kb

KENNETH BURKE’S SOURCES & CONTEMPORARIES,

PERMANENCE & CHANGE

Below are enyclopedia entries for major figures referenced in Kenneth Burke's Permanence and Change.

For a diagram of Burke's network of relations at the time of composition, click here.

Baudelaire, Charles

b. April 9, 1821, Paris, France

d. Aug. 31, 1867, Paris

in full CHARLES-PIERRE BAUDELAIRE, French poet, translator, and literary and art critic whose reputation rests primarily on Les Fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil), which was perhaps the most important and influential poetry collection published in Europe in the 19th century. Similarly, his Petits poèmes en prose (1868; "Little Prose Poems") was the most successful and innovative early experiment in prose poetry of the time.

Early life.

Baudelaire was the only child of François Baudelaire and his much younger second wife, Caroline Defayis, whom he married in 1819. Having begun his career as a priest, François had abandoned holy orders in 1793 and ultimately became a prosperous middle-ranking civil servant. A painter and poet of modest talent, he introduced his son to art, or what the younger Baudelaire would later call his greatest, most consuming and earliest of passions, "the cult of images." His father died in February 1827, and for some 18 months thereafter Baudelaire and his mother lived together on the outskirts of Paris in conditions that he would always remember, writing to her in 1861 of that "period of passionate love" for her when "I was forever alive in you; you were solely and completely mine." This "verdant paradise of childhood loves" abruptly ended in November 1828 when Caroline married Jacques Aupick, a career soldier who rose to the rank of general and who later served as French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and Spain before becoming a senator under the Second Empire.

In 1831 Aupick was posted to Lyons, and Baudelaire began his education at the Collège Royal there in 1832 before transferring, on the family's return to Paris in 1836, to the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Baudelaire showed promise as a student and began to write his earliest poems, but to his masters he seemed an example of precocious depravity, adopting what they called "affectations unsuited to his age." He also developed a tendency to moods of intense melancholy, and he became aware that he was solitary by nature. Regular acts of indiscipline led to his being expelled from the school after a trivial incident in April 1839. After passing his baccalauréat examinations while enrolled at the Collège Saint-Louis, Baudelaire became a nominal student of law at the École de Droit while in reality leading a "free life" in the Latin Quarter. There he made his first contacts in the literary world and also contracted the venereal disease that would eventually kill him, probably from a Jewish prostitute nicknamed Sarah la Louchette ("Squint-eyed Sarah"), whom he celebrated in some of his most affecting early poems.

In an attempt to wean his stepson from such disreputable company, Aupick sent him on a protracted voyage to India in June 1841, but Baudelaire effectively jumped ship in Mauritius and, after a few weeks there and in Réunion, returned to France in February 1842. The voyage had deepened and enriched his imagination, however, and his brief encounter with the tropics would endow his writing with an abundance of exotic images and sensations and an everlasting theme of nostalgic reverie.

Baudelaire came into his inheritance in April 1842 and rapidly proceeded to dissipate it on the lifestyle of a dandified man of letters, spending freely on clothes, books, paintings, expensive food and wines, and, not least, hashish and opium, which he first experimented with in his Paris apartment at the Hôtel Pimodan (now the Hôtel Lauzun) on the Île Saint-Louis between 1843 and 1845. It was shortly after returning from the South Seas that Baudelaire met the mulatto woman known as Jeanne Duval, who, first as his mistress and then, after the mid-1850s, as his financial charge, was to dominate his life for the next 20 years. Jeanne would inspire Baudelaire's most anguished and sensual love poetry, her perfume and, above all, her magnificent flowing black hair provoking such masterpieces of the exotic-erotic imagination as "La Chevelure" ("The Head of Hair").

Baudelaire's continuing extravagance exhausted half his fortune in two years, and he also fell prey to cheats and moneylenders, thus laying the foundation for an accumulation of debt that would cripple him for the rest of his life. In September 1844 his family imposed on him a legal arrangement that restricted his access to his inheritance and effectively made of him a legal minor. The modest annual allowance henceforth granted him was insufficient to clear his debts, and the resulting state of permanently straitened finances led him to still greater emotional and financial dependence on his mother and also exacerbated his growing detestation of his stepfather. The agonizing moods of isolation and despair that Baudelaire had known in adolescence, and which he called his moods of "spleen," returned and became more frequent.

To cite this page: "Baudelaire, Charles" Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://search.eb.com/bol/topic?eu=13972&sctn=1&pm=1 [Accessed 29 July 1999].

Dada

(French: "hobby-horse"), nihilistic movement in the arts that flourished primarily in Zürich, New York City, Berlin, Cologne, Paris, and Hannover, Ger. in the early 20th century. Several explanations have been given by various members of the movement as to how it received its name. According to the most widely accepted account, the name was adopted at Hugo Ball's Cabaret (Café) Voltaire, in Zürich, during one of the meetings held in 1916 by a group of young artists and war resisters that included Jean Arp, Richard Hülsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, and Emmy Hennings; when a paper knife inserted into a French-German dictionary pointed to the word dada, this word was seized upon by the group as appropriate for their anti-aesthetic creations and protest activities, which were engendered by disgust for bourgeois values and despair over World War I. A precursor of what was to be called the Dada movement, and ultimately its leading member, was Marcel Duchamp, who in 1913 created his first ready-made (now lost), the "Bicycle Wheel," consisting of a wheel mounted on the seat of a stool.

The movement in the United States was centred at "291," the New York City gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, and the studio of the Walter Arensbergs, both wealthy patrons of the arts. There Dada-like activities, arising independently but paralleling those in Zürich, were engaged in by such artists as Man Ray, Morton Schamberg, and Francis Picabia. Both through their art and through such publications as The Blind Man, Rongwrong, and New York Dada the artists attempted to demolish current aesthetic standards. Travelling between the United States and Europe, Picabia became a link between the Dada groups in New York City, Zürich, and Paris; his Dada periodical, 291, was published in Barcelona, New York City, Zürich, and Paris from 1917 through 1924. (See Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession.)

In 1917 Hülsenbeck, one of the founders of the Zürich group, transmitted the Dada movement to Berlin, where it took on a more political character. Among the German artists involved were Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, George Grosz, Johannes Baader, Hülsenbeck, Otto Schmalhausen, and Wieland Herzfelde and his brother John Heartfield (formerly Helmut Herzfelde, but Anglicized as a protest against German patriotism). One of the chief means of expression used by these artists was the photomontage, which consists of fragments of pasted photographs combined with printed messages; the technique was most effectively employed by Heartfield, particularly in his later, anti-Nazi works (e.g., "Kaiser Adolph"). Like the groups in New York City and Zürich, the Berlin artists staged public meetings, shocking and enraging the audience with their antics. They, too, issued Dada publications: Club Dada, Der Dada, Jedermann sein eigner Fussball ("Everyman His Own Football"), and Dada Almanach. The First International Dada Fair was held in Berlin in June 1920.

Dada activities were also carried on in other German cities. In Cologne in 1919 and 1920, the chief participants were Max Ernst and Johannes Baargeld. Also affiliated with Dada was Kurt Schwitters of Hannover, who gave the name Merz to his collages, constructions, and literary productions. Although Schwitters used Dadaistic material--bits of rubbish--to create his works, he achieved a refined, aesthetic effect that was uncharacteristic of Dada antiart.

In Paris Dada took on a literary emphasis under one of its founders, the poet Tristan Tzara. Most notable among the numerous Dada pamphlets and reviews was Littérature (published 1919-24), which contained writings by André Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Paul Éluard, and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. After 1922, however, Dada began to lose its force, and the energies of its participants turned toward Surrealism.

Dada had far-reaching effects on the art of the 20th century. Its nihilistic, antirationalistic critiques of society and its unrestrained attacks on all formal artistic conventions found no immediate inheritors, but its preoccupation with the bizarre, the irrational, and the fantastic bore fruit in the Surrealist movement. Dada artists' techniques of creation involving accident and chance were later employed by the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists. Conceptual art also is rooted in Dada, for it was Duchamp who first asserted that the mental activity ("intellectual expression") of the artist was of greater significance than the object created.

To cite this page: "Dada" Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://search.eb.com/bol/topic?eu=28956&sctn=1&pm=1 [Accessed 29 July 1999].

Cited in Kenneth Burke, Permanence & Change 115+

Bentham, Jeremy

b. Feb. 15, 1748, London

d. June 6, 1832, London

English philosopher, economist, and theoretical jurist, the earliest and chief expounder of Utilitarianism.

Early life and works.

At the age of four, Bentham, the son of an attorney, is said to have read eagerly and to have begun the study of Latin. Much of his childhood was spent happily at his two grandmothers' country houses. At Westminster School he won a reputation for Greek and Latin verse writing. In 1760 he went to Queen's College, Oxford, and took his degree in 1763. In November he entered Lincoln's Inn to study law and took his seat as a student in the King's Bench division of the High Court, where he listened with rapture to the judgments of Chief Justice Lord Mansfield. In December 1763 he managed to hear Sir William Blackstone lecture at Oxford but said that he immediately detected fallacies that underlay the grandiloquen language of the future judge. He spent his time performing chemical experiments and speculating upon the more theoretical aspects of legal abuses rather than in reading law books. On being called to the bar, he "found a cause or two at nurse for him, which he did his best to put to death," to the bitter disappointment of his father, who had confidently looked forward to seeing him become lord chancellor.

Bentham's first book, A Fragment on Government, appeared in 1776. The subtitle, "being an examination of what is delivered, on the subject of government in general, in the introduction to Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries," indicates the nature of the work. Bentham found the "grand and fundamental" fault of the Commentaries to be Blackstone's "antipathy to reform." Bentham's book, written in a clear and concise style different from that of his later works, may be said to mark the beginning of philosophic radicalism. It is also a very good essay on sovereignty. Lord Shelburne (afterward 1st Marquess of Lansdowne), the statesman, read the book and called upon its author in 1781. Bentham became a frequent guest at Shelburne's home. At this period Bentham's mind was much-occupied with writing the work that was later published in French in 1811 by his admirer Étienne Dumont and entitled Théorie des peines et des récompenses. This work eventually appeared in English as The Rationale of Reward (1825) and The Rationale of Punishment (1830). In 1785 Bentham started, by way of Italy and Constantinople, on a visit to his brother, Samuel Bentham, an engineer in the Russian armed forces; and it was in Russia that he wrote his Defence of Usury (published 1787). This, his first essay in economics, presented in the form of a series of letters from Russia, shows him as a disciple of the economist Adam Smith but one who argued that Smith did not follow the logic of his own principles. Bentham held that every man was the best judge of his own advantage, that it was desirable from the public point of view that he should seek it without hindrance, and that there was no reason to limit the application of this doctrine in the matter of lending money at interest. His later works on political economy followed the laissez-faire principle, though with modifications. In the "Manual of Political Economy" he gives a list of what the state should and should not do, the second list being much longer than the first.

(See "Commentaries on the Laws of England".)

Mature works.

Disappointed, after his return to England in 1788, in the hope of making a political career, he settled down to discovering the principles of legislation. The great work on which he had been engaged for many years, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, was published in 1789. In this book he defined the principle of utility as "that property in any object whereby it tends to produce pleasure, good or happiness, or to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered." Mankind, he said, was governed by two sovereign motives, pain and pleasure; and the principle of utility recognized this state of affairs. The object of all legislation must be the "greatest happiness of the greatest number." He deduced from the principle of utility that, since all punishment involves pain and is therefore evil, it ought only to be used "so far as it promises to exclude some greater evil." (See Utilitarianism.)

