by David Cohen
Freud and the ambitions of psychohistory
Since the mid-nineteenth century, many brilliant historians have concentrated on political, social and economic history. At school, I had two distinguished teachers: Peter Brooks, who went on to become Dean of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and T. E. B. Howarth, later Master of Trinity College, Oxford. They taught us to look at the reasons why we won the Battle of Agincourt, why we defeated the Spanish Armada and how George III lost America. As a schoolboy, I had to master the arguments between Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists and the God-fearing, sex-crazed Anabaptists, who seized the town of Munster in 1534 and declared the Kingdom of God on Earth had materialised in the town. The cage in which the tortured remains of their leader, John of Leiden, was exhibited still hangs from the steeple of St Lambert’s Church. The closest we came to discussing any psychological ‘causes’ of history was the thesis put forward by Max Weber, who argued that the rise of capitalism was helped by the Reformation. Protestants were more motivated to achieve, if only to convince themselves that they were among the elect who would be on a flight path to Heaven.
In a number of his writings after 1910, Freud attempts to use psychoanalytic insights to understand historical personalities. He first examined da Vinci’s ‘The Virgin and Child with St Anne’and offered an analytic interpretation. Look at the Virgin’s garment sideways and you see a vulture, he claimed, arguing that this was a manifestation of a ‘passive homosexual’ childhood fantasy. In the Codex Atlanticus, da Vinci describes being attacked in his crib by a vulture. Freud translated the passage as follows: ‘I recall as one of my very earliest memories that while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips.’
The tail in the mouth symbolises fellatio. Freud believed da Vinci’s fantasy was based on the memory of sucking his mother’s nipple. Freud had a surrealist imagination and produced a theory to match. Da Vinci’s fantasy, he claimed, was connected to Egyptian hieroglyphs that represented the mother as a vulture because the Egyptians believed male vultures did not exist. Unfortunately, the word ‘vulture’ was a mistranslation. The bird that da Vinci imagined was, in fact, a kite, which rather destroyed Freud’s thesis, as there are male kites – and the Egyptians knew that.
Freud’s mistake enabled many historians to belittle his ideas but the Pentagon either did not know or did not care about these academic squabbles. In 1943, the American military contacted a young psychiatrist, Walter Langer, who had studied psychoanalysis in Vienna before the start of the war. He was asked to collaborate on a top-secret psychological profile of Hitler. The Allies hoped Langer’s analysis would reveal Hitler’s weaknesses and offer suggestions on how to defeat him. However, the study was cautious and did not draw far-reaching conclusions from limited facts.
Any hope that historians would employ psychology seriously was destroyed in 1958, when the well-known psychoanalyst Erik Erikson published Young Man Luther. Luther rebelled against the Church because he had unresolved issues with his father, Erikson argued. The youngish monk, who pinned his ninety-five theses to the door of the church at Wittenberg, was furious with the Pope because he had never dealt with his anger towards his own father. Many historians were unimpressed, particularly as Erikson made a number of factual errors and relied far too much on three remarks allegedly made by Luther in old age. Erikson’s book sparked much controversy but he chose to stay aloof and refused to respond to criticism.
In 1967, nearly thirty years after he died, Freud ‘published’ his last book. It was a biography of President Woodrow Wilson, co-authored with William Bullitt, a former patient of Freud, who became the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union. The work was a devastating attack on Wilson, who never began to understand his neuroses. As a result of never having seen a therapist, he lacked insight and was subsequently out-manoeuvred by Clemenceau and Lloyd George in the negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles. As Bullitt knew Wilson well and Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, had also worked for the President, the book was formidably well-researched, though marred by the contempt both authors had for their subject. The President suffered from subconscious cannibalism, they bitched, and wanted to eat his father, whom he pretended to adore.
