Promises, Oaths, and Vows: On the Psychology of Promising

Promises, Oaths, and Vows

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Promises, Oaths, and Vows On the Psychology of Promising

Herbert J. Schlesinger

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The Analytic Press Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

The Analytic Press Taylor & Francis Group 27 Church Road Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA

© 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Printed in the United States of America on acid‑free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑88163‑454‑9 (Hardcover) Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Law, no part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, trans‑ mitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data Schlesinger, Herbert J. Promises, oaths, and vows : on the psychology of promising / Herbert J. Schlesinger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978‑0‑88163‑454‑9 (alk. paper) 1. Promises. 2. Moral development. I. Title. BJ1500.P7S35 2008 155.2’5‑‑dc22

2007046174

Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and The Analytic Press Web site at http://www.analyticpress.com

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To my wife, Ann Halsell Applebaum, M.D., whose sweetness and patience are exceeded only by her good judgment.



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Contents Preface Acknowledgments

xi xiii

Chapter 1 Promising and Morality

1 3 4 6 9 12

The Scientific Study of Morality

The Everyday Meaning of Promising Categories of Promises Promising and Culture

Promising and Rationality

Chapter 2 Why Do We Make Promises? Promise Keeping as One of the Defining Acts of Morality: Philosophical, Historical, and Legal Background A Definition of Promising

Why Do We Keep Promises?

Chapter 3 Promising and the Theory of Mind in Development Memory versus Perception Self from Other

Past from Present and Present from Future Internal and External Word and Deed

Theory of Mind and Magical Thinking Magical Thinking and Psychoanalysis

15 19 25 27 29 29 29 30 30 31 31

vii

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Contents

Chapter 4 Empirical Studies of Moral Development Empirical Studies of Intention and Will The Psychology of Intention

Reflections on the Implications of Lewin’s Research

Chapter 5 Developmental and Regressive Aspects of Making and Breaking Promises Case Example

A Bit of Theory

Case Example, Continued

Implications for Technique

Chapter 6 Mature and Regressive Determinants of the Keeping of Promises Case Examples Promising and Psychopathology: Regression and Magical Thinking The Psychology of Intention

Chapter 7 Implicit Promising and the Implicit Promise The Person to Whom Life Has Failed to Keep Its Promises The Promising, but Problematic, Patient as an Analytic Candidate Detecting the “Narcissistic Core” of the Problematic Applicant Problems Arise as These Analysts Age

Problems for Terminating the Analysis of a Once Promising but Problematic Patient Another Variety of the Problematic “Promising” Patient The “Promiser” Who Fails to Live Up to His “Promise”

Chapter 8 Promising in the Clinic

35 40 41 43 47 48 50 58 71 77 81 83 89 93 93 101 102 105 107 110 113 117 117

Promises of Patients

viii

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Contents

Promises of Clinicians

121 121 128

Exception 1 Exception 2

Chapter 9 Promising as an Element of Form and Content in Greek Drama Psychoanalysts and Literature The Tragic View of Life

Promising as a Formal Element in Greek Drama The Tragic View of the Hero

The Tragic Hero in Relation to Personality Development

Chapter 10 Promising in Shakespearean Drama Action and Delay in Psychosexual Development Promising as a Device Dramatists Use to Heighten Dramatic Tension A Gloss on Oedipus and Hamlet

The Comedies

The Historical Plays

Chapter 11 Forms of Promising in Religious Practices

131 131 133 138 147 149 151 158 160 160 166 168

The Oath Form

173 176 181 188



199

References

201

Index

209

The Covenant Form

The Covenants of the Old Testament

Epilogue

ix

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Preface “What makes man moral?” We are not likely to ask that daunting question when someone we depend on either fails to keep a promise or fails to live up to an expectation that we feel is legitimate. We feel let down and disappointed, if not shocked and outraged, by the immorality of his behavior, uncertain about what to do. Only when calm returns can we allow ourselves to muse about the larger philosophical questions of morality and immorality that lie behind that breach, questions that have concerned scholars from the beginning of recorded history. So it was with me. I had not given much thought to the act of promising either as a social event or as a problem for psychology until I was forced to by a patient whose way of relating himself to significant others, including me, was to invite us to depend on his uncalled for promises and then fail to keep them. Coming to understand this odd and exasperating behavior (see chapter 5) for what it was and was not broadened my interest to include the larger significance of making, breaking, and keeping promises. When I was fortunate enough to encounter patients whose difficulties seemed to be of the opposite kind, including a fear of making commitments or promises lest they become trapped and unable to back out of them (see chapter 6), my interest in promising as a topic was confirmed and led, eventually, to the writing of this book. As other writers on clinical topics have discovered, once one is forced to pay attention to a new phenomenon, one sees it everywhere. This book does not follow my personal path of discovery. To facilitate understanding, I have placed my clinical findings and generalizations from them (chapters 5 through 8) in the broader context of several cultures that have contrasting expectations about making and keeping promises, and of research on how children become moral beings (chapters 1 through xi

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Preface

4). I was bemused to discover, when I went to the literature to find what other psychologists and psychoanalysts had written about the act of promising, that the cupboard was bare; social psychologists have studied human behavior in groups from the point of view of morality, and developmental psychologists have studied how unruly infants become moral beings, but neither professional group came to my conclusion that the ability to make and keep a promise could be taken to be a, if not the, defining act of moral maturity. The act of promising is absent from their paradigms. Nor have psychoanalytic writers considered the act of promising a topic worth writing about. In contrast, the authors of imaginative literature, for instance the great Greek dramatists and great playwrights, such as Shakespeare, whom we regard as intuitive psychologists, made wide and discriminating use of the several forms of promising, especially oaths and vows. In chapters 9 and 10, I examine how they used vows and oaths both to move forward the action of the play and to fan the audience’s interest in the fate of the hero. Some of Shakespeare’s villains are masterful at duplicitous promising. And to make the matter even more interesting, even if one utters a promise seemingly without serious intention to carry it out, one’s insincerity does not guarantee that, in fact, it will not be carried out. It may very well be fulfilled to the letter and to the dismay and destruction of the promiser. Sophocles and Shakespeare are among those who told of promises that seemed to take on a life of their own and that fulfilled themselves even in spite of the too-late change of heart of the promiser. Finally, in chapter 11, I discuss how recent discoveries in the archeology of the Near East permit us to reconstruct the rise of the Judeo-Christian religions and show that making a vow or oath was one of the activities that crucially defined the boundary of what was allowed to man and what was reserved to deity. Attempts to answer these knotty questions—When is it permissible to make a promise? and When is it prohibited?—occupy large portions of ancient religious texts. I trust that readers will come away from this book with a better understanding of promises, kept and broken in human affairs, and for clinicians, a better understanding of their promising patients.

xii

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Acknowledgments Once again, I am deeply indebted to my indispensable first reader and first critic Stanley Goodman, MD who vetted nearly every page. His unerring eye for the simpler and less stuffy way to put it accounts for the easy read I hope this book will be. Paul Stepansky first met this book when it was only a gleam in the author’s imagination. I am grateful for his encouragement and for the many valuable suggestions he offered about its organization and content. Once again, Lenni Kobrin, editor extraordinaire, offered wise counsel and strict guidance as she excised extraneous words and massaged the remainder. Kristopher Spring thoughtfully helped me to navigate the transition between publishers and then greatly facilitated the production of this book. A large part of Chapter 5 appeared earlier in The Human Mind Revisited, edited by Sydney Smith, New York, International Universities Press. Portions of Chapter 6 appeared earlier in The Course of Life, Vol. III, Adulthood, edited by Stanley Greenspan and George Pollock, Washington, D.C., U.S. Govt. Printing Office. I am grateful to the publishers for granting permission to reprint.

xiii

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1 Promising and Morality

At some time, every one of us has been disappointed by the failure of another to behave as expected. We may take the unpleasant reminder philosophically; accepting that some among us do not act properly at times; whereas most of us behave appropriately most of the time. When does an encounter with someone behaving improperly raise considerations of a higher order? When do we consider such behavior not just wrong, but immoral? Rather than approaching the issue from the negative side, let us consider what we mean by moral. Freud (1915) famously dismissed the question with an answer that might have been offered by any 19th-century gentleman who assumed that his personal code of behavior also defined morality, “What is moral is self-evident” (p. 267). Far from being self-evident, the question has preoccupied philosophers, ethicists, and religionists from time beyond memory (e. g., Newman, 2004; see also Gilligan, 1976; Gert, 2005) and it still excites lively controversy among our contemporaries. Philosophers have been clear about the central importance of the act of promising for a theory of morality. Kant (1785) applied his seminal concept of morality, “the categorical imperative,” to a number of examples. Perhaps the best known concerns unfaithful promises. Consider, for instance, a person who is short of money and asks for a loan. He promises Translated in the Standard Edition: “As to morals, that goes without saying” For a concise review of the topic, the reader can do no better than to consult William Kerrigan’s (1999) Preface to his Shakespeare’s Promises and Vitek (1993) for a discussion of philosophical approaches.

