_________________________________________________________ VOLUME 2, ISSUE 4 PSYCHNEWS INTERNATIONAL July-Sept 1997 _________________________________________________________ ========================================================== THE FIFTH COLUMN (2/2) ========================================================== The present generation of students may not be aware that it was dangerous for a young, untenured professor of the sixties to admire Karl Marx. Admirers of Marx were likely to be champions of civil rights and opponents of the war in Viet Nam. Ernest fell into this category, but he was not a political Marxist. He was a humanist who, like the early Marx, advocated a more rational and ethical society. Nevertheless Ernest was perceived by the reactionary faculty, especially his archenemies the empiricists, as an intellectual and political radical. Becker relentlessly opposed the narrow positivists who were taking over the chairs of academic power and who arrogantly maintained that fundamental questions are nonsense, belonging in sophomore philosophy classes, and that the only legitimate path to knowledge is the slow, steady accumulation of value-neutral facts. Ernest criticized the new empiricists for their narrow, trivial, meaningless pursuit of facts, separate from any consideration of values. He called them "number mumblers." The empiricists in turn, stung by Becker's criticisms, called him a fuzzy-minded bleeding heart, a poet, a philosopher, a speculator in ideas, a weaver of myths, a provocateur. Becker was a victim of the purge of radicals and Marxists from American universities during the late sixties and early seventies. This purge was one of the earliest waves of the present reactionary tide in America. The conflicts which were intrinsic to the social and political history of the sixties, were brought to an explosive intensity at Syracuse by a series of events that began in 1962, and culminated in Ernest being fired from the faculty in 1963 and blackballed by academic psychiatry. After publication of the Myth of Mental Illness, Szasz began to talk and lecture on his new theory. On several occasions, he testified on behalf of patients who were petitioning for release from involuntary confinement in a state mental hospital. In his testimonies, Szasz condemned the use of psychiatric diagnosis to justify depriving people of liberty, and he compared mental hospitals to jails. Dr. Newton Bigelow, then Director of Marcy State Hospital and former State Commissioner of Mental Hygiene, became very angry with Szasz (Bigelow, 1962). Some of the patients whom Szasz had defended were inmates of Marcy. Bigelow petitioned Paul Hoch, then State Commissioner of Mental Hygiene, to bar Szasz from teaching in the state hospital system. He claimed that if Szasz does not believe in mental illness, then he should not be teaching heresy to state-paid psychiatric residents and interns, nor taking clinical responsibility for mentally ill patients. On November 26, 1962, Hoch ordered Marc Hollender to ban Szasz from teaching or performing clinical functions at the Syracuse State Psychiatric Hospital. To understand the events that followed this order, it is necessary to understand something about academic psychiatry in general, and the situation at Syracuse in particular. Academic psychiatry uses involuntarily confined mental patients as a teaching resource. Academic psychiatrists often administer staff facilities in which involuntary patients are confined. At Syracuse, Hollender was both chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the medical school and director of the state mental hospital which was, as he called it, "the flagship" of the department. As chairman of psychiatry, Hollender was independent of the State Commissioner of Mental Hygiene. As director of the hospital, he was an employee of the Commissioner and was bound by official directives. Hollender responded to the order from Hoch by assigning Szasz to a room in the medical school for his classes and seminars. Hollender figured that he was not violating Szasz's academic freedom. He was merely switching the location of Szasz's classroom to the medical school, where he could speak freely. At first, Szasz accepted the order, but then changed his mind. He had already fled Hitler's fascism in Europe as a teenager and was not going to passively tolerate repression. State psychiatry was trying to punish and silence him for critical ideas which it was his right as professor of psychiatry to express. If the hospital was part of the medical school, he argued, then he should be permitted to teach there, like other faculty. If the hospital was not part of the medical school, then Hollender should change his flagship. Szasz fought Hollender's order by hiring a good lawyer, and filing a formal complaint with the medical school administration and the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Szasz also boycotted all department activities at the Syracuse State Psychiatric Hospital. After two years of investigation and controversy, the AAUP finally upheld Szasz's charge that Hollender had violated his academic freedom. But the boycott generated a passionate controversy which eventually split the department. Ernest and I joined Szasz in boycotting the state hospital. We joined for several reasons. A teacher we admired and loved was under attack. Also, since we shared Szasz's view that the medical model of psychiatry serves as an ideology for social control and obstructs the development of an ecumenical concept of mental illness, the state's attack on Szasz was also an attack on us. A third reason was that Szasz was fighting for the rights of mental patients, and by extension for the rights of all oppressed minorities across the world. The struggle at Syracuse was a part of the global struggle for human rights and dignity with which we both identified. A few other members of the faculty joined the boycott either because they agreed with Szasz's views on psychiatry or because they affirmed his right to teach them in any academic installation, including the state