force for good in the history of black America.

One recent book on black American literature, it seems to me, draws creatively on a psychological approach for its literary insights: Michael Cooke’s Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy (1985). Cooke sees four steps in the unfolding of black literature. First is “self-veiling,” marked by an unasserted, undemanding adaptation to the environment: “Its motive—to survive—is positive, but its vision limited.” Second is “solitude,” in which “the black character stands out from the veil [separating the races] and survives, but survives without sustaining or amplifying connections.” The third is “kinship,” when “relationships come into play, as the conditions of life become ampler and more varied”; but the enrichment comes “without relief,” and the literature that results cannot escape a sense of “something deliberate, rather than fluent, and defensive, rather than spontaneous.” Last of all is “intimacy,” marked by “an openness towards the turns of inner life as well as the force of things without, and by a conviction of being at home in any dimension of the human experience.” Robert Hayden’s poetry and Alice Walker’s Meridian exemplify the last category. James Baldwin and Ishmael Reed, on the other hand, stand for “tragic and ironic denials of intimacy.” Another evolving stage is “beyond intimacy,” marked by a kind of full-scale plunging into black experience, “axiomatic and comprehensive,” as opposed to plunging into the black experience, which is called “dogmatic and political.”

What we have here, I think, is a loose but intelligent adaptation or recasting of Erikson, surely the most influential and effective of the Freud-based biographer-psychologists, and his eight stages of human development: trust (learned at the breast); autonomy (toilet training, control of the anus); initiative; industry; identity (the sum of all previous identities); intimacy (the ability to love and surrender in love); generativity; and integrity. This adaptation or recasting on Cooke’s part is quite sweeping, but I do not think that anyone familiar with Afro-American literature and culture, and Afro-American life, can deny that his stages parallel certain prominent features of the evolution of the literature and culture over the past century. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that his book offers one of the more provocative and engaging statements on the psychology of black expression since Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk in 1903.

However, one question raised by Cooke’s work seems to me particularly challenging. Does literature “improve” to the extent that the text proposes what we the readers consider to be more advanced human development, greater psychological maturity? Or is such a consideration in the end virtually extraliterary? From a literary or artistic point of view, something is obviously questionable, I would think, about any scheme that places Robert Hayden's poetry, fine as it is, at the summit of black literature, even if we are tempted to see Hayden, with his gentle, inclusive Baha’i philosophy and his patient, literate craftsmanship, as possibly the wisest and most admirable of our writers. I am not certain that we can use our sense of the state of mental health of a narrative voice or a narrative presence to evaluate the work of writers. Our typical psychological tools are not politically or racially neutral, it seems to me, and we should be wary of being swayed in artistic judgments by writers whose work suggest temperamental and intellectual calm and pliability, together with integrationist politics—even if we admire such calm and pliability, and practice such politics.

In other words, if there is a questionable element in Cooke’s argument, it lies in the apparently linear and progressive nature of his scheme. I suspect that each of his four areas will continue to generate literature to the end of time, and that no one area is by definition more likely than the others to produce what objectively can be called good literature. Allison Davis ends by praising each of his four leaders for what they achieved; he had tried to explain the contours of their behavior, its origin and development, and not to see them in some scale of evolution. No doubt he clearly admires most of all the apostle of love, Martin Luther King, Jr., who reflects Cooke’s and Erikson’s common stage of intimacy and Erikson’s generativity and integrity. King was also by far the most influential and successful of the four men (Douglass, Du Bois, Wright, and King) as a leader. But Davis never argues that King’s speeches or writings were superior to those of the others because of his greater psychological maturity. They were not. As an artist in words, and although he wrote several books and was renowned as a public speaker, King is decidedly inferior to Douglass, Du Bois, and Wright.

In insisting on the need to take psychology more into account, I do not want to cover up the limitations of the field, or even to underestimate them—or to avoid acknowledging that possibly, just possibly, the man who was pushing the African gods might be on to something, in the sense that Freud and Erikson, say, might be all wrong for blacks. Of enormous help here, though not definitive help, is the thinking of certain feminists on the question of autobiography and the related and greater matter of identity. In her essay “On Female Identity,” published in the Winter 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry, Judith Kegan Gardiner quotes Carolyn Heilbrun, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Elaine Showalter, and other critics on female identity and suggests that “the quest for female identity seems to be a soap opera, endless and never advancing, that plays the matinees of women’s souls.” I would say that the stabs by black cultural nationalists of a generation ago at defining black identity were often another version of the soap opera, or should I say another feature at the matinee—not so much As the World Turns but Apocalypse Now. But in the notes that Gardiner offers toward defining the answer to the question, “Who is there when a woman says, ‘I am,’” we should find something useful for our own question today.