 



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Promises, Oaths, and Vows: O n the Psychology of Promising

to repay it, but he has no intention of repaying. By applying the idea of the categorical imperative to this behavior, Kant observed that it fails the necessary condition that one should behave as if one’s behavior would be adopted universally. About this example, he noted that the behavior is self-contradictory; if breaking promises were to become universal, no one would ever agree to accept a promise and promising would disappear, and with that so would morality. We daily experience that, if kept at all, promises tend to be kept only more or less as offered, and yet morality is not shattered as Kant’s tight, deductive logic would predict. Still, it is hardly arguable that man’s ability to make a promise with the intention to keep it and then actually to carry it out is essential to the orderly functioning of society. The very question, Why should we keep promises? is so embedded in our social norms that asking it can be used to test a child’s intelligence (Wechsler, 2003). It has profound implications that touch on core issues of culture, the nature of the social contract, and the very substance of higher morality. I draw on personal experience to note that when I asked one bright child that question, he retorted tartly that some people do not always keep their promises. We might agree that, although the question implies an absolute value, as this child had already discovered, whether or not one fulfills a promise is highly conditioned by circumstance. The circumstances include at least the promiser’s perhaps conflicted or even insincere intention in making the promise, the nature of the perhaps changing relationship between the promiser and promisee, and who else might be listening. While we may accept, cynically or philosophically, that occasionally we fall short of our best intentions in regard to keeping promises, we probably do not challenge Kant’s proposal that keeping promises is an absolute good, an aspect of “natural law” (Murphy, 2002). Yet we can imagine, as did Cicero (60 BCE, p. 197), that because in the mean time circumstances might have changed, it could be inadvisable, even harmful, to keep a particular promise, even if it had been made with the best intentions. Recent history and current newspapers tell that the principles many of us hold as moral absolutes are widely ignored. The governmentally approved mass slaughters in Nazi Germany and more recently in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Sudan tell us that following the rules of local society may not guarantee that one is moral. These questions—What is moral behavior? How do children become moral? How do we understand obvious 

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Promising and Morality

departures from moral behavior?—continue to trouble those who think about such matters I have put the issue of morality by assuming that floating somewhere above the regularities of the social order that define propriety there is a generally accepted moral code. Most of us, like Freud, might hold the code to be self-evident, and most of us, at least in casual usage, would include that every person has a will that is sufficiently free to choose to behave morally or not, properly or not. While the factuality of these assumptions is challengeable, they are nevertheless convenient. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine how an organized society, even a primitive one, could exist if its people did not subscribe and largely conform to a broad array of implicit expectations of how people are to behave in relation to each other, to the material world of things, and to the environment in general. The “soft” system of social controls embodied in “culture” complements the more formal sets of rules and sanctions that are codified in law and regulation. Anthropologists tell us that every culture develops such patterns of traditional customs and expectations, which differ from each other in particulars but cover the same areas of behavior and belief and always are supported by a set of overarching principles, often based in or supported by religion; and it is this set of higher principles that frames what is moral. Yet, if we follow this line of argument much further, we will be in danger of falling into the same error I warned about earlier—equating what is moral with what, locally, is socially accepted and even praised. The great exemplars that define morality for us, after all, include Socrates, Jesus, and Gandhi, each of whom took a principled stance based on what he took to be higher values, a stance that was against certain contemporary social norms. On a less lofty plane, each of us has observed on occasion, “It might be legal, but it ain’t right.”

The Scientific Study of Morality As a question to be studied scientifically, morality preoccupied social and developmental psychologists even before these subdisciplines of psychology were firmly established, perhaps as soon as the discipline of psychology sep I chose this construction so as to weasel out of taking up at this point the larger issue of whether or not we have free will.





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Promises, Oaths, and Vows: O n the Psychology of Promising

arated itself from its parent, philosophy. As Lickona (1975) noted, the question of morality is at an interdisciplinary crossroads and permeates many discussions and studies of child and adult development and behavior. His list of moral issues that have been studied more or less scientifically includes, among many other subjects, “violence, altruism, criminality, cooperation, honesty, child-rearing, self-control, situational variations in behavior, modeling, the influence of heredity versus experience, bystander response to emergencies, social and political attitudes, personality functioning and the impact of culture on socialization” (p. x). Although this list is hardly exhaustive, it is noteworthy that keeping a promise does not appear on it; neither does promise or promising appear in Lickona’s index. The omission of promising in relation to morality is representative of works in the field. It is hardly arguable that the ability to make and keep a promise, and the general agreement that breaking a promise invokes moral condemnation, are essential to the orderly functioning of society. It is remarkable, then, that promise keeping, which I propose is one of the defining acts of maturity in moral behavior, has been almost totally ignored as a focus of systematic study by psychologists. Nevertheless, in chapter 4, I offer a sample of the research on the development of moral behavior in children for the tangential relevance of its findings to the morality of keeping promises. Although I must situate my discussion of promising within the general context of morality and moral behavior, I do not deal here with morality in general or philosophical terms, but only in those special instances when unconscious forces seem to corrupt one’s moral sense as it takes over the fulfilling of a dire oath (see chapter 6).

The Everyday Meaning of Promising I use the term promise in its ordinary, everyday sense as an explicit statement of one’s intention to perform some act at a future time with the proviso that someone relies on the fulfillment of the promise. One could, of course, promise to avoid performing some act, and the someone who counts on fulfillment could also be the one who makes the promise. We can and, at least as often as New Year’s Day, we do promise ourselves to do or not do I make this general statement hesitantly, although my search of the various indexes of searchable literature has not found any exceptions. Nevertheless, there is the possibility that I have overlooked something.





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Promising and Morality

something. Whether or not a promise must be explicit and verbalized, and whether it is made in the hearing of another party are subissues I consider later; I expand on this partial definition in chapter 2. Although I have assumed the commonsensical position that we know when we have made a promise, scholars differ about this matter. As I will discuss further in chapter 2, theorists, including some linguists, for example Austin (1962), consider only the words spoken, regardless of context. Others, for example Grice (1975), think it important to consider the intention of the speaker as well. Clearly, linguistic theorists are preoccupied by different questions from those that concern everyday consumers of promises, such as; does the speaker mean what he says? Can we count on his delivering the goods when he said he would? That last concern, of course, is a separate issue from whether or not, when he spoke, the speaker did intend to deliver the goods. Moreover, it is a separate issue from how fixed his intention might remain, however “true” it might have been when uttered. How quickly this seemingly simple matter has become complicated. And, too, an ordinary promise is similar in semantic structure to other statements of intention—vows, oaths (both solemn, as in marriage, and testimonial, as in a court of law), threats, covenants or contracts, and in contingent form, ultimatums. It is also obvious that the amount of moral (and legal) weight we give any particular promise varies with context and circumstance. For instance, the degree of willingness or obligation one feels to fulfill a promise may depend on the rational and emotional circumstances that existed at the time one made the promise, for example, when one was grateful or enraged, and that exist at the time set for fulfillment, when the circumstances might be other than one anticipated when making the promise. Another index of the moral and legal weight of a promise is the expected or actual reaction of others to keeping it or breaking it. Earlier, I slipped in a phrase, as if by the way, to the list of circumstances that helps to determine if a promise will be fulfilled, that is, “on who else may be listening.” This innocuous-seeming insertion conceals a heavy addition to the complexity of the problem of promising, and it “Will you love me in December as you loved me in May?” I shall use the term promise to mean any of these contingent statements unless I specify otherwise.  Including one’s emotional state, one’s relationship to the one to whom the promise is made, and the expected and actual consideration for which the promise was made.  



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Promises, Oaths, and Vows: O n the Psychology of Promising

invokes a current and lively debate among psychoanalytic theorists; should we remain with what some call a “one-person” theory or accept that the “two-person” version of object relations theory gives a better account of the actuality of human experience (Aron, 1990)? This debate ignores that in one of Freud’s (1905a) least referred to, “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,” but hardly least important, works, he saw the necessity for a three-party relationship paradigm. Although his main interest at the time was in expanding the reach of the libido theory, he found it necessary to expand his conception of human relatedness to include a third person to understand how we appreciate a joke; he distinguished the one who tells the joke, the one about whom it is told, and the one to whom it is told (pp. 144-158). Freud spelled out the qualities that third party must have to appreciate the joke, including that he be in psychical accord with the teller of the joke (p.151). To ease the analogy between joking and promising, we may note, as Freud did not, that the person telling the joke may also be the butt of it (e.g., the joke is on me), one can laugh at oneself. In the social arrangements in which the act of promising is embedded, the nature and degree of affinity between the listening, witnessing third party and the promiser and promisee will prove to be particularly important. The third party may be the being—living, dead, or immortal—whose name is invoked to guarantee fulfillment of a vow or oath, as when in the courtroom, with hand on the Bible, one utters the fateful phrase, “So help me God.” Or he may be the oath maker himself, as in “On my sacred honor.” Or he may be represented by the legal system in the promises that are embedded in contracts; or he may be embodied namelessly, so to speak, in one’s conscience. In chapter 6, I return to detail the importance of the third party, embodied or not, when I consider the destructive overfulfillment of a promise or oath, fulfillment when the oath maker no longer consciously wishes to fulfill it.

Categories of Promises In daily life, a complicated web of factors and circumstances promotes the keeping of actual promises and may even excuse the breaking of prom E.g., “on my mother’s grave,” or “or may God hear me.” Note that we are warned in the Decalogue not to take the name of the Lord in vain.





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ises. Statements in the semantic form of a promise, that is, utterances that sound like promises, are so loosely offered in everyday usage that the meaning the promiser intends and the meaning the receiver infers are far from certain. Moreover, the fate of a statement that sounds like a promise depends on much more than the half-hearted intention of the promiser; unlike a contract, which is a set of mutual promises that ends a period of negotiation, the more-or-less promise may be offered only to open negotiation. The opening statement that sounded like a promise may evolve into a firmer and more considered commitment, or it may lose even the little force it once seemed to have as the promiser’s intentions and their possible consequences become clarified. Considering the complexities, it is remarkable that the promises we expect to be kept are indeed kept. It is equally remarkable that we are not surprised, and may not even notice, that certain statements made to us in the syntax of promising are not kept, for neither party expected them to be kept; and, even if we remember that the statements were made, we do not remember them as actual promises. Here is a brief catalogue of statements that are cast as some form of promising and that arouse varying expectations: Serious Promises: Promises Made with the Full Intention to Keep Them Marriage vows—While they may be made in all sincerity, often enough they are not kept, at least not in all particulars, and yet the marriage may endure. Even if the vow is later broken, or bent, one cannot say it was insincere when made. Although religious sanctions may enforce the keeping of marriage vows “until death do us part,” society provides the mechanism of divorce to relieve each party of the obligations of the vows. Serious promises, of course, are offered on less momentous occasions and generally are uttered in such a way as to convince listeners of the promiser’s sincerity. The promisee will wonder if she actually knows the true intentions of the person who says, “I promise;” Can she rely on it? As promises are offered only in the context of possibly mixed intentions, we must challenge the usage “true intentions.” Although we should know better, we often speak in this reductionistic way, ignoring that we harbor conflicting intentions, all of them true. Which of these intentions is salient Or any of the variants of the promissory form, such as or “I will (not),” or “I swear,” or “I resolve,” or “If you don’t….I will…”.





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at the time set for fulfilling the promise is of the essence, and if several sincere and conflicting intentions are operative, the outcome may be especially uncertain and especially interesting. Solemn oaths—For example, oaths of office, like marriage and religious vows, may be kept scrupulously or only more or less. Generally, unlike marriage vows and religious vows, they are time limited. Testimonial oaths—The requirement to tell the truth when under oath is expected to be observed scrupulously. The court will impose severe punishment for failure to do so while “on the stand”—for committing perjury. These oaths are in force only until one is excused from being “sworn” by the court. Contracts—These promises are expected to be fulfilled as written. Contracts usually state precisely the way and time when they are to be fulfilled, and detail the consequences of a breach and the procedures for adjudicating one. The obligations end when the contract is fulfilled or terminated. A contract may be unwritten or oral, and yet will be binding if another party relied on its fulfillment. The parties may later agree to nullify the contract or change its provisions.