In general, historians remain wary of descending into what many see as a pit of psychobabble. In her biography of Charles II, for example, Lady Antonia Fraser snipes that ‘in his case blood was evidently less important than those early formative years rated so highly by the Jesuits and modern psychology’, dumping Freud and Ignatius Loyola in the same unsatisfactory pot. But Charles II and Elizabeth I are among the most intriguing British monarchs – in childhood, each had to cope with severe traumas, but they survived and did not spiral into psychopaths, often behaving generously to their enemies.
Oldest children rarely succeed
Monarchy is very much a family business. According to the law of primogeniture, the eldest son should follow his father on to the throne. The statistics are surprising, however. I include some forgotten figures among the forty-eight who have been proclaimed King or Queen of England. The unhappy Lady Jane Grey reigned for only nine days – at fifteen, she was pushed on to the throne by her father-in-law. Other largely forgotten reigns are those of Henry the Younger, who ruled jointly with his father Henry II between 1170 and 1183 and that of Louis, heir to the King of France, also proclaimed King of England in 1216. For six months, he ruled the lands south of the Wash.
Henry VI confuses the statistics as he managed two reigns or, according to Shakespeare, two parts. In 1461 the King was deposed and replaced by Edward IV and so concluded his first part. Unusually, Henry was not filleted, beheaded, drowned in Malmsey wine, nor disposed of in any of the ways so popular in medieval times. This concession allowed him to return for a final flourish. (I have counted Henry as only one monarch, though.) A crowned king could not be crowned again and so Henry had to be ‘readopted’, a curiously modern term; he was eventually murdered by his cousin.
Seven Lord Protectors also ruled but only two did so in their own right. When Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, the belief that the son should succeed the father was so ingrained that the council of state named Oliver’s son, Richard, as the next Lord Protector. England was 300 years ahead of North Korea in trying to establish a hereditary republic. Richard Cromwell was a true survivor and outlived Charles II, James II, William III and Mary II. In 1712, Richard died peacefully in his own bed, fifty-three years after he had given up trying to rule Britain.
The surprise is that only nine of the forty-eight rulers to succeed were the eldest child of the previous monarch. In 1272, Henry III was succeeded by his first son – Edward I – and, for the next 105 years, eldest sons followed their fathers. This is the longest period of orderly succession in the ten centuries. In 1307, Edward I was succeeded by his eldest son, Edward II. Then, in January 1327, Edward II abdicated, to be succeeded by his eldest son, Edward III. Edward II was murdered at the end of the year to prevent any comeback on his part.
When he died in 1422, Henry V was succeeded by his son, Henry VI. It would be another 125 years until a first son again followed his father on to the throne. In 1547, Edward VI succeeded the flamboyant Henry VIII. The year 1727 saw the next ‘correct’ succession when George II became King after the death of his father, George I. The next father-to-eldest-son succession took place in 1820, when George IV took over from his ‘mad’ father, George III. It would be eighty years before another first-born inherited: Edward VII, in 1901. In 1936, Edward VIII, the first son of George V, was crowned but abdicated. Then, in 1952, George VI’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, followed her father.
The eldest child did not succeed for many reasons; the catalogue of mishaps and tragedies included shipwreck, murder, epidemics, appalling medical care, conspiracies, exile, execution, a wayward cricket ball and many other slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Of the first-born who got there in the end, six were called Edward. Often
there was rivalry between and within the generations. Since 1066, sons have plotted against their fathers, especially when the monarch lived a ludicrously long time in the opinion of his child. To date, no British monarch has reigned into their nineties. George III died at eighty-one; Queen Victoria lived to eighty-one. The present Queen, Elizabeth II, turned eighty-six in 2012 – the oldest person ever to occupy the throne.
Some royals have not been able to cope with the pressures. George III was not the first to have some sort of breakdown. The long history reveals a number of monarchs were psychologically fragile. Around 1370, Edward III suffered some such episode, as did Henry VI on a number of occasions – most dramatically around 1453 – and Henry VII in 1503.
