March 28, 2013

Finest Hour 155, Summer 2012

Page 46

Psychobiography or Psychobabble?

Winston Churchill: Portrait of an Unquiet Mind, by Andrew Norman. Pen & Sword Books, hardbound, illus. 262 pages, £19.99. Member price $24.

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024

More

By Erica L. Chenoweth

Ms. Chenoweth is a fishery biologist for the state of Alaska. Her “Churchill and the Theatre” appeared in Finest Hour 152.

In 1960, HM the Queen approved the Royal Charter and Statutes of Churchill College, then the newest addition to the University of Cambridge. The same year, across the Atlantic in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Jerome Bruner was co-founding the Center of Cognitive Studies at Harvard University, a place of “interdisciplinary study” of the mind and learning before “interdisciplinary” became a buzz-word.

Twenty-three years later, Bruner would write of a “deep gap” in the modern world “between the historyminded and the social-science-minded.” The reader begins to understand that such underlying tensions exist between history and psychology when reading Dr. Andrew Norman’s “psychobiography” of Winston Churchill.

Norman sets out his goal in the preface, with gratuitous reference to his subject by first name, to enable “Winston’s true nature finally to be revealed and understood.” In Sherlockian tone, he lures the reader down the path of his pseudo-scientific investigation looking to recognize “clues” for understanding Churchill’s “character traits” and to see them “for what they are” (x).

But rather than a serious treatment of what should be an endlessly fascinating topic—the inner workings of the mind of a great man and the possible underlying motives for his behavior— the reader is presented with sparse, unenlightening excerpts from two short books, authored by psychologists, in the rare chapters that offer original writing; along with recitations of symptoms from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. (See “The Myth of the ‘Black Dog,'” page 28.)

These are used, first, to diagnose Churchill as having “Emotional Deprivation Disorder,” and then to suggest the armchair diagnosis of “hypomanic-depressive”—which, we are informed, fortunately gave him the “almost super-human” energy to help save the free world, and of which Churchill’s body of written work and paintings “may also be regarded as part of the ‘hypomanic dividend'” (204).

The surrounding pages contain so-called evidence cherry-picked from writings of Churchill and others, presented by a researcher already convinced of his own theories, and reproduced whether they support his thesis or not. In the appendix, he states his belief that Lord Randolph Churchill died of syphilis, basing it on unenlightened and simplistic analysis.

Norman is so noncommittal in his investigation that it is often difficult for the reader to understand if any conclusion is meant to be reached. Some of his commentary is so outrageously off the mark that the reader cannot tell if the misunderstanding is deliberate, or if such blinkered analysis lies in wait after every delightful quotation. One is reminded of Churchill’s description, in Great Contemporaries, of how Arthur Balfour once contemplated a frenzied member of the House of Commons, regarding him “with no more and no less than the interest of a biologist examining through a microscope the contortions of a rare and provoked insect.” Churchill himself surely deserves better as a subject for study.

The most readable chapters are those which summarize biographical material from well-known sources. Churchill further relates in Great Contemporaries how he and Balfour “touched one night upon the topic of whether public men should read newspaper comments about themselves,” to which Balfour reportedly replied: “I have never put myself to the trouble of rummaging an immense rubbish-heap on the problematical chance of discovering a cigar-end.” Only to one who finds such work appealing can I commend this book.