Using the psychological insights of Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering, Gardiner concludes that “for every aspect of identity as men define it, female experience varies from the male model.” The cornerstone of male definitions of identity is, of course, Eriksonian, and Gardiner makes much of the fact that for him, “the paradigmatic individual achieving a mature identity is male, whereas the female has a specialized role as childbearer.” A rival theory of identity—the main rival, and of great appeal to litterateurs, as Gardiner points out—is Heinz Lichtenstein’s theory of “primary identity,” on which Norman Holland, for one, has drawn for his strongly psychoanalytic criticism involving reader-response. Gardiner links the three men for the purposes of indictment. “Neither Holland, Lichtenstein, nor Erikson,” she writes, “uses gender as a significant variable in his basic theory; none offers a theory of female identity as distinct from male identity.” The thrust of the rest of her essay is an attempt to repair this inadequacy. I would argue that it is pretty clear that she repairs very little—her ideas are generally vague and tentative, but perhaps necessarily so, as mine certainly would be if I tried to talk about black identity. However, it also doesn't take much to see that the damage she inflicts as she tries to do her repairs is valuable in itself, for the damage is done mainly to a male-dominated theory of allegedly human, allegedly gender-free identity that manages at the same time to slight women.

I applaud, finally, not her conclusions but her process. (Ironically, she believes that “female identity is a process, and primary identity for women is more flexible and relational than for men.”) Explorations of this sort are badly needed in black biography. Of course, explorations of this sort, in connection with black culture, would be in the hands of black American psychologists above all—but litterateurs apparently can expect little help from that quiet quarter. Incidentally, I have shifted from Judith Gardiner’s theorizing about women to theorizing about blacks, and I know that this shift appears to slight the topic of black women. Their experience indeed illuminates both sides of the question—gender and race. My point here, however, is that if we can separate men from women, we should be able, at least in theory, to separate blacks from whites. But we will do nothing at all on these scores if we do not accept the investigation of the mind as a proper province for the intellectual.

Why has black biography been so wary of psychology? The answers are many. A prejudice exists against psychoanalysis—ironically, not unlike the prejudice against biography itself. But are there reasons peculiar to black culture? One reason could be that most of the leading biographers of blacks are white, and write under diplomatic constraints in the more intimate areas of their subjects lives—and diplomacy is often the art of deceiving. But black scholars are really no more blunt or brave than their white counterparts. They are, indeed, at least as timid in the face of the potential black readership. In addition, many undoubtedly feel the overriding need, in a racist national culture, to keep black heroes scrubbed and shining and heroic, and to conceal any evidence that may “tarnish” their reputations.

For myself, I find that I share the general suspicion of psychology in biography that I write myself. Some time ago, a friend who had read a large part of my biography of Hughes in manuscript form, and also read an essay of mine called “The Origins of Poetry in Langston Hughes” that was published in the Southern Review, expressed some bewilderment at the difference in approach between the two. Not only was the essay written at a more intense pitch than was the biography itself, but it seemed to be more “intellectual.” In the essay, I wrote of a contest between will and passivity in Hughes, springing out of anger and a sense of isolation, on one hand, and a desire for a stasis like death on the other; I tried to argue that Hughes’s poetry often showed the flaring of one or the other of these polar oppositions, but that his best work marked a compromise between the two because of the annealing context of the black race, which had entered into the boy’s consciousness in lieu of his parents.

I don’t believe that in my biographical work I ever write boldly about such factors as will and passivity. I would hesitate to write about neurosis and aggression, although I may betray a literary weakness for identifying guilt and shame. Why am I so reticent as a biographer? Biography, it seems to me, is an art insofar as it encourages genuine storytelling, and not many tales would survive the introduction of terminology borrowed from the sciences. The type of story that survives most easily is science fiction, with its dependence on scientific terminology. Which is perhaps why so many explicitly psychoanalytic biographies read like . . . science fiction.

These reservations should not lead the biographer to ignorepsychology. Rather, we have the burden of recognizing the validity of psychology and of using its methods to understand our subject. Then we have to translate those insights into a language appropriate to our discipline. In the process, something will be lost and the room for error is potentially great. But we really have no choice in the matter.

Let me end with a suggestion and then two observations.

Just as a psychiatrist must go through analysis in order to be certified, perhaps it should be the case that no one should attempt the biography of an artist, and perhaps the biography of anyone—if the aim is serious biography—without having become acquainted, in some form, with the basic psychoanalytic approaches. If this means entering a course of therapy, or the more expensive and time-consuming analysis, so be it. Surely we all can use at least a little psychotherapy.

Also, the tear of the political consequences of psychiatry and psychoanalysis needs to be reexamined. What we may fear, from a political point of view, is only the American version of Freud. As Sherry Turkel has pointed out in Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud’s French Revolution, while American psychiatry has maintained itself historically as the antithesis of progressive politics, or of politics at all, in recent years the French overcame their historic hostility to Freud and underwent a kind of conversion experience and devised a reinterpretation of Freud that has made his teachings, especially as interpreted and challenged by Lacan, not only compatible with socialism and feminism, for example, but a prime source of inspiration to both movements. One may see Fanon’s work as part of this process.

And last, as biographers of blacks we should not forget the simple truth that being black in America is above all a psychological state. I believe that the effects of direct racism on the personality are trivial and relatively powerless compared to its indirect effects, which can be crippling. The damage of racism is often done long before someone is finally called a “n*****”—and many of us now go through life without a personal experience of that thrilling moment. Thus one explains very little as a biographer if one does not attempt to explain the mind, and to do so—in the absence of a rival model—according to some model derived, as Erik Erikson’s and Allison Davis’s are, from the works of Freud, or from some conscious opposition to Freud.