The fame of his writings spread widely and rapidly. Bentham was made a French citizen in 1792, and in later life his advice was respectfully received in several of the states of Europe and America. With many of the leading men of these countries Bentham maintained an active correspondence. The codification of law was one of Bentham's chief preoccupations, and it was his ambition to be allowed to prepare a code of laws for his own or some foreign country. He was accused of having underestimated both the intrinsic difficulties of the task and the need for diversity of institutions adapted to the tradition and civilization of different countries. Even so, Bentham must be reckoned among the pioneers of prison reform. It is true that the particular scheme that he worked out was bizarre and spoiled by the elaborate detail that he loved. "Morals reformed, health preserved, industry invigorated, instruction diffused" and other similar desiderata would, he thought, be the result if his scheme for a model prison, the "Panopticon," were to be adopted; and for many years he tried to induce the government to adopt it. His endeavours, however, came to nothing; and though he received £23,000 in compensation in 1813, he lost all faith in the reforming zeal of politicians and officials.

In 1823 he helped to found the Westminster Review to spread the principles of philosophic radicalism. Bentham had been brought up a Tory, but the influence of the political theory of the Enlightenment served to make a democrat of him. As far back as 1809 he had written a tract, A Catechism of Parliamentary Reform, advocating annual elections, equal electoral districts, a wide suffrage, and the secret ballot, which was, however, not published until 1817. He drafted a series of resolutions based on this tract that were introduced in the House of Commons in 1818. A volume of his Constitutional Code, which he did not live to complete, was published in 1830.

After Bentham's death, in accordance with his directions, his body was dissected in the presence of his friends. The skeleton was then reconstructed, supplied with a wax head to replace the original (which had been mummified), dressed in Bentham's own clothes and set upright in a glass-fronted case. Both this effigy and the head are preserved in University College, London.

Bentham's life was a happy one. He gathered around him a group of congenial friends and pupils, such as the philosopher James Mill, father of John Stuart Mill, with whom he could discuss the problems upon which he was engaged. His friends, too, practically rewrote several of his books from the mass of rough though orderly memoranda that Bentham himself prepared. Thus the Rationale of Judicial Evidence, 5 vol. (1827), was put in its finished state by J.S. Mill and the Book of Fallacies (1824) by Peregrine Bingham. The services of Étienne Dumont in recasting as well as translating the works of Bentham were still more important.

Assessment.

Bentham was less a philosopher than a critic of law and of judicial and political institutions. Unfortunately, he was not aware of his limitations. He tried to define what he thought were the basic concepts of ethics, but the majority of his definitions are oversimple or ambiguous or both, and his "felicific calculus," a method for calculating amounts of happiness, as even his warmest admirers have admitted, cannot be used. As a moralist and psychologist, Bentham has similarly appeared to be inadequate; his arguments, though sometimes elaborate, rest too often on insufficient and ambiguous premises. His analyses of the concepts that men use to describe and explain human behaviour are too simple. He seems to have believed both that man is completely selfish and that everyone ought to promote the greatest happiness, no matter whose. Not even the formula of which he made so much, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," possesses a definite meaning.

Given all this, it should be noted that the publication since World War II of Bentham's previously unknown manuscripts has done much to enhance his reputation as a philosopher of law. His Victorian editor, Sir John Bowring, cut out from Bentham's work much that was both original and well-argued. The more up-to-date scholarship of such Bentham specialists as Herbert L.A. Hart, J.H. Burns, Frederick Rosen, and Lea Campos-Boralevi has revealed a more rigorous and systematic thinker than the legendary muddled Utilitarian that Bentham appeared to be to earlier generations.

As a critic of institutions Bentham was admirable. In his Rationale of Judicial Evidence he describes the methods that a court should use to get at the truth as quickly as possible; and in the Essay on Political Tactics he describes what he considers the most effective forms of debate for a legislative assembly--an account largely based on the procedure of the House of Commons. In these works and in others Bentham is concerned to discover what makes for efficiency. Though he defines efficiency in terms of happiness, his reader need not do so; or, if he does, he need not think of happiness as Bentham did. Bentham's assumptions about what makes for happiness are often quite ordinary and sensible; the reader can accept them and still insist that happiness is not to be defined in terms of pleasure and is not to be measured. Whatever is excellent, ingenious, and original in Bentham--and there is a great deal of it--need not depend on the "felicific calculus" and "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." (J.P.Pl./Ed.)

To cite this page: "Bentham, Jeremy" Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://search.eb.com/bol/topic?eu=80768&sctn=1&pm=1 [Accessed 28 July 1999].

(Cited in Kenneth Burke, Permanence & Change 35+)

Bergson, Henri

b. Oct. 18, 1859, Paris, France

d. Jan. 4, 1941, Paris

in full HENRI-LOUIS BERGSON French philosopher, the first to elaborate what came to be called a process philosophy, which rejected static values in favour of values of motion, change, and evolution. He was also a master literary stylist, both academic and popular appeal, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.

Early years

Through his father, a talented musician, Bergson was descended from a rich Polish Jewish family--the sons of Berek, or Berek-son, from which the name Bergson is derived. His mother came from an English Jewish family. Bergson's upbringing, training, and interests were typically French, and his professional career, as indeed all of his life, was spent in France, most of it in Paris.

He received his early education at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, where he showed equally great gifts in the sciences and the humanities. From 1878 to 1881 he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the institution responsible for training university teachers. The general culture that he received there made him equally at home in reading the Greek and Latin classics, in obtaining what he wanted and needed from the science of his day, and in acquiring a beginning in the career of philosophy, to which he turned upon graduation.

His teaching career began in various lycées outside of Paris, first at Angers (1881-83) and then for the next five years at Clermont-Ferrand. While at the latter place, he had the intuition that provided both the basis and inspiration for his first philosophical books. As he later wrote to the eminent American Pragmatist William James:

(See James, William.)

I had remained up to that time wholly imbued with mechanistic theories, to which I had been led at an early date by the reading of Herbert Spencer. . . . It was the analysis of the notion of time, as that enters into mechanics and physics, which overturned all my ideas. I saw, to my great astonishment, that scientific time does not endure. . . that positive science consists essentially in the elimination of duration. This was the point of departure of a series of reflections which brought me, by gradual steps, to reject almost all of what I had hitherto accepted and to change my point of view completely.

(See duration.)

The first result of this change was his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889; Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness), for which he received the doctorate the same year. This work was primarily an attempt to establish the notion of duration, or lived time, as opposed to what Bergson viewed as the spatialized conception of time, measured by a clock, that is employed by science. He proceeded by analyzing the awareness that man has of his inner self to show that psychological facts are qualitatively different from any other, charging psychologists in particular with falsifying the facts by trying to quantify and number them. Fechner's Law, claiming to establish a calculable relation between the intensity of the stimulus and that of the corresponding sensation, was especially criticized. Once the confusions were cleared away that confounded duration with extension, succession with simultaneity, and quality with quantity, he maintained that the objections to human liberty made in the name of scientific determinism could be seen to be baseless.

(See Webers law, determinism.)

To cite this page: "Bergson, Henri" Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://search.eb.com/bol/topic?eu=80890&sctn=1&pm=1 [Accessed 29 July 1999].

KB P&C 92+

Dewey, John

Philosophical thought.

Dewey left Michigan in 1894 to become professor of philosophy and chairman of the department of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy at the University of Chicago. Dewey's achievements there brought him national fame. The increasing dominance of evolutionary biology and psychology in his thinking led him to abandon the Hegelian theory of ideas, which views them as somehow mirroring the rational order of the universe, and to accept instead an instrumentalist theory of knowledge, which conceives of ideas as tools or instruments in the solution of problems encountered in the environment. These same disciplines contributed somewhat later to his rejection of the Hegelian notion of an Absolute Mind manifesting itself as a rationally structured, material universe and as realizing its goals through a dialectic of ideas. Dewey found more acceptable a theory of reality holding that nature, as encountered in scientific and ordinary experience, is the ultimate reality and that man is a product of nature who finds his meaning and goals in life here and now. (See instrumentalism.)

Since these doctrines, which were to remain at the centre of all of Dewey's future philosophizing, also furnished the framework in which Dewey's colleagues in the department carried on their research, a distinct school of philosophy was in operation. This was recognized by William James in 1903, when a collection of essays written by Dewey and seven of his associates in the department, Studies in Logical Theory, appeared. James hailed the book enthusiastically and declared that with its publication a new school of philosophy, the Chicago school, had made its appearance.

Dewey's philosophical orientation has been labeled a form of pragmatism, though Dewey himself seemed to favour the term "instrumentalism," or "experimentalism." William James's The Principles of Psychology early stimulated Dewey's rethinking of logic and ethics by directing his attention to the practical function of ideas and concepts, but Dewey and the Chicago school of pragmatists went farther than James had gone in that they conceived of ideas as instruments for transforming the uneasiness connected with the experience of having a problem into the satisfaction of some resolution or clarification of it.

Dewey's preferred mode of inquiry was scientific investigation; he thought the experimental methods of modern science provided the most promising approach to social and ethical as well as scientific problems. He rejected the idea of a fixed and immutable moral law derivable from consideration of the essential nature of man, since such a traditional philosophical method denied the potential application and promise of newer empirical and scientific methods.

Dewey developed from these views a philosophical ground for democracy and liberalism. He conceived of democracy not as a mere form of government, but rather as a mode of association which provides the members of a society with the opportunity for maximum experimentation and personal growth. The ideal society, for Dewey, was one that provided the conditions for ever enlarging the experience of all its members.

Dewey's contributions to psychology were also noteworthy. Many of the articles he wrote at that time are now accepted as classics in psychological literature and assure him a secure place in the history of psychology. Most significant is the essay "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology," which is generally taken to mark the beginnings of functional psychology--i.e., one that focuses on the total organism in its endeavours to adjust to the environment.

Educational theory and practice. Dewey's work in philosophy and psychology was largely centred in his major interest, educational reform. In formulating educational criteria and aims, he drew heavily on the insights into learning offered by contemporary psychology as applied to children. He viewed thought and learning as a process of inquiry starting from doubt or uncertainty and spurred by the desire to resolve practical frictions or relieve strain and tension. Education must therefore begin with experience, which has as its aim growth and the achievement of maturity.

Dewey's writings on education, notably his The School and Society (1899) and The Child and the Curriculum (1902), presented and defended what were to remain the chief underlying tenets of the philosophy of education he originated. These tenets were that the educational process must begin with and build upon the interests of the child; that it must provide opportunity for the interplay of thinking and doing in the child's classroom experience; that the teacher should be a guide and coworker with the pupils, rather than a taskmaster assigning a fixed set of lessons and recitations; and that the school's goal is the growth of the child in all aspects of its being.

Among the results of Dewey's administrative efforts were the establishment of an independent department of pedagogy and of the University of Chicago's Laboratory Schools, in which the educational theories and practices suggested by psychology and philosophy could be tested. The Laboratory Schools, which began operation in 1896, attracted wide attention and enhanced the reputation of the University of Chicago as a foremost centre of progressive educational thought. Dewey headed the Laboratory Schools until 1904.

Dewey's ideas and proposals strongly affected educational theory and practice in the United States. Aspects of his views were seized upon by the "progressive movement" in education, which stressed the student-centred rather than the subject-centred school, education through activity rather than through formal learning, and laboratory, workshop, or occupational education rather than the mastery of traditional subjects. But though Dewey's own faith in progressive education never wavered, he came to realize that the zeal of his followers introduced a number of excesses and defects into progressive education. Indeed, in Experience and Education (1938) he sharply criticized educators who sought merely to interest or amuse students, disregarded organized subject matter in favour of mere activity on the part of students, and were content with mere vocational training.

During the last two decades of Dewey's life, his philosophy of education was the target of numerous and widespread attacks. Progressive educational practices were blamed for the failure of some American school systems to train pupils adequately in the liberal arts and for their neglect of such basic subjects as mathematics and science. Furthermore, critics blamed Dewey and his progressive ideas for what the former viewed as an insufficient emphasis on discipline in the schools.

