Churchill's Black Dog

by Anthony Storr

  At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that the relation between great achievement and the depressive temperament was worth more attention than has yet been bestowed upon it. In psychiatric practice, it is not at all uncommon to come across men of great ability and dynamic force who have achieved far more than the common run of success, and who are generally supposed by their contemporaries to be, if not necessarily happy, at least free from any kind of neurotic disability. On the surface, such men appear to be more confident than the average. They often inspire those who serve them, set an example by their own enormous appetite for work, and appear to possess inexhaustible vitality. Those who follow in their wake regard such leaders as being superhuman, and merely envy their energy without stopping to inquire what it is that drives them. Yet, anyone who has himself ventured along the corridors of power knows that the extremely ambitious are often highly vulnerable, that the tycoon may be lost if his luck deserts him, and that the personal and emotional relationships of those who pursue power are often sadly inadequate. Ambition, taken in isolation, may be a trait of character which merely reflects a man’s desire to find adequate scope for his abilities. It can also be a demonic force, driving the subject to achieve more and more, yet never bringing contentment and peace, however great the achievement. The degree to which the highly successful are able to conceal, both from themselves and from others, that they are tormented beings, is extraordinary; and it is often only in the consulting room that the truth emerges. Alanbrooke, weary of the war and the enormous responsibility he carried, was content to lay down his burden and retire to domestic happiness and bird watching. Churchill, on the other hand, was extremely reluctant to abandon power, although, as early as 1949, after his first stroke, some medical opinion considered that he should no longer pursue high office. There is no doubt in my mind as to which of the two men was the happier and the better balanced. Yet Alanbrooke, as he would himself have been the first to admit, could never have inspired the nation as did Churchill.

  The end of Churchill’s long life makes melancholy reading. It is indeed a tragedy that he survived into old age. Moran records that, after his retirement in April 1955, “Winston made little effort to hide his distaste for what was left to him of life,” and adds that “the historian might conclude that this reveals a certain weakness in moral fibre.” Any historian who does so conclude will merely reveal his ignorance of medicine. For cerebral arteriosclerosis, with which Churchill was seriously affected, not only saps the will, as Lord Moran says. It also makes impossible the mechanisms of defense with which a man copes with his temperamental difficulties. In old age, most people become to some extent caricatures of themselves. The suspicious become paranoid, the intolerant more irritable, and the depressives less able to rouse themselves from the slough of despond. Moran brings his story to a close five years before Churchill’s death because he “thought it proper to omit the painful details of the state of apathy and indifference into which he sank after his resignation.” I think he was right, as a doctor, to do so. He records that Churchill gave up reading, seldom spoke, and sat for hours before the fire in what must have amounted to a depressive stupor. To dwell upon the medical and psychiatric details of Churchill’s end would have exposed Moran to even more criticism from his medical colleagues than he received in any case. But the fact that the “Black Dog” finally overcame an old man whose brain could, because of an impaired blood supply, no longer function efficiently, merely increases our admiration for the way in which, earlier in life, he fought his own disability. For he carried a temperamental load which was indeed an exceptionally heavy burden.

  It is at this point that psychoanalytic insight reveals its inadequacy. For, although I believe that the evidence shows that the conclusions reached in this chapter are justified, we are still at a loss to explain Churchill’s remarkable courage. In the course of his life he experienced many reverses: disappointments which might have embittered and defeated even a man who was not afflicted by the “Black Dog.” Yet his dogged determination, his resilience, and his courage enabled him, until old age, to conquer his own inner enemy, just as he defeated the foes of the country he loved so well.

  We have often had occasion to comment upon Churchill’s “inner world of make-believe” in which, as Moran says, he found reality. At one period in his life, he was fortunate. For, in 1940, his inner world of make-believe coincided with the facts of external reality in a way which very rarely happens to any man. It is an experience not unlike that of passionate love, when, for a time, the object of a man’s desire seems to coincide exactly with the image of woman he carries within him. In 1940, Churchill became the hero that he had always dreamed of being. It was his finest hour. In that dark time, what England needed was not a shrewd, equable, balanced leader. She needed a prophet, a heroic visionary, a man who could dream dreams of victory when all seemed lost. Winston Churchill was such a man; and his inspirational quality owed its dynamic force to the romantic world of fantasy in which he had his true being.