The royals, childcare and therapy
In The King’s Speech (2010), the speech therapist Lionel Logue ‘saves’ George VI. The film never mentions the fact that George was treated for depression years before he met Logue. He was seen by Sir Frederick Treves, who looked after the so-called ‘Elephant Man’, and by leading psychiatrist Sir Maurice Craig, whose patients included many upper-class winter sports enthusiasts who developed ‘nervous exhaustion’ on the slopes. George’s father, King George V, was so concerned that he attached a doctor, Louis Greig, to his son’s permanent staff. The king could see the boy was nervous and stammered, but never seems to have acknowledged that his own behaviour as a father might have helped cause those problems.
It is also impossible to understand the royal family today without looking at the childhood of Queen Elizabeth II and that of Prince Philip. Chapter 10 deals with the Queen’s rather happy childhood; Prince Philip had a very different experience. He grew up in a family which included Princess Marie Bonaparte, a famous analyst who was close to Freud. His aunt by marriage, Edwina Mountbatten, was the granddaughter of Sir Ernest Cassell, who set up a psychiatric hospital for soldiers who suffered shell shock in the First World War. Cassell asked the psychiatrist Sir Maurice Craig to help plan the hospital. Together they appointed as its first director Thomas Ross. Both Ross and Craig treated members of the royal family, including Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Alice, and George VI.
A year after Philip was born, his father faced an extreme life event: Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark was court-martialled for losing a battle against the Turks and forced to flee his own country. Soon afterwards, Philip’s mother began to behave in a very disturbed manner. The family consulted Thomas Ross, who diagnosed schizophrenia – a reasonable conclusion as Princess Alice claimed she was often in conversation with Christ and the Buddha.
Only those who have managed to cope with a severely disturbed person in their family can truly understand the constant stress it causes. Prince Philip’s father could not handle it when his wife ‘went mad’ and he left for the South of France. In contrast, Princess Alice’s mother was distraught but practical. She arranged for her daughter to attend the Tegel Clinic in Berlin, which was run by Ernst Simmel, a close colleague of Freud’s. Princess Alice then went to a Swiss asylum run by Ludwig Binswanger, another follower of Freud’s. Binswanger also described her condition as paranoid schizophrenia.
Prince Philip’s mother is not the only royal to have been incarcerated in an asylum in the last sixty years. The Bowes-Lyons family, the family of Elizabeth II’s mother, had to place two first cousins and three second cousins of the current Queen in Banstead Hospital in Surrey; their presence there was revealed in the 1980s by The Sun and the royal family was shamed into providing for them. One reason this was kept secret is that at least two other royals have received psychiatric help – and these episodes almost certainly affected their performance as parents.
George VI and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon knew this troubled history and made heroic attempts to give the current Queen and Princess Margaret a normal, loving childhood. The girls saw their parents every day, hugs and kisses were routine and the family played games together. When she became Queen in 1952, however, Elizabeth II was beset by pressures: she was just twenty-five years old and forced to cope with enormous responsibilities, as well as dealing with the loss of her beloved father. Official duties took her away from her family. Young children whose parents have recently been bereaved often absorb their depression.
As a toddler, Prince Charles faced another problem. His father had survived a traumatic childhood and survivors often find it hard to be sympathetic to those less robust than themselves. It seems Prince Philip was unable to see why his son could not ‘get on with it’, as he himself had done (Philip’s own words to describe his reaction to his chaotic childhood). Prince Charles’s sons, of course, have had to deal with the death of their mother, when the Mercedes in which she was travelling crashed in Paris on the night of 31 August 1997.
One of my aims is to use contemporary psychological research to make sense of the relationships between royal children and their parents. Authors do not always know what their readers are already familiar with, so it seems prudent to explain some concepts. Freud argued that all boys go through an Oedipal stage when they unconsciously want to sleep with their mothers and kill their fathers. He made much of sibling rivalry. In 1914, he wrote the paper ‘On Narcissism’, and the long case history shows that a number of kings, including Henry VIII and George IV, have been deeply narcissistic.