Promises That Are Not Serious Casual promises—One may use the promising form “lightly,” or casually, or to show interest in another; but without the full intention of keeping it and without any expectation that one will be called on to keep it, unless the other person confirms the offer. For example, one offers a ride to another when several drivers are available and have made offers; only one ride is needed. A promise one makes with “fingers crossed”—Such a promise is made with the hope that one will not be called on to keep it; it is even made, perhaps with the expectation that the offer will be refused. The promiser may use extravagant terms to preclude being understood literally; such as, “promise the moon.” The promiser may not remember making a promise if it is not “picked up” by a listener and included in that person’s plans. A promise may be extorted in some sense; for instance, one may pledge a contribution one cannot afford, or that one does not wish to make but feels one must because “everybody is doing it.” One may later default, or perhaps fulfill the promise if one learns that there is an important tax advantage to doing so; a promise may be fulfilled for reasons other than one’s intention when making it. 

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Boastful oaths—Boastful oaths may use the same wording as serious oaths, although generally they are expressed in a louder voice. But rather than declaring a firm intention, they are intended to enhance the sense of importance of the oath maker, or to emphasize his depth of feeling about some issue, and are not intended to be taken literally. Still, if a listener wants to trap the oath maker, he may challenge him to “put up or shut up.” The consequences may vary from the oath maker’s backing down or feeling that, because he was challenged, his “honor” is at stake and so he must fulfill the oath despite not having made it sincerely, or he may react to the entrapment, and attack the challenger in some way. Duplicitous promises—Such promises are made without intention to keep them but with the aim to deceive the listener and gain some advantage. False promises seem common enough to require no further explication. We should note, however, that a promise made without conscious intention to fulfill it nevertheless might be carried out precisely as spoken following a “change of heart.” For example, a standard plot of the romantic novel has a would-be seducer promise marriage to a maiden he intended merely to love and leave and then, finding he has fallen in love with her, insists on marrying her to “make an honest woman of her.” In chapter 6, I consider further the tendency of promises to fulfill themselves despite the seeming counter-intention of the promiser.

Promises That Are Not Really Promises In chapter 5, I discuss a special variety of promising behavior that paradoxically is sincere in the offering but carries no implication of future action. This form of promising, for instance, the “morning-after” vow of a suffering alcoholic, is better understood as an act of propitiation and is complete in itself.

Promising and Culture We live within a social order that does not require us to make explicit promises to maintain normal connections any more than we depend on law and regulation to tell us right from wrong from moment to moment. While both the apparatus of law and the conventions of promising and contracting are at hand to be called on as needed, we seldom call on them. Rather, we rely on “culture,” the inbuilt set of implicit expectations that others and we will behave “normally” under normal circumstances. 

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Promises, Oaths, and Vows: O n the Psychology of Promising

An example of the power of implicit promising can be seen in the way the federal government maintains the faith of the citizenry in the quality of our money. The government has done so well in that regard that the people of many countries of the world prefer to keep their funds in dollars; they are certain that our currency is more stable than their own and that the amounts they eventually withdraw will not be worth less than what they deposited. Our financial system is based on promises, and that system works best when conditions foster the widespread belief of depositors that the currency is so strong that they do not question it. Ironically, as long as that belief is sustained, the promise never has to be kept in any literal sense (see Scherman, 1938). Our nation’s paper currency once bore the legend that declared that each paper note was backed by (i.e., “There is on deposit . . .”) a quantity of gold or silver, depending on the era, sufficient for the bearer to exchange it for bullion. The Silver Certificate was merely a more convenient way to carry money than carting an equivalent amount in coin or bullion. Later, the legend on our currency was reworded as “A promise to pay . . .” Our paper currency now is labeled Federal Reserve Note, and the legend reads, “This note is legal tender for all debts public and private.” The promise that once was explicit is now implicit. Despite the Jeremiads of conservative economists who denounce the arrangement as a deception, we freely accept and exchange these bits of paper in the belief that “the full faith and credit” of the federal government is behind them. The American public and much of the rest of the world hardly heeds the warnings that inflation reduces the value of the notes even as we hold them, and we exchange the notes freely for goods and services; many of us even attempt to protect our future by hiding quantities of these notes “under the mattress.” The danger of inflation is real, however, and the conditions that erode or enhance the confidence of the presumably more knowledgeable sector of the public can be seen in the fluctuation of the market value of ordinary stocks and bonds as well as governmentissued bonds. The conditions that erode and destroy the faith of the general public in the stability of the monetary system can be seen most clearly in history in the spectacle of crowds in Germany after World War I trying to get their savings out of banks; inflation ultimately became so severe that one needed a wheelbarrow to cart the currency needed for daily purchases. 10

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Promising and Morality

The issue of how we manage to get along in society is usually discussed under the heading of manners and customs, the patterns we have grown up with. We teach our children how we want them to behave in company, beginning perhaps with “please” and “thank you.” In the company of adults, we constantly exchange signals intended to establish and maintain “normal” order and to assure each other that there exists among us a meeting of minds and emotional positions sufficient for safe connection. These signals take the form of a smiling glance at the other that one expects to be returned by eye contact and a quick smile of recognition; or we make a ritualistic response to a ritual greeting (e.g., “How are you?” “Fine, thank you.”), by returning a handshake if a hand is offered; or we maintain a respectful, attentive silence when another is speaking. Such minimal signals, properly responded to, assure us that we are in civil company and that it is safe, and may be mutually profitable, to exchange more specific messages to define more precisely the immediate reason for being in the company of the other. When the other responds as expected, we pay little explicit attention, but merely relax the slight sense of vigilance that led us to signal for recognition in the first place.10 We may then expect, not always correctly, that the parties can trust each other in other pending matters.11 Although the guarantee is not certain, in most exchanges in everyday life we rely on such implicit assurances that all of us will follow the rules and conventions of civil society consistently and will avoid bumping into each other, literally or figuratively. The expectation that each of us will behave consistently across situations is a convenient, if sometimes naïve, assumption. We resort to making or expecting a formal promise12 on two occasions: when it becomes clear, or when it is assumed as a matter of course because of the nature of the social setting, that one of the parties might have a conflict of interest. In that event, we could not safely assume a mutual understanding of the matters at hand or believe that we could infer the actual intentions of the other. Thus, in a court of law, a witness must swear to tell the truth; at a marriage ceremony, both parties promise fidelity; when In the clinic, of course, we use this exchange of ritualistic messages to inform us first, about the degree to which a patient is “in contact” or contactable, that is, not “psychotic,” and second, how ready he or she is to make use of our services. 11 The examples of the smooth-talking swindler and the seducer come easily to mind. 12 Or one of its variants, e.g., oath, vow, contract. 10

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Promises, Oaths, and Vows: O n the Psychology of Promising

awarded citizenship, one pledges allegiance; in making a large purchase, for instance a house, when one does not immediately exchange goods and payment, one enters a sales contract that makes explicit the conditions that will govern the exchange. These occasions of serious promising are generally solemnified by a degree of ceremony.

Promising and Rationality In economics, rational choice theory assumes that in economic exchanges, people behave rationally, that is, according to what consensually would be taken to be their best interests. Relying on an improvised version of rational choice theory in our everyday dealings with each other, we all more or less behave to maximize gain and minimize loss as we personally define them, but not necessarily at the expense of others. Nevertheless, we may be dismayed when events force us to recognize that our assumptions about shared values and presumed logic have failed. People do not always behave rationally, that is, as they are expected to behave in accordance with popular notions of rationality. A person may have an idiosyncratic sense of values that is at odds with conventional mores; his thinking might be disturbed in the clinical sense so that his reasoning follows a private logic or none; or emotionally he might be out of balance, distraught, depressed, angry, or in love. Under any of these circumstances, and with varying degrees of divided intention, he may fail to keep a promise. We take fulfilling a promise for granted and so seek an explanation for breaking a promise. We may attribute the failure to “causes” ranging from a “simple” failure of memory, such as not returning a library book on time, or the perhaps more obviously motivated failure to pay a debt on time, to a clearly vengeful breaking of a promise when we feel we have been wronged by the other. But these examples of promise breaking, although they violate certain expectations, and in some instances even could be considered morally wrong, do not seem irrational; that is, they seem easily understandable—certainly all of us have either been in such a situation or can imagine being in one. We do not, however, understand so easily the instances of a bright young person, a promising scholar, who regularly fails at school, or the talented and promising musician who fails to redeem his promise, or the desperately ill patient who promises to abide by his prescribed regimen but 12

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Promising and Morality

regularly fails to take his medicines, or the rarer instance of the persons I discuss in chapter 5, who regularly make gratuitous promises in all apparent sincerity and just as regularly fail to keep them. A well-known example is the alcoholic who attempts to ease his pain and soothe his spouse with “morning after” vows to forgo drink forever. After several relapses, listeners tend to dismiss the promiser and his vows as insincere. If, however, we consider those promises to be invocations of pity and forgiveness that make use of the syntactic form of the promise, but lack the intention or ability to follow through, we might regard the invocations as sincere, but not as promises. But have I not contradicted myself? Does not offering a promise, even offering one formulaically, without the intention to carry it, out define insincerity? Indeed. But if one reproaches the morning-after sufferer about the likelihood that his intention will last no longer than his headache, he will feel deeply injured, badly misunderstood, unloved. He says, of course, that he is sincere, how could one doubt him—even as we remind him of his history of relapses and he cannot deny them. He does “mean it” this time, even while appreciating why his hearers doubt him. He cannot say why his intention flags as his pain fades; one rueful penitent said, “Just my weak character, I guess.” He wants us to believe him now because he wants forgiveness now, and for him being forgiven is conflated with having the pain go away. We may analogize to the way a young child comes crying to his parent. He is in pain and outraged that the sidewalk he fell on bruised his knee. He demands that the parent kiss his bruise to make it stop hurting, and the kiss does just that—a bit of magical thinking we find charming in children.

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2 Why Do We Make Promises?