To cite this page: "Dewey, John" Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://search.eb.com/bol/topic?eu=30675&sctn=2&pm=1 [Accessed 28 July 1999].

(Cited in Kenneth Burke, Permanence & Change 37-40, Occupational Psychosis)

Frazer, Sir James George

b. Jan. 1, 1854, Glasgow, Scot.

d. May 7, 1941, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Eng.

British anthropologist, folklorist, and classical scholar, best remembered as the author of The Golden Bough.

From an academy in Helensburgh, Dumbarton, Frazer went to Glasgow University (1869), entered Trinity College, Cambridge (1874), and became a fellow (1879). In 1907 he was appointed professor of social anthropology at Liverpool, but he returned to Cambridge after one session, remaining there for the rest of his life.

Science, Magic and Religion in Frazer

His outstanding position among anthropologists was established by the publication in 1890 of The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (enlarged to 12 vol., 1911-15; abridged edition in 1 vol., 1922; supplementary vol. Aftermath, 1936). The underlying theme of the work is Frazer's theory of a general development of modes of thought from the magical to the religious and, finally, to the scientific. His distinction between magic and religion (magic as an attempt to control events by technical acts based upon faulty reasoning, religion as an appeal for help to spiritual beings) has been basically assumed in much anthropological writing since his time. Although the evolutionary sequence of magical, religious, and scientific thought is no longer accepted and Frazer's broad general psychological theory has proved unsatisfactory, his work enabled him to synthesize and compare a wider range of information about religious and magical practices than has been achieved subsequently by any other single anthropologist.

The Golden Bough directed attention to the combination of priestly with kingly office in the "divine kingships" widely reported from Africa and elsewhere. According to Frazer, the institution of divine kingship derived from the belief that the well-being of the social and natural orders depended upon the vitality of the king, who must therefore be slain when his powers begin to fail him and be replaced by a vigorous successor. (See sacred kingship.)

In making a vast range of primitive custom appear intelligible to European thinkers of his time, Frazer had a wide influence among men of letters; and, though he traveled little himself, he was in close contact with missionaries and administrators who provided information for him and valued his interpretation of it. His other works include Totemism and Exogamy (1910) and Folk-Lore in the Old Testament (1918). He was knighted in 1914.

To cite this page: "Frazer, Sir James George" Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://search.eb.com/bol/topic?eu=35870&sctn=1 [Accessed 28 July 1999].

(Cited in Kenneth Burke, Permanence & Change 59-68)

Freud, Sigmund

b. May 6, 1856, Freiberg, Moravia, Austrian Empire [now Príbor, Czech Republic]

d. Sept. 23, 1939, London, Eng.

Austrian neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis.

Freud may justly be called the most influential intellectual legislator of his age. His creation of psychoanalysis was at once a theory of the human psyche, a therapy for the relief of its ills, and an optic for the interpretation of culture and society. Despite repeated criticisms, attempted refutations, and qualifications of Freud's work, its spell remained powerful well after his death and in fields far removed from psychology as it is narrowly defined. If, as the American sociologist Philip Rieff once contended, "psychological man" replaced such earlier notions as political, religious, or economic man as the 20th century's dominant self-image, it is in no small measure due to the power of Freud's vision and the seeming inexhaustibility of the intellectual legacy he left behind.

Psychoanalytic theory

Freud, still beholden to Charcot's hypnotic method, did not grasp the full implications of Breuer's experience until a decade later, when he developed the technique of free association. In part an extrapolation of the automatic writing promoted by the German Jewish writer Ludwig Börne a century before, in part a result of his own clinical experience with other hysterics, this revolutionary method was announced in the work Freud published jointly with Breuer in 1895, Studien über Hysterie (Studies in Hysteria). By encouraging the patient to express any random thoughts that came associatively to mind, the technique aimed at uncovering hitherto unarticulated material from the realm of the psyche that Freud, following a long tradition, called the unconscious. Because of its incompatibility with conscious thoughts or conflicts with other unconscious ones, this material was normally hidden, forgotten, or unavailable to conscious reflection. Difficulty in freely associating--sudden silences, stuttering, or the like--suggested to Freud the importance of the material struggling to be expressed, as well as the power of what he called the patient's defenses against that expression. Such blockages Freud dubbed resistance, which had to be broken down in order to reveal hidden conflicts. Unlike Charcot and Breuer, Freud came to the conclusion, based on his clinical experience with female hysterics, that the most insistent source of resisted material was sexual in nature. And even more momentously, he linked the etiology of neurotic symptoms to the same struggle between a sexual feeling or urge and the psychic defenses against it. Being able to bring that conflict to consciousness through free association and then probing its implications was thus a crucial step, he reasoned, on the road to relieving the symptom, which was best understood as an unwitting compromise formation between the wish and the defense. (See sexuality.)

Screen memories

At first, however, Freud was uncertain about the precise status of the sexual component in this dynamic conception of the psyche. His patients seemed to recall actual experiences of early seductions, often incestuous in nature. Freud's initial impulse was to accept these as having happened. But then, as he disclosed in a now famous letter to Fliess of Sept. 2, 1897, he concluded that, rather than being memories of actual events, these shocking recollections were the residues of infantile impulses and desires to be seduced by an adult. What was recalled was not a genuine memory but what he would later call a screen memory, or fantasy, hiding a primitive wish. That is, rather than stressing the corrupting initiative of adults in the etiology of neuroses, Freud concluded that the fantasies and yearnings of the child were at the root of later conflict.

The absolute centrality of his change of heart in the subsequent development of psychoanalysis cannot be doubted. For in attributing sexuality to children, emphasizing the causal power of fantasies, and establishing the importance of repressed desires, Freud laid the groundwork for what many have called the epic journey into his own psyche, which followed soon after the dissolution of his partnership with Breuer. (See repression.)

Freud's work on hysteria had focused on female sexuality and its potential for neurotic expression. To be fully universal, psychoanalysis--a term Freud coined in 1896--would also have to examine the male psyche in a condition of what might be called normality. It would have to become more than a psychotherapy and develop into a complete theory of the mind. To this end Freud accepted the enormous risk of generalizing from the experience he knew best: his own. Significantly, his self-analysis was both the first and the last in the history of the movement he spawned; all future analysts would have to undergo a training analysis with someone whose own analysis was ultimately traceable to Freud's of his disciples.

Freud's self-exploration was apparently enabled by a disturbing event in his life. In October 1896, Jakob Freud died shortly before his 81st birthday. Emotions were released in his son that he understood as having been long repressed, emotions concerning his earliest familial experiences and feelings. Beginning in earnest in July 1897, Freud attempted to reveal their meaning by drawing on a technique that had been available for millennia: the deciphering of dreams. Freud's contribution to the tradition of dream analysis was path-breaking, for in insisting on them as "the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious," he provided a remarkably elaborate account of why dreams originate and how they function.

The interpretation of dreams

In what many commentators consider his master work, Die Traumdeutung (published in 1899, but given the date of the dawning century to emphasize its epochal character; The Interpretation of Dreams), he presented his findings. Interspersing evidence from his own dreams with evidence from those recounted in his clinical practice, Freud contended that dreams played a fundamental role in the psychic economy. The mind's energy--which Freud called libido and identified principally, but not exclusively, with the sexual drive--was a fluid and malleable force capable of excessive and disturbing power. Needing to be discharged to ensure pleasure and prevent pain, it sought whatever outlet it might find. If denied the gratification provided by direct motor action, libidinal energy could seek its release through mental channels. Or, in the language of The Interpretation of Dreams, a wish can be satisfied by an imaginary wish fulfillment. All dreams, Freud claimed, even nightmares manifesting apparent anxiety, are the fulfillment of such wishes.

More precisely, dreams are the disguised expression of wish fulfillments. Like neurotic symptoms, they are the effects of compromises in the psyche between desires and prohibitions in conflict with their realization. Although sleep can relax the power of the mind's diurnal censorship of forbidden desires, such censorship, nonetheless, persists in part during nocturnal existence. Dreams, therefore, have to be decoded to be understood, and not merely because they are actually forbidden desires experienced in distorted fashion. For dreams undergo further revision in the process of being recounted to the analyst.

The Interpretation of Dreams provides a hermeneutic for the unmasking of the dream's disguise, or dreamwork, as Freud called it. The manifest content of the dream, that which is remembered and reported, must be understood as veiling a latent meaning. Dreams defy logical entailment and narrative coherence, for they intermingle the residues of immediate daily experience with the deepest, often most infantile wishes. Yet they can be ultimately decoded by attending to four basic activities of the dreamwork and reversing their mystifying effect.

The first of these activities, condensation, operates through the fusion of several different elements into one. As such, it exemplifies one of the key operations of psychic life, which Freud called overdetermination. No direct correspondence between a simple manifest content and its multidimensional latent counterpart can be assumed. The second activity of the dreamwork, displacement, refers to the decentring of dream thoughts, so that the most urgent wish is often obliquely or marginally represented on the manifest level. Displacement also means the associative substitution of one signifier in the dream for another, say, the king for one's father. The third activity Freud called representation, by which he meant the transformation of thoughts into images. Decoding a dream thus means translating such visual representations back into intersubjectively available language through free association. The final function of the dreamwork is secondary revision, which provides some order and intelligibility to the dream by supplementing its content with narrative coherence. The process of dream interpretation thus reverses the direction of the dreamwork, moving from the level of the conscious recounting of the dream through the preconscious back beyond censorship into the unconscious itself.

Further theoretical development

In 1904 Freud published Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life), in which he explored such seemingly insignificant errors as slips of the tongue or pen (later colloquially called Freudian slips), misreadings, or forgetting of names. These errors Freud understood to have symptomatic and thus interpretable importance. But unlike dreams they need not betray a repressed infantile wish yet can arise from more immediate hostile, jealous, or egoistic causes.

In 1905 Freud extended the scope of this analysis by examining Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten (Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious). Invoking the idea of "joke-work" as a process comparable to dreamwork, he also acknowledged the double-sided quality of jokes, at once consciously contrived and unconsciously revealing. Seemingly innocent phenomena like puns or jests are as open to interpretation as more obviously tendentious, obscene, or hostile jokes. The explosive response often produced by successful humour, Freud contended, owes its power to the orgasmic release of unconscious impulses, aggressive as well as sexual. But insofar as jokes are more deliberate than dreams or slips, they draw on the rational dimension of the psyche that Freud was to call the ego as much as on what he was to call the id.

In 1905 Freud also published the work that first thrust him into the limelight as the alleged champion of a pansexualist understanding of the mind: Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory, later translated as Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality), revised and expanded in subsequent editions. The work established Freud, along with Richard von Kraft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Albert Moll, and Iwan Bloch, as a pioneer in the serious study of sexology. Here he outlined in greater detail than before his reasons for emphasizing the sexual component in the development of both normal and pathological behaviour. Although not as reductionist as popularly assumed, Freud nonetheless extended the concept of sexuality beyond conventional usage to include a panoply of erotic impulses from the earliest childhood years on. Distinguishing between sexual aims (the act toward which instincts strive) and sexual objects (the person, organ, or physical entity eliciting attraction), he elaborated a repertoire of sexually generated behaviour of astonishing variety. Beginning very early in life, imperiously insistent on its gratification, remarkably plastic in its expression, and open to easy maldevelopment, sexuality, Freud concluded, is the prime mover in a great deal of human behaviour.

Sexuality and development

To spell out the formative development of the sexual drive, Freud focused on the progressive replacement of erotogenic zones in the body by others. An originally polymorphous sexuality first seeks gratification orally through sucking at the mother's breast, an object for which other surrogates can later be provided. Initially unable to distinguish between self and breast, the infant soon comes to appreciate its mother as the first external love object. Later Freud would contend that even before that moment, the child can treat its own body as such an object, going beyond undifferentiated autoeroticism to a narcissistic love for the self as such. After the oral phase, during the second year, the child's erotic focus shifts to its anus, stimulated by the struggle over toilet training. During the anal phase the child's pleasure in defecation is confronted with the demands of self-control. The third phase, lasting from about the fourth to the sixth year, he called the phallic. Because Freud relied on male sexuality as the norm of development, his analysis of this phase aroused considerable opposition, especially because he claimed its major concern is castration anxiety. (See psychosexual stage.)