  NOTES

  1. C. P. Snow, Variety of Men (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 120.

  2. A. L. Rowse, The Early Churchills (London: Macmillan, 1956), pp. 227–28.

  3. Quoted in ibid., pp. 251–52.

  4. Quoted in ibid., pp. 241, 252.

  5. Quoted in ibid., p. 252.

  6. A. L. Rowse, The Later Churchills (London: Macmillan, 1958), pp. 287–88.

  7. Rowse, The Early Churchills, p. 29.

  8. Quoted in Lord Moran, Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1940–1965 (London: Constable, 1966), p. 745.

  9. Ibid., p. 621.

  10. Quoted in Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 1 (London: Heinemann, 1966), p. 212.

  11. Quoted in ibid., 2:69.

  12. W. H. Sheldon, The Varieties of Human Physique (New York: Harper, 1940); and The Varieties of Temperament (New York, Harper, 1942).

  13. Quoted in Moran, Churchill, p. 621.

  14. C. G. Jung, Psychological Types, vol. 6 of Collected Works, 20 vols., trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953–79), vol. 6, para. 613.

  15. Ibid., paras. 613, 614.

  16. Snow, Variety of Men, p. 125.

  17. Quoted in Arthur Bryant, The Turn of the Tide (London: Collins, 1957), p. 25.

  18. Quoted in ibid., p. 707.

  19. Jung, Psychological Types, para. 613.

  20. Moran, Churchill, p. 167.

  21. Ibid., p. 745.

  22. Sarah Churchill, A Thread in the Tapestry (London: Deutsch, 1967), p. 17.

  23. Winston S. Churchill, Savrola (Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1973), pp. 39–40.

  24. Ibid., pp. 253–54.

  25. Ibid., p. 259.

  26. Ibid., pp. 42–43.

  27. Ibid., p. 41.

  28. R. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, 1:45.

  29. Quoted in ibid., p. 441.

  30. Quoted in ibid., p. 53.

  31. Lord Reith, television interview on BBC’s Face to Face.

  32. Quoted in Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill As I Knew Him (London: Pan, 1967), p. 16.

  33. Quoted in Moran, Churchill, p. 776.

  34. Ibid., p. 778.

  35. Quoted in ibid., p. 433.

  36. Quoted in ibid., p. 247.

  37. Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life (London: Collins, 1959), p. 13.

  38. Carter, Churchill As I Knew Him, p. 152.

  39. Quoted in Moran, Churchill, p. 203.

  40. Carter, Churchill As I Knew Him, p. 28.

  41. R. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, 1:50–52.

  42. Moran, Churchill, pp. 744–45.

  43. W. Churchill, My Early Life, p. 234.

  44. Ibid.

  45. Ibid., p. 265.

  46. Carter, Churchill As I Knew Him, p. 23.

  47. Quoted in R. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, 1:260.

  48. Quoted in Moran, Churchill, p. 167.

  49. Quoted in ibid., p. 122.

  50. Jean-Paul Sar
tre, Words, trans. Irene Clephane (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964), p. 37.

  51. Quoted in Moran, Churchill, p. 429.

  52. Georges Simenon, in Writers at Work, Paris Review Interviews, vol. 1, (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), p. 132.

  53. Carter, Churchill As I Knew Him, p. 427.

  54. Winston S. Churchill, Painting as a Pastime (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 20.

  55. Ibid., p. 21.

  56. Ibid., p. 29.

  57. Quoted in Moran, Churchill, p. 746.

  2

  Kafka’s Sense of Identity

  I MUST BEGIN by saying that I approach the study of Kafka from the point of view of a psychiatrist rather than from that of a literary scholar. Because Kafka was both a great writer and also scrupulously honest, he is able, in a unique way, to illumine an area of psychological experience which, though not infrequently encountered in certain kinds of psychiatric patient, is remote from that of the ordinary person.