hospital. The reactionary faculty opposed Szasz, either because they disagreed with his critique of mental illness or because they were dedicated conformists who believed it is a sin to oppose authority and who feared and hated freedom, especially in psychiatry. These reactionaries conspired to harass Szasz and lure him into an act of insubordination which they could use as a justification to fire him. Failing in this, they went after his junior, non-tenured associates. Until this conflict developed, Szasz and Hollender were close friends. They had both trained and taught at the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis, where they met Julius Richmond, who later became Surgeon General. Richmond came to Syracuse in 1954 as chairman of the Department of Pediatrics. He was instrumental in Hollender's appointment as chairman of psychiatry. Hollender, in turn, invited Szasz to join the faculty as full professor with tenure, hoping he would be the nucleus of an exciting new school of psychosocial psychiatry. Until Hoch's order, the new school was taking shape. Szasz and Hollender collaborated on several papers critical of the medical model of psychiatry. Becker and I wrote and lectured on our new views of mental illness. But the repression of Szasz destroyed the friendship between Szasz and Hollender, split the faculty into hostile factions and ended Becker's career in academic psychiatry. Becker was outraged by state psychiatry's efforts to suppress a university professor. He was dismayed that a fundamental law of civilization was being violated, the right of free inquiry and free expression. Ernest expressed his dismay to some medical student friends. Shortly thereafter, he received a phone call from Hollender demanding that Ernest come immediately to his office in the hospital to explain why he was criticizing the department to prospective applicants for training. I was with Ernest when he received the call. He was indignant. He told Hollender that he would not come to the hospital because it was run by the state and was hostile to free inquiry. He was a professor at the medical school not an employee of the hospital. If Hollender wanted to talk to him, he should come up to the medical school. Hollender fired Becker on the spot for insubordination. Becker's career in psychiatry was finished before it began. His dream of a revolution in psychiatry was over. Within a few years, every one of Szasz's followers were purged from the faculty and Szasz was isolated. A potential new school of critical psychiatry which might have shaped a current of modern thought and mental health practice had been aborted. >From that moment on, Becker was a wandering exile. He was effectively barred from obtaining another academic job in psychiatry. Szasz was anathema to ninety-nine percent of American psychiatrists and seeking an academic position with Szasz's recommendation was like trying to join the Catholic priesthood with the devil's brand on your forehead. Ernest was also shunned by the sociologists because his degree was in anthropology, and he was shunned by the anthropologists because he had never done what they considered legitimate field work. Douglas Haring had arranged for Becker's years in Paris to be counted as meeting the field work requirement. Some friends at Syracuse University found Ernest a one-year appointment in the Department of Sociology, but despite the instability of his employment, he continued to speak his mind. He backed the students in their fight against the university's _in locum parentis_ control of student life. He opposed the ideological, pedagogical and administrative domination of the empiricists. He fought for civil rights and against the war in Viet Nam. Predictably, the reactionary faculty opposed his reappointment and he was on the road again. The following year, Ernest went to Rome at his own expense, to sit at the seat of western civilization and reflect upon its history and destiny. The product of this sabbatical was "The Structure of Evil: An Essay on the Unification of the Science of Man" (Becker, 1968). The following year he returned to Syracuse where Tom Green found him a one-year appointment in the school of education. In this period, Ernest worked on his neo-Rousseauian theory of education (Becker, 1967). Ernest was then invited by the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley to replace the departing Erving Goffman, on Goffman's recommendation. At Berkeley, Ernest became enormously popular with the students. He finally had reached an audience that resonated with his fundamental, critical questioning and his imaginative perceptions of human nature. After two years, the faculty again, predictably, refused to renew his appointment. The students appealed, and in an unprecedented gesture, offered to pay Ernest's salary from their own student funds. But the university, lacking both courage and wisdom, refused to permit it. Ernest briefly became a media hero when this comi-tragic play at Berkeley was covered by Time Magazine. Ernest moved across the Bay to the Department of Psychology at San Francisco State. He loved San Francisco and would have remained in this plum position indefinitely, had he not felt a sense of desperation about the course of world events and a compulsion to commit a moral act as his contribution to history. When Hayakawa called the police to suppress an antiwar demonstration on campus, Ernest resigned in protest. It was a tremendously courageous act, an example to the morally bankrupt American universities which refused to divest from the South African apartheid regime on the grounds that they would lose money. When he resigned, Ernest had a wife and three children to support, and no prospect of a job. An interdisciplinary group of social scientists at Simon Fraser University near Vancouver invited Ernest to join their department. Simon Fraser was bitter-sweet for Ernest. It provided him with the tranquil setting in which to concentrate on his mature works, "The Denial of Death" and "Escape From Evil" (1975). But he remained grim about the dark forces of human evil that seemed to dominate world events and history. And he was sad and disappointed about being repressed, ignored and exiled from his own country. A fascinating fact of the sociology of knowledge is that Becker's work on psychopathology has never been noticed, never been reviewed and never been mentioned in the psychiatric literature. Szasz has suffered a similar fate. Because Szasz's early papers and books were published and widely read, it is not generally known that psychiatric journals will no longer publish his work. Becker and Szasz are both non-persons in the official history of psychiatry. Like that other great political monolith, our alter ego the Soviet Union, Americans too suppress and control threatening ideas. Thankfully, we do not usually imprison dissenters, although there are exceptions to this rule. But we repress dangerous ideas subtly, by means of the academic blackball and the refusal to publish. In his later years, Becker returned to his psychological studies, but with an added religious dimension. His perennial questions focused on the problem of the tragic human flaw. In his inquiries into the roots of tragedy, Becker rediscovered the insights of the ancient Greeks, Hebrews and Buddhists. The basic problems of human life are the result of the consciousness of the fact of death. The word "human" comes from "humus" which means mud. From mud we came, to mud we shall return. So it is with all living things. Nothing lasts forever. One day, even the sun shall die. But human beings, of all the beings in the universe as far as we know, have the power to be aware of the certainty of death and to dream of eternal life. This power is based on the capacity for language and symbolism, the distinctive thread of human consciousness, from which profane time and history are woven. The presence of death casts a dark shadow on human life. Becker believed that the driving mechanism of self and society is the denial of death, that is, the creation of a web of meanings, goals and activities which generate the illusion of transcending death. At the center of this web is self, and at the periphery is society. In Becker's view, self and society are a tangle of fictions which individuals take as reality in order to repress the inevitability and finality of death. The root of tragedy lies in the fact that the desires, hopes and dreams of human individuals are eventually doomed to be frustrated by the fact of death. Becker called the techniques by which individuals and groups create the illusion of transcendence of death "immortality mechanisms." The chief immortality mechanism of every individual is what Becker terms "the oedipal project," the project to transform one's self from a child into an adult person in society. To accomplish this task required taking (mistaking, really,) personal and social fictions as realities. This is the meaning of Becker's statement that every person must choose in what level of illusions to believe and act upon in order to project meaning and purpose into life. The root of evil, Becker believed, is in the restless strivings of individuals and groups to transcend death and nonexistence through the pursuit of eternal meanings. This implies that the source of evil lies in the selfish strivings and ambitions of egos and nations. Confirmation of this fact does not require experimental research. Buddha became aware of it twenty-five hundred years ago, without the benefit of modern science. It requires only the effort and the willingness to recognize the evidence of the ordinary life that the stubbornly aggressive, self-serving desires of individuals and states are the primary causes of self-induced human suffering. Becker's most precious legacy to us is his encouragement to ask fundamental questions, ultimate questions. Unless there is free and open inquiry into these questions we will never know the difference between truth and fiction. Individuals and nations are very vulnerable to mistaking for truth their self-generated fictions which are basically myths and ideologies which justify the aggressive enactment of their immortality projects. It is but a small step of logic to realize that knowing the difference between truth and fiction is vital for the evolution of the human species. Becker would rest peacefully if he knew his life contributed to this awareness. FOOTNOTE 1 This article was reprinted from KAIROS (1986), Volume 2, pp. 8-21. REFERENCES Becker, E. (1961). Zen: A rational critique. New York: Norton. Becker, E. (1962). Birth and death of meaning. New York: The Free Press (2nd ed. 1971). Becker, E. (1964). The revolution in psychiatry. New York: The Free Press. Becker, E. (1967). Beyond alienation: A philosophy of education for the crisis in democracy. New York: Braziller. Becker, E. (1968). The structure of evil: An essay on the unification of the science of man. New York: Braziller. Becker, E. (1969). Angel in armor: A post-Freudian perspective on the nature of man. New York: George Braziller. Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. New York: The Free Press. Becker, E. (1975). Escape from evil. New York: The Free Press. Bigelow, N. (1962). Sass for the gander. Psychiatric Quarterly, 36(4), October. Leifer, R. (1969). In the name of mental health: The social functions of psychiatry. New York: Science House. Leifer, R. (1979). Biography of Ernest Becker. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Volume 18. New York: The Free Press. Szasz, T. (1957). Pain and pleasure. New York: Basic Books. Szasz, T. (1961). The myth of mental illness: Foundations of a theory of personal conduct. New York: Hoeber-Haper. -------------------------------------------------------- Ron Leifer, M.D., is a psychiatrist in private practice in Ithaca, New York. His address is 215 North Cayuga St., Ithaca, N.Y. USA. He has a book to be published in November entitled "The Happiness Project: Transforming The Three Poisons" which are the causes of the suffering we inflict on ourselves and each other (Snow Lion Press, Ithaca, N.Y.). His email address is ronleifer@aol.com