CHAPTER
6
THE
SWEDENBORGIANIZED FOURIERISM OF HENRY JAMES, SR.:
A
STUDY IN PATHOLOGY
I.
Henry
James, Sr., was a derivative iconoclast, one who presented the ideas of others
in original combinations. His first biographer,
Austin Warren, identified four pivotal influences upon James's intellectual
career: Robert Sandeman (the eighteenth-century critic of institutional
religion), his friend Emerson, Swedenborg, and Fourier. Of these influences, Swedenborg was the most
important (see Deck), but throughout his public life, James remained a staunch
Harmonian partisan. Only recently has
Alfred Habegger's The Father revealed
the full extent of James's commitment to Fourier, a commitment that became
James's full-time occupation in the late 1840s.
This fascinating biography leaves one question unanswered: why
was James obsessed with Fourier?
In the two previous chapters, I
argued that Chasseguet-Smirgel's theory of the ego ideal suggested why Brownson
and Emerson evinced interest in, then turned upon, Fourierism. But while these psychoanalytic readings are
suggestive, some readers might argue that they are not indispensable. However, I believe that a psychoanalytic
approach is necessary to make sense of the strange case of James. Relying heaving on Habegger's excellent
biography, this chapter attempts to explain the phenomenon of Swedenborgian
Fourierism in the 1840s—and particularly James's idiosyncratic version—through
Chasseguet-Smirgel's ego ideal hypothesis.
As
we saw in the last chapter, James thought little of Fourier's teachings in
1842, when he vigorously refuted
Later
in 1844, James returned to his native
[M]y dear Henry and I have lately been
receiving a whole flood of light and joy and hope . . . by an insight into the glorious plans and
prospects which Fourier opens for the world. . . . As fiction it is more beautiful than any
romance I have ever read, but if true (and I feel that it must be so, or if
not, as my hopeful loving Henry says, something much better must be) it will
not only banish from the world, poverty with its long list of debasing evils,
but it will remove every motive to cruelty, injustice and oppression to which
the present disordered state of society has given birth and nourished in the
selfish heart of man. . . . (Mary James to Emma Wilkinson, 29
Nov. 1846, qtd., Edel 45)
Soon afterwards, Henry's December 1846 lecture on
"A True Education" employed a quasi-Fourierist narrative of
historical necessity: just as patriarchal unity was superseded by national
unity, national unity will give way to universal unity (Father 250-251). James may well have borrowed this schema from
James
would soon have the opportunity to share his developing interpretations of
Fourier and Swedenborg with a wider audience.
A few months later, in the wake of the dissolution of Brook Farm, The Harbinger also moved to
At
this time, Fourier's writings on sexual reform were subverting the
Associationists' propaganda efforts.
[Fourier] has said very little about
the relation of the sexes, and what he has said is stated in such extremely
technical language, and so vague and general, that it is impossible to arrive
at a clear knowledge of the system which he had in view. ("The American Associationists"
202)
Possibly Brisbane had been given access to the Nouveau Monde amoreux manuscripts during
his 1844 sabbatical in Paris; if so, his lie was particularly brazen. In any case, the Greeley-Raymond debate soon
made such evasions impractical. From
across the
James
eventually backed down from many of his most radical positions in the
1850s. But he never renounced his
commitment to the new society envisioned by Fourier, as evidenced by his
reaction to Emerson's criticism of Fourier in 1868. Despite his public denial, the
"shaving" anecdote recounted in the last chapter may well have been
accurate. After having heard Emerson's
lecture, James wrote an angry letter to Caroline [Sturgis] Tappan, the woman
who had introduced Emerson to 'true' Fourierism more than twenty-three years
earlier. James complained that Emerson's
"unprincipled (because ignorant) denunciation of Fourier" was
"intellectual slip-slop of the poorest kind" (
What
had transformed the anti-Fourierist of 1842 into the Fourierist propagandist of
the late 1840s? While James paid lip
service to Fourier's appeals to economic common sense—for example, the critique
of the structural inefficiencies and inequities of "Civilization," or
the demonstration of the phalanx's economies of scale—
II.