To grasp what Freud meant by this fear, it is necessary to understand one of his central contentions. As has been stated, the death of Freud's father was the trauma that permitted him to delve into his own psyche. Not only did Freud experience the expected grief, but he also expressed disappointment, resentment, and even hostility toward his father in the dreams he analyzed at the time. In the process of abandoning the seduction theory he recognized the source of the anger as his own psyche rather than anything objectively done by his father. Turning, as he often did, to evidence from literary and mythical texts as anticipations of his psychological insights, Freud interpreted that source in terms of Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus Rex. The universal applicability of its plot, he conjectured, lies in the desire of every male child to sleep with his mother and remove the obstacle to the realization of that wish, his father. What he later dubbed the Oedipus complex presents the child with a critical problem, for the unrealizable yearning at its root provokes an imagined response on the part of the father: the threat of castration.

The phallic stage can only be successfully surmounted if the Oedipus complex with its accompanying castration anxiety can be resolved. According to Freud, this resolution can occur if the boy finally suppresses his sexual desire for the mother, entering a period of so-called latency, and internalizes the reproachful prohibition of the father, making it his own with the construction of that part of the psyche Freud called the superego or the conscience.

The blatantly phallocentric bias of this account, which was supplemented by a highly controversial assumption of penis envy in the already castrated female child, proved troublesome for subsequent psychoanalytic theory. Not surprisingly, later analysts of female sexuality have paid more attention to the girl's relations with the pre-Oedipal mother than to the vicissitudes of the Oedipus complex. Anthropological challenges to the universality of the complex have also been damaging, although it has been possible to redescribe it in terms that lift it out of the specific familial dynamics of Freud's own day. If the creation of culture is understood as the institution of kinship structures based on exogamy, then the Oedipal drama reflects the deeper struggle between natural desire and cultural authority.

Freud, however, always maintained the intrapsychic importance of the Oedipus complex, whose successful resolution is the precondition for the transition through latency to the mature sexuality he called the genital phase. Here the parent of the opposite sex is conclusively abandoned in favour of a more suitable love object able to reciprocate reproductively useful passion. In the case of the girl, disappointment over the nonexistence of a penis is transcended by the rejection of her mother in favour of a father figure instead. In both cases, sexual maturity means heterosexual, procreatively inclined, genitally focused behaviour.

Sexual development, however, is prone to troubling maladjustments preventing this outcome if the various stages are unsuccessfully negotiated. Fixation of sexual aims or objects can occur at any particular moment, caused either by an actual trauma or the blockage of a powerful libidinal urge. If the fixation is allowed to express itself directly at a later age, the result is what was then generally called a perversion. If, however, some part of the psyche prohibits such overt expression, then, Freud contended, the repressed and censored impulse produces neurotic symptoms, neuroses being conceptualized as the negative of perversions. Neurotics repeat the desired act in repressed form, without conscious memory of its origin or the ability to confront and work it through in the present. (See paraphilia, psychoneurosis.)

In addition to the neurosis of hysteria, with its conversion of affective conflicts into bodily symptoms, Freud developed complicated etiological explanations for other typical neurotic behaviour, such as obsessive-compulsions, paranoia, and narcissism. These he called psychoneuroses, because of their rootedness in childhood conflicts, as opposed to the actual neuroses such as hypochondria, neurasthenia, and anxiety neurosis, which are due to problems in the present (the last, for example, being caused by the physical suppression of sexual release).

Freud's elaboration of his therapeutic technique during these years focused on the implications of a specific element in the relationship between patient and analyst, an element whose power he first began to recognize in reflecting on Breuer's work with Anna O. Although later scholarship has cast doubt on its veracity, Freud's account of the episode was as follows. An intense rapport between Breuer and his patient had taken an alarming turn when Anna divulged her strong sexual desire for him. Breuer, who recognized the stirrings of reciprocal feelings, broke off his treatment out of an understandable confusion about the ethical implications of acting on these impulses. Freud came to see in this troubling interaction the effects of a more pervasive phenomenon, which he called transference (or in the case of the analyst's desire for the patient, counter-transference). Produced by the projection of feelings, transference, he reasoned, is the reenactment of childhood urges cathected (invested) on a new object. As such, it is the essential tool in the analytic cure, for by bringing to the surface repressed emotions and allowing them to be examined in a clinical setting, transference can permit their being worked through in the present. That is, affective remembrance can be the antidote to neurotic repetition.

It was largely to facilitate transference that Freud developed his celebrated technique of having the patient lie on a couch, not looking directly at the analyst, and free to fantasize with as little intrusion of the analyst's real personality as possible. Restrained and neutral, the analyst functions as a screen for the displacement of early emotions, both erotic and aggressive. Transference onto the analyst is itself a kind of neurosis, but one in the service of an ultimate working through of the conflicting feelings it expresses. Only certain illnesses, however, are open to this treatment, for it demands the ability to redirect libidinal energy outward. The psychoses, Freud sadly concluded, are based on the redirection of libido back onto the patient's ego and cannot therefore be relieved by transference in the analytic situation. How successful psychoanalytic therapy has been in the treatment of psychoneuroses remains, however, a matter of considerable dispute.

Although Freud's theories were offensive to many in the Vienna of his day, they began to attract a cosmopolitan group of supporters in the early 1900s. In 1902 the Psychological Wednesday Circle began to gather in Freud's waiting room with a number of future luminaries in the psychoanalytic movements in attendance. Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Stekel were often joined by guests such as Sándor Ferenczi, Carl Gustav Jung, Otto Rank, Ernest Jones, Max Eitingon, and A.A. Brill. In 1908 the group was renamed the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and held its first international congress in Salzburg. In the same year the first branch society was opened in Berlin. In 1909 Freud, along with Jung and Ferenczi, made a historic trip to Clark University in Worcester, Mass. The lectures he gave there were soon published as Über Psychoanalyse (1910; The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis), the first of several introductions he wrote for a general audience. Along with a series of vivid case studies--the most famous known colloquially as "Dora" (1905), "Little Hans" (1909), "The Rat Man" (1909), "The Psychotic Dr. Schreber" (1911), and "The Wolf Man" (1918)--they made his ideas known to a wider public.

As might be expected of a movement whose treatment emphasized the power of transference and the ubiquity of Oedipal conflict, its early history is a tale rife with dissension, betrayal, apostasy, and excommunication. The most widely noted schisms occurred with Adler in 1911, Stekel in 1912, and Jung in 1913; these were followed by later breaks with Ferenczi, Rank, and Wilhelm Reich in the 1920s. Despite efforts by loyal disciples like Ernest Jones to exculpate Freud from blame, subsequent research concerning his relations with former disciples like Viktor Tausk have clouded the picture considerably. Critics of the hagiographic legend of Freud have, in fact, had a relatively easy time documenting the tension between Freud's aspirations to scientific objectivity and the extraordinarily fraught personal context in which his ideas were developed and disseminated. Even well after Freud's death, his archivists' insistence on limiting access to potentially embarrassing material in his papers has reinforced the impression that the psychoanalytic movement resembled more a sectarian church than a scientific community (at least as the latter is ideally understood).

Toward a general theory

If the troubled history of its institutionalization served to call psychoanalysis into question in certain quarters, so too did its founder's penchant for extrapolating his clinical findings into a more ambitious general theory. As he admitted to Fliess in 1900, "I am actually not a man of science at all. . . . I am nothing but a conquistador by temperament, an adventurer." Freud's so-called metapsychology soon became the basis for wide-ranging speculations about cultural, social, artistic, religious, and anthropological phenomena. Composed of a complicated and often revised mixture of economic, dynamic, and topographical elements, the metapsychology was developed in a series of 12 papers Freud composed during World War I, only some of which were published in his lifetime. Their general findings appeared in two books in the 1920s: Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920; Beyond the Pleasure Principle) and Das Ich und das Es (1923; The Ego and the Id).

In these works, Freud attempted to clarify the relationship between his earlier topographical division of the psyche into the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious and his subsequent structural categorization into id, ego, and superego. The id was defined in terms of the most primitive urges for gratification in the infant, urges dominated by the desire for pleasure through the release of tension and the cathexis of energy. Ruled by no laws of logic, indifferent to the demands of expediency, unconstrained by the resistance of external reality, the id is ruled by what Freud called the primary process directly expressing somatically generated instincts. Through the inevitable experience of frustration the infant learns to adapt itself to the exigencies of reality. The secondary process that results leads to the growth of the ego, which follows what Freud called the reality principle in contradistinction to the pleasure principle dominating the id. Here the need to delay gratification in the service of self-preservation is slowly learned in an effort to thwart the anxiety produced by unfulfilled desires. What Freud termed defense mechanisms are developed by the ego to deal with such conflicts. Repression is the most fundamental, but Freud also posited an entire repertoire of others, including reaction formation, isolation, undoing, denial, displacement, and rationalization.

The last component in Freud's trichotomy, the superego, develops from the internalization of society's moral commands through identification with parental dictates during the resolution of the Oedipus complex. Only partly conscious, the superego gains some of its punishing force by borrowing certain aggressive elements in the id, which are turned inward against the ego and produce feelings of guilt. But it is largely through the internalization of social norms that the superego is constituted, an acknowledgement that prevents psychoanalysis from conceptualizing the psyche in purely biologistic or individualistic terms.

Freud's understanding of the primary process underwent a crucial shift in the course of his career. Initially he counterposed a libidinal drive that seeks sexual pleasure to a self-preservation drive whose telos is survival. But in 1914, while examining the phenomenon of narcissism, he came to consider the latter instinct as merely a variant of the former. Unable to accept so monistic a drive theory, Freud sought a new dualistic alternative. He arrived at the speculative assertion that there exists in the psyche an innate, regressive drive for stasis that aims to end life's inevitable tension. This striving for rest he christened the Nirvana principle and the drive underlying it the death instinct, or Thanatos, which he could substitute for self-preservation as the contrary of the life instinct, or Eros.

Social and cultural studies

Freud's mature instinct theory is in many ways a metaphysical construct, comparable to Bergson's élan vital or Schopenhauer's Will. Emboldened by its formulation, Freud launched a series of audacious studies that took him well beyond his clinician's consulting room. These he had already commenced with investigations of Leonardo da Vinci (1910) and the novel Gradiva by Wilhelm Jensen (1907). Here Freud attempted to psychoanalyze works of art as symbolic expressions of their creator's psychodynamics.

The fundamental premise that permitted Freud to examine cultural phenomena was called sublimation in the Three Essays. The appreciation or creation of ideal beauty, Freud contended, is rooted in primitive sexual urges that are transfigured in culturally elevating ways. Unlike repression, which produces only neurotic symptoms whose meaning is unknown even to the sufferer, sublimation is a conflict-free resolution of repression, which leads to intersubjectively available cultural works. Although potentially reductive in its implications, the psychoanalytic interpretation of culture can be justly called one of the most powerful "hermeneutics of suspicion," to borrow the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur's phrase, because it debunks idealist notions of high culture as the alleged transcendence of baser concerns.