Promise Keeping as One of the Defining Acts of Morality: Philosophical, Historical, and Legal Background

Before examining the special circumstances that lead us to make an explicit promise (whether or not we intend to keep that promise), we must recognize that most of the time, civil society gets along quite well without such declarations of intent. We take for granted that the implicit promises embedded in the fabric of social expectations will be fulfilled, and we generally do not worry about the possibility that they will not. Unless we are alerted to that possibility, we do not dwell on the fact that promises themselves are but words. Tenuous as this foundation may seem, modern civilization is based on the general acceptance of such embedded promises. The checks we are paid with and the currency for which we exchange them are only promissory notes. So are the bus, train, and plane schedules we rely on. Trains and planes are late far more often than checks bounce, but any of these failures, even the occasional serious ones, do not challenge our expectation that regularity will prevail in spite of the expectable occurrence of such annoyances. It takes a great calamity, as when rampant inflation erodes the value of a nation’s currency, to destroy our confidence in the larger system, and then all its promises become suspect. Fukuyama (1995) put it well:

“Oaths are but words, and words but wind”—Samuel Butler.



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Promises, Oaths, and Vows: O n the Psychology of Promising

Today, having abandoned the promise of social engineering, virtual all serious observers understand that liberal political and economic institutions depend on a healthy and dynamic civil society for their vitality. “Civil society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities and churches—builds in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations. A strong and stable family structure and durable social institutions cannot be legislated into existence in the way a government can create a central bank or an army. A thriving civil society depends on a people’s habits, customs, and ethics—attributes that can be shaped only indirectly through conscious political action and must otherwise be nourished through an increased awareness and respect for culture. (pp. 4–5)

In presenting these considerations, I may seem to have parochially assumed that there is only one Culture (with a capital C) our own, United States, Western culture. Yet it takes only a day’s travel to enter a cultural setting that holds far more relaxed attitudes toward regularity in behavior and respect for time and timely performance and in which the value system is organized quite differently, around personal loyalty rather than specific performance (Jackson, 1968; see also Mischel, 1961). Egner (2002) cites her own experience and that of European colleagues in West Africa in which native colleagues offered promises that on their face could not possibly be kept and, in fact, were not kept. She tried to examine whether these statements were truly promises according to Searle’s (1969) speech acts of promising (see also Smith, 1990). She concluded that those odd promises did not fulfill the third and fourth of Searle’s four formal “felicity conditions,” which are that the statement in question:

1. have propositional content, that is, refer to a future act of the speaker; 2. meet preparatory conditions: that the act is one the hearer would want to have done, or at least would not object to, and the act is one the speaker would not perform in the ordinary course of events;

Namnum, cited by Jackson (1968), notes that in Mexico it is common for promises to be made that both promiser and promise know are not likely to be carried out. He relates this behavior to the cultural tendency to ignore the future and a disinclination to be unpleasant by saying no.



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Why Do We Make Promises?



3. be sincere, the speaker intends to fulfill the promise; 4. that speaker intends that the speech act places him under obligation to perform as promised.

In an effort to include that behavior in the purview of speech act theory, Egner (2002) turned to Grice (1975), whose cooperative principle allows that the motive of politeness in the interest of preserving relationship, which Grice terms an implicature, is superordinate to other formal conditions of conversational analysis. In the West African culture, the “false promise,” as it would be regarded in European culture, permits the conversational exchange to be closed with mutual regard. In contrast, in Japan the values of liberal, democratic, civil society are expressed as cultural norms that stress fulfilling expectations of performance while valuing the general good over individual preferences. In social discourse, directness and sincerity may seem to be valued less than the desire to save face and to avoid offending. The perils of failure to understand the vast differences between what we might crudely call Western culture and the cultures of the Near East, for instance, are illustrated in the widely reported difficulties the American military have carrying out the declared policy to “liberate” the citizens of Iraq. Our mistaken expectation that the cultures of the Near Eastern countries will mirror our own expectation that our words should be taken at face value is well captured by an Op Ed piece in the New York Times: It is unfair to accuse all Iranians of being liars. The label is judgmental and reeks of stereotype. The more appropriate view toward honesty, the way many Iranians themselves describe it, is to say that being direct and telling the truth are not prized principles in Iran. Often, just the opposite is true. People are expected to give false praise and make insincere promises. They are expected to tell you what you want to hear so as to avoid conflict, or to offer hope when there is none. There is a social principle in Iran called taarof, a concept that describes the practice of insincerity—of inviting people to dinner when you do not really want their company, for example. Iranians understand such practices as manners and are not offended by them. Speech has a different function than it does in the West,” said Kian Tajbakhsh, a social scientist who lived for many years in England and 17

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Promises, Oaths, and Vows: O n the Psychology of Promising

the United States before returning to Iran a decade ago. “In the West, 80 percent of language is denotative. In Iran 80 percent is connotative.” [Translation: In the West, “yes” generally means yes. In Iran, “yes” can mean yes, but it often means maybe or no.]) In Iran, Dr. Tajbakhsh said, listeners are expected to understand that words don’t necessarily mean exactly what they mean. This creates a rich, poetic linguistic culture,” he said. “It creates a multidimensional culture where people are adept at picking up on nuances. On the other hand, it makes for bad political discourse. In political discourse people don’t know what to trust. (Slackman, 2006, p. 5)

In larger American cities, one can find enclaves of people who mirror the alternative value system of their source culture. But in all functional versions of modern industrial-commercial culture, I believe people tend to have more exacting, if perhaps naïve, expectations of regularity and precision in their dealings with institutions—banks and government—than they hold for themselves when dealing with each other and with institutions. Thus, society seems held together by a network of mutually held expectations that we will behave toward each other and toward our institutions in ways that seem well understood by all but rarely are made explicit, as in law or regulation. In this context of shared expectation, there is hardly any need for explicit restatement of the elements of the underlying matrix, although we welcome the traffic signs that remind us when to yield and which streets are one way, and we welcome the calendar that reminds us of the days when we need not go to work. But the system works mostly with little need for anyone to make explicit reference to the commonly held expectation of normative behavior. Explicit promises, vows, or oaths are reserved for such ceremonial occasions as marrying, taking office, or testifying in court. Laws and regulations address only the more egregious lapses. Given that living in a cultural setting in which we generally can count on others to obey the unwritten rules, there are occasions when we feel called on to announce publicly the seriousness of our intention by embedding it in a promise. The first example that comes to mind is the promise to love and support another when proposing marriage, a promise later formalized in marriage vows. A marriage proposal is the announcement (however private it may be) of one’s intention to change one’s relationship to the other party from the more loosely defined bond of friendship 18

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Why Do We Make Promises?

or companionship to a special relationship with more precisely defined mutual responsibilities, rewards, and exclusivity, a new and stricter, and yet more privileged, bond. Unlike most secular promises, in principle, if not invariably in fact, the marriage vow is unique; it forms a bond that (ideally) cannot be undone other than by death. In contrast with marriage vows, ordinary secular promises change our relationship to someone else (or to the self) temporarily. They mark a particular intention as serious but also, perhaps implicitly, state the means of releasing us from the obligation undertaken. That is, by fulfilling the promise we are relieved of the voluntarily assumed obligation to perform. But other than when intending to wed or when required by law or custom to promise to fulfill the requirements of an office, why would any of us volunteer a promise? Clearly, we might promise another to do something that we might ordinarily be expected to do as a matter of course if the other person doubted either our intentions or our ability to carry out the conditions of the promise, or perhaps foresaw difficulties that might defeat the intention. In the last instance, the other person might have foreseen that a conflict of interest might arise to sap our resolve to act in accordance with our original intention. In any of these circumstances, we frame the intention as a promise in order to convince others of our seriousness; we invite the expectation in ourselves and others that “Come what may, I will do as I have said I would.” To this point, I have used the term promise as if its meaning were well understood. But the range of circumstance that condition how the declaration of a promise is received and the degree to which its fulfillment is expected makes that assumption difficult to maintain. It may seem that our common experience is different only in degree from that in Tehran.

A Definition of Promising First, as I discuss further in chapter 5, in order to make and keep a promise one needs to have a clear sense of self and other and the difference between them. One needs also a level of cognitive development that includes at least a rudimentary sense of time and its passage, as well as a concept of a future, and one must be able to remember one’s intention; then one can reliably announce an action that one will actually perform at a later time and know from the outset that one has committed oneself to perform that 19

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Promises, Oaths, and Vows: O n the Psychology of Promising

later action and that having performed it, one is relieved of one’s promise. Second, one must be aware that one has conflicting intentions—that others may reasonably doubt one’s word. Third, there is someone, it may even be oneself, to whom the fulfillment of the promise is important. And, fourth, there must be a witness to the act of promising: a god, a respected figure, even an abstraction, such as one’s sense of honor, or there must be a significant penalty for reneging; in ancient times it could have been the loss of a limb (see chapter 11). This last proviso is a most important one, which distinguishes a promise from a casual statement of intention. The line between the two is difficult to draw, as one might conclude from the discussion in chapter 1 about the multiple conditions that determine whether or not an intention, even one cast as a promise, will be kept. The elevation of a simple intention to the higher status of a promise, a statement of intention that others may take seriously as binding, requires the invocation of the higher power of a credible witness. Often, this last condition is the least evident and may seem implicit in the very act of promising; when it is not obviously present, as by placing one’s hand on the Bible, it will be marked by some gesture or motoric expression (see chapter 11). Ironically, this invocation to compel belief in one’s probity and ability to keep one’s word also contains an important element of regression. Perhaps the most important achievements of cognitive maturity—the essence of secondary process—are the abilities to distinguish between memory and perception and between word and deed. When one binds oneself to making one’s word a guarantee of a future deed—“I will do what I said I will do”—in effect, one is saying, “What I said will be (that is, a word) will be (that is, will become a deed).” By reuniting word and deed, one undoes the primal achievement of separating them and removes of one’s promise from the further exercise of mature judgment. I put the issue rather portentously because the regressive, magical element in the act itself and the exclusion of judgment opens that act to subversion by other, perhaps unrelated unconscious motives that constantly seek an avenue of expression. Here is the point that psychoanalysis can contribute to our understanding of what makes the fulfillment of certain promises compulsory rather than elective. Consider, too, that the act of promising verges on an act of hubris. Most organized religions reserve to deity or its representatives, the prophets, the right to know the future, to know what will be. It is not for ordinary persons to dare to project their understandings or their will into the future. 20

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Why Do We Make Promises?