From 1844 to 1847, James assiduously absorbed
Swedenborgian, then Fourierist literature.
At the same time, several New Englanders were making similar attempts to
update the doctrines of eighteenth-century theologian by melding them with the
nineteenth-century socialist's thought.
It is understandable that they felt a need to update Swedenborg, for the
Other
Americans viewed Swedenborg with suspicion.
At Princeton Theological Seminary, a bastion of Presbyterian orthodoxy, James
may have heard Prof. Samuel Miller's lecture on Swedenborg's "SERIOUS,
PIOUS, PHILOSOPHIC INSANITY" (qtd., Father
229). Even Emerson, despite his
admiration for and emulation of Swedenborg, had similarly contrasted the seer's
claims to have conversed with angels with others made more
"sanely." However, Emerson
also insisted upon a doubleness in both Swedenborg's psyche and writings. While conceding the mystic's "deranged
balance," he maintained that Swedenborg's "principal powers continued
to maintain a healthy action."
George Ripley found the same admixture of sanity and irrationality in
Swedenborg's thought. Reviewing an
anti-Swedenborgian tract for the Harbinger,
Ripley complained that the orthodox writers had emphasized the "heresies
as to the relations of the sexes" and the "delights of insanity"
while glossing over Swedenborg's more refined teachings (rev. of Swedenborgianism Reviewed
. . . and Lectures on
Swedenborgianism, 217).
Of
course, Fourier's readers had had to face similar interpretative
difficulties. Fourier's first disciple,
Just Muiron, had noticed the similarities and brought Swedenborgian ideas to
the annoyed Master's attention. As early
as 1839, French Swedenborgians expressed cautious interest in Fourier[8];
in the early 1840s, the London Phalanx
had praised Swedenborg. After Emerson, a
reader of Doherty's magazine, called attention to "the strange
coincidences betwixt Fourier and Swedenborg" in The Dial, other American journals followed suit. In 1843, comparisons were made in W. H.
Channing's The Present as well as The Retina, a short-lived
Many
of The Harbinger's most prolific
contributors—Godwin, Charles A. Dana, Channing, Ripley, and John Sullivan
Dwight—attempted a synthesis of the two thinkers. A contemporary reader who glanced at the
The Swedenborgian tendency grew
more pronounced in The Harbinger's
second year (1846-47), as Dana began to review Swedenborgian publications on a
regular basis. He lavished the highest
praise on Wilkinson's ongoing translations of Swedenborg, arguing that they
were the most important publications of last 50 years, with one predictable
exception. According to Wilkinson's
reading of the mystic, "the doctrine of society" was "the key to
the other sciences"; Dana commented, "Every student of Fourier will
recognize the thoughts they express" ("Swedenborg's Scientific
Writings" 71, 73). In another
review, Dana condemned apocalyptic Christianity as un-Swedenborgian, while
borrowing his counterexample from Fourier's teleology: "A planet, or a
universe is a natural growth as much as an animal or a tree. Like all other things it has its origin, its
periods of vigor and of decay, and its end, in regular and orderly
succession."[12] Even though neither prophet foretold a
cataclysmic end to the planet, both agreed that Earth was in unusually poor
health. At the same time, they expressed
unlimited optimism for the planet's future.
In his 1846 Christmas sermon, William H. Channing blasted the U.S.
intervention in Mexico as symptomatic of the world's evils, confessing that he
was tempted to agree with Swedenborg that Earth was the "most debased
planet in the Universe" and with Fourier that the world's illnesses
appeared incurable. Yet Channing shared
his heroes' overriding faith in an efficacious spirit that was working to unite
humanity ("Gloria in Excelsis" 59).
