Churchill's Black Dog and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind

by Anthony Storr

  But action at a distance worried Newton just as much as it has worried later scientists. In a letter to Richard Bentley, the master of Trinity, he wrote:

  It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon, and affect other matter without mutual contact: as it must do, if gravitation, in the sense of Epicurus, be essential and inherent in it. And this is one reason, why I desired you would not attribute innate gravity to me. That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this agent be material or immaterial, I have left to the consideration of my readers.27

  The material agent to which Newton refers was the hypothetical interstellar “ether,” in which Newton himself probably no longer believed. The immaterial agent is God, and Sullivan thinks that Newton came to regard gravitational phenomena as due to the direct intervention of the deity. It is, therefore, interesting to note that Newton’s religious beliefs may have prevented him from traveling further along the path towards relativity. I do not pretend to understand relativity in its entirety but can comprehend that in considering the motions of bodies it is impossible to define absolute rest or absolute uniform motion. The only physically detectable states of uniform motion are the relative motions of one observer with respect to another. According to Jeremy Bernstein in his book on Einstein, “Newton himself was aware of the difficulty of specifying states of absolute motion.” But “Newton resolved the problem theologically. For him, a devout Christian mystic, it was enough that rest and motion were distinguishable in the consciousness of God. God, in other words, provides the absolute frame of reference in Newtonian mechanics.”28

  As we have seen, Newton’s adult character presented both depressive and schizoid traits; and these, in part, may justifiably be related to the sudden severance, at an age before it could have been reasonably understood by him, of an unusually close tie with his mother. Being suddenly left by one’s only parent can, I believe, make self-esteem difficult to achieve. For self-esteem seems primarily dependent on the sense of value derived from being loved, and the withdrawal of love is likely to result in a child doubting his own worth. Newton, in youth, wondered whether he would be fit for anything, as he himself recorded. I think that the part of his achievement that can be attributed to ambition (and what great achievement does not owe something to this source?) took origin from his need to obtain self-esteem in ways other than by gaining the affection of his fellows. We cannot assume that even a man as intelligent as Newton necessarily achieved as much as he did without some compulsive force fueling that intelligence.

  Although Newton guarded his work jealously, and might have gained public recognition earlier than he did if he had not been reluctant to publish, it seems certain that his self-esteem was almost entirely bound up with his work, and that this is why he was so touchy about questions of priority and anxious always to be in the right in any dispute. Like other people of similar temperament, Newton may have felt that, though he himself might be of little worth, the amount and quality of his work would bring him fame, as indeed it did. Fame often serves as a partially effective substitute for love in those who are uncertain of obtaining love; and work is often substituted for the self as a focus of self-esteem in those in whom a tendency toward depressive self-denigration is manifest. In later life, when his creative days were past, Newton found an alternative in seeking and obtaining power, much as in Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold, when the dwarf Alberich, spurned in his pursuit of love by the Rhinemaidens, foreswears love in exchange for the power conferred by Rhinegold, which he steals from his mockers.

  There are other aspects of his achievement that may, not unreasonably, be related to his early experience. To an infant the world must seem arbitrary and unpredictable, as the fulfillment of his needs, indeed, his very existence, depends on the whim of those on whom he is dependent. If his needs are met he develops what Erik Erikson has aptly called a sense of basic trust. If, on the contrary, his needs are not met or he is suddenly deprived by his mother’s death or disappearance, he is likely to develop a sense of basic distrust with regard to people and an exaggerated anxiety about the arbitrary and unpredictable nature of the world. The writer Kafka, better than anyone else I know, described in his novels and short stories what it is like to feel oneself helplessly at the mercy of people who are not only powerful but also remote, inaccessible, and entirely arbitrary in their actions.

  It seems likely that an exaggerated sense of helplessness in the face of the unpredictable in infancy may lead some gifted people to strive especially hard to master and control as many facets of existence as possible. Could Newton’s basic mistrust have been one motive force that spurred him to solve some of the most difficult problems with which science has been confronted? Manuel has no doubt of it, and I am inclined to agree with him. As he puts it, “To force everything in the heavens and on earth into one rigid, tight frame from which the most minuscule detail would not be allowed to escape free and random was an underlying need of this anxiety-ridden man.”29

  An absence of intimacy with other persons often goes hand in hand with being cut off from one’s own emotions; out of touch with bodily experience, which, more than thought, seems to be the common basis of our closest relationships with others, as the phrase “out of touch” indicates. In some instances failure to achieve later intimacy seems to follow as a consequence of an interruption of the physical relation of the child with its mother, leading to distrust of the senses. Such distrust may, in gifted people, enhance certain capacities even if it deprives them of the chance of closeness with others.

