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

by Anthony Storr

  The relationship doesn’t last. Sammy finds himself another girl, and the passive Beatrice ends up in a mental hospital, with Sammy wondering whether he is responsible for her total retreat into chronic mental illness. In The Paper Men, Wilfred Barclay behaves with the utmost cruelty to Rick, the American academic who is pursuing him; the sadism of power rather than of sex, but sadism nonetheless.

  Golding dislikes homosexuality, but he is expert at describing its compulsions. The inhibited, paranoid Father Watts-Watt in Free Fall; the drunken, effeminate Mr. de Tracy in The Pyramid; the egregious, pedophilic Mr. Pedigree in Darkness Visible; the appalling Mr. Colley in Rites of Passage—all are memorable figures whose sexual preferences are even more central to their personalities than those of Golding’s heterosexual characters. But, whatever the nature of the sexual impulse, in whatever direction it is pointed, it seems, in Golding’s work, to be as much pain as it is pleasure. Moreover, sex never seems to be integrated as part of the whole man or woman. It remains something which takes over, subdues the will, and forces the subject, often against his own intention, to comply with a compulsion over which he has no control.

  Sex is not the only emotion which takes over the individual. Golding has a pre-Freudian vision of man in which the notion of repression plays little part. He thinks much more in terms of dissociation and even of possession. Actual loss of consciousness is surprisingly common in the novels. Simon, the Christ figure in Lord of the Flies, is an epileptic. He loses consciousness, not only on his first appearance in the book, but also after the pig’s head delivers its sermon to him. It is worth recalling that epilepsy was called the “sacred” malady until Hippocrates affirmed that it had natural causes. In Darkness Visible, Sophy suddenly loses consciousness at a party when presented with a Rorschach inkblot which everyone else sees as part of a game. She does so again after her terrifying fantasy of murdering the kidnapped boy. Earlier in the same book, Matty loses consciousness twice after his agonizing encounter with the aborigine. De Tracy passes out from alcohol in The Pyramid. Confronted with an image of Christ, Wilfred Barclay, the alcoholic, pursued author in The Paper Men, loses consciousness and wakes up in hospital: “Surrounded, swamped, confounded, all but destroyed, adrift in the universal intolerance, mouth open, screaming, bepissed and beshitten, I knew my maker and I fell down.”10 Sammy nearly faints after his encounter with the psychotic Beatrice in Free Fall. Jocelin, in The Spire, loses consciousness more than once, and, when dying, has an “out-of-body” experience of the kind often described by those who have been close to death.

  Nor are faints, fits, and drink the only things to obliterate normal consciousness. Madness is never far away. It takes over Miss Bounce in The Pyramid as well as Beatrice in Free Fall. It hovers round the heads of both Jocelin and Roger Mason in The Spire. It is an essential ingredient in Pincher Martin: “There is always madness, a refuge like a crevice in the rock. A man who has no more defence can always creep into madness like one of those armoured things that scuttle among weed down where the mussels are.”11

  Golding acknowledges his belief in God, but his vision is not that of a Christian. It is closer to that of the ancient Greeks, in whose language and literature he is so profoundly steeped. The Greeks believed that the onslaughts of passion which assail human beings were the work of the gods rather than the responsibility of men themselves. Lust, aggression, ecstasy, inspiration, and prophecy possess men unpredictably and are not within human control. Emotions appear from nowhere, and have to be examined and evaluated before they can be understood. In The Inheritors, when Liku has been captured by “the new people,” Lok “examined the feeling of heaviness in his head and body. There was no doubt at all. The feeling was connected with Liku.”12 Later, when Fa’s tracks and scent have disappeared,

  Lok began to bend. His knees touched the ground, his hands reached down and took his weight slowly, and with all his strength he clutched himself into the earth. He writhed himself against the dead leaves and twigs, his head came up, turned, and his eyes swept round, astonished eyes over a mouth that was strained open. The sound of mourning burst out of his mouth, prolonged, harsh, pain-sound, man-sound.… He clutched at the bushes as the tides of feeling swirled through him and howled at the top of his voice.13

  Lok is not homo sapiens, but, in Golding’s vision, although homo sapiens has developed language to a greater extent than Lok, he has not gained much more control over his emotions, nor integrated them as part of the totality of his being.