Though Swedenborg emphasized theology, and Fourier sociology, most Harbinger writers believed that the two
were delivering the same message of hope.
The
grand synthesis was even being made outside the editorial offices of The Harbinger. When the spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis
appropriated Fourier and Swedenborg for his own purposes, he yoked them
together by foregrounding some of their wackiest doctrines. In The
Principles of Nature (1847), the transcription of
[Fourier]
. . . mathematically . . . proves that the mental
advancement of the inhabitants of each [planet in our solar system] must
necessarily constitute such a Brotherhood and such an association of congenial
parts as to render the whole an harmonious existence, such as he expended his
powers to have accomplished on earth.
And I have the means of knowing that his general conceptions were
strictly true as regards the inhabitants of the planets belonging to our solar
system.
(The "means" were of course earlier séances,
during which
Ridiculous,
to be sure. But even if young
Death, or the sloughing off of a body
of whatever nature, is nothing but the sign of the resurrection of the soul in
another milieu, and the external bodies, which can thus be cast off and donned
again alternatively, are not the interior, personal bodies of the soul, but the
corporal matter of the triniverses, biniverses, universes, solar systems in
which the soul dwells for a portion of its eternal career. (Doherty [Mar. 1846], qtd. in Nathan 96, my
trans.)
Nor was Doherty alone in his beliefs. Paul Bénichou has observed that similar wacky
syntheses of Fourier with Illuminist writers were characteristic of La
Phalange between 1845 and 1848. Even
on the eve of the Revolution, Fourierists continued to spin their esoteric
theories. The postulate of godlike
beings on another planet suggested the conclusion that "God is man and man
is God" (Bénichou, qtd. in Nathan 97).
As Chasseguet-Smirgel suggests, such a fantasy can act as balm for even
the largest narcissistic wound.
But
as Doherty admitted in an 1845 article, not every Swedenborgian nor every
Fourierist approved of the comparison (qtd., Nathan 185n33). New Churchmen were most likely to stress the
differences. Doherty had already become
embroiled in a controversy with the New
Jerusalem Magazine. In the December
1843 issue, their London correspondent, the energetic Wilkinson, complained
that no provision had been made for the New Church in Harmony, and that
Fourier's "doctrines of Transmigration of Souls, Transmutation of Sex, the
conscious life of the Planets . . . generally" conflicted
with the New Church's teachings.[16] Doherty's rebuttal, which was not accepted
for publication by the New Jerusalem
editors, eventually appeared in The
Phalanx. Thus, the esoteric battle
between the rival camps of disciples had spilled over into
The mystical tendencies of some
Fourierists were becoming more pronounced as the communitarian movement
sputtered: seven phalanxes folded in 1845, three in 1846, six in 1847 (Guarneri
407-408). As Guarneri notes, some Fourierists—the
"guarantist" reformers—took the more pragmatic approach of accepting
these temporary setbacks and "retreat[ing] to more limited and gradual
reforms" (283). But another wing of
the movement chose the pleasure principle as its guiding star, "[taking]
on the characteristics of a sect" and placing greater emphasis on
"Fourier's arcane theories of analogy and cosmology" (278). These tensions between pragmatists and
spiritualists were evident in the final years of The Harbinger. In his
November 1847 prospectus for the journal's
III.
One of James's first Harbinger pieces, a November 1847 review of Horace Bushnell's tract
on raising Christian children, suggests that James had already begun his
synthesis of Swedenborgian and Fourierist doctrine. Just as Bushnell insisted that parental
discipline was necessary to mold children, James argued that the "divine society" of the
"Associationist" was needed to mold adults, even as he dropped such
Swedenborgian buzzwords as "instrumentalities" and "uses"
(rev. of Views of Christian Nurture,
5). In the next Harbinger, James criticized the worldliness of the Presbyterians,
calling for "radical reform in the religious sphere" ("Disease
in the Church" 12).