  I have called this chapter “Kafka’s Sense of Identity.” What do I mean by “identity”? In A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Charles Rycroft defines identity as “The sense of one’s continuous being as an entity distinguishable from all others.”1 Erik Erikson, the psychiatrist who has written most extensively on the subject, refers to “a subjective sense of invigorating sameness and continuity.” (I note in passing that a photographic reproduction of Michelangelo’s David adorns the dustjacket of the English edition of Erikson’s book Identity. I shall return to why that particular image is associated with the notion of identity at a later point.) Erikson goes on to quote from a letter written by William James to his wife: “A man’s character is discernible in the mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: ‘This is the real me.’”2 Jung is surely referring to the same phenomenon when he writes:

  Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence, coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination.3

  Although William James uses the word “character” and Jung uses the word “personality,” they and Erik Erikson are referring to the same experience: that of being positively, fully oneself, without equivocation or pretense, and they are affirming that this experience is fulfilling and life-enhancing.

  Contrast these statements with the words which Kafka puts into the mouth of the supplicant in one of the two versions of “Conversation with the Supplicant” in his early story “Description of a Struggle”: “There’s never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away.”4 So little is the young suppliant convinced of the validity of his own existence that he has to draw attention to himself in church by his eccentric behavior. In one version of the story he says, “It is the aim of my life to get people to look at me.”5 In the other version, he refers to “a need to let myself be nailed down for a brief hour by those eyes,”6 as if being stared at convinced him, for the moment, of the reality of his own existence.

  Although Kafka was writing fiction, I think that we can be sure that these passages refer to his own experience, and I agree with Ronald Hayman, who, in his recent biography of Kafka, writes that the characters in this story are “transparent self-projections.”7

  It may, at first sight, seem paradoxical that a writer who is so unlike any other, who is so uniquely himself as Kafka, should entertain doubts about his own identity. When he was actually writing, and when he read and reread what he had written, I think his doubts about himself diminished or disappeared. But, once away from his writing desk, when in the company of others, those doubts constantly recurred. Many of those who knew Kafka were clearly deeply fond of him, and some, like Gustav Janouch, made him the object of hero worship. With those he knew, Kafka could be at times a lively and humorous companion. But, one must recall, Kafka himself said that even with Max Brod, his closest friend, he had never been able to hold a prolonged conversation in which he really revealed himself.

  With strangers, he was always ill at ease. In a letter to Felice Bauer dated June 1913, Kafka writes: “But if I am in an unfamiliar place, among a number of strange people, or people whom I feel to be strangers, then the whole room presses on my chest and I am unable to move, my whole personality seems virtually to get under their skins, and everything becomes hopeless.”8

  Kafka is not the only writer to describe such feelings. In a letter to Richard Woodhouse written in October 1818, John Keats writes, “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no identity.” He goes on, “When I am in a room with People if ever I am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated—not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children.”9

  For most people, interaction is a recurrent and necessary affirmation of identity. Indeed, without any kind of interaction with others, the term “identity” has no meaning. For identity depends upon contrast, and contrast demands that there should be at least one other person with whom the one can be contrasted. Just as the size of an object cannot be determined without reference to other objects, so the qualities of a person cannot be described without comparison with the qualities of other persons. One cannot be “kind” or “clever” or “ironical” or “self-effacing” in a vacuum. Because of the nature of thought and language, our descriptive statements are bound to imply an opposite.

  Since identity implies difference, it follows that the affirmation of identity requires a modicum of self-esteem. If a person is to hold his own in the company of others, he must have some sense of being himself worthwhile. We all know people who have no such sense of their own worth; who never put forward opinions of their own, but who always anxiously agree with the opinions of others. We rightly refer to such people as “nonentities” because their true identities are not made manifest. These are the people who seem constantly to be apologizing for their own existence, as if they felt that they had no right to be alive. Often, these people are intermittently or permanently depressed. From time to time they may assert themselves in explosive outbursts of aggression against those to whom they too closely strive to conform; but after such outbursts are over, they revert to their habitual overadaptation to the other.

