Commentary
from the Crow's Nest
THE CAINE MUTINY COURT MARTIAL
or, Is it Worthwhile to Psychoanalyze Politicians?
by Fritz Wagner
There was a time, not too long ago, when amateur psychoanalysis was in the toolbox of students, intellectuals, and even the smart set. It was marvelous! If you knew just a few facts about a person you could plug the facts into the Freudian system and imaginatively destroy him. And without Freud's ghost hovering, it is unlikely either Herman Wouk's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Caine Mutiny (1951), or the later movie of the same name (1954) would have taken the form they did.
Today the grandchildren of that generation are not much interested in psychoanalysis. Voegelinian analysis of pneumopathology certainly provides a superior tool for Voegelin readers. For a wider public a strong argument can be made that a psychology based on doing good and avoiding evil is more useful to the individual than trying to recover forgotten childhood experiences in order to explain unhappiness. The facultative psychology of the Scholastics, most notably in the work of St. Thomas, may be the best path to emotional well-being.
In any event, we no longer have a shared psychological vocabulary at hand as we had with psychoanalysis, Freudian or otherwise. Voegelin did point out that Freudian psychoanalysis was a reaction against Positivism, and that insofar as Freud looked beneath the surface, he was going in the right direction. He had rediscovered the soul.
Then Freud was disestablished by a number of successful criticisms, including Philip Rieff's Freud, the Mind of a Moralist, which Voegelin particularly admired. Among other things, Rieff analyzed Freud’s Moses and Monotheism and showed how inconvenient passages in the Old Testament had been ignored to make the argument appear persuasive.
Psychoanalysis had also been used to threaten and coerce people. One could hardly find a better account of this in turn-of-the-century Vienna than Thomas Szasz’ Karl Kraus and the Soul Doctors (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. The book was edited by our own VoegelinView Advisory Board Member Beverly Jarrett.)
Most importantly, people eventually noticed that, as a science, Freudian psychoanalysis offered little predictive value and limited healing power. And then along came drugs to help people with emotional problems and depth psychoanalysis receded even further into the cultural background. But psychoanalysis did offer great entertainment value, whether at a cocktail party or on the stage or in film.
Now to the movie. In the 1954 Hollywood production of The Caine Mutiny, Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg, Captain of a destroyer-minesweeper engaged in combat in the Pacific theatre during World War II, is relieved by his subordinate officers because they believe he is incapable of exercising rational command during the crisis of a typhoon at sea.
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by Alvino-Mario Fantini
Recently I began to read about the life and work of German philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand who, to escape the Nazis, moved to the Austrian capital — until the German Anschluss (annexation) forced him to leave for the U.S.1 As a conference in Rome at the end of May will consider, von Hildebrand had a lot to say about love; but he also wrote a lot on the subject of beauty — in music, the visual arts and in the natural world.
Yet beauty, like love, is frankly not a subject many of us are used to talking about with any kind of philosophical rigor.
In the past, my own attempts at representing my experiences with beautiful things to others have left something to be desired. I’ve generally described Vienna in strictly physical terms and have tended to limit my comments to rudimentary descriptions of its grand sights and charming sounds.
Frankly, I’m overwhelmed. It seems like every day brings with it a new sensory experience: another tiny, cobblestone street with hidden steps; a previously unseen image of Our Lady on the corner of a quiet building; and the cries and laughter of Austrian schoolchildren on their way home from school.
Admittedly, these are not necessarily the life-changing experiences that the entertainment and tourism industries have taught us to expect when traveling abroad. But they are profound and lovely in their own gentle, hushed way; their worth can only be appreciated when one is not hurrying off to complete an errand. As I’ve told visiting friends in the past, Vienna is a city to be walked. Its delights are to be absorbed and savored slowly.
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by Alvino-Mario Fantini
I sometimes think I can catch a glimpse of the lost world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as I walk through the streets of Vienna late at night. Walking past the windows of a gasthaus (a tavern with bar or restaurant) or heuriger (a wine tavern), I like to imagine the old Austrians sitting inside are characters in a Viennese novel. Their faces flushed, they almost look as crippled by their frailties as do some of the characters in the Austrian literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This seems to be especially so with many of the later turn-of-the-century stories and novellas, which seem to revel in the gloom and melancholy of their protagonists. In the stories of Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), for example, lonely sympathetic characters often end up struggling with moral dilemmas or carry the pain of unrequited love. Zweig tells of the desperation in the lives of his characters and, in many cases, his characters end up as suicides.
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from the Crow's Nest
Gosplan Healthcare?
by Fritz Wagner
This week the machinery of the US Congress will grind furiously and may extrude a healthcare sausage that is nothing less than a Soviet style economic and social disaster. With the very best of intentions it cannot work because central planning cannot work. It runs contrary to the ineluctable tendencies of human nature. The impossiblility of successful centrally managed healthcare was brought home to me when considering Thomas Sowell's recent The Intellectuals and Society (See Book Reviews). At the same time, a not at all recent book, dating from the last years of the cold war, considers the then-Soviet design and construction of nuclear submarines ( (I am an inveterate reader of books naval and if you are old enough, you can remember it was a very scary time!).
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from the Crow's Nest
Taking a Chance on Love
by Fritz Wagner
In the Church calender, this past Monday was celebrated as the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. In his homily at that Mass, the celebrant mentioned the late philosopher Martin Buber as representing the viewpoint that "the problem with Christianity is St. Paul." It got us thinking. And, not surprisingly, our thoughts turned to Eric Voegelin and specifically the shock that many Christians experienced after reading Voegelin's appraisal of St. Paul. This happened with the publication of Volume IV of Order and History, The Ecumenic Age, in 1974.
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"So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, O wicked man, you shall surely die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way; he shall die in his iniquity, but you will have saved your life."
Ezekiel, chapter 33, verses 7-9
Quoted in Hitler and the Germans, CW 31, p 201.
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