James's
friend George Bush had strained his relations with the
James
assured his readers that the Transcendentalist movement's progenitor, William
Ellery Channing, had "died . . . in the faith of Association" (rev. of Memoirs of William Ellery Channing,
23). Yet James argued that Channing's
socialist faith was not enough—as a reformer, "always motivated by
'duty'", he had not realized "the true divine life in man"
because he had lived for others rather than for himself. James had nothing against virtue; he simply
felt that "self-denial" was not the path to our fullest realization
("Dr. Channing and the Moral Life" 29). In a July 1848 article on "The Divine
Life in Man," James went on to explain that this life required "the
harmony of [man's] passions and his intellect, in the unity of his will and
understanding," and that this harmony was only achieved through "our
æsthetic activity[,] which avouches a divine presence and power within us"
(69).
In
proposing to replace self-flagellating disquisitions on human depravity with a
celebration of human potential, James's philosophy would have meshed well with
son William's "Religion of Healthy-Mindedness"—to a point. In the August 1848 articles on "Human
Freedom," James went beyond that point when he posited that "[t]he
true and vital selfhood . . . of man is God"—that is, not from God, but identical to
God (133). Further, the realization of
Fourier's plan was a necessary step in realizing one's own divinity: “the
creature, in order to become divinely conscious, in order to become conscious
of his true divine selfhood, is bound to experience in himself this unity of
the universal and individual elements. . . .” ("Human Freedom" 134). Here, as in the "American Scholar,"
it is the Godlike creator, the creature who experiences universal unity, who is
exalted by James. And like Poe in Eureka (published earlier that year),
James verges upon declaring his own divinity.
But keeping in mind that James was writing on the eve of his public
declaration of support for sexual reform, there is another, more striking
analogue to "Human Freedom" in the America of the 1840s. Joseph Smith had already outlined man's path
to Godhood through sexual license.[20] Since direct influence is impossible, Smith's
and James's models of reality may have had similar psychological sources.
As
he defended Fourier's morality, James drew fire from both the religious Left
and the religious Right. The Harbinger correspondent "E. A.
F."[21]
accused James and other Associationists of "subvert[ing] the foundations
of morality" by following Fourier's advice to indulge one's passions
(qtd., "Practical Morality and Association" 100). James offered the orthodox Fourierist
response, that in the Harmonian regime, the passions would be a reliable guide.
James
also returned fire, intensifying his attacks on the New Church's claim to
catholicity. These attacks, which had
begun with his Letter to a Swedenborgian
(1847) and which would eventually culminate in his 1854 book The Church of Christ Not an Ecclesiasticism,
were reinforced by the publication of Charles Julius Hempel's long-contemplated
synthesis of Swedenborg and Fourier, The True
Organization of the New Church (1848).
Hempel argued that Swedenborg had prophesied the new order, but its full
elaboration had only been made by Fourier:
[T]he science of Association as
discovered by Charles Fourier, is the divine arrangement of Society to which
Swedenborg alludes in No. 4266 of the Arc[ana coelestia], the true science of
correspondence, the science of uses, of charity, the science of the conjunction
of the external with the internal man . . . . (Hempel, "A Reply to the Repository"
101)
Hempel's thesis was not original: a version had first
been advanced by Just Muiron (Beecher 163, 166). But to the members of the institutional New
Church, Hempel's argument was more than an irritant, for it challenged their
claim to be the fulfillment of Swedenborg's visions. Hempel had even had the effrontery to ask
them to re-examine their flawed understanding of Swedenborg in the light of
Association:
[Y]ou have not
comprehended the whole scope of the doctrines of your Master, that Man's regeneration
is impossible without a true organization of Society and the Church, based upon
the law of Divine Order, which is the Series of Groups, and that this Serial
law has therefore to be discovered and applied by Man before the inauguration
of Peace, the Sabbath, the Conjunction of the Good
and the True, can take place upon earth . . . .
[U]nless
the writings of Swedenborg are illustrated by the sublime teachings of Fourier,
the "Heavenly Arcana" will remain a mystical doctrine, and the
glorious truths contained in those unknown and derided volumes will never have
any important bearing upon the social progress of Humanity.
. . . . You, men of bad faith, who, knowing better,
accuse Fourier of infidelity; you, noisy controversists . . . ; to
you all I would say, that Fourier's Science was necessary to complete the
mission of Christ. (Hempel, True Org. 24)
James,
who had read the proof sheets, quoted the above passage in a rave review for The Harbinger.[22] When Hempel's book was attacked in the New Jerusalem Magazine, James
counterpunched furiously. He complained
that American Swedenborgians had too long been allowed to "play new
church," and he called the reviewer, Caleb Reed, a "mere
ecclesiastical zany" with no claim to divine revelation.[23] But Barrett's review of Hempel scored more
substantive points.[24] He suggested that only a Fourierist believer
in the supremacy of self-love could hold that ". . . Christ
and the Devil are the fundamental constituents of the Divine Principle, and
will ultimately coalesce into One
compound unit."[25] (Note that Hempel's thesis was essentially
James's, recast to maximized its shock value.)
Furthermore, Hempel had offered a qualified endorsement of Fourier's
theory of transmigration of souls— balking only at endowing planets with
souls—as well as a passionate argument for the necessity of the Boreal Crown.[26] Barrett closed by reprimanding James for his
failure to examine Hempel's book "critically" in his Harbinger reviews (610). Another possibility, less charitable and, in
my opinion, more probable, was that James had noted Hempel's bizarre positions
and privately endorsed them.
In
other essays from this period, James was becoming more daring, more
expansive. In the September 1848 article
"Is Human Nature Positively Evil," James asked why the New Church
objected to Fourier's project of reconciling self-love with universal
love. In affirming this project, he
depicts Fourier, or rather Fourier's message, as a second Messiah:
Human life was in the main so ugly and
disreputable, that you could not point to any man, . . . and
say—Behold the creature of a perfect creator.
In the universal absence of the marks of such creatureship, you were
obliged to postulate the Christ, or a coming
man, as the only true son of God, and affirming the evil of all other men,
suspend their sonship wholly upon a gradual conformity to his spirit. But this man so long coming, is at length
with us, not indeed in any precise fleshly limitations which shall justify us
in saying—Lo here! or, Lo there!—but as a spirit diffusing itself among all
hearts, and going on to the empire of the whole earth. He is no longer a merely finite corporeity,
. . . he is a most living and present spirit, authenticated in all
the forms of divine and multifarious Art, and by the whole strain of our
nascent social science. (173)
This
was James's vision of Fourierism when he translated Victor Hennequin's Love in the Phalanstery, a prophecy of
the forthright pleasures of the new sexual order. In the phalanx, the "féate,"
a class of benevolent panderers, would make it their business to "bring
together sympathetic natures, and make it their business to appreciate one
another" (Hennequin 19). The young
members of the "faquirate" would gladly satisfy the sexual
needs of the elderly (19-20). The
"pivotale" series—by Fourier's definition, the most important
series for its historical epoch—was not fully elaborated: readers were
discreetly referred to the analysis in Quatre
mouvements of the "Method of union between the sexes in the seventh
period." While Hennequin's
subsequent celebration of the Harmonian "bacchante" made his meaning
clear to the uninitiated (22-23), the relevant passage in Fourier makes it
clear what degree of sexual license he, and his translator James, were
advocating for the coming order:
A woman can simultaneously have: 1° a
Husband with whom she has two children; 2° a Begetter with
whom she only has one child; 3° a Favorite who has lived
with her and retains the title; as well as some simple possessors, who are
nothing before the law. This gradation
of titles establishes a noble courtesy and a great fidelity towards one's
obligations. A woman can refuse the
title of Begetter to a Favorite who has impregnated her; she can, in case of
displeasure, also refuse a superior title to these assorted aspirants. Men will treat their diverse wives in similar
fashion. This method completely prevents
the hypocrisy that marriage engenders. (OC 1:125-126, my trans.)
Even more restraints were to be lifted in full Harmony:
as Hennequin confirms, the seventh period is merely the "germ" of
Harmonian sexual relations.[27] In the unpublished Nouveau Monde amoreux, Fourier offhandedly predicted the eventual
eradication of the ultimate taboo: ". . . [Harmonians] will
proceed only by degrees in religious and moral innovations, such as incest for
example, which might be offensive."[28]
While
less controversial, Hennequin's general defense of Fourierism was equally striking. He divided Fourier's theory into three parts:
industrial association, a "poetic and stupendous cosmogony," and the
sexual reforms (2). Before beginning his
defense of the sexual reforms, Hennequin argued that neither they nor the
cosmogony required a defense:
Certainly the advantages offered to the
world by carrying out the principle of Industrial Association, are sufficiently
great, without rendering it needful to inquire into the sidereal key, and the
phanerogamic corporations . . . .[29]
Nevertheless, Hennequin (as translated by James) went on
to defend the cosmogony as an illustration of "the idea of the universal
Life." Even though the cosmogony
was not taught as part of Associationist doctrine, the recent discovery of the
planet Le Verrier (Neptune) supported Fourier's theory that there were
"gaps (lacunes) of our sideral key" waiting to be filled—in
other words, that Neptune was a missing note in the harmonic chord of the solar
system. Furthermore, Hennequin observed,
recent experiments "confir[m] the celebrated hypothesis of the Boreal
Crown" (4).
Of
course, James the translator may not have agreed with every one of Hennequin's
positions. But this translation was a
strategic intervention in the public debate on Associationism, and in the
ensuing mêlée, James did not contradict any of Hennequin's claims. Had James felt that the cosmogony could be
easily refuted, then why would he have risked undermining his stated purpose,
"to provoke the attention of honest minds to the truths involved in
[Fourier's] views" (vi) ?
Furthermore, James had gone out of his way to defend Hempel, whose book
had also insisted upon the reality of the Boreal Crown. How did James come to hold such bizarre
views?
IV.
By his own account, his conversion to Fourierism was the
indirect result of the pivotal event of his adult life, the bizarre spiritual
crisis he had undergone one afternoon in the spring of 1844. He recalled this episode decades later:
[H]aving eaten a
comfortable dinner, I remained sitting at the table after the family had
dispersed, idly gazing at the embers in the grate, thinking of nothing, and
feeling only the exhilaration incident to a good digestion, when suddenly—in a
lightning-flash as it were—"fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all
my bones to shake." To all
appearance it was a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible
cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some
damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and
raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life. The thing had not lasted ten seconds before I
felt myself a wreck, that is, reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful,
manhood to one of almost helpless infancy.
The only self-control I was capable of exerting was to keep my
seat. I felt the greatest desire to run
incontinently to the foot of the stairs and shout for help to my wife,—to run
to the roadside even, and appeal to the public to protect me; but by an immense
effort I controlled these frenzied impulses, and determined not to budge from
my chair till I had recovered my lost self-possession. This purpose I held to for a good long hour,
as I reckoned time, beat upon meanwhile by an ever-growing tempest of doubt,
anxiety, and despair, with absolutely no relief from any truth I had ever
encountered save a most pale and distant glimmer of the divine existence, when
I resolved to abandon the vain struggle, and communicate without more ado what
seemed my sudden burden of inmost, implacable unrest to my wife.