The more circumspect and superstitious of us embed even hopes about the future in such respectful formulae as, “God willing” (see chapter 11). Another element in promising, that it is a statement of one’s intention, an act of will, has been studied chiefly by the group of psychologists led by Kurt Lewin beginning in Berlin in the late 1920s. Although making an explicit promise adds weight to one’s intention, it may not compel belief. After all, the verbal formula in which a promise is usually couched can be uttered with varying degrees of seriousness. Even an honorable person will at different times use identical promissory formulae to mean quite different things ranging from serious intention to idle braggadocio. It is highly unlikely that such a person will be misunderstood in each usage, so prepared are we to take context into account when attributing significance to another’s utterances. There is no need to document the wide variety of implicit, but well-understood, conditions that we take for granted when making most promises; “Yes, of course, I will return your book tomorrow,” with an unspoken, “ . . . that is, if I remember it and I am more likely to remember it if, in my estimation, you really will need it tomorrow.” In most of our everyday promising behavior, the likelihood of fulfillment is conditioned by tacit (but often mutually understood) reservations in which the dangers, or inconveniences, or embarrassments of non-fulfillment are weighed against the hazards associated with efforts toward fulfillment. This is to say no more than our behavior about promising is subject to mature reality testing. While we solemnly uphold that certain promises are sacred, everyday promises often are made without any great sense of “moral risk” (Kading, 1960). This absence of “moral risk” is so prevalent that in many interactions we will not expect to be believed unless we make special efforts to signal sincerity. We feel called upon to signal that we want to be taken at face value when we fear that the listener might, for one reason or another, discount our words. These signals range from placing a hand on the Bible when taking an oath in court to interjecting, “I really mean it,” to deliberately reiterating our words, to a fervent handshake. Children, too, develop special signals that generally are accompanied by gestures that emphasize that they want to be taken seriously by their In chapter 4, I review Lewin’s (1935) contribution, that conscious willing establishes its own field of force that can be demonstrated and measured.



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peers (“cross my heart and hope to die”) or that they are not to be taken seriously (“cross my fingers”). Some element of magic attends these kinds of gestural sealing of bonds (Reik, 1925; see also chapter 6). Our language retains many such vestiges of the magical meaning of promising, which originally were intended not only to compel the hearer’s belief but also to guarantee fulfillment. Consider such an expression as, “I’ll be damned if . . .,” which is in the “If then . . .” syntax of promising. These days, one might intend by it only a high degree of wonderment or exasperation. Cultural historians tell us, however, that such expressions were once deemed to have literal force; the superstitious thought that invoking the devil was tantamount to inviting him to appear. But there was some awareness of the duality of promising even in the earliest times; a number of reinforcing devices, precursors of “I’ll be damned if . . .” were used to make sure that all understood that this oath or promise was for real. Thus, the oath assumed more force if sworn in blood, on a grave, or in the name of a god or of someone dead or alive whose integrity one honored. To swear in such a way struck listeners with awe, for they believed nothing thenceforth would be able to dissuade the swearer from the execution of his intention. He had surrendered control over himself; his pledge would take precedence over all reason (Gaster, 1957). Recall, the third commandment of the Decalogue prohibits calling on God to witness one’s oath unless the oath is taken in full sincerity. Attenuated gestures, like putting one’s hand on the Bible, are the faint residues of ancient and far more heroic practices to guarantee fulfillment (Reik, 1925). Our ordinary usage at present is hardly so severe about promising. Something of the same weight given promises and oaths of medieval times can be gained from a glance at English history. Trevelyan (1958), discussing the reasons for the success of the Norman conquest of England with a relatively small invasion force, notes that William’s claim to the throne of England was weak but: He had won the sympathy of continental Christendom by certain arguments which appeal very little to modern minds, though they served conveniently to brand Harold for many centuries as a perjurer-usurper. William had, a couple of years before the death of Edward [the then reigning king], compelled Harold, who had fallen by chance into his hands, to swear on certain relics to be his man and to support his claims 22

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Why Do We Make Promises?

to the English throne. The solemn oath and its flagrant breach weighed heavily on the minds of contemporaries, in whose everyday lives and legal proceedings oaths sanctioned by religion played a very much larger part than in our own. The less formal modern mind is more impressed by the fundamental injustice of William’s proceedings; he took advantage of an accident to compel his guest, as a condition of safe return home, to swear away his own chances of succession and those of [another more valid claimant] and his country’s freedom to decide its own destiny. It is one of the points on which medieval and modern ethics stand honestly at variance. (p. 114)

The same text, describing the legal system in England in the century following the Norman landings, tells about the barbarous Anglo-Saxon method of trial by “compurgation,” when a man proved his case by bringing his friends and relations in a sufficient number to swear that they believed his oath. . . . The oaths of these ‘compurgators’ swearing to a man’s innocence or to his character, even if they did not know the facts of the case at issue, held the place which the examination of evidence holds today in criminal justice. It was the oath more than the evidence that was valued. (p. 159)

Thus, we see that, in fairly recent times, it did not matter whether the oath was meant, was made in the heat of anger, or was extorted; an oath was an oath, and there could be no mitigating or extenuating circumstances in regard to keeping it. Just as the concept of justice at that time focused on the act, no matter why it was done, the one or the thing that did it must be punished—the act of making a promise stood for its fulfillment. A more modern expression of this position is that a man is only as good as his word. Recognizing that promise-making is subject to situational ethics, government requires that when assuming public office, one must take an oath to fulfill its conditions. Similarly, certain professions, law and medicine, for example, also solemnify entry by taking an oath. One condition of these oaths is to keep confidential all that one learns about one’s client or patient, a proviso that is much under attack when the national interest is held to trump the expectation of personal privacy. Even less momentous claims may seek to limit the promise of confidentiality. Philosopher Sisella 23

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Promises, Oaths, and Vows: O n the Psychology of Promising

Bok (1978) discussed the power of promising in connection with the higher expectation of confidentiality we expect as a patient of a physician or the client of a lawyer. She noted: The promise may exert such a strong pull as to override not only veracity alone and not only the desire to allow no harm to be done, but both together. What is it, then, about promises that endows them with such power? In the first place, in making a promise, I set up expectations, and equilibrium; should I break my promise, I upset that equilibrium and fail to live up to those expectations; I am unfair, given what I have promised and what I now owe to another. Second, in breaking faith, I am failing to make my promise come true. If I make a promise, knowing I will break it, I am lying. Third, professional promises to clients are granted special inviolability so that those who most need help will feel free to seek it. Without a social policy allowing the protection of such secrets, people might not confide in lawyers or clergy. In this way, many would fail to benefit from the legitimate means to help them. But even this appeal to the sanctity of promises must surely have its limits. We can properly promise only what is ours to do in the first place. Having made a promise adds no justification at all to an undertaking to do something that is in itself wrong. Here again, the question which must be asked of the deceptive practices shielded by confidentiality is what, exactly, can be thought of as rightly have been promised to clients and peers. The three claims made for confidentiality must be kept separate, then, as we look at practices of professional confidentiality to clients and colleagues. When they are not seen clearly, their limits grow dim; the rhetoric of loyalty may then take over, expanding those limits to include what never was meant to be protected by confidentiality. Or else, the reverse may happen, so that the regime of privacy shrinks in the face of unwarranted inquiries. (p. 152)

We may turn to Shakespeare, whose plays are replete with examples of promises made and broken, of swearing allegiance, and the tortured reasoning his characters invoke to justify forswearing. It is important to note, as Shirley (1979) reminded us, that shortly after her accession to the throne, Queen Elizabeth restored the practice of requiring oaths of allegiance and supremacy of all Englishmen; we may take it that Shakespeare 24

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Why Do We Make Promises?

was mirroring the times. The blasphemy statute of 1606 outlawed cursing and swearing both on the stage and in print; and since many of the plays were not printed until later, they were subject to church censorship.

Why Do We Keep Promises? There are a number of cultural sources of pressure to keep promises. Traditions of chivalry, honor, and romantic love idealize the promise, the vow, and the oath and extol scrupulous fulfillment of promises often more highly than life itself. Indeed, in many settings we can say little worse of a person and do little more effectively to place him beyond the pale than to say that he does not keep his word (the paradox that we can also admire, if not openly, those who “can get away with it” deserves separate consideration). Thus, our shared value system, our awareness of social reality, and the consequences of the failure to keep our promises, together with sanctions of custom and social insti­tutions, are potent reinforcers of promise-keeping. Nevertheless, these guarantees of honorable behavior, while quite effective in general, hardly operate in any absolute fashion. We know that people often are no better than they ought to be and do not always fulfill their promises. In the expectation that our shared value system will prove insufficient, society provides recourse in laws that compel fulfillment of both implicit and explicit promises and exact punishment for default. However, whether we idealize or romanticize the connection between a promise and its fulfillment, take it for granted, or are ever ready to cry “fraud,” we expect the words of a promise to be succeeded by redemption in action. The words imply the act; much of the time we expect to be able to take the word for the act itself. Often the sanctity of promises in our value system becomes identified with morality itself. And yet we likely all have made observations that undermine any absolute position about the sanctity of promises. Although a promise may at times be valued more highly than life itself, at other times it may be valued at less than the breath with which it is spoken. The fate of a promise depends on much more than the ostensible (conscious or unconscious) motives for making it. Keeping a promise may be rationalized in several ways. For some persons, it is enough that a promise has been made; one keeps it as a matter of course—not to do so would be 25

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Promises, Oaths, and Vows: O n the Psychology of Promising

unthinkable. A central characteristic of this attitude is that fulfillment of the promise is not influenced by any subsequent events. Others may keep promises as if fulfillment would be extorted: “If I do not keep it, I fear something bad will happen.” Many implicit promises are kept for fear of inner or external retaliation. Closely linked to this kind are the promises that are kept conditionally, only provided certain explicit or implicit conditions are met. For instance, “I will keep the promise if you are good to me” or “if you continue to love me,” or “if I continue to love you.” This type of promise may be one kept in anticipation of some benefit that is to follow. It is also not uncommon for a promise to be kept for reasons quite apart from those for which it was made. For example, a promise made as an expression of intense, if momentary, emotion may be fulfilled for quite extrinsic reasons. A banal instance: At a charity banquet one may make a pledge greater than one can afford because everyone else is pledging. It may later become a point of pride to impoverish oneself to meet the pledge, or, on the other hand, perhaps one discovers that a favorable tax deduction makes the benefaction worthwhile. A more interesting variety of this phenomenon is common in popular romantic literature. Typically, a young rake gives a “line” of false promises to seduce an innocent girl. Having succeeded in his plan, he then proceeds to fall in love with her and insists on making her an “honest woman.” By doing so, he redeems his formerly worthless pledge. Thus, even apparently unmeant promises may become fulfilled, as meant ones are, under the transformations possible through regression when aided by the catalytic action of unconscious guilt. In chapter 6, I return to the factors that make for the keeping of promises, and I consider some of the darker forces that require the fulfillment of an oath regardless of the ostensible intention of the swearer and despite changes of heart and mind.