  It is partly for this reason that, in Golding, human identity is more fluid, more easily lost or dissolved than in the work of other writers. The sense of continuing identity is, for most people, rooted in the body. There are passages in Golding’s novels in which dissociation from the body is as complete as it often is in Kafka. In Pincher Martin, the drowning man’s “mind inside the dark skull made swimming movements long after the body lay motionless in the water.”14 Later, when the sea has deposited him on the rock, “The hardnesses under his cheek began to insist. They passed through pressure to a burning without heat, to a localized pain. They became vicious in their insistence like the nag of an aching tooth. They began to pull him back into himself and organize him again as a single being.”15 This experience of dissociation from the body is like that experienced in high fever or other serious illness. Virginia Woolf describes something similar in The Voyage Out. Has Golding ever been seriously ill? The description of Sammy Mountjoy’s mastoid in Free Fall, as well as Jocelin’s “out-of-body” experience referred to above, suggests the possibility.

  However this may be, Christopher Hadley Martin, alone on his rock in mid-Atlantic, asks himself:

  How can I have a complete identity without a mirror? That is what has changed me. Once I was a man with twenty photographs of myself—myself as this and that with the signature scrawled across the bottom right-hand corner as a stamp and seal. Even when I was in the Navy there was that photograph in my identity card so that every now and then I could look and see who I was.16

  One might argue that Martin was an actor, a role player with less than average sense of being continuously the same person, but the theme of uncertain identity recurs too often for this to be a convincing explanation. “What is it like to be you?” asks the adolescent Sammy in Free Fall of his girlfriend Beatrice. “What is it like in the bath and the lavatory and walking the pavement with shorter steps and high heels; what is it like to know your body breathes this faint perfume which makes my heart burst and my senses swim?”17 A natural enough inquiry for an adolescent who is still in the business of self-discovery, but this quest for identity is persistent in other contexts. In Darkness Visible, Matty recurrently confronts those dreaded questions, “What am I for? What am I?” In Free Fall, the Nazi interrogator, Dr. Halde, says:

  “There is no health in you, Mr. Mountjoy. You do not believe in anything enough to suffer for it or be glad. There is no point at which something has knocked on your door and taken possession of you. You possess yourself. Intellectual ideas, even the idea of loyalty to your own country, sit on you loosely. You wait in a dusty waiting-room on no particular line for no particular train. And between the poles of belief, I mean the belief in material things and the belief in a world made and supported by a supreme being, you oscillate jerkily from day to day, from hour to hour.”18

  A novelist who wants to write a series of books as different from one another as possible is better off without too rigid a set of beliefs or too fixed a sense of his own identity. One recalls Keats’s famous letter to Richard Woodhouse in which he affirms, “A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other body.19 One way of looking at Golding’s novels is to see them as a voyage through all the contradictory possibilities he finds within himself; a quest for some sort of coherence and consistency:

  Yet I am a burning amateur, torn by the irrational and incoherent, violently searching and self-condemned.�
� I have hung all systems on the wall like a row of useless hats. They do not fit. They come in from outside, they are suggested patterns, some dull and some of great beauty. But I have lived enough of my life to require a pattern that fits over everything I know; and where shall I find that?20

