Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  Shufeldt, like many of her most ardent supporters, was intent on remembering Craddock as a victim of Comstockery—a daring agent of sexual emancipation and social progress, “an earnest and noble woman.” That reprise of Craddock’s life, the valiant fighter against obscene tyrannies, had a lot of luster, but it was nonetheless hard pressed to hold the ground against the psychological sciences. Soon, indeed, it seemed to give way altogether. In the quarter century after the posthumous diagnoses that Bell and Barlow had offered in late 1902, Craddock’s case was summarily entered into the “clinical record in abnormal psychology for the use of psychoanalysis and the psychiatrists.” The martyr for civil liberties gradually morphed into the Freudian analysand—a transformation that threatened to make Craddock’s psychopathology her only afterlife.5

  No longer a struggling scholar, religious innovator, marriage reformer, or free-speech defender, Ida Craddock would become Ida C, a case history of a psychoneurotic. She would stand, in her own small way, as an American incarnation of Dora and Anna O, two of the foundational cases in the birth of psychoanalysis in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Even in death, though, Craddock remained one crafty madwoman. Knowing full well the power of psychiatric classification, she had been intent before she died on supplying the materials for a second opinion. Always the folklorist of her own experience, she had left behind a treatise on the history of heavenly brides—one that managed to talk back to those who would confine her solely to the annals of American psychoanalysis.

  BELL AND BARLOW had not been the first to pronounce Craddock insane. Her initial brush with bedlam had come in the aftermath of the Danse du Ventre controversy in early 1894, when she had quickly fled to London to escape her mother’s plans to have her committed. “I have always had a horror of insane asylums,” she declared at the time in explanation of her rushed departure from Philadelphia. “Suppose they should give me bromides, or douche me with cold water, or treat certain parts of my body with electricity?” she continued, well aware of the popularity of sedatives, hydrotherapies, and electrical stimuli as treatments for any number of disorders. “Why, they might make a mental wreck of me before they produced me in court.” Her opponents managed to realize those fears for her only once—the three-month period from June to September 1898, the bulk of which she was confined at the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane. With the help of lawyer Carrie Burnham Kilgore, Craddock had won release, but thereafter the threat of renewed confinement—the “hounding” of her with “insane asylum papers”—was recurrent. 6

  To Craddock’s supporters, these efforts to institutionalize her were a matter of political plotting rather than necessary treatment. “She was once incarcerated in a lunatic asylum, although not insane—an atrocity easily perpetrated,” the physician Alexander Wilder remarked in February 1902. “That her notions are what many consider outré, I am aware; but that she is culpable or insane, I do not believe for a moment.” One young woman, inspired by Craddock’s example, put this charge more sharply. “Ah, Ida Craddock,” she lamented in an “Infidel Sermon” published a short time after Wilder’s assessment, “can the reading public conceive of the number of women who are bereft of liberty on account of some unorthodox opinion and confined in asylums by good Christian parents until they come to their senses, in other words, refute their original opinion for the orthodoxy stamped correct.” The authorities’ harassment of Craddock, from this perspective, was all about silencing her, not restoring her to health.7

  Craddock’s admirers were right that it did not take a lot to get a wayward family member committed in the late nineteenth century. Even with the statutes revised in Pennsylvania in 1883 to help prevent cases of unwarranted confinement, the process required only the signature of a near relation, endorsement from a magistrate or judicial officer, and certification from two physicians. Ida’s mother had little trouble clearing the prescribed threshold for commitment papers in 1894 and again in 1898. Without good lawyers and well-connected supporters, Craddock might have been locked away among the incurably insane—a fate that her mother accepted as necessary for putting an end to her daughter’s scandalous activities.

  Ida’s avowal of spiritual betrothal provided a crucial justification for her confinement, but the madness of that assertion was always impossible to separate from the threat she posed as a marriage reformer. “The charge against me, I afterwards learned, was the spirit husband; but this was only a pretext,” Ida remarked the month after her release from the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane in 1898. “The real reason, unblushingly avowed by all parties, was my sex reform teaching. So the signing of a certificate by physicians was a farce. I was incarcerated on one charge, and really held on another, which did not appear in writing.” Her spiritualist idiosyncrasies, in effect, offered her opponents another way of stopping her work on sexology. For the latter, she could be sent to jail for obscenity; for the former, she could be sent to the asylum for insanity. Craddock’s claim to be a heavenly bride did nothing but compound her legal and medical vulnerabilities.8

  American psychologists and asylum-keepers did not require a Freudian revolution to view Craddock’s mixture of religion and eroticism through a medical lens. In nineteenth-century clinical accounts of mental disorders, “theomaniacs”—those who imagined themselves to be in heavenly communication (whether with angels, Jesus, or the Virgin Mary)—often overlapped with “erotomaniacs,” those who fixated on an illusory love object. Both types tended toward singularly focused delusions; both were prone to visions or hallucinations; and both were liable to amorous excess, at least in their imaginations. No nineteenth-century medical psychologist would have been surprised by the proposition that earthly loves could be projected onto imaginary divine objects. And none would have blinked at the suggestion that women were especially prone to that kind of mistaken substitution. “Closely connected with salacity, particularly in women,” one late nineteenth-century doctor remarked, “is religious excitement.”9

  One of the reasons why psychologists of the era easily recognized the connections between religion and sexuality was all the work that had already been done on sex worship and phallic symbolism—the very topics that had so absorbed Craddock. G. Stanley Hall, America’s dean of the new psychological sciences at Clark University, wrote Freud a few years after their famed meeting in 1909 in Worcester, Massachusetts, that he was having a hard time applying Freud’s “rather wild use of sex symbolism, e.g. that dreams of money mean spermatozoa, that every curve is feminine and every straight line masculine.” Apprehensive about his own public reputation for uprightness, Hall worried that he and even more so Freud were in “much danger of repeating the extravagancies of the old students of phallicism.” That was not a misplaced anxiety. Critics sneered at the psychoanalyst’s ability to find sexual significance in any object. “Even the physician’s stethoscope,” one of the nation’s leading neurologists, Francis Dercum, remarked incredulously in 1914, “is believed to be a phallic symbol.” Freudian psychoanalysis gave the old studies of phallic worship a new lease on life, even as it seemed only to magnify their notoriety. Totems, taboos, fetishes, and phalluses—they all migrated out of Victorian anthropology into the modern psychology of religion.10

  Beyond these wild encounters with the “primitive,” the new psychologies were also shaped through heightened exposure to what William James labeled “the mystical classics.” In creating a canon of spiritual guides and ecstatic visionaries—Teresa of Avila was always near the top of the list—researchers were able to establish, so they thought, a recognized baseline for sorting out the main features of mystical experience. Being in the canon did not always work to the mystic’s benefit. “Psychic onanism”—that is how the Boston-based psychiatrist James S. Van Teslaar described what he found in culling this “devotional religious literature” for “data.” In large measure, he concluded, “religious ecstasy and mysticism generally” were traceable to “aberrations of the erotic instinct.” Whether the subject was Catholic mystics, aborig
inal fetishists, or pubescent Protestants, the new psychologies of religion underscored the “close affinity between the sexual and religious emotions.” As a German researcher portentously concluded in 1908, “We may describe the history of religions as the history of a special manifestation of the human sexual instinct.”11