Freud extended the scope of his theories to include anthropological and social psychological speculation as well in Totem und Tabu (1913; Totem and Taboo). Drawing on Sir James Frazer's explorations of the Australian Aborigines, he interpreted the mixture of fear and reverence for the totemic animal in terms of the child's attitude toward the parent of the same sex. The Aborigines' insistence on exogamy was a complicated defense against the strong incestuous desires felt by the child for the parent of the opposite sex. Their religion was thus a phylogenetic anticipation of the ontogenetic Oedipal drama played out in modern man's psychic development. But whereas the latter was purely an intrapsychic phenomenon based on fantasies and fears, the former, Freud boldly suggested, was based on actual historical events. Freud speculated that the rebellion of sons against dominating fathers for control over women had culminated in actual parricide. Ultimately producing remorse, this violent act led to atonement through incest taboos and the prohibitions against harming the father-substitute, the totemic object or animal. When the fraternal clan replaced the patriarchal horde, true society emerged. For renunciation of individual aspirations to replace the slain father and a shared sense of guilt in the primal crime led to a contractual agreement to end internecine struggle and band together instead. The totemic ancestor then could evolve into the more impersonal God of the great religions.

A subsequent effort to explain social solidarity, Massenpsychologie und Ich-analyse (1921; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego), drew on the antidemocratic crowd psychologists of the late 19th century, most notably Gustave Le Bon. Here the disillusionment with liberal, rational politics that some have seen as the seedbed of much of Freud's work was at its most explicit (the only competitor being the debunking psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson he wrote jointly with William Bullitt in 1930, which was not published until 1967). All mass phenomena, Freud suggested, are characterized by intensely regressive emotional ties stripping individuals of their self-control and independence. Rejecting possible alternative explanations such as hypnotic suggestion or imitation and unwilling to follow Jung in postulating a group mind, Freud emphasized instead individual libidinal ties to the group's leader. Group formation is like regression to a primal horde with the leader as the original father. Drawing on the army and the Roman Catholic Church as his examples, Freud never seriously considered less authoritarian modes of collective behaviour.

Religion, civilization, and discontents

Freud's bleak appraisal of social and political solidarity was replicated, if in somewhat more nuanced form, in his attitude toward religion. Although many accounts of Freud's development have discerned debts to one or another aspect of his Jewish background, debts Freud himself partly acknowledged, his avowed position was deeply irreligious. As noted in the account of Totem and Taboo, he always attributed the belief in divinities ultimately to the displaced worship of human ancestors. One of the most potent sources of his break with former disciples like Jung was precisely this skepticism toward spirituality.

In his 1907 essay "Zwangshandlungen und Religionsübungen" ("Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices," later translated as "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices") Freud had already contended that obsessional neuroses are private religious systems and religions themselves no more than the obsessional neuroses of mankind. Twenty years later, in Die Zukunft einer Illusion (1927; The Future of an Illusion), he elaborated this argument, adding that belief in God is a mythic reproduction of the universal state of infantile helplessness. Like an idealized father, God is the projection of childish wishes for an omnipotent protector. If children can outgrow their dependence, he concluded with cautious optimism, then humanity may also hope to leave behind its immature heteronomy.

The simple Enlightenment faith underlying this analysis quickly elicited critical comment, which led to its modification. In an exchange of letters with the French novelist Romain Rolland, Freud came to acknowledge a more intractable source of religious sentiment. The opening section of his next speculative tract, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930; Civilization and Its Discontents), was devoted to what Rolland had dubbed the oceanic feeling. Freud described it as a sense of indissoluble oneness with the universe, which mystics in particular have celebrated as the fundamental religious experience. Its origin, Freud claimed, is nostalgia for the pre-Oedipal infant's sense of unity with its mother. Although still rooted in infantile helplessness, religion thus derives to some extent from the earliest stage of postnatal development. Regressive longings for its restoration are possibly stronger than those for a powerful father and thus cannot be worked through by way of a collective resolution of the Oedipus complex.

Civilization and Its Discontents, written after the onset of Freud's struggle with cancer of the jaw and in the midst of the rise of European Fascism, was a profoundly unconsoling book. Focusing on the prevalence of human guilt and the impossibility of achieving unalloyed happiness, Freud contended that no social solution of the discontents of mankind is possible. All civilizations, no matter how well planned, can provide only partial relief. For aggression among men is not due to unequal property relations or political injustice, which can be rectified by laws, but rather to the death instinct redirected outward.

Even Eros, Freud suggested, is not fully in harmony with civilization, for the libidinal ties creating collective solidarity are aim-inhibited and diffuse rather than directly sexual. Thus, there is likely to be tension between the urge for sexual gratification and the sublimated love for mankind. Furthermore, because Eros and Thanatos are themselves at odds, conflict and the guilt it engenders are virtually inevitable. The best to be hoped for is a life in which the repressive burdens of civilization are in rough balance with the realization of instinctual gratification and the sublimated love for mankind. But reconciliation of nature and culture is impossible, for the price of any civilization is the guilt produced by the necessary thwarting of man's instinctual drives. Although elsewhere Freud had postulated mature, heterosexual genitality and the capacity to work productively as the hallmarks of health and urged that "where id is, there shall ego be," it is clear that he held out no hope for any collective relief from the discontents of civilization. He only offered an ethic of resigned authenticity, which taught the wisdom of living without the possibility of redemption, either religious or secular.

Last days

Freud's final major work, Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion (1938; Moses and Monotheism), was more than just the "historical novel" he had initially thought to subtitle it. Moses had long been a figure of capital importance for Freud; indeed Michelangelo's famous statue of Moses had been the subject of an essay written in 1914. The book itself sought to solve the mystery of Moses' origins by claiming that he was actually an aristocratic Egyptian by birth who had chosen the Jewish people to keep alive an earlier monotheistic religion. Too stern and demanding a taskmaster, Moses was slain in a Jewish revolt, and a second, more pliant leader, also called Moses, rose in his place. The guilt engendered by the parricidal act was, however, too much to endure, and the Jews ultimately returned to the religion given them by the original Moses as the two figures were merged into one in their memories. Here Freud's ambivalence about his religious roots and his father's authority was allowed to pervade a highly fanciful story that reveals more about its author than its ostensible subject. (See Moses.)

Moses and Monotheism was published in the year Hitler invaded Austria. Freud was forced to flee to England. His books were among the first to be burned, as the fruits of a "Jewish science," when the Nazis took over Germany. Although psychotherapy was not banned in the Third Reich, where Field Marshall Hermann Göring's cousin headed an official institute, psychoanalysis essentially went into exile, most notably to North America and England. Freud himself died only a few weeks after World War II broke out, at a time when his worst fears about the irrationality lurking behind the facade of civilization were being realized. Freud's death did not, however, hinder the reception and dissemination of his ideas. A plethora of Freudian schools emerged to develop psychoanalysis in different directions. In fact, despite the relentless and often compelling challenges mounted against virtually all of his ideas, Freud has remained one of the most potent figures in the intellectual landscape of the 20th century. (M.E.J.)

To cite this page: "Freud, Sigmund" Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://search.eb.com/bol/topic?eu=117272&sctn=1&pm=1 [Accessed 29 July 1999].

Cited in Kennth Burke, Permanence & Change 125+

Gestalt psychology

20th-century school of psychology that provided the foundation for the modern study of perception. Its precepts, formulated as a reaction against the atomistic orientation of previous theories, emphasized that the whole of anything is greater than its parts. The attributes of the whole of anything are not deducible from analysis of the parts in isolation. The word Gestalt is used in modern German to mean the way a thing has been gestellt; i.e., "placed," or "put together." There is no exact equivalent in English. "Form" and "shape" are the usual translations; in psychology the word is often rendered "pattern" or "configuration."

Gestalt theory began toward the close of the 19th century in Austria and south Germany as a protest against the associationist and structural schools' piecemeal analyses of experience into atomistic elements. Gestalt studies made use instead of the methods of phenomenology. This method, with a tradition going back to Goethe, involves nothing more than the description of direct psychological experience, with no restrictions on what is permissible in the description. Gestalt psychology was in part an attempt to add a humanistic dimension to what was considered a barren approach to the scientific study of mental life. Gestalt psychology sought to encompass the qualities of form, meaning, and value that prevailing psychologists had either ignored or thought to fall outside the confines of science.

Max Wertheimer in 1912 published the paper considered to mark the founding of the Gestalt school. In it he reported the result of an experimental study done at Frankfurt with two colleagues, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka; these three formed the core of the Gestalt school for the next decades. The earliest Gestalt work concerned the area of perception, particularly visual perceptual organization as illuminated by the phenomenon of illusion. A perceptual illusion that provided strong support for Gestalt principles was the phi-phenomenon, an illusion of apparent motion named and described in 1912 by Wertheimer. The phi-phenomenon is a visual illusion in which stationary objects shown in rapid succession appear to move by transcending the threshold at which they can be perceived separately (the phenomenon is experienced in viewing motion pictures). (See vision, optical illusion.)

The effect of the phi-phenomenon was apparently inexplicable on the old assumption that the sensations of perceptual experience stand in a one-to-one relation to the physical stimuli. The perceived motion is an emergent experience, not present in the stimuli in isolation but dependent upon the relational characteristics of the stimuli. The nervous system of the observer and the observer's experience do not passively register the physical input in a piecemeal way. Rather, the neural organization as well as the perceptual experience springs immediately into existence as an entire field with differentiated parts. In later writings this principle was stated as the law of Prägnanz: The neural and perceptual organization of any set of impinging stimuli forms as good a Gestalt, or whole, as the prevailing conditions allow.

Major elaborations of the new formulation occurred within the next decades. Wertheimer, Köhler, Koffka, and their students extended the Gestalt approach to problems in other areas of perception, problem solving, learning, and thinking. The Gestalt principles were later applied to motivation, social psychology, and personality, particularly by Kurt Lewin, and to aesthetics and economic behaviour. Wertheimer demonstrated that Gestalt concepts could also be used to shed light on problems in ethics, political behaviour, and the nature of truth. Gestalt psychology's traditions have continued in the perceptual investigations undertaken by Rudolf Arnheim and Hans Wallach in the United States.

To cite this page: "Gestalt psychology" Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://search.eb.com/bol/topic?eu=37336&sctn=1&pm=1 [Accessed 28 July 1999].

(Cited in Kenneth Burke, Permanence & Change 11+)

Jaensch, eidetic images & the Muller-Lyer Illusion

Muller-Lyer

The so-called Müller-Lyer illusion (also Figure 2) is based on the Gestalt principles of convergence and divergence: lines at the sides seem to lead the eye either inward or outward to create a false impression of length. eidetic image

Eidetic Image

An unusually vivid subjective visual phenomenon. An eidetic person not only can imagine an absent object but behaves as if he really can see it, either with closed eyes or while looking at some surface that serves as a convenient background for the image. A particular object may be recalled eidetically either immediately after its disappearance or removal from sight or after a lapse of several minutes, days, or even years; spontaneously appearing eidetic images have also been reported. In some instances, eidetic images and the objects they represent differ in colour, form, apparent size, position in space, richness of detail, and many other characteristics; in other instances, objects may be eidetically reproduced with almost photographic fidelity. Phenomena corresponding to eidetic images in the visual field are believed to exist in other sense fields as well. Investigations have revealed little about the nature, causes, and significance of eidetic images.

To cite this page: "eidetic image" Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://search.eb.com/bol/topic?eu=32673&sctn=1 [Accessed 29 July 1999].

Cited in Kenneth Burke, Permanence & Change 213

Joyce, James

b. Feb. 2, 1882, Dublin, Ireland

d. Jan. 13, 1941, Zürich, Switz.

in full JAMES AUGUSTINE ALOYSIUS JOYCE Irish novelist noted for his experimental use of language and exploration of new literary methods in such large works of fiction as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

Early life.