  Has Golding found such a pattern? One should not assume that he shares the requirements of a character he invents, and, as we have already seen, he is profoundly intolerant of those great reductionist pattern-makers Darwin, Marx, and Freud. We know from his most revealing lecture, “Belief and Creativity,” that he believes in God, and in both the truth and the mystery of the imagination. Golding has one of the most powerful imaginations of any living writer, which is why he convinces even at his most obscure. It seems to me that he believes that imagination can sometimes penetrate what, in Darkness Visible, the captain who rescues the child Matty calls “the screen that conceals the working of things.”21 This is what gives the poet and the novelist absolute conviction, the “voice of authority, power” to which Golding refers in his lecture.22 It is a profoundly irrational, anti-intellectual view of reality; and so it is not surprising that, in the novels, it often seems to be the primitive or the simple who come closest to it. The Inheritors used to be, and may still be, Golding’s own favorite among his novels. The “pictures” which Lok and his fellow creatures share are both precursors of thought and intimations of a reality which thought cannot penetrate. In Darkness Visible, poor, ugly, burned Matty may perform inexplicable rituals and have psychotic visions, but he finally “knows” what he is for more clearly than do any of the more conventional characters. Golding believes that the violence of our century is, at bottom, a revolt against reductionism. Perhaps this is what he is getting at when, in Darkness Visible, a truth appears in the mind of Sophy: “The way towards simplicity is through outrage.”23

  I count myself fortunate in having known William Golding for over twenty years. He and some of his best work are still mysterious to me. He would not want this any other way, nor would I. Intimations of mystery are what the twentieth century needs.

  NOTES

  References are to William Golding’s books unless otherwise indicated.

  1. A Moving Target (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), p. 198.

  2. Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (London: Allen and Unwin, 1956), p. 82.

  3. Lord of the Flies (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), p. 86.

  4. A Moving Target, pp. 186–87.

  5. The Inheritors (London: Faber and Faber, 1955), p. 175.

  6. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–64), 7:196.

  7. The Pyramid (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), p. 79.

  8. Pincher Martin (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), p. 149.

  9. Free Fall (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), pp. 122–23.

  10. The Paper Men (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 123.

  11. Pincher Martin, p. 186.

  12. The Inheritors, p. 130.

  13. Ibid., pp. 190, 191.

  14. Pincher Martin, p. 16.

  15. Ibid., p. 24.

  16. Ibid., p. 132.

  17. Free Fall, pp. 103–4.

  18. Ibid., p. 144.

  19. The Letters of John Keats, ed. M. B. Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 228.

  20. Free Fall, pp. 5, 6.

  21. Darkness Visible (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), p. 16.

  22. A Moving Target, p. 193.

  23. Darkness Visible, p. 167.

  9

  Jung’s Conception of Personality

  ALL CONCEPTIONS OF personality are, to a varying extent, subjective. Jung’s idea of the person is no exception. It was influenced by his family background, by the time at which he lived, by his reading and education, and by the fact that he was a citizen of German-speaking Switzerland. It is therefore appropriate to give a brief outline of Jung’s origins.

  Carl Gustav Jung was born on July 26, 1875. His father was a minister in the Swiss Reformed Church. The greater part of his early childhood was passed at Klein-Hüningen, near Basel, to which the family moved in 1879. For his first nine years, Jung remained an only child who lived primarily in his imagination and who spent much of his time in solitary play. The birth of his much younger sister did little to alleviate Jung’s solitude.

  He attended the local school; but, being more intelligent than most of his schoolfellows, attracted a certain amount of competitive hostility. In his eleventh year, he was moved to the gymnasium in Basel. From there, he went to Basel University. Jung originally wished to study archaeology; but there was no teacher in this subject at Basel University, and, since the family was far from rich, he was dependent upon a grant which applied only to his local university. He therefore decided to read medicine, but continued to feel that this choice was something of a compromise. However, his interest in the past found fulfillment in studying evolutionary theory and comparative anatomy. Jung came to think of the mind as having an immensely long history; as functioning along lines laid down in the remote past. I believe that this view of mind took origin from his anatomical studies. If the structures of the body had been adaptively evolved over many centuries, the same consideration might reasonably apply to the structures of the mind.