  One human capacity that is enormously important in certain kinds of creative achievement is that of abstraction, the ability to divorce thinking from feeling and to be more concerned with the relation between concepts than with the objects from which the concepts originated. Both Newton and Einstein distrusted the senses. The latter believed that understanding the world depended on concepts of objects becoming to a high degree independent of the sense impressions that originally gave rise to them. Einstein said himself that his supreme aim was to perceive the world by thought alone, leaving out everything subjective.

  Most human beings are, to some extent, capable of abstraction in the sense in which I am using the word. Indeed, in my book The Dynamics of Creation, I attribute man’s inventiveness, and hence his supremacy, in part to this capacity. But most of us do not find it easy to escape from the subjective for long periods, from the demands of the body or our need for interpersonal relationships. Those men of genius who are responsible for the greatest achievements of abstract thought seem particularly often to have formed no close personal ties and to have been largely indifferent to, or else repelled by, bodily needs and functions. Newton shared his absence of close personal ties with Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Pascal, Spinoza, Kant, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein—in short, with many of the world’s greatest thinkers. This is also true of two of the greatest historians: Gibbon and Macaulay. Some of these men of genius were celibate or homosexual; others had transient affairs with women. Descartes fathered a daughter on a servant girl; Schopenhauer, in spite of his notorious misogyny, had a number of short-lived involvements with women. Nietzsche fell in love with Lou Andreas Salomé, who later became a psychoanalyst and intimate friend of Freud. He had himself and another admirer of Lou, Paul Rée, photographed with Lou brandishing a whip, apparently driving a cart to which both men were roped. Within a few months the relationship broke up and Nietzsche coined his famous phrase, “You go to women? Don’t forget the whip.” Wh
atever passing relationships these men had, none of them married, and most of them lived alone for the greater part of their lives. The point I want to make is amply shown. Although, especially in youth, sexual preoccupations and the need for personal relations may distract a man from his work, emotional isolation, with or without celibacy, goes hand in hand with supreme abstract mental achievement.

  There is, of course, a simpler, more obvious relation between solitude and thinking. Lord Keynes, in the essay on Newton from which I have already quoted, wrote:

  I believe that the clue to his mind is to be found in his unusual powers of continuous concentrated introspection.… His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen straight through it.… I believe that Newton could hold a problem in his mind for hours and days and weeks until it surrendered to him its secret. Then being a supreme mathematical technician he could dress it up, how you will, for purposes of exposition, but it was his intuition which was pre-eminently extraordinary.30

  This kind of prolonged concentration requires solitude. Without going into any elaborate speculations about the sublimation of the sexual drive, let me make the simple point that if intense periods of concentration over long periods are required to attain fundamental insights, the family man is at a disadvantage. In answer to a question as to how he came to make his discoveries, Newton himself said, “I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait till the first dawnings open slowly by little and little into the full and clear light.”31 If Newton had been subject to the demands of a wife for companionship or interrupted by the patter of tiny feet, it would certainly have been less easy for him to concentrate so intensely over long periods of time.

  The field of pathography has been so muddied by Freudian overstatement that it is small wonder that Popper and other critics entirely dismiss psychopathological interpretations of historical figures. Here I have tried to limit myself to discussing psychological matters that, though they may provoke disagreement, are accessible to common sense. In a subject in which so much is controversial, it behooves both the psychiatrist and the historian to be modest in their claims to psychological understanding.

  NOTES

  1. In Hans A. Krebs and Julian H. Shelley, eds., The Creative Process in Science and Medicine (Amsterdam: Excerpta Medica, 1975), p. 115.

  2. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2d ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 415.

  3. William Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life, ed. A. Hastings White (London: Taylor and Francis, 1936), pp. 45–46.

  4. Ibid., pp. 46–47.

  5. Ibid., p. 51.

  6. Humphrey Newton, letter to Conduitt, quoted in Frank Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 105.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Quoted in Manuel, Portrait of Newton, pp. 62–63.

  9. Quoted in Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 53.

  10. Manuel, Portrait of Newton, p. 59.

  11. William Whiston, Authentick Records, 2:107, quoted in Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 650.

  12. S. Brodetsky, Sir Isaac Newton (London: Methuen, 1972), pp. 69, 89.

  13. William Whiston, Historical Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Samuel Clarke (London: F. Gyles, 1730), p. 132.

  14. Quoted in Peter King, The Life of John Locke, 2 vols., 2d ed. (London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1830), 2:38.

  15. Quoted in Manuel, Portrait of Newton, p. 75.

  16. Ernest Jones, “The Nature of Genius,” in his Sigmund Freud: Four Centenary Addresses (New York: Basic Books, 1956), p. 22.