Joyce, the eldest of 10 children in his family to survive infancy, was sent at age six to Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school that has been described as "the Eton of Ireland." But his father was not the man to stay affluent for long; he drank, neglected his affairs, and borrowed money from his office, and his family sank deeper and deeper into poverty, the children becoming accustomed to conditions of increasing sordidness. Joyce did not return to Clongowes in 1891; instead he stayed at home for the next two years and tried to educate himself, asking his mother to check his work. In April 1893 he and his brother Stanislaus were admitted, without fees, to Belvedere College, a Jesuit grammar school in Dublin. Joyce did well there academically and was twice elected president of the Marian Society, a position virtually that of head boy. He left, however, under a cloud, as it was thought (correctly) that he had lost his Roman Catholic faith.

He entered University College, Dublin, which was then staffed by Jesuit priests. There he studied languages and reserved his energies for extracurricular activities, reading widely--particularly in books not recommended by the Jesuits--and taking an active part in the college's Literary and Historical Society. Greatly admiring Henrik Ibsen, he learned Dano-Norwegian to read the original and had an article, "Ibsen's New Drama"--a review of the play When We Dead Awaken--published in the London Fortnightly Review in 1900 just after his 18th birthday. This early success confirmed Joyce in his resolution to become a writer and persuaded his family, friends, and teachers that the resolution was justified. In October 1901 he published an essay, "The Day of the Rabblement," attacking the Irish Literary Theatre (later the Dublin Abbey Theatre) for catering to popular taste.

Joyce was leading a dissolute life at this time but worked sufficiently hard to pass his final examinations, matriculating with "second-class honours in Latin" and obtaining the degree of B.A. on Oct. 31, 1902. Never did he relax his efforts to master the art of writing. He wrote verses and experimented with short prose passages that he called "epiphanies," a word that Joyce used to describe his accounts of moments when the real truth about some person or object was revealed. To support himself while writing, he decided to become a doctor, but, after attending a few lectures in Dublin, he borrowed what money he could and went to Paris, where he abandoned the idea of medical studies, wrote some book reviews, and studied in the Sainte-Geneviève Library.

Recalled home in April 1903 because his mother was dying, he tried various occupations, including teaching, and lived at various addresses, including the Martello Tower at Sandycove, now Ireland's Joyce Museum. He had begun writing a lengthy naturalistic novel, Stephen Hero, based on the events of his own life, when in 1904 George Russell offered £1 each for some simple short stories with an Irish background to appear in a farmers' magazine, The Irish Homestead. In response Joyce began writing the stories published as Dubliners (1914). Three stories, "The Sisters," "Eveline," and "After the Race," had appeared under the pseudonym Stephen Dedalus before the editor decided that Joyce's work was not suitable for his readers. Meanwhile Joyce had met a girl named Nora Barnacle, with whom he fell in love on June 16, the day that he chose as what is known as "Bloomsday" (the day of his novel Ulysses). Eventually he persuaded her to leave Ireland with him, although he refused, on principle, to go through a ceremony of marriage.

To cite this page: "Joyce, James" Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://search.eb.com/bol/topic?eu=45058&sctn=1&pm=1 [Accessed 29 July 1999].

Cited in Kenneth Burke, Permanence & Change 113+

Kretschmer, Ernst

b. Oct. 8, 1888, Wüstenrot, Ger.

d. Feb. 8, 1964, Tübingen, W.Ger.

German psychiatrist who attempted to correlate body build and physical constitution with personality characteristics and mental illness.

Kretschmer studied both philosophy and medicine at the University of Tübingen, remaining there as an assistant in the neurologic clinic after completing his studies in 1913. The next year, he published his dissertation on manic-depressive delusions, anticipating his later work in mental illness. He studied hysteria while a military physician during World War I, developing a treatment in which victims of battle hysteria were quieted in dark chambers and treated with electrical impulses. After the war, he returned to Tübingen as a lecturer and began writing books containing his psychological theories. His best-known work, Körperbau und Charakter (1921; Physique and Character), advanced the theory that certain mental disorders were more common among people of specific physical types. Kretschmer posited three chief constitutional groups: the tall, thin asthenic type, the more muscular athletic type, and the rotund pyknic type. He suggested that the lanky asthenics, and to a lesser degree the athletic types, were more prone to schizophrenia, while the pyknic types were more likely to develop manic-depressive disorders. His work was criticized because his thinner, schizophrenic patients were younger than his pyknic, manic-depressive subjects, so the differences in body type could be explained by differences in age. Nevertheless, Kretschmer's ideas to some extent entered into popular culture and generated further psychological research.

Kretschmer left Tübingen in 1926, when he became professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Marburg. During this period, he produced Hysterie, Reflex und Instinkt (1923; Hysteria, Reflex, and Instinct, 1960), in which he suggested that the formation of symptoms in hysteria is initially conscious but is then taken over by automatic mechanisms and becomes unconscious, and Geniale Menschen (1929; The Psychology of Men of Genius, 1931). In 1933 Kretschmer resigned as president of the German Society of Psychotherapy in protest against the Nazi takeover of the government, but unlike other prominent German psychologists he remained in Germany during World War II.

After the war, Kretschmer returned to Tübingen and remained there as professor of psychiatry and director of the neurologic clinic until 1959. He concerned himself with studies of physical constitution and mental illness in children and adolescents, developed new methods of psychotherapy and hypnosis, and studied compulsive criminality, recommending adequate provisions be made for the psychiatric treatment of prisoners.

To cite this page: "Kretschmer, Ernst" Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://search.eb.com/bol/topic?eu=47312&sctn=1&pm=1 [Accessed 29 July 1999].

KB P&C 243

La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duke (duc) de

b. Sept. 15, 1613, Paris, Fr. d. March 16/17, 1680, Paris

also called (UNTIL 1650) PRINCE DE MARCILLAC, French classical author who had been one of the most active rebels of the Fronde before he became the leading exponent of the maxime, a French literary form of epigram that expresses a harsh or paradoxical truth with brevity.

Heritage and political activities.

La Rochefoucauld was the son of François, Count (comte) de La Rochefoucauld, and his wife, Gabrielle du Plessis-Liancourt. In 1628 he was married to Andrée de Vivonne, with whom he had four sons and three daughters. He served in the army against the Spaniards in Italy in 1629, in the Netherlands and Picardy in 1635-36, and again in Flanders in 1639. The public lives of both father and son were conditioned by the policies of Louis XIV's government, which by turns threatened and flattered the nobility. Though his father was created duke and made governor of Poitou, he was later deprived of that post when the loyalty of the family was called into question. The younger La Rochefoucauld was allowed by Cardinal Mazarin, the infant king's chief minister, to resume the governorship in 1646. The fact that his château at Verteuil was demolished by the crown, apparently without notice, in 1650 throws light on a main cause of the series of revolts between 1648 and 1653 known as the Fronde: the distrust and fear felt by the monarchy for the local independence of the nobility.

La Rochefoucauld was more vulnerable than most of his contemporaries, because throughout his life he seems to have been susceptible to feminine charm. In 1635 the Duchess (duchesse) de Chevreuse had lured him into intrigues against Cardinal de Richelieu, the chief minister of Louis XIII, an adventure that only procured for La Rochefoucauld a humiliating interview with Richelieu, eight days of imprisonment in the Bastille, and two years of exile at Verteuil. Later, his hatred for Mazarin and his devotion to Anne de Bourbon, Duchess de Longueville, sister of the Great Condé, who was the leader of the Fronde, led to an even more disastrous outcome. His own account of the weary alternation of plots and campaigns of the mutinous nobles throughout the revolts (1648-53) may be read in his Mémoires. His loyalty to the House of Condé did not increase his popularity with the crown and prevented him from pursuing any single policy for reform of royal or ministerial government. How far toward treason he allowed himself to be led, when the intentions of the reforming princes and nobility were superseded by personal ambitions, is shown by the draft of the so-called Treaty of Madrid of 1651, which laid down conditions of Spanish help to the French nobility. La Rochefoucauld not only signed the treaty but is thought by one scholar to have drafted it. (See Chevreuse, Marie de Rohan-Montbazon, duchesse de, Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis, cardinal et duc de, Longueville, Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon-Condé, Duchesse de.)

Two other features of his public career deserve mention, since they explain much of his writing--courage and litigation. The man who was to pen the aphorisms on courage and cowardice had certainly been in the forefront of battle. Within six years he was wounded in no fewer than three engagements. The injuries to his face and throat were such that he retired from the struggle, his health ruined and his peace of mind lost.

His financial difficulties were no doubt intensified by war, his lands were heavily mortgaged, and but for the astute help of his agent he might not have been able to keep his establishment in central Paris, as he did from 1660 onward. He was forced to pay not only for fine living but for endless litigation. There is evidence of no fewer than five lawsuits in the space of three years, chiefly against other noble families, over questions of precedence and court ceremonial.

Yet in 1655 his literary endeavours were still before him. Thanks to the lasting and intellectually stimulating friendships with Mme de Sablé, one of the most remarkable women of her age, and Mme de Lafayette, he seems to have avoided politics for a while and gradually won his way back into royal favour, a feat sealed by his promotion to the knightly order of the Saint-Esprit at the end of 1661. Reading and intellectual conversation occupied his time as well as that of other men and women of a circle who listened to private readings of Pierre Corneille's classical tragedies and Nicolas Boileau's didactic poem on the principles of poetic composition, L'Art poétique. The circle was enlivened by a new game that consisted of discussing epigrams on manners and behaviour, expressed in the briefest, most pungent manner possible. The care with which La Rochefoucauld kept notes and versions of his thoughts on the moral and intellectual subjects of the game is clear from the surviving manuscripts. When the clandestine publication of one of them in Holland forced him to publish under his own name, it was clear that he had satisfied public taste: five editions of the Maximes, each of them revised and enlarged, were to appear within his lifetime.

The Maximes.

The first edition of the Maximes, published in 1665, was called Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales and did not contain epigrams exclusively; the most eloquent single item, which appeared only in the first edition and was thereafter removed by the author, is a three-page poetic description of self-interest, a quality he found in all forms of life and in all actions. The manuscripts also contain epigrams embedded in longer reflections; in some cases the various versions show the steps by which a series of connected sentences was filed down to the point of ultimate brevity. Beneath the general single statement, however, can be found a personal reaction to the Fronde, or to politics, often violent in its expression. For example:

Les crimes deviennent innocents, même glorieux, par leur nombre et par leurs qualités; de là vient que les voleries publiques sont des habiletés, et que prendre des provinces injustement s'appelle faire des conquêtes. Le crime a ses héros, ainsi que la vertu. (Crimes are made innocent, even virtuous, by their number and nature; hence public robbery becomes a skillful achievement and wrongful seizure of a province is called conquest. Crime has its heroes no less than virtue has.)

It may have been hostile reception or the fear of revealing a political attitude that made him abandon this kind of epigram except for the almost unrecognizable No. 185: "Il y a des héros en mal comme en bien" ("Evil as well as good has its heroes"). Modern readers forget that La Rochefoucauld's contemporaries would read recent history into statements that appear cryptic and opaque to posterity.

The Fronde was to La Rochefoucauld one of those moments of history that seemed to reveal men's motives at their worst. His exposure of the self-seeking that lay beneath conventional homage to morality has earned for him the reputation of a cynic, but his keener contemporaries are no less severe. The pungency and absence of explanation make his epigrams seem more scornful than similar statements embedded in memoirs. But La Rochefoucauld was concerned with conveying something more than scorn, and beneath his professions of idealism he pinpointed a restless and unquenchable thirst for self-preservation. Virtue in the pure state was something he did not find:

Les vertus se perdent dans l'intérêt comme les fleuves se perdent dans la mer. (Virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea.)

This image of the sea recurred:

Voilà la peinture de l'amour-propre, dont toute la vie n'est qu'une grande et longue agitation; la mer en est une image sensible; et l'amour-propre trouve dans le flux et reflux de ses vagues continuelles une fidèle expression de la succession turbulente de ses pensées et de ses éternels mouvements. (Such is the picture of self-love, of which all life is one continuous and immense ferment. The sea is its visible counterpart and self-love finds in the ebb and flow of the sea's endless waves a true likeness of the chaotic sequence of its thoughts and of its everlasting motion.)