Along the continuum of such attitudes lie degrees of self-conscious dedication and feelings of solemn obligation. At one pole of this continuum, one cannot be released from a promise, short of fulfillment, even by the person to whom the promise is made.



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3 Promising and the Theory of Mind in Development

I have already alluded to several assumptions about the working of the mind of the infant, child, and adult—from the earliest days, when the modes of functioning we call primitive were normal, when they were the best the infant or child could do, to the later years, when we see these modes only as they become activated again in regression (although not necessarily in regression associated with illness). It is time to make those assumptions explicit. Let us consider more carefully the assumption that earlier modes of functioning may be revived under regression. Primitive modes of functioning (states of mind), commonly seen during early development, will be outgrown and supplanted by more effective and realistic modes as the child matures. The earlier modes, however, are never extinguished or abandoned but merely are layered over by later modes. The earlier ways remain functional and ready to be reactivated as circumstances require or permit. Notably, regression provides an occasion for such a reactivation, as we see in the disturbances of thinking and feeling that mark the various forms of psychopathology.

The term primitive state of mind implies the way the infant’s mind works from the earliest days of its existence. Speculations about the infant’s experience have ranged from a “blooming buzzing confusion” to the ability to form complex emotional states. Recently, research has discovered more about how the infant’s experience actually is organized and the kinds of perceptual discriminations that are possible. I intend the term to refer to the child’s state of mind before it has achieved a realistic conception of causality.



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While regression is generally thought of in the context of explaining psychopathology, Anna Freud (1963) pointed out what many analysts had already come to understand: that regression is a normal and necessary aspect of development in childhood as well as among adults who are coping with changed circumstances. Regression is not a unitary phenomenon; each of the several aspects of personality is subject to regression and, depending on the particular personality and circumstances, each may regress or resist regression independently. Thus, we commonly see regression of object relationships or regression in sexual functioning, without the same degree, if any, of regression of cognitive functions (Schlesinger, 2003). However, the onset of a mental illness is not the only occasion for regression in mode of mental functioning (Pumpian-Mindlin, 1969). When we dream or fantasize, or engage in forms of creative pursuit, such as poetry and art, we allow earlier modes of mental activity, earlier states of mind less wedded to logical thinking, to become active again. These excursions into regression differ from those seen in psychopathology mainly in the degree of control one has, how voluntary or compelled the experience is, and perhaps the degree to which the experience is ego alien, that is, how particularly frightening it seems to be. Toxic states, whether the result of disease, fever, or ingestion of substances of abuse, may also be accompanied by regressive experiences. A corollary of this assumption is that one never fully completes the following basic discriminations, and further that they are separable, that is, one may achieve greater maturity of functioning in one area than in another. A further corollary is that, like the larger units of personality of which they are a part, some may be more vulnerable or resistant to regression than are others, so that in regression we may see a return to an earlier mode of functioning in one or several, but not necessarily all, discriminations. Other assumptions refer to several discriminations the developing mind makes and maintains as it develops a maturing sense of reality and a mastery of secondary process. I believe that the other capacities that we consider essential or desirable for living in society can be derived from them. These discriminations include the ability to distinguish memory Or neurological disease or substance-induced mental states. Users of mind-altering substances may count on the experience being limited duration by the metabolism of the substance, and with that assurance they can enjoy the sense of being out of control only temporarily.

 

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from perception; self from other; past from present and present from future; internal and external; and word from deed.

Memory versus Perception This distinction is basic to our ability to test reality, to answer the basic questions: Is what I am experiencing now actually happening now? Or am I remembering an actual earlier event? Or am I imagining something that never occurred? A current experience must include data from memory and may also include data from the external world gathered through the senses. Data from memory are required to identify, name, conceptualize and, in general, appreciate the nature of any experience, whether or not it includes data of the senses. But we all have had experiences, for instance, dreaming, that involve only memorial data. Even when dreaming, we may attempt to test the “reality” of what is going on, such as when we wonder while dreaming, “Is this really happening?” or when we question the identity of one of the characters in the dream who doesn’t look quite right. Freud (1911) supposed that the ability and necessity to make this distinction grows out of the infant’s discovery that one can only reduce momentarily the feeling of hunger by a hallucinatory experience of satisfaction under the rule of the pleasure principle.

Self from Other In adult life, we usually make the distinction between self and other automatically. For many of our patients, however, the ability to make that distinction is shaky and is easily lost when they are under stress. For them, the danger of losing the sense of self, of merging, as it were, with the loved and feared object is always imminent. We assume that the problem stems from the failure to learn to make this distinction firmly at the appropriate time in infancy and early childhood, possibly because of the combined effects of inconsistency in the early parent–child relationship and a genetically vulnerable personality.

Past from Present and Present from Future The sense of time as a dimension of one’s experience includes the awareness that time passes irreversibly and that one has a sense of the duration 29

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of time intervals. The conceptualization of time develops more slowly than do the other basic distinctions and perhaps is not firmly established until adolescence (Colarusso, 1979). The time sense seems especially vulnerable to regression, especially as anxiety mounts while one is forced to wait and bear frustration. Anxiety tends to shrink the experience that time is passing while depression and boredom tend to expand it.

Internal and External Whether something, someone, or an experience is occurring inside or outside one’s body is a basic discrimination that probably develops as the infant becomes aware of the separate existence of self and other, but not soon enough for the worried parent who is uncertain whether crying means the baby is hungry or has a loose diaper pin.

Word and Deed This discrimination is the one I refer to most frequently because it is the one most involved in the vicissitudes of the act of promising, the circumstances and reasons for making a promise and whether or not the promise is fulfilled, and, if it is fulfilled, how and when the words of the promise become actualized as the deed promised. As a general matter, this discrimination becomes established later in development than the others; making a promise depends first of all on having sufficient cognitive development to acquire language and speech, whereas keeping a promise requires a sufficient level of emotional maturity, relatedness, and conscience. It is understandable, then, that to the degree that one achieves this discrimination tenuously or only partially, one is more susceptible to slipping into the condition we call omnipotence of thought. The relative interchangeability of word and deed also has acquired cultural and religious sanction by institutionalizing the moral position that to think a bad deed is equivalent to acting badly, and, perhaps with less social significance, being willing to overlook inadequate performance because good intentions should count for something. For example, while I am concerned about what might happen eventually, I am anxious about it right now.



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Theory of Mind and Magical Thinking Although the several discriminations may undergo different fates under regression, they tend to form recognizable patterns of level of mastery in the various character or personality structures we recognize. One of these patterns that reflects loss of several of the basic discriminations is a tendency to slip easily from realistic thinking based in secondary process into magical thinking. When magical thinking holds full sway, one believes the real world to be governed by supernatural beings and forces that are able to disturb even the best established and most obvious of causal relationships. Superstition may reign and what one does not immediately understand one will refer to the supernatural and become preoccupied with avoiding or placating malign influences. We see this mode of functioning most clearly in the severe obsessive– compulsive neurosis, but milder, more innocuous versions are common in not otherwise disturbed persons. Versions of this form of mental functioning that allow for the role of the supernatural in human affairs are institutionalized universally in certain religious traditions and practices and are without pathological significance. It is one of my major arguments that, because one making a serious and far-reaching promise makes a firm bond between word and deed that commits one to perform regardless of future circumstances, the act of promising may weaken one’s attachment to secondary process in general, or it may exacerbate any existing tendency toward magical thinking and provide a point of vulnerability at which unconscious forces can find discharge by corrupting the promised act (see chapter 6).

Magical Thinking and Psychoanalysis Psychoanalysis has been concerned with the issues of epistemology from its earliest days. The idea of reality testing was implicit in Freud’s (1900) Interpretation of Dreams, although he did not use the term until 1911 in The Two Principles of Mental Functioning. Freud expanded on his thinking on the power of words and in that same year, Ferenczi (1913) offered

Though without the pejoritive label, magical. For a review of the concept of reality testing, see Abend (1982).

 

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an account of the place of magical thinking and omnipotence of thought in early development that is widely accepted today. Praying to the god of one’s faith can be seen to have a forerunner in the ancient magic of the hunt. Just as the drawing of a bison being slain in the cavern of Lasceaux signified the hunter’s wish to be successful and, we surmise, was intended to guarantee success, so modern prayers of supplication are intended to bring about the ends they seek, to influence fate by petitioning its author. Adult parishioners appreciate that fulfillment of a prayer, the explicit reward, if it occurs at all, will be at some time in the uncertain future. But there also is an implicit reward for praying. To the extent that the mode of primary promising is still active, one is rewarded by the very act of praying; when one prays, one not only establishes a hope that one’s request (in a prayer of supplication) will be granted, but by praying one restores oneself to communion. For the young child, as I illustrate in chapter 5, the only time is now, and the adult’s promise is experienced as fulfilled immediately by ending the child’s feeling of alienation. We may analogize further to the experience of the somewhat older child who is not yet fully competent at secondary process and who promises the parent obedience, something the parent values. The parent’s smile on hearing the promise both confirms that the child’s wish to be restored to communion has been fulfilled and also reinforces the omnipotence of thought that led to the making of a promise. The expectation and experience of restored communion of both adult and child rests on the omnipotence of thought; to think it is to do it, to pray or wish for it or draw it is to have it or to make it happen. In human history, the magic of the hunt gradually gave way to more formal and somewhat less expectant religious rites of supplication in which one prays to a god and acknowledges that only through the god’s agency will the desired end be fulfilled; so it is with the young child who makes a promise. As secondary process replaces primary process in his mentation, he comes to understand that it is not enough simply to say the promise as the equivalent of making it happen, but rather that saying it only estab There are various kinds of prayer: prayers of praise, of acknowledgment of the supremacy of Deity, and for forgiveness. To the extent that one is not requesting something explicit through prayer, the act is its own reward. Of course, praying to restore one’s sense of communion with God may imply that as one has fulfilled one’s obligations to Deity, and Deity may be expected to fulfill the general promise of religion.



