Genius in Madness
MORGENTHAU, HANS J.
Genius in Madness Appearances and Realities By Gustav Ichheiser Jossey-Bass. 221 pp. $8.50. Reviewed by Hans J. Morgenthau Leonard Davis Distinguished Professor of Political Science, City...
...When you talk to a high government official about the poly-centric character of Communism he will admit its existence as a matter of course, but simultaneously he will defend our policies in Vietnam because their purpose is to stop Communism...
...we both agreed that if successful it would probably destroy his powers of social criticism...
...At his death he left a suitcase full of unpublished manuscripts, including a monumental work on War and Peace that he thought would do for our time what E. H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis accomplished 30 years ago...
...Ichheiser's observations on the question of social coercion are similarly relevant...
...Appearances and Realities, besides displaying the range and depth of Ichheiser's perceptions into the nature of personality, includes the brilliant essay on Freud's interpretative "blind spots" and the problem of violence...
...In it he diagnoses his condition as "situationally-induced, pseudo-paranoid...
...He died last November at the age of 72...
...He saw clearly in his theoretical analysis the inevitability of these misunderstandings and deceptions (which arc the very cement of human relations), yet he acted as though he, alone among men, could dispense with them and remain an active member of society...
...Only its visibility, he argues, distinguishes violence from the other forms of social coercion...
...The organic interplay of Ichheiser's madness and his originality as a sociologist had always been fascinating...
...he sees coercion as being of the very essence of social life...
...His basic defect was, one might say, that he tried to practice what he preached...
...As the title of the present collection of essays indicates, Ichheiser's main intellectual concern was the contrast in interpersonal relations between the external appearance and the submerged reality...
...And much of what Ichheiser has to say is of current importance...
...He believes the distinction between coercion and non-coercion is a "pseudo-problem...
...Ichheiser distinguishes between "interpretation in principle" and "interpretation in fact," and has a great deal that is new to tell us about their character and interrelationship...
...reveals with particular poignancy both his brilliance and his madness...
...Instead, he carried the ethos of his social analysis into his social life, and was ruined...
...We have all marveled, for example, at the contrast between the convictions people hold explicitly and the beliefs implicit in their actions...
...Of course, society would not allow him to violate its rules, and put him away...
...Once Ichheiser discovered misunderstanding and deception as integral elements of social life, he saw them everywhere, especially in his professed friends, who were out to steal his ideas and otherwise do him in...
...Reviewed by Hans J. Morgenthau Leonard Davis Distinguished Professor of Political Science, City University of New York Gustav Ichheiser was a social psychologist of unusual originality and brilliance, and he was mad...
...I remember that more than 20 years ago I raised the question of psychiatric treatment with him...
...His insights into the nature of man and society and, more particularly, of man's propensity to deceive himself and others, reflected the truth he had discovered by his personal refusal to deceive or be deceived...
...Although he had little to say about Marx, he commented profoundly on the achievements and limitations of psychoanalysis...
...In this respect he followed in the footsteps of Marx and Freud...
...Thus his inadaptability and paranoia were rooted in the same fundamental attitude to society from which his insights sprang...
...This volume is not merely a deserved posthumous tribute to a gifted and tragic figure, it is an important intellectual event as well...
...Committed to the Illinois State Hospital in Peoria in 1951 and released in 1962, he was as mad when released as when committed...
...It makes accessible the works of an original thinker, and might facilitate the publication of Ichheiser's other writings...
...Another manuscript, "Was I insane—or was I 'railroaded' to a state hospital...
...It also presents a fascinating case study of the link between genius and madness, which ought to give psychologists and psychiatrists something to think about...
...Ichheiser made a name for himself in 1930, while he was still in Vienna, with a sociological critique of the concept of success...
...Had he had the common sense to make the indispensable concessions to the rules of the game, however morally distasteful, he might have become another Veb-len...
...Among the articles he published in German and English, his 1949 monograph, Misunderstanding in Human Relations, stands out today...
Vol. 53 • May 1970 • No. 10