La Rochefoucauld has been called an Epicurean but his imaginative insights attached him to no doctrine. Like Michel de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal, he was aware of the mystery around man that dwarfs his efforts and mocks his knowledge, of the many things about man of which he knows nothing, of the gap between thinking and being, between what man is and what man does: "La nature fait le mérite et la fortune le met en oeuvre" ("Nature gives us our good qualities and chance sets them to work"). Some epigrams show a respect for the power of indolence, and others reveal an almost Nietzschean respect for strength. All these insights seem common to the French classical school of which he is so brilliant a member--though as an aristocrat he disdained being called a writer. These insights also accounted for his fame and influence on his disciples: in England Lord Chesterfield, the orator and man of letters, and the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy; in Germany the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg; in France the writers and critics Stendhal, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and André Gide.

Yet his chief glory perhaps is not as thinker but as artist. In the variety and subtlety of his arrangement of words he made the maxime into a jewel. It is not always the truth of the maxim that is so striking, but its exaggeration which can surprise one into a new aspect of the truth. He describes and defines--he has no time for more--but of the single metallic image he makes amazing use. He handles paradox to such effect that a final word can reverse the rest:

On ne donne rien si libéralement que ses conseils (We give nothing so generously as . . . advice). C'est une grande folie de vouloir être sage tout seul (It is great folly to seek to be wise . . . on one's own).

La Rochefoucauld authorized five editions of the Maximes from 1665 to 1678. Two years after the last publication, he died in Paris.

Though he did a considerable amount of writing over the years La Rochefoucauld actually published only two works, the Mémoires and the Maximes. In addition, about 150 letters have been collected and 19 shorter pieces now known as Réflexions diverses. These, with the treaties and conventions that he may have drawn up personally, constitute his entire work and of these only the Maximes stand out as a work of genius. Like his younger contemporary, Jean de La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld was a man of one book. (W.G.Mo.)

To cite this page: "La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duke (duc) de" Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://search.eb.com/bol/topic?eu=47751&sctn=1&pm=1 [Accessed 29 July 1999].

Cited in KB P&C 123+

Lawrence, D.H.

b. Sept. 11, 1885, Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, Eng

d. March 2, 1930, Vence, France

in full DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE English author of novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, and letters. His novels Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1920) made him one of the most influential English writers of the 20th century.

Youth and early career.

Lawrence was the fourth child of a north Midlands coal miner who was a dialect speaker, a drinker, and virtually illiterate. Lawrence's mother, who came from the south of England, was educated, refined, and pious. Lawrence won a scholarship to Nottingham High School (1898-1901) and left at 16 to earn a living as clerk in a factory, but he had to give up work after a first attack of pneumonia. Convalescing, he began visiting the Haggs Farm nearby and began an intense friendship (1902-10) with Jessie Chambers. He became a pupil-teacher in Eastwood in 1902 and, encouraged by Jessie, began to write in 1905; his first story was published in a local newspaper in 1907. He studied at University College, Nottingham, from 1906 to 1908, earning a teachers' certificate, and went on writing poems and stories and drafting his first novel, The White Peacock.

The Eastwood setting, especially the contrast between mining town and unspoiled countryside, the life and culture of the miners, the strife between his parents, and its effect on his tortured relationship with Jessie all became themes of Lawrence's early short stories and novels. He kept on returning to Eastwood in imagination long after he had left it in fact.

In 1908 Lawrence went to teach in Croydon, a London suburb. Jessie Chambers sent some of his poems to Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford Madox Ford), editor of the influential English Review. Hueffer recognized his genius, the Review began to publish his work, and Lawrence was able to meet such rising young writers as Ezra Pound. Hueffer recommended The White Peacock to the publisher William Heinemann, who published it in 1911, just after the death of Lawrence's mother and his break with Jessie. His second novel, The Trespasser (1912), gained the interest of the influential editor Edward Garnett, who secured the third novel, Sons and Lovers, for his own firm, Duckworth. In the crucial year of 1911-12 Lawrence had another attack of pneumonia and decided to give up teaching and live by writing. Most importantly, he fell in love and eloped with Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen), the aristocratic German wife of a professor at Nottingham. The couple went first to Germany and then to Italy, where Lawrence completed his third novel, Sons and Lovers. They were married in England in 1914 after Frieda's divorce.

Sons and Lovers. Lawrence's first two novels, first play, and most of his early short stories, including such masterpieces as "Odour of Chrysanthemums" and "Daughters of the Vicar" (collected in The Prussian Officer, and Other Stories, 1914), use early experience as a departure point. Sons and Lovers carries this process to the point of quasi-autobiography. The book depicts Eastwood and the Haggs Farm, the twin poles of Lawrence's early life, with vivid realism. The central character, Paul Morel, is naturally identified as Lawrence; the miner-father who drinks and the powerful mother who resists him are clearly modeled on his parents; and the painful devotion of Miriam Leivers resembles that of Jessie Chambers. An older brother, William, who dies young, parallels Lawrence's brother Ernest, who met an early death. In the novel, the mother turns to her elder son William for emotional fulfillment in place of his father, and when William dies, his younger brother Paul becomes the mother's mission and, ultimately, her victim. Paul's adolescent love for Miriam is undermined by his mother's dominance; though fatally attracted to Miriam, Paul cannot be sexually involved with anyone so like his mother, and the sexual relationship he forces on her proves a disaster. He then, in reaction, has a passionate affair with a married woman, Clara Dawes, in what is the only purely imaginary part of the novel. Clara's husband is a drunken workingman whom she has undermined by her social and intellectual superiority, so their situation mirrors that of the Morels. But Paul can manage sexual passion only when it is split off from commitment; their affair ends after Paul and Dawes have a murderous fight, and Clara returns to her husband. Paul, for all his intelligence, cannot fully grasp his own unconscious motivations, but Lawrence silently conveys them in the pattern of the plot. Paul can only be released by his mother's death, and at the end of the book, he is at last free to take up his own life, though it remains uncertain whether he can finally overcome her influence. The whole narrative turns Lawrence's own life history into a powerful psychoanalytic study of a young man's Oedipal attraction toward his mother and its consequences on his relations with other women.

To cite this page: "Lawrence, D.H." Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://search.eb.com/bol/topic?eu=48524&sctn=1&pm=1 [Accessed 29 July 1999].

Cited in ther Conclusion to Kenneth Burke, Permanence & Change.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm

b. July 1 [June 21, old style], 1646, Leipzig

d. Nov. 14, 1716, Hannover, Hanover

German philosopher, mathematician, and political adviser, important both as a metaphysician and as a logician and distinguished also for his independent invention of the differential and integral calculus.

Early life and education

Leibniz was born into a pious Lutheran family near the end of the Thirty Years' War, which had laid Germany in ruins. As a child, he was educated in the Nicolai School but was largely self-taught in the library of his father, who had died in 1652. At Easter time in 1661, he entered the University of Leipzig as a law student; there he came into contact with the thought of men who had revolutionized science and philosophy--men such as Galileo, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and René Descartes. Leibniz dreamed of reconciling--a verb that he did not hesitate to use time and again throughout his career--these modern thinkers with the Aristotle of the Scholastics. His baccalaureate thesis, De Principio Individui ("On the Principle of the Individual"), which appeared in May 1663, was inspired partly by Lutheran nominalism (the theory that universals have no reality but are mere names) and emphasized the existential value of the individual, who is not to be explained either by matter alone or by form alone but rather by his whole being (entitate tota). This notion was the first germ of the future "monad." In 1666 he wrote De Arte Combinatoria ("On the Art of Combination"), in which he formulated a model that is the theoretical ancestor of some modern computers: all reasoning, all discovery, verbal or not, is reducible to an ordered combination of elements, such as numbers, words, sounds, or colours. (See Aristotelianism, scholasticism.)

After completing his legal studies in 1666, Leibniz applied for the degree of doctor of law. He was refused because of his age and consequently left his native city forever. At Altdorf--the university town of the free city of Nürnberg--his dissertation De Casibus Perplexis ("On Perplexing Cases") procured him the doctor's degree at once, as well as the immediate offer of a professor's chair, which, however, he declined. During his stay in Nürnberg, he met Johann Christian, Freiherr von Boyneburg, one of the most distinguished German statesmen of the day. Boyneburg took him into his service and introduced him to the court of the prince elector, the archbishop of Mainz, Johann Philipp von Schönborn, where he was concerned with questions of law and politics.

King Louis XIV of France was a growing threat to the German Holy Roman Empire. To ward off this danger and divert the King's interests elsewhere, the Archbishop hoped to propose to Louis a project for an expedition into Egypt; because he was using religion as a pretext, he expressed the hope that the project would promote the reunion of the church. Leibniz, with a view toward this reunion, worked on the Demonstrationes Catholicae. His research led him to situate the soul in a point--this was new progress toward the monad--and to develop the principle of sufficient reason (nothing occurs without a reason). His meditations on the difficult theory of the point were related to problems encountered in optics, space, and movement; they were published in 1671 under the general title Hypothesis Physica Nova ("New Physical Hypothesis"). He asserted that movement depends, as in the theory of the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, on the action of a spirit (God).

In 1672 the Elector sent the young jurist on a mission to Paris, where he arrived at the end of March. In September, Leibniz met with Antoine Arnauld, a Jansenist theologian (Jansenism was a nonorthodox Roman Catholic movement that spawned a rigoristic form of morality) known for his writings against the Jesuits. Leibniz sought Arnauld's help for the reunion of the church. He was soon left without protectors by the deaths of Freiherr von Boyneburg in December 1672 and of the Elector of Mainz in February 1673; he was now, however, free to pursue his scientific studies. In search of financial support, he constructed a calculating machine and presented it to the Royal Society during his first journey to London, in 1673.

Late in 1675 Leibniz laid the foundations of both integral and differential calculus. With this discovery, he ceased to consider time and space as substances--another step closer to monadology. He began to develop the notion that the concepts of extension and motion contained an element of the imaginary, so that the basic laws of motion could not be discovered merely from a study of their nature. Nevertheless, he continued to hold that extension and motion could provide a means for explaining and predicting the course of phenomena. Thus, contrary to Descartes, Leibniz held that it would not be contradictory to posit that this world is a well-related dream. If visible movement depends on the imaginary element found in the concept of extension, it can no longer be defined by simple local movement; it must be the result of a force. In criticizing the Cartesian formulation of the laws of motion, known as mechanics, Leibniz became, in 1676, the founder of a new formulation, known as dynamics, which substituted kinetic energy for the conservation of movement. At the same time, beginning with the principle that light follows the path of least resistance, he believed that he could demonstrate the ordering of nature toward a final goal or cause.

(See Cartesianism, classical mechanics.)

The Hanoverian period

Leibniz continued his work but was still without an income-producing position. By October 1676, however, he had accepted a position in the employment of John Frederick, the duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg. John Frederick, a convert to Catholicism from Lutheranism in 1651, had become duke of Hanover in 1665. He appointed Leibniz librarian, but, beginning in February 1677, Leibniz solicited the post of councillor, which he was finally granted in 1678. It should be noted that, among the great philosophers of his time, he was the only one who had to earn a living. As a result, he was always a jack-of-all-trades to royalty.

Trying to make himself useful in all ways, Leibniz proposed that education be made more practical, that academies be founded; he worked on hydraulic presses, windmills, lamps, submarines, clocks, and a wide variety of mechanical devices; he devised a means of perfecting carriages and experimented with phosphorus. He also developed a water pump run by windmills, which ameliorated the exploitation of the mines of the Harz Mountains, and he worked in these mines as an engineer frequently from 1680 to 1685. Leibniz is considered to be among the creators of geology because of the observations he compiled there, including the hypothesis that the Earth was at first molten. These many occupations did not stop his work in mathematics: In March 1679 he perfected the binary system of numeration (i.e., using two as a base), and at the end of the same year he proposed the basis for analysis situs, now known as general topology, a branch of mathematics that deals with selected properties of collections of related physical or abstract elements. He was also working on his dynamics and his philosophy, which was becoming increasingly anti-Cartesian. At this point, Duke John Frederick died on Jan. 7, 1680, and his brother, Ernest Augustus I, succeeded him.

