Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Archives

108 Reviews PSYCHOBIOGRAPHY AND REALITY LOUIS GREENSPAN Russell Editorial Project / McMaster University Hamilton, Ont., Canada L8s 4Kl Andrew Brink. Bertrand Russell.- the Psychobiography ofa Moralist. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1989. Pp. vii, 174. US$39.95 (paper, $12.50). In this work Professor Andrew Brink seeks to get beneath Russell's confident public persona as a champion of reason and the scientific method. Instead, he sets out to explore the private Russell, a far less confident, even desperate seeker after personal wholeness and self-realization. The public Russell, he maintains, is revealed in his characteristic literary form, the expository essay. But the private Russell is revealed in letters, diaries, unpublished essays and occasionally in a public work, notably "The Free Man's Worship". Brink is a Professor of English Literature, and one sometimes senses the shadow of the literary caricatures of Russell by D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Reviews 109 Eliot that parody Russell as a disembodied mouthpiece of pure logic. But in calling attention to Russell's tormented struggle after wholeness, Brink shows himself to be far more interested in discovering the real man than in contributing to the caricatures. The thesis of the work is that Russell, qua philosopher and rationalist, sought an Olympian escape from his tormented struggle for self-knowledge. The record of this struggle is preserved in Russell 's purely literary works, and Brink implies that the world might have been better off had Russell persisted in his literary quest than in his philosophical one. Brink calls his work a psychobiography, a term that sets off many alarms, even though psychobiography is a type of enterprise that Russell would have accepted. The alarms go offwhen one thinks of psychobiography as a type of hatchet job in which the subject is seen as the plaything of various subterranean and usually infantile psychical conflicts. They also go offwhen writers try to discredit philosophical ideas by tracing their origins in psychic deformities . Freud and Bullitt's distorted study of Woodrow Wilson fits this description . But though Russell is perceived to be the strongest defender of pure reason, he was in fact, one of the most vehement critics of the adage that Man, or Woman, is a "rational animal". He thought of psychology as the new frontier of science, arguing that human beings must be understood with reference to pre-rational impulses. His own portraits of his contemporaries and figures from the past contain a good deal of psychobiography. Russell's celebrated History of ~stern Philosophy (1945) is in large part a study of the psychological origins of many philosophies-the traditional systems of metaphysics which he traces to a will to cosmic security, and the more contemporary philosophies that he traces to a will to power. Brink proceeds then with Russell's imprimatur. Russell's Autobiography initiates the narrative structure of Russellian psychobiography. Volume I in particular is a "coming of age" story beginning with an account of the suffocating repression of Pembroke Lodge. There Russell endured the severity of his grandmother's regime until going up to Cambridge in 1890, where he was liberated intellectually. His moral liberation proceeded in 1901 through intense experience of the suffering of Mrs. Whitehead, while his instinctual liberation came about in the arms of Lady Ottoline Morrell. As his godfath~J. John Stuart Mill, had learned before him, the rigours of a repressive upbringing can lead to secular liberal superegos as ferocious as the Christian ones. Brink's volume retraces this odyssey arguing that it is more complex than Russell, and scholars writing about Russell, had revealed. He maintains that Russell's emancipation was not fully realized. He describes Russell's psyche as a maelstrom, a meeting ofcontradictory currents, which can be characterized, according to Brink, as an immature instinctual liberation that mingled with another psychic process that Brink calls an incomplete process of mourning. 110 Reviews The failed liberation turns Russell into the prophet ofsexual emancipation as the author of the notorious Marriage and Morals. In this work, Russell disparages monogamous marriage and calls for impermanent liaisons and an acceptance of libertinism. Marriage and Morals, writes Brink, shows Russell the "propagandist and sex\lal politician" and...