  Not every psychologist was happy with this explicit sexual turn in exploring the religious consciousness. William James, indeed, was famously unhappy about it. In his classic account, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James took direct aim at this intellectual “fashion” of explaining the religious emotions in sexual terms: “For the hysterical nun, starving for natural life, Christ is but an imaginary substitute for a more earthly object of affection,” he wrote with a dismissive wave of the hand. “It seems to me that few conceptions are less instructive than this re-interpretation of religion as perverted sexuality.” In his curt dismissal of the interdependent relationship between religion and sexuality, James ended up the odd man out. Even those colleagues who valued James’s cautions against overly naturalistic interpretations of mystical experience conceded his error on this point. “We must surrender to the evidence,” the Bryn Mawr psychologist James H. Leuba concluded in The Psychology of Religious Mysticism in 1925. “The virgins and the unsatisfied wives who undergo the repeated ‘love-assaults of God’ . . . suffer from nothing else than intense attacks of erotomania.”12

  If James marked one intellectual pole in debates over the psychosexual study of religion, Theodore Schroeder, more than any other expositor, staked out the antithesis: namely, “that all religion is ultimately reducible to sexual excitement and sexual ideas.” A leading civil-liberties lawyer who doubled as a freelance psychoanalyst, Schroeder had already moved into the orbit of freethinking agnosticism and robust secularism as a young man. He had his own reasons for being skeptical about religion: His Roman Catholic mother had been disowned for marrying a Lutheran, and her treatment had left him permanently on guard against religious intolerance and utterly alienated from Christianity. Finishing his law degree at the University of Wisconsin in 1889, he thereafter began his legal career in Salt Lake City where he tangled repeatedly with both Mormons and their Protestant critics. The debates over Mormon polygamy especially piqued his “agnostic curiosity” and launched him into a psychosexual exploration of Mormon history and theology. Those initial fascinations honed his skills as both a freethinking polemicist and an avid collector. Within the decade, he had pulled together a massive repository of early Mormon and anti-Mormon materials. Schroeder became a lifelong compiler of cases to support his psychosexual theorizing about religion, and Craddock would surface as his favorite specimen.13

  Souring on Salt Lake City, Schroeder moved to Manhattan in early 1903—in the winter immediately following Craddock’s death. There he re-imagined himself as bohemia’s legal advocate and emerged as a presiding force in the Free Speech League, an organization through which he quickly became aware of the lingering controversy surrounding Craddock’s case. Over the next decade he cultivated associations with Emma Goldman, Lincoln Steffens, and Margaret Sanger, among other activists, and came to the legal defense of one social radical after another. All along he was willing to put his money (and his expertise) where his mouth was, and that was a good thing because he certainly liked to talk. Steffens, a vigorous muckraker in his own right, admired Schroeder’s persistence in fighting injustices, large and small, but wearied of his self-assured verbosity: “I believe in Free Speech for everybody except Schroeder,” Steffens half-jokingly remarked. By the 1910s Schroeder had become a player in both civil-liberties and psychoanalytic circles, but he had also developed a reputation for mule-headed tenacity in his intellectual labors. Once he had a thesis, he hammered it—and then kept hammering it. That proved especially true in his myriad studies designed to establish “the sexual origin of all religion and religious experiences.”14

  Over the course of his long career Schroeder had two consuming passions. The first was the total dismantling of anti-obscenity laws for the sake of free speech and a free press. That concern resulted in a series of publications, the most comprehensive of which was ‘Obscene’ Literature and Constitutional Law (1911), a major work in the ongoing liberal critique of Comstockian regulations of publishing and the postal system. His second obsession was establishing the sexual basis of all religious experience in order to advance both scientific knowledge and secular mores. Aligning himself with the highly regarded clinician William Alanson White and becoming—as part of his Freudian tutelage—one of White’s first analysands, Schroeder emerged as a prolific contributor to the Psychoanalytic Review in the three decades after its founding in 1913. Publishing alongside Freud and Jung as well as Americans Isador Coriat and Karen Horney, Schroeder churned out more pieces for that banner journal than any of his more illustrious and better credentialed contemporaries.