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lishes the expectation in others as well as in himself that he will do as he said, thereby making it happen in actuality. As he matures, the child relies less on the omnipotence of thought and yields, if not completely, to seeing himself as the necessary agent of change. When the adult or child regresses, we expect to see the revival of magical thinking; and, with it, returns the omnipotence of thought. Whether, in regression, one revives a normal early mode or a mode that was already developing abnormally is a question that deserves fuller consideration (see Caper, 1998). Particularly, but not only, in the obsessional patient, we find that what is unconsciously hoped for, wished for, and fantasized sooner or later comes about; perhaps in disguise, perhaps after long postponement, but come about it will. The relentless march of these events toward the ultimate dénouement has attracted the attention of the world’s great authors and dramatists who have constructed our iconic tragedies using the hero’s promise or vow as the vehicle of fate (see chapter 8). Magical thinking can also be seen in persistent beliefs that have become encrusted into life-long character attitudes, such as the conviction that all will turn out badly, no matter how one tries, or that all will turn out well regardless of events or appearances that suggest, as Voltaire (1759) put it, the madness of the optimist is to maintain that all is well when, in fact, things are going badly. Although we recognize that a generally optimistic outlook can foster a realistic readiness to overcome obstacles rather than to yield to whatever obstructs one’s way, we can distinguish it from the pathological fantasy that resembles it. The person in the grip of the latter is convinced that all will be well and, in his passively accepting and infinitely patient attitude, expresses the belief that success ultimately will be delivered and so requires no personal effort. A neurotic symptom, frigidity for instance, may be based on the woman’s unconscious fantasy that because, as a “good little girl” she surrendered her claim to father, her goodness would be redeemed “some day” (Akhtar, 1996) when daddy returned to claim her.

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4 Empirical Studies of Moral Development

The issues surrounding morality as an intellectual topic have been the province of philosophers and an occasional sociologist and anthropologist. Only in fairly recent times has the question of what is moral been seen as a proper one for scientific examination. By adapting the method of directed conversation he had used earlier to investigate children’s conceptions of causality and of the world, Piaget (1932) undertook investigations of the development of morality, construed as how children make moral judgments. He approached the study of morality by examining children’s understanding of the game of marbles, their ability to play the game, and their willingness to conform to the rules of the game they played. The ability and willingness to follow rules is essential to playing games, as indeed it is to living in society, and makes for convenient experimental entry into the larger topic. But following rules is only an approximate surrogate for behaving morally. Piaget adopted another method to investigate the development of morality in children; he told them little stories and then asked them, non-directively, how they would judge the way the characters in the story behaved. This method permitted a more direct approach to moral behavior but has the shortcoming that the child subjects were asked to respond to hypothetical examples, and their opinions were taken to represent how they actually would act in similar situations. It is well known that what people say they would do does not guarantee that they will do so. A broken promise is only one example of the occasional failure of behavior to correspond with 35

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intention. Knowing how one should behave is necessary to behaving morally, but it is not sufficient to guarantee it. Still, the method of querying children about hypothetical situations does inform us about what children know and understand about how one should act when facing the kinds of choices that define moral behavior. Piaget’s next investigations dealt with issues clearly related to morality: telling the truth versus lying, and respecting the property of others versus stealing. His interest, as in his earlier epistemological investigations, was in the development of moral ideas, the ages and stages through which children pass as their ideas mature. From his studies of how children think in several areas, Piaget developed a theory that Wolff (1960) encapsulated as: “thought passes through a series of stages from early animistic through magical and artificialistic forms to rational thought, and at each level, the child constructs a systematic ‘cosmology’ of the world according to the modes of reasoning available to him at that stage” (p. 14). Piaget’s work was scarcely referred to, at least by American psychologists, during the dry years in which behaviorism was the dominant point of view, but now it is rightly viewed as central to our thinking. As Lickona (1975) pointed out, behaviorist psychologists have only grudgingly come to acknowledge that there is an irreducible philosophical element to morality as a higher order principle that cannot be reduced to observable behavior. While subsequent investigators have challenged Piaget’s theory of stages of moral development, the method of inquiry he used has been adopted widely. The major shortcoming of this method is that it is based on an untested assumption that what subjects say they would do when asked to place themselves within a scenario by an experimenter is representative of what they would do in a similar situation in life. Thus, we must read the findings and the theories built to account for the findings as referring only to what subjects said they believed or would do in hypothetical situations; we must not draw the unwarranted conclusion that we know how they actually would behave in life in a comparable situation. I reiterate this warning because the studies I review do not mention, let alone stress as I think they should, the limits on generalization of their findings. Perhaps the most prominent theorist in the field of moral development was Lawrence Kohlberg (1963, 1976, 1978), who offered a theory that cognitive moral development evolves in children in fairly well-defined stages, beginning with a stage in which moral behavior is prompted by fear of 36

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retribution through stages in which children feel respect for the rights of others and eventuating, for those few who achieve the highest stages, in a morality guided by concern for the needs of society in general. Kohlberg’s studies have been replicated often enough in this and other cultures so that his theory may be regarded as valid with the caveat that it applies to what children said about how they would behave or how one should behave in hypothetical situations. However, as Robert Coles (1985,1986) reminded us, using the example of the six-year-old black child who held her moral ground and with head high walked through hostile crowds to desegregate the public schools of New Orleans, Kohlberg’s scheme would have placed her in his earliest, “pre-moral,” stage of development, a vast underestimate of her demonstrated moral capacity. Although the method of having children respond to hypothetical situations has obvious shortcomings, it also has the important advantages of easy manipulation of variables and ease of replication. Using it, researchers have been able to establish the age at which children seem to develop a theory of mind so that they understand what is meant by lies versus truth (Strichartz and Burton, 1990), the difference between lies and mistakes (Siegal, 1982; Siegal and Peterson, 1996, 1998), and between a false belief that results from another’s deliberate effort to deceive and an inherently wrong idea (Sodian et al., 1991). The consensus of researchers places this critical age at about four years. More recently, Charlois and Dietre (2003) found that until about age six, children tend to confuse simple forgetting of a promise and lying, whether whatever was promised was desired or not. But these researchers did not study children younger than five years. Similarly, and in contrast with Piaget’s contention that preschool children tend to confuse issues of convention and morality, Smetana (1981) showed that young children can evaluate moral transgressions as more serious than other offenses and then award punishment judiciously. Schultz, Wright, and Schleifer (1986) showed that young children are able to evaluate whether or not harm resulted from the actions of another and can assign blame and punishment appropriately. Researchers have investigated a wide range of moral issues in the context of child development, but disappointingly for my present purpose, few developmental psychologists (other than Charlois and Dietre, 2003) have examined the way children regard the moral implications of making, keeping, and breaking promises. It would be difficult to study children’s promising directly; to have ecological validity, 37

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the promising would have to be spontaneous, and children rarely make promises. However, the indirect method of observing children’s reactions to stories would seem as adaptable to making and keeping promises as it is to lying and deception and the other morally fraught issues that have been investigated thoroughly. One group of researchers (Oakley and Lynch, 2000) studied adults, business people, and students in MBA courses with the aim of discovering the importance of promise keeping in the workplace. They adapted the indirect method used by researchers with children by creating five employee descriptions. The subject’s task was to place them in the order in which the employees should be discharged given the assumption that, because of a business reverse, the company would have to let one of them go. Only one of the descriptions included that, when hired, the employee was promised that if she accepted the position, she would be kept on for at least two years. The date of prospective firing would occur only six months after she was hired. Under one of the conditions the researchers studied, the subjects were told that the promise made to this employee was legally enforceable. To the surprise of the investigators less than a third of the subjects would have honored the promise made to that employee. Under the condition that the subjects were told the promise was unenforceable, only 10.9 percent would have kept it and when told it was enforceable, 65.9 percent would have kept it. They concluded that despite the widespread endorsement in the business community of the ethical imperative to keep promises, in fact the ethic of promise keeping does not matter much in the workplace. These authors ignored the warning about generalizing to behavior from paper-and-pencil exercises. To their credit, they reported the comments of some of their subjects to show that the subjects took the task seriously and weighed the ethic of discharging an old and effective employee against the ethic of keeping a promise to retain a young and highly employable one. At best, their findings demonstrate that their subjects did not regard keeping a promise as an absolute good but were ready to consider the context in which the promise was made. I cannot account for the failure of developmental psychologists to study how and when young children learn about promising, the value of promises made In chapter 6, I discuss instances when the promiser feels he must fulfill a promise, oath, or vow in literal terms, regardless of context or consequence.



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to them and that they make, but the literature is largely barren. Astington (1988) dealt with promising in children but her focus was not on promising behavior. Her interest rather was linguistic; she wanted to determine what kind of statements by teenage and pre-teenage children are regarded by them to be promises. I can offer an instance in point demonstrating that at least one child has tried to come to terms with the consequences of an unkept promise. The earliest instance of which I am aware of a child behaving as if he had made a promise and reacting emotionally to having failed to keep it was furnished by L, my 3 1/2-year-old grandson, during a recent visit to my home. The background is that L’s father wanted to attend a friend’s Saturday evening party and so had arranged this long-awaited visit to accommodate both purposes. He expected to be out late and, as he did not want to disturb his wife or J, their four-month-old son, he told L as he put him to bed before leaving for the party that he would sleep in my office when he returned. L accepted that news and told him that he would come to visit his father in his bed when his father returned that night. His father nodded casually to that proposal and L went to sleep with no further fussing. Sunday morning I came into the kitchen to find L’s mother feeding him an early breakfast, after which he was ready to play with the toys he had brought with him. Meanwhile I prepared breakfast for the rest of the family, our usual custom. Suddenly, I noticed that L had returned to the kitchen and was awaiting my attention. When I turned to him inquiringly, I was surprised to hear him say, “When you say you will do something and then don’t do it, you feel silly.” At first he wouldn’t elaborate, but slowly the story came out that he had not awakened during the night as he had said he would do and so did not come to his father’s bed. In the morning, after his father had awakened, L did come to see him in my office, a room located just off the kitchen. His father teased him gently, saying, “I thought you were going to visit me last night.” L did not respond. I presume that he had construed his plan as a promise, one he had failed to fulfill and, especially after his father reminded him of it, had a reaction of conscience that he called feeling “silly.” According to his father, “silly” is a term of mild pejorative intent commonly used in their household to label small mishaps and absurdities, such as putting one’s pants on over one’s head. Lest I betray my keen interest in the matter, I did not attempt to interview L further about his statement but relied on his spontaneous, repeated recounting of the 39

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statement and his parent’s filling in the background and their agreement that L had said what I had heard and that it is consistent with his other behavior and attitudes. In substance, the incident was repeated the next evening when L’s father told him that if L went to sleep without fussing Daddy would come in later, wake him, and do their customary bedtime ritual of tucking him in. His father forgot and in the morning L asked me, “If Daddy says he will do something and doesn’t, does he feel silly?” This anecdote is important because accounts of spontaneous utterances of this kind are rare (at least, I know of no others), and it places the ability to appreciate the significance of a promise at about the same age (around four years) as researchers have placed understanding of other moral issues such as lying and deception.