Now, to make a long
story short, this ghastly condition of mind continued with me, with gradually
lengthening intervals of relief, for two years, and even longer. (qtd. in Literary
Remains, 59-60)
This
may seem like a typical nineteenth-century hysteric episode, but James's
intuition of the "damned shape" is especially interesting. He had elsewhere hinted at a long and
probably unsuccessful struggle to suppress his sexual desires, even suggesting
that he had been deluded to think that his wife would not "exhaust [his]
capacity of desire."[30] Habegger suggests that the beast was nothing
other than the obsessively metaphysical James's monstrous carnality, projected
and exorcised.[31] The beast's "raying out" is itself
a metaphor for projection; compare Judge Schreber's belief that "Rays of
God" were mocking him for having fallen into sexual disgrace (qtd., SE 12:20). Whether James had actually had extramarital
relations is less important than his obsession with them, as evidenced by his hyperactive
defense of Love in the Phalanstery. Note further that at the onset of his crisis,
James was immediately "reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful,
manhood," which sounds suspiciously like a definition of detumescence.
But
James's impotence was not merely a function of his adult sexual experiences,
for he found himself in "almost helpless infancy." Indeed, he responded as a baby might have,
unsuccessfully struggling to suppress his desire to cry for the wife/mother,
unsuccessfully struggling to control his own body. (James uses the word
"incontinently" in an otherwise curious context.) This full-blown regression suggests the
relevance of Chasseguet-Smirgel's interpretative framework. She argues that the oedipal tragedy arises
from the small boy's awareness of his physiological inability to consummate his
desire for his mother, and that he faces the "perverse temptation
. . . to accept pregenital desire and satisfactions
. . . as being equal, or even superior, to genital desires and
satisfactions (attainable only by the father)." Chasseguet-Smirgel posits that each adult
retains a latent "perverse core" ("Perversion and the Universal
Law" 293-294).
I
find "perverse temptation" an unfortunate phrase: Chasseguet-Smirgel
muddles the clinical sense of perversion—a literal turning away from the
normative path—with a moral overlay, as if the subject were always free to
choose. With this proviso, I would argue
that prior to his crisis, James had succumbed to the so-called "perverse
temptation"—which in James's case was linked with the acceptance of
certain pregenital satisfactions, as I shall suggest presently. But James's illusory satisfaction collapsed,
precipitating his crisis—as evidenced by his temporary regression to the state
of Hilflösigkeit (the Freudian term denotes not so much the subject's
helplessness as his coming-to-awareness of his immaturity). James was forced, in other words, to
"recognize the not-me," to cede "narcissistic omnipotence"
by "[projecting it] on to the object, the infant's first ego ideal" (EI 6).
What
omnipotence would the 32-year-old James have been ceding? Possibly that of his work-in-process, which
had hubristically aimed, in the manner of Fourier and Swedenborg, at nothing
less than deciphering the Divine will: "[Circa 1841-1842] I had made an
important discovery . . .; namely, that the book of Genesis
. . . was an altogether mystical or symbolic record of the laws of
God's spiritual creation" (qtd., Literary Remains 59) James's
belief that the keys to the universe were embroidered into the narrative of the
wanderings of Israel's patriarchs smacks of paranoia. So does James's 1843 letter to his former
teacher, the physicist Joseph Henry, naïvely requesting the book that proves
"the fundamental unity of the sciences" (qtd., Father 204). James's grand delusion, his
hyperrationalistic interpretation of God's plan, verse by painstaking verse,
suggests that on the eve of his breakdown, he had not abandoned the illusion of
narcissistic omnipotence. As Chasseguet-Smirgel
observes,
[The future paranoic] has not been able
to go through the phase of idealization of the father
. . . necessary . . . [to] oedipal
identifications . . . .
[He will] idealize his own ego, this idealization representing the first
fruits of his uncontrolled megalomania.
(EI 121)
But James suddenly became aware of the futility of his
project, a realization preserved in his later account: ". . . I
had made an important discovery, as I fancied . . . ,"
which in turn seems to have precipitated his nervous breakdown.[32] The young adult's infantile dreams of
omnipotence were dashed.
Following Chasseguet-Smirgel's case study of August Strindberg, one which bears remarkable similarities to James's,