  Theodore Schroeder, free-speech lawyer turned psychoanalyst, painstakingly preserved Craddock’s manuscripts in order to make her the primary case history in his psychosexual theory of religion’s origins. Toying with the pen name “Lucifer” as a young man, he sported a goatee most of his life that seemed to fit him to the role of devil’s advocate. Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

  Craddock got caught in the crisscrossing of Schroeder’s dual preoccupations. No matter how much her court battles jibed with his liberal commitments to a free press, Schroeder’s interest in her remained primarily sexual. In his copious work on censorship and constitutional law, men like Moses Harman and D. M. Bennett held the starring roles, while women like Craddock and Alice Stockham rated cameos. Taking up the judicial claim that Craddock’s Wedding Night was “unquestionably obscene”—indeed, “the most offensive of condemned literature”—Schroeder exploited the extremity of that estimate in a three-page review of her case: “If this is the worst, I am prepared to take my chances on lesser ‘obscenity,’” he concluded after emphasizing the humanitarian impulse behind Craddock’s booklet. That nod, though, was the most he ever made of her legal struggles in his various anthologies and casebooks on civil liberties. Put simply, Craddock’s free-speech fight was not what Schroeder found attractive about her.15

  One of Theodore Schroeder’s correspondents turned to caricature to capture Schroeder’s manly zeal in chasing away America’s puritanical and Comstockian bogeys. Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

  Ida C served as the darling of Schroeder’s other love, his psychosexual theorizing about religion, a subject upon which he planned multiple volumes with Craddock as his centerpiece (not to say centerfold). Toward that end, between 1915 and 1917, Schroeder published six installments of one of her manuscripts, the treatise on “Heavenly Bridegrooms,” in the Alienist and Neurologist, on the conjecture that her mystical notions provided “an unintentional contribution” to his own psychosexual theories of religion’s origins. Two decades later, still at work on his magnum opus on religion and sexuality, he remained preoccupied with Craddock, presenting her case history in the Psychoanalytic Review in 1936 under the title “One Religio-Sexual Maniac.” Elsewhere he had started peddling his work on her under titles like “Ida’s Theomania”; “Religious Erotism of Ida C”; “Puritanism through Erotomania to Nymphomania,” and “Philosophy and Moral Theology of an Erotomaniac.” As he assured potential publishers, “The material is very sexy, but its treatment is always coldly scientific.” No doubt that frosty erudition is why, in one especially alluring variation, he proposed calling his volume on Craddock, “TRUE CONFESSIONS OF ONE SEXUAL AND RELIGIOUS MANIAC.” The extent to which Craddock had become fused to Schroeder’s inquiries was evident in the typographical error in one byline in 1917: It proclaimed the authors of the piece to be “Theodore and Ida C. Schroeder.”16

  Schroeder’s psychosexual theory of religion’s origins doubled down on all the reigning inquiries of the day. He saw, for exam
ple, ancient phallicism as the evolutionary fount of sexuality’s sacramental aura: At the most primitive stage of human development, he claimed, “we find sex worship, with its exaggerated . . . estimates of the sacredness of sex.” He also agreed with those psychologists who saw mysticism as masking deeper sexual urges and desires. Indeed, for Schroeder, passionate religious experience was at its heart a misinterpretation; it was actually an unrecognized sex ecstasy, a misidentified form of “psychic sexual orgasm.” Schroeder’s ultimate ambition was to demystify sexuality, to lead the march forward from the religious control of the body—whether exercised through sacraments or taboos—to “secularized sex.” As Schroeder saw it, “sex-superstition is the most persistent of all superstitions,” and modern civilization still suffered from this “mad overvaluation” of the sinfulness and sacredness of sex. “The secularization of sex,” on Schroeder’s terms, offered the consummate disenchantment of the world. Human feelings of love, intimacy, and desire would all be demythologized and then reinterpreted in terms of evolutionary psychology and biology.17

  Schroeder began his publishing ventures on Craddock in 1915 in the Alienist and Neurologist, a medical psychology journal based in St. Louis. Having previously featured the work of sexologist Havelock Ellis, the serial ran Schroeder’s version of Craddock’s work on heavenly bridegrooms in six parts over three years.