Empirical Studies of Intention and Will Here I review some experimental work that, although not directly concerned with making, breaking, or keeping promises, provides a theoretical base for one aspect of promising behavior: what it is that is necessary by way of developmental achievement and mental state in order for one to make a promise and later to keep it: First, as I discussed in chapter 1, to make and keep a promise one needs to have a clear sense of self and other and the difference between them; a sense of time and of a future; and the ability to remember one’s intention so that one can reliably announce an action that one will perform at a later time and also realize that one has committed oneself to perform that later action. Second, one must be aware to some degree that one has at least one additional intention that conflicts with one’s ostensible intention so that one (and others) may reasonably doubt that one actually will do later as one says one will do. Third, there is someone—it may even be oneself—to whom the fulfillment of the promise is important. See in this connection the discussion of primary promising in chapter 5. The degree of awareness is a critical issue. We must allow that the counter-intention might be wholly unconscious but still represented in consciousness by the awareness that some people have not kept their promises, so that an act to dissociate oneself from such others is called for.

 

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Fourth, there is a witness to the act of promising, a god, a respected figure, even an abstraction such as one’s sense of honor, or willingness to undergo a significant penalty for reneging such as death or loss of a limb. This last proviso is a most important one that distinguishes a promise from a more casual statement of intent. The line between them is difficult to draw as one might conclude from the discussion in chapter 5 about the multiple conditions that determine whether or not an intention, even one cast as a promise, will be carried out. When one finds it necessary to elevate a simple intention to the more impressive, higher status of a promise, one often feels called upon to invoke a higher power to serve as a credible witness of one’s seriousness of purpose, or to serve as a helper to keep the promise, or as an enforcer of it.

The Psychology of Intention In earlier chapters I identified two sources of motivation for one to act in an expectable manner toward others and to the institutions of society whether or not one has made an explicit promise to do so. The first is an omnibus factor, including all those forces that affect mature people acting in a responsible way in a social context. Shared value systems, reasonable self-interest, recognized obligation, and honor are significant terms in this area, theories of which are more common in social psychology and sociology than in psychoanalysis. Second, one may make a promise in order to reinforce the expectation of regularity when one recognizes that one has a conflict of interest such that one could have weighty reasons for not acting as others (including oneself) might expect and desire. In either case, whether or not one will act as expected or as one has promised, depends on the social context at the time one aroused the expectation or made the promise as well as at the time when one should fulfill it. I would like to expand the discussion of the obvious point that logically and psychologically the promise can be subsumed under the more general heading of intention. A promise is an intentional statement—the first phase of an action whose execution is deferred. Although promising has not been studied experimentally, the fate of intentions has been intensively studied and may throw some light on the nature and fate of promising. The dynamics of interrupted activities was among the issues studied by the group of psychologists led by Kurt Lewin at the University of Berlin in the 41

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late 1920s and, after the Nazi takeover, continued at MIT and the University of Iowa. The paradigm introduced by Lewin is comparable to that of Freud in that, as de Rivera (1976) put it, in each of his studies, Lewin attempted to “coordinate the concrete behavior of an individual at a moment in time to concepts that reveal the general dynamics that underlie the particular case” (p. 26). The major difference between the interrupted activity inherent in the promise and the interrupted activities of the Lewinian paradigm is that the promise (even though possibly coerced) expresses the intention of the promiser about an issue of importance to him and to others who will be counting on fulfillment. In contrast, the activities Lewin’s subjects engaged in were assigned by the experimenter and were of no intrinsic interest to the subject. Also, the experimenter interrupted the task seemingly at his whim; not by any choice of the subject. All the more impressive, then, are the general findings that subjects tended to remember more of the tasks that were interrupted than were completed, and that, given the opportunity, they would resume voluntarily more of the tasks that were interrupted. Something like a residual tension that favors selective recall and resumption, Lewin called it a “quasi need,” results from being prevented from completing a task that the subject had expected to be allowed to finish in line with the instructions given him at the outset (Zeigarnik, 1938). Ovsiankina (1976), Lewin’s graduate student, carried out an experiment in which over 100 subjects, mostly adults, were given a series of tasks designed to be either finite, that is, having a more or less obvious ending point, or infinite, not having a clear ending point. The tasks were designed also to vary in pleasantness, a judgment that had to be made afterward because pleasantness is a subjective matter. The tasks were interrupted by the experimenter in a range of ways intended to have different meanings to the subject, such as by suddenly assigning a different task and insisting that it be done first; or by apparent “chance,” such as the experimenter’s “accidentally” dropping a box of paper clips in such a way that the subject would break off his task to help the experimenter pick up the clips; or by a distracting conversation, or by a direct order to stop work on the task. The interruptions varied in duration from a minute or two to complete abandonment of the task. The subject was unaware that the experimenter was manipulating this variable. Freud made a similar observation that interrupted activities seemed to exert a controlling tendency. Particularly from his self-analysis, he noted 42

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that certain kinds of memories have a peculiar attribute of endurance, a greater unresolved discharge potential than others. He wrote to his fiancée (Freud, 1882) that in his dreams only such themes occurred as “were touched upon once in the course of the day and then broken off.” He later elaborated this observation to include several classes of unsolved and unfinished concerns of the day (Freud, 1900). This basic process, the striving for expression or realization of unresolved tensions (that is, wishes), whether of mourning (Freud, 1917), an unconscious sense of guilt (Freud, 1923), or tensions, has also acquired central importance in the psychoanalytic understanding of symptom formation.

Reflections on the Implications of Lewin’s Research We may look to the research of Lewin and his students for hints about the forces in the psychological field that lead to the fulfillment of intentions, particularly the fulfillment of the intention embodied in a promise, conceived of as a voluntarily assumed obligation that carries some strength of purpose. This concept requires that we discuss the meaning of two terms, voluntary and strength of purpose. In general, the strength of an intention seems proportional to the degree that it seems peremptory or urgent and expresses a demand to which, at the moment, one feels one cannot say no. Clearly, one’s state of being in the grip of a strong intention would have to be defined individually and situationally. At one extreme, one does not feel that one has a choice about what one will do; if one ever had a choice about acting, it is now history: “I made my choice and cannot go back on it.” The intention then has a moral component, a sense of “I must” or profound obligation, for instance, the tragic hero who goes forth against impossible odds and certain failure regardless of personal or other consequence. Or Luther saying, “Here I stand; I can do no other.” At the other extreme, the strong intention can be quite idiosyncratic and socially inconsequential. For illustration, I offer an anecdote about the composer Rossini, who, it is said, could be roused from his bed only by the playing of an unresolved chord on the piano, a situation that for him was so painful that he felt compelled to arise and resolve his pain by playing the missing We know less about state of mind of the exemplars of recent history, such as the Japanese Kamikazi pilots of World War II, who flew their final missions to certain death, or the even more recent suicide bombers who aim to terrorize large populations.



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tonic. But most of us have had the experience, for instance, when about to act imprudently out of anger, by counting to 10, we were able to cool off and allow time for a counter-intention to take hold and then say no to the formerly peremptory demand. As I noted, promises may be of a wide range of seriousness, if we may use that term to stand for the strength of the intention to carry out the promise as spoken. The eventual fulfillment of any promise is subject to any of many qualifying circumstances including external difficulties, the promiser’s change of heart or mind, and the possibly changing circumstances of the one to whom the promise was made. The qualifying phrase, that promising implies that one has undertaken a “voluntarily assumed obligation,” also requires explication. Clearly, there are some circumstances in which we are required to promise, to take a vow, or make an oath. If called to testify in a court of law, we must appear and are then required to swear that we will tell the truth and nothing but. Except under such unusual circumstances, we are not called on to take an oath of office or vow of marriage without having voluntarily followed a lengthy path with ample opportunity for reconsideration. But even under these less coercive conditions, when we finally take the oath of office or recite a marriage vow, the seriousness of the commitment makes it extremely likely that we will wonder, “Do I really want to do this?” and will have to suppress reservations and second thoughts. Clearly, that one has volunteered need not imply that one will be without conflict although the other voices may not be allowed expression. I offer these musings about the strength of an intention and whether it is undertaken voluntarily or not because Lewin (1935) and his students worked with “weak” intentions, that is, intentions that were not originated or even consciously adopted by the subjects; they easily could be defeated by a counter-intention, or even could be prevented from forming by the nature of the task. The subjects of his studies generally were unaware that the experimenter had manipulated matters so that they would feel inclined to resume the task that he had assigned to them and then deliberately kept them from completing it. This task was one in which they had no previous intrinsic interest. The motive to finish it was task specific; that is, it was a task that had a clear ending point, one the subject could not reach because The sort of experience that makes plausible the idea that there is such a thing as “free will.”



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the experimenter interfered. If the task was one without an obvious ending point, subjects showed little, if any, motive to return to work on it. We may wonder why these subjects behaved as they did. They had no primary motive in regard to the outcome of the assigned tasks other than, I presume, to perform satisfactorily for the experimenter. They volunteered to be subjects for a colleague’s (or the Herr Professor’s) experiment, as they were expected to volunteer, knowing that others, in turn, would volunteer. The relationship to the experimenter, whether fellow student or professor, and the prestige of this other, supplied the initial motivation to engage in the experiment before the subject had any idea of what would be expected of him other than the commitment of time and sense of sincere involvement. I add this last expectation because in comparable situations in today’s academic laboratories, student researchers cannot count on the willing participation of fellow students in their research and generally offer extrinsic motivation, usually a small cash payment, to overcome the potential subject’s feeling of being imposed upon. It seems obvious that in research on intention and motivation, the nature and degree of involvement of the subject (animal or human) must be considered a key variable. In my experience, however, once a subject has, for whatever reason, agreed to serve, the researcher hastens to take advantage of the boon and does not inquire into the subject’s willingness, perhaps lest inquiring into it might dissipate it. It is noteworthy that, although the researchers in Lewin’s laboratory were deeply concerned with the phenomenology of the subjects’ experience of the task and the interruption of it, they did not inquire about the subjects’ motives for volunteering; the researchers seemed to take it for granted as part of the culture of the laboratory. The statements and example of the head of the project set the culture of the laboratory; volunteering was what the professor expected. To connect the situation of the subject in one of Lewin’s experiments with the