  17. Sherwood Taylor, The Alchemists (London: Heinemann, 1951), p. 235.

  18. John Maynard Keynes, “Newton the Man,” in Essays in Biography, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Hart-Davis, 1951), p. 313.

  19. Ibid., pp. 310–11.

  20. J. W. N. Sullivan, Isaac Newton: 1642–1727 (London: Macmillan, 1938), p. 275.

  21. Manuel, Portrait of Newton, p. 214.

  22. Quoted in ibid., p. 215.

  23. Quoted in ibid.

  24. Quoted in ibid., p. 216; and in Maurice Cranston, John Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 372.

  25. Manuel, Portrait of Newton, p. 197.

  26. Quoted in Sullivan, Isaac Newton, p. 13.

  27. Quoted in ibid., pp. 169–70.

  28. Jeremy Bernstein, Einstein (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 40.

  29. Manuel, Portrait of Newton, p. 380.

  30. Keynes, “Newton the Man,” p. 312.

  31. Quoted in E. F. King, A Biographical Sketch of Isaac Newton, 2d ed. (Grantham: S. Ridge, 1858), p. 66.

  4

  C. P. Snow

  I FIRST MET C. P. SNOW in October 1939, when I arrived at Christ’s College, Cambridge, as an undergraduate. Although he did not actually teach me, he was my tutor in the sense that he was responsible for looking after my progress, my behavior, and my welfare. At that time, Snow looked much older than his thirty-four years. Heavily built and already balding, he continued to look much the same until his death. I don’t remember seeing very much of him during my first year as an undergraduate. He was often in London; for this was the first year of the war, and Snow already had a toehold in the corridors of power as member of a group set up by the Royal Society to advise upon the best way of using scientists to promote the war effort. In my second year, however, I aroused his particular interest; we became fast friends, and remained so until his death. The reason was the death of my father in 1940. I had to go to Snow to seek permission to attend my father’s funeral. I made some remark indicating that I regarded such ceremonies as otiose but that I felt I had to go for form’s sake. This remark, I suppose, made him think that I might be less conventional than some public schoolboys. He invited me to dine with him at High Table; and from then on, I was a frequent visitor to his rooms. It also happened that my father died leaving no money, not even enough to pay the modest fees demanded by Cambridge at that date. Friends of my father’s clubbed together to raise enough to see me through my medical training, but Snow also persuaded the College to contribute a modest sum. He thought the College mean not to do more for me, but I was delighted. In fact, this gesture gave an enormous boost to my self-esteem. I was a diffident and insecure young man; I showed no particular promise as a medical student; and the fact that Snow thought well enough of me to persuade the College that I was worth supporting meant a great deal to me.

  Of course, I became an ardent admirer of C. P. Snow and bought each of his novels as soon as it was published. In those days, he had only published three: Death Under Sail, New Lives for Old, and The Search, which made his name as a novelist. While I was still an undergraduate, Strangers and Brothers, the first of the series of novels which bears that name, was published; and I remember Snow’s pleasure when Desmond MacCarthy gave it a long and favorable review. I later met Bert Howard, the schoolmaster who was the original of George Passant in the novel, and who, so Snow told me, looked over his shoulder while he was writing certain passages to make sure that the portrait Snow was painting of him was accurate.

  Snow’s rooms at Christ’s were a meeting place for his friends. I recall particularly C. H. Waddington, the biologist, and J. B. Trend, the Spanish scholar and friend of Falla. It was my first introduction to a society in which very clever men discussed everything under the sun without talking down to the younger and less experienced. It was a marvelously exhilarating and different atmosphere from the Victorian, clerical household in which I had been reared. In Snow’s world there was little room for disapproval, and he put a liberal interpretation upon the duties of a moral tutor. When, while an undergraduate, I embarked upon my first “affair,” it seemed natural to ask Snow to dinner to meet the young woman.

  Like his schoolmaster and friend Bert Howard, Snow was a liberator. But what I chiefly remember was the intellectual stimulus of his con
versation, his openness to new ideas, and his unflagging interest in every oddity of human nature. Snow was interested in psychology and psychiatry, and, when I suggested that I might become a psychiatrist, said, “I think you’d make a very good one,” a remark which clinched my resolve. At that time, Snow was much taken with Jung’s extravert/introvert dichotomy, and also with the work of W. H. Sheldon, the American who originated the technique of “somatotyping,” in which temperamental traits were linked with physical characteristics. While I, in those days, was reading Freud and Jung with enthusiasm, fascinated by the possibility of altering personality by psychoanalysis, Snow remained firmly convinced that temperament, as well as physique, was genetically determined, and that, while individuals could be helped to come to terms with their innate characteristics, not much could be done to alter them. It was some years before I came round to agreeing with him.