  As he approached the end of his medical studies, Jung was in debt and realized that he would have to earn a living as soon as possible. At first he was inclined toward surgery. Then, he happened to read a textbook by the Viennese psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing, and at once realized in what field his future lay. In December 1900, Jung became an assistant at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zürich, which was then under the direction of Eugen Bleuler, the pioneer investigator of schizophrenia. In 1902, his M.D. dissertation, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena, was published. During the winter of 1902–1903, Jung spent a term at the Salpêtrière in Paris in order to study psychopathology with Pierre Janet. This was the same famous hospital at which Freud had studied with Charcot in 1885–1886. In 1903, Jung married Emma Rauschenbach, by whom he had a son and four daughters. In 1905, Jung was promoted to senior staff physician at the Burghölzli and was also appointed as lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Zürich.

  In 1907, Jung published his original study of schizophrenia, The Psychology of Dementia Praecox. He sent a copy to Freud, whom he met for the first time in Vienna in March of the same year. In 1909, Jung visited the United States with Freud and Ferenczi, and was given an honorary degree by Clark University. In the same year, he gave up his post at the Burghölzli in favor of his growing private practice.

  Jung’s break with Freud occurred in 1913. Following this, Jung went through a period of intense personal crisis, and resigned his lectureship at the University of Zürich. He continued to write and practice at his house in Küsnacht on the Lake of Zürich until his death in 1961.

  Although Jung was, for a time, strongly influenced by Freud, it is important to realize that he had carried out a great deal of original work before he even met Freud. The main ideas which coalesced to form his picture of human personality can be traced to earlier periods in his development. Jung was never an uncritical Freudian disciple. The differences between the two men were evident from the beginning.

  Jung’s earliest work and his later writings are linked by the theme that mental illness is characterized by disunity of the personality, while mental health is manifested by unity. Jung’s doctoral thesis was a study of a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old cousin of his, Hélène Preiswerk, who, claiming to be a medium, said that she was “controlled” by a variety of different personalities. Jung interpreted these as being personifications of various unconscious parts of herself; subsidiary, incomplete personalities which could temporarily take over.

  It will be recalled that, at the turn of the century, psychiatrists were fascinated by cases of so-called “multiple personality” like Morton Prince’s f
amous case of Sally Beauchamp. Pierre Janet was particularly interested in cases of this kind, described several examples from his own practice, and had reviewed the literature. Janet believed that neurosis was due to some physiological deficiency in the nervous system which prevented cohesion of the various aspects of personality. This lack of integration resulted in aspects of consciousness becoming split off and dissociated.

  Jung was as much influenced by Janet, with whom he had studied, as he was by Freud, with whose opinions he came more and more to disagree. Although Jung valued Freud’s concept of repression, he continued to think of personality as being capable of dissociation into subsidiary personalities, in line with Janet’s ideas. In hysteria, for example, the patient might behave like his young cousin; as if she were two or more different persons who had no cognizance of each other. It followed that the treatment of this type of neurosis depended upon making these divided selves aware of each other and thus creating a new unity of personality.

  In schizophrenia, it appeared to Jung that the personality was fragmented into many parts, rather than into two or three, as in hysteria. Jung wrote:

  Whereas in the healthy person the ego is the subject of his experience, in the schizophrenic the ego is only one of the experiencing subjects. In other words, in schizophrenia the normal subject has split into a plurality of subjects, or into a plurality of autonomous complexes.1

  Jung’s next group of studies was based upon the use of word-association tests. A list of one hundred words is read out, and the subject is asked to respond to each with the first word that occurs to him. By timing the interval between stimulus and response with a stopwatch, it becomes possible to demonstrate that, unknown to themselves, subjects are influenced by words which arouse emotion. Such words have the effect of slowing down their responses. Often, groups of words are linked around a single theme; and to such a collection of associations Jung gave the name complex, a term which he introduced into psychiatry. These experiments were important in that they demonstrated objectively, in ways which could be measured, the dynamic effects of unconscious mental processes. Jung gives as an example the case of a normal man of thirty-five whom he himself tested: