Friendship and Fratricide; an Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss
Meyer A. Zeligs
Meyer Zeligs wrote this in the nineteen sixties--Alger Hiss gave him face to face interviews, Chambers refused to see him, then died--Zeligs is a psychoanalyst from San Francisco who thought he saw an interesting dynamic operating in the relationship of Chambers-Hiss--He was criticized for conducting analysis "from a distance" and not in a face to face interview--In fact he spent a good amount of time with Hiss, and had to be content to consider Chambers from his own words in his autobiography, Hiss's memories of him and other collateral material--Now that we're hearing mental health professionals offer diagnoses of the current POTUS (Trump), the ethical issue of making such diagnoses has been raised again--This was made an issue after the failed candidacy of Barry Goldwater who had been profiled publicly by MH professionals--It was the APA which came up with the "no diagnosis without a face to face interview" but in the tradition of psychoanalysis there really is no such stricture--Freud's famous monograph on Judge Schreber, a man he never saw, whose account of his madness he read--Marie Bonaparte on Edgar Allan Poe, and the whole discipline of psychohistory which flourished in the seventies--Zeligs interest does not repeat standard Freudian tropes such as the Oedipus complex, castration, etc.--Rather he interestingly found a kind of twins-symmetry operating in this bizarre relationship--One will conclude that the most bizarre aspects of this case were provided by Chambers, who does appear to be a diagnostic entity--a fascinating angle on the case.
Year:
1964
Language:
english
File:
PDF, 83.05 MB
IPFS:
,
english, 1964