Life events – and their effect on parenting
As well as sibling rivalry, the Oedipus complex and narcissism, a fourth concept must be considered: ‘life events’. In 1967, Thomas H. Holmes and Dr Richard H. Rahe suggested that individuals might be more vulnerable to illness had they suffered too many ‘life events’. After some years, they compiled a chart of forty-three life events that provoked stress. The Life Events Scale has become a staple of psychological research and it is now clear there is a link between life events and the way parents behave. Key life events include:
Death of a spouse
Divorce
Death of a close family member
Pregnancy
Sexual difficulties
Success in work
Trouble with in-laws
Changes in living conditions
Any analysis of royal family history also has to include the grotesquely improbable. Holmes and Rahe did not have many subjects who had lived through murders in their immediate family, let alone instances when one family member ordered the execution of another. They did not imagine ‘changes in living conditions’ would include being removed by soldiers from a palace where they had been pampered only to be flung into the rat-infested Tower of London, knowing many of their relatives had not emerged from there alive. Holmes and Rahe also neglected the question of kidnapping. In 1786, George Washington encouraged a plot to seize Prince William, George III’s third son, who liked to wander around New York without an escort. Princess Anne was also the subject of a kidnap attempt in 1974.
Assassination does not figure in the scale as a separate category. The royals have been targeted more than most. Two lunatics tried to kill ‘mad’ King George III. Six men attempted to kill Queen Victoria, and one of them tried twice to do so. There has also been at least one attempt to kill Prince Charles. A surprising number of royals and their close associates have died in accidents. Prince Philip’s sister, Cecilie, her husband and two of their children died in an air accident in Ostend in 1937. She was pregnant and her stillborn child was found in the wreckage. George V’s fourth son, George, died in an air crash in Scotland in 1942. The Duke of Gloucester destroyed his Rolls-Royce driving back from Churchill’s funeral. He survived, but in 1972 his son died in an air crash. In 1979, Philip’s ‘honorary grandfather’, Lord Mountbatten, was killed by the IRA, as was Lady Brabourne, mother-in-law of Mountbatten’s eldest daughter.
Some of the research based on the Life Events Scale highlights the way life events affect parenting. One study of 451 families in Iowa, for example, found that when parents suffer ‘stressful life events’ many become depressed, ‘which operates to disrupt skilful parenting practices’. This in turn make
s it more likely their teenage children will become depressed. Overwhelmed parents tend to be harsher and more inconsistent, the study found. In Parenting with Reason (2010), Esther Strahan shows that depressed parents are less likely to interact with their offspring because they are obsessed with their own problems. She also offers evidence that depressed parents are more hostile to their children, sometimes without realising it. If parents are anxious as well as depressed, their children suffer even more disadvantages.
Good-enough parenting
Finally, we need to examine a concept developed by one of Princess Marie Bonaparte’s friends, Donald Winnicott, one of the leading child therapists of the mid-twentieth century. Winnicott saw the dangers of great expectations and coined the phrase, ‘spurious maturity’. It was neurotic to try to be a perfect parent, he argued. Mothers and fathers were fallible; the most loving parents should only hope to provide ‘good-enough parenting’, as he termed it. The ‘ordinary devoted mother’ did not have to be a paragon but need only – and indeed can only – provide ‘ordinary loving care of her own baby’.
Winnicott stressed the baby’s need for touch. He described ‘the business of picking a baby up’ and the way the ‘mother’s technique of holding, of bathing, of feeding, everything she did for the baby, added up to the child’s first idea of the mother’. The ‘child’s ability to feel the body as the place where the psyche lives could not have been developed without a consistent technique of handling’. Royal children were often inconsistently handled. Nearly all of them had wet nurses, up until the end of the nineteenth century. Sometimes the wet nurse both fed and petted the baby; sometimes the biological mother did not breastfeed but was still very involved in caring for the baby.