France was growing more intolerant at home--from 1680 to 1682 there were harsh persecutions of the Protestants that paved the way for the revocation of the Edict of Nantes on Oct. 18, 1685--and increasingly menacing on its frontiers, for as early as 1681, despite the reigning peace, Louis XIV took Strasbourg and laid claim to 10 cities in Alsace. France was thus becoming a real danger to the empire, which had already been shaken on the east by a Hungarian revolt and by the advance of the Turks, who had been stopped only by the victory of John III Sobieski, king of Poland, at the siege of Vienna in 1683. Leibniz served both his prince and the empire as a patriot. He suggested to his prince a means of increasing the production of linen and proposed a process for the desalinization of water; he recommended classifying the archives and wrote, in both French and Latin, a violent pamphlet against Louis XIV.

During this same period Leibniz continued to perfect his metaphysical system through research into the notion of a universal cause of all being, attempting to arrive at a starting point that would reduce reasoning to an algebra of thought. He also continued his developments in mathematics; in 1681 he was concerned with the proportion between a circle and a circumscribed square and, in 1684, with the resistance of solids. In the latter year he published Nova Methodus pro Maximis et Minimis ("New Method for the Greatest and the Least"), which was an exposition of his differential calculus.

Leibniz' noted Meditationes de Cognitione, Veritate et Ideis (Reflections on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas) appeared at this time and defined his theory of knowledge: things are not seen in God--as Nicolas Malebranche suggested--but rather there is an analogy, a strict relation, between God's ideas and man's, an identity between God's logic and man's. In February 1686, Leibniz wrote his Discours de métaphysique (Discourse on Metaphysics). In the March publication of Acta, he disclosed his dynamics in a piece entitled Brevis Demonstratio Erroris Memorabilis Cartesii et Aliorum Circa Legem Naturae ("Brief Demonstration of the Memorable Error of Descartes and Others About the Law of Nature"). A further development of Leibniz' views, revealed in a text written in 1686 but long unpublished, was his generalization concerning propositions that in every true affirmative proposition, whether necessary or contingent, the predicate is contained in the notion of the subject. It can be said that, at this time, with the exception of the word monad (which did not appear until 1695), his philosophy of monadology was defined.

In 1685 Leibniz was named historian for the House of Brunswick and, on this occasion, Hofrat ("court adviser"). His job was to prove, by means of genealogy, that the princely house had its origins in the House of Este, an Italian princely family, which would allow Hanover to lay claim to a ninth electorate. In search of these documents, Leibniz began travelling in November 1687. Going by way of southern Germany, he arrived in Austria, where he learned that Louis XIV had once again declared a state of war; in Vienna, he was well received by the Emperor; he then went to Italy. Everywhere he went, he met scientists and continued his scholarly work, publishing essays on the movement of celestial bodies and on the duration of things. He returned to Hanover in mid-July 1690. His efforts had not been in vain. In October 1692 Ernest Augustus obtained the electoral investiture.

Until the end of his life, Leibniz continued his duties as historian. He did not, however, restrict himself to a genealogy of the House of Brunswick; he enlarged his goal to a history of the Earth, which included such matters as geological events and descriptions of fossils. He searched by way of monuments and linguistics for the origins and migrations of peoples; then for the birth and progress of the sciences, ethics, and politics; and, finally, for the elements of a historia sacra. In this project of a universal history, Leibniz never lost sight of the fact that everything interlocks. Even though he did not succeed in writing this history, his effort was influential because he devised new combinations of old ideas and invented totally new ones.

In 1691 Leibniz was named librarian at Wolfenbüttel and propagated his discoveries by means of articles in scientific journals. In 1695 he explained a portion of his dynamic theory of motion in the Système nouveau ("New System"), which treated the relationship of substances and the preestablished harmony between the soul and the body: God does not need to bring about man's action by means of his thoughts, as Malebranche asserted, or to wind some sort of watch in order to reconcile the two; rather, the Supreme Watchmaker has so exactly matched body and soul that they correspond--they give meaning to each other--from the beginning. In 1697, De Rerum Originatione (On the Ultimate Origin of Things) tried to prove that the ultimate origin of things can be none other than God. In 1698, De Ipsa Natura ("On Nature Itself") explained the internal activity of nature in terms of Leibniz' theory of dynamics.

All of these writings opposed Cartesianism, which was judged to be damaging to faith. Plans for the creation of German academies followed in rapid succession. With the help of the electress Sophia Charlotte, daughter of Ernest Augustus and soon to become the first queen of Prussia (January 1701), the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin was founded on July 11, 1700.

On Jan. 23, 1698, Ernest Augustus died, and his son, George Louis, succeeded him. Leibniz found himself confronted with an uneducated, boorish prince, a reveller who kept him in the background. Leibniz took advantage of every pretext to leave Hanover; he was constantly on the move; his only comfort lay in his friendship with Sophia Charlotte and her mother, Princess Sophia. Once again, he set to work on the reunion of the church: in Berlin, it was a question of uniting the Lutherans and the Calvinists; in Paris, he had to subdue Bishop Bénigne Bossuet's opposition; in Vienna (to which Leibniz returned in 1700) he enlisted the support of the Emperor, which carried great weight; in England, it was the Anglicans who needed convincing.

The death in England of William, duke of Gloucester, in 1700 made George Louis, great-grandson of James I, a possible heir to the throne. It fell to Leibniz, jurist and historian, to develop his arguments concerning the rights of the House of Braunschweig-Lüneburg with respect to this succession.

The War of the Spanish Succession began in March 1701 and did not come to a close until September 1714, with the Treaty of Baden. Leibniz followed its episodes as a patriot hostile to Louis XIV. His fame as a philosopher and scientist had by this time spread all over Europe; he was named a foreign member by the Academy of Sciences of Paris in 1700 and was in correspondence with most of the important European scholars of the day. If he was publishing little at this point, it was because he was writing Théodicée, which was published in 1710. In this work he set down his ideas on divine justice.

Leibniz was impressed with the qualities of the Russian tsar Peter the Great, and in October 1711 the ruler received him for the first time. Following this, he stayed in Vienna until September 1714, and during this time the Emperor promoted him to the post of Reichhofrat ("adviser to the empire") and gave him the title of Freiherr ("baron"). About this time he wrote the Principes de la nature et de la Grâce fondés en raison, which inaugurated a kind of preestablished harmony between these two orders. Further, in 1714 he wrote the Monadologia, which synthesized the philosophy of the Théodicée. In August 1714, the death of Queen Anne brought George Louis to the English throne under the name of George I. Returning to Hanover, where he was virtually placed under house arrest, Leibniz set to work once again on the Annales Imperii Occidentis Brunsvicenses (1843-46; "Braunschweig Annals of the Western Empire"). At Bad-Pyrmont, he met with Peter the Great for the last time in June 1716. From that point on, he suffered greatly from gout and was confined to his bed until his death.

Leibniz was a man of medium height with a stoop, broad-shouldered but bandy-legged, as capable of thinking for several days sitting in the same chair as of travelling the roads of Europe summer and winter. He was an indefatigable worker, a universal letter writer (he had more than 600 correspondents), a patriot and cosmopolitan, a great scientist, and one of the most powerful spirits of Western civilization. (Y.B./Ed.)

To cite this page: "Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm" Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://search.eb.com/bol/topic?artcl=47669&seq_nbr=1&page=p&pm=1 [Accessed 29 July 1999].

Cited in Kenneth Burke, P&C 124

McDougall, William

b. June 22, 1871, Chadderton, Lancashire, Eng. d. Nov. 28, 1938, Durham, N.C., U.S.

British-born U.S. psychologist influential in establishing experimental and physiological psychology and author of An Introduction to Social Psychology (1908; 30th ed. 1960), which did much to stimulate widespread study of the basis of social behaviour.

Soon after becoming a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, McDougall joined the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait, between Australia and New Guinea, and there administered psychological tests to the native inhabitants. He then went to Germany, where, at the University of Göttingen, he conducted research on colour vision. His interest in psychical research also dates from that period. An assistant at the experimental laboratory, University College, London (1901), he was appointed reader in mental philosophy at the University of Oxford (1904), where he wrote Physiological Psychology (1905), demonstrating the value of a thoroughgoing biological approach in place of the traditional philosophical approach.

McDougall's well-known Introduction to Social Psychology developed a Darwinian theory of human behaviour based on the assumption of inherited instinct, or tendency, to note particular stimuli and to respond to them for the purpose of attaining some goal. Should response be delayed, an emotional reaction follows. Diversification and stabilization of response result from learning. A classic work, Body and Mind (1911), subtitled A History and Defense of Animism represented the kind of espousal of unpopular causes that increasingly tended to isolate McDougall from colleagues.

Opposed to mechanistic interpretations of human behaviour, he wrote The Group Mind (1920), a speculative attempt to interpret national life and character that was intended as a sequel to his Social Psychology. Its poor reception was partly responsible for his move that year to the United States and a professorship at Harvard University. Maintaining that the basic human activity is searching for goals, he generally alienated himself from the dominant U.S. behaviourists, who confined psychology to observable evidence of organismic activity. In an attempt to demonstrate inheritance of acquired characteristics, he published Outline of Psychology (1923) and Outline of Abnormal Psychology (1926). Finding his situation at Harvard unsatisfactory, in 1927 he moved to Duke University, Durham, N.C. There he developed a psychology department and continued various research, including work in parapsychology.

To cite this page: "McDougall, William" Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://search.eb.com/bol/topic?eu=50895&sctn=1&pm=1 [Accessed 29 July 1999].

Cited in Kenneth Burke, P&C 129+

Malinowski, Bronislaw (Kasper)

b. April 7, 1884, Kraków, Pol., Austria-Hungary

d. May 16, 1942, New Haven, Conn., U.S.

one of the most important anthropologists of the 20th century who is widely recognized as the founder of social; anthropology and principally associated with field studies of the peoples of Oceania.

Early life and studies

Malinowski was the son of Lucjan Malinowski, a professor of Slavic philology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and a linguist of some reputation who had studied Polish dialect and folklore in Silesia. Bronislaw Malinowski's mother, Józefa, née Lacka, of a moderately wealthy land-owning family, was highly cultured and a good linguist. Early afflicted by the ill health that dogged him throughout life, Malinowski in his teens traveled extensively in the Mediterranean region with his mother, who was by then widowed. Although his early education was conducted largely at home, he subsequently attended the Jagiellonian University, completing his doctorate in 1908, with highest grade honours in philosophy, with physics and mathematics as subsidiaries. Happening upon Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough, an encyclopaedic treatment of religious and magical practices, Malinowski was enthralled and long afterward traced his enthusiasm for anthropology to it. After contact with the newer psychologies and economics in Leipzig, he came in 1910 to the London School of Economics and Political Science, where anthropology had been recently established as a discipline.

For the next quarter-century Malinowski's career was oriented toward London. A prolific writer, he soon published reinterpretations of Australian Aboriginal data from literature then very popular in anthropological circles. These gained him a reputation and promoted his plans for field research, and in 1914 he was able to go to New Guinea. Six months' work among the Mailu on the south coast produced a monograph that, while lacking theoretical development, was sufficient--along with his study of the Australian family--to earn him a doctor of science (D.Sc.) degree from the University of London in 1916. When he moved to the nearby Trobriand Islands, where he worked for two years in 1915-16 and 1917-18, Malinowski's talent