  There are others who have even greater difficulty in affirming, or even in preserving, identity. Instead of welcoming interaction with others as a life-enhancing opportunity for self-affirmation, they treat people as a threat; as potential enemies who might, at any time, attack and destroy them. R. D. Laing describes how, in the course of an analytic group session, an argument occurred between two patients: “Suddenly, one of the protagonists broke off the argument to say, ‘I can’t go on. You are arguing to have the pleasure of triumphing over me. At best you win an argument. At worst you lose an argument. I am arguing in order to preserve my existence.’” Laing comments: “A firm sense of one’s own autonomous identity is required in order that one may be related as one human being to another. Otherwise, any and every relationship threatens the individual with loss of identity.”10

  On what does a firm sense of one’s autonomous identity depend? First, there is the question of the individual’s relation with his own body. It seems probable that, to start with, the human infant has little idea of where he begins and ends. Having, for nine months, been incorporated within someone else, he needs time to discover that his own limbs belong to him, and that his skin is an envelope which constitutes a boundary between him and the rest of the world. He probably makes these discoveries by com
ing up against objects in the external world; the side of his crib, his mother’s body, and so on. It is easy to understand why Freud referred to the pristine ego as a bodily ego.11 The sense of “I”-ness, of identity, is for most people rooted in the body, although of course it comes to include much else in the course of time. This, no doubt, is why the publishers chose to put Michelangelo’s David on the dust jacket of Erikson’s book Identity. The David is a paean of praise to the beauty of the male body, and one cannot imagine David’s identity as not being rooted in his physical existence. However, not everyone feels like this. Some people feel that the body is a kind of appendage to their true self; almost an object in the external world with which they are connected, but with which they do not identify. Some such people actively dislike or despise their bodies.

  This was certainly true of Kafka. We know, from his “Letter to His Father,” that he regarded his own body with distaste, and that he compared it unfavorably with that of his father.

  For instance, I remember how we often undressed together in the same bathing-hut. There I was, skinny, weakly, slight, you strong, tall, broad. Even inside the hut I felt myself a miserable specimen, and what’s more, not only in your eyes, but in the eyes of the whole world, for you were for me the measure of all things.12

  It is not until August 15, 1911, when he was twenty-eight years old, that Kafka is able to record in his diary, “The time which has just gone by and in which I haven’t written a word has been so important for me because I have stopped being ashamed of my body in the swimming pools in Prague, Königssaal and Czernoschitz.”13 However, later in the same year he reverts to his former attitude: “It is certain that a major obstacle to my progress is my physical condition. Nothing can be accomplished with such a body. I shall have to get used to its perpetual balking.”14

  Kafka is writing about his body as if it were an object in the external world quite separate from himself. It is of course true that all human beings are capable of temporary detachment of this kind, and this is particularly true of intellectuals. Indeed, conceptual thought demands this degree of abstraction. However, even dedicated scholars generally find that, after a spell of concentrated work, they abandon their books and return to the life of the senses, to identification with the body. Kafka and others like him seem habitually more alienated than this. This alienation, in Kafka’s case, was not related to his later ill health. Although Kafka died of laryngeal and pulmonary tuberculosis in 1924, his first hemoptysis did not occur until August 1917. We cannot be sure when the disease took sufficient hold to interfere with his general health and vitality, but it certainly did not do so in his early years. Although, throughout his life, Kafka was concerned about his physical health and suffered from all manner of psychosomatic symptoms, he was able to swim, to row, and to go for long hikes in the country when he was in his twenties. His feeling of physical inferiority dated from childhood, and was emotionally determined, not based upon reality. A well-known photograph of Kafka, taken when he was about five, shows him as a skinny, frightened waif. Although a later portrait, taken at the age of eleven, shows a handsome boy who might justifiably have been proud of his looks, it is evidently the earlier image which impressed itself upon his mind, and which persisted, unmodified by later developments. There is a good example in his early fragment of a novel, Wedding Preparations in the Country, which demonstrates that Kafka was familiar with the experience of being dissociated from his body. Raban is hesitating about whether or not to travel to the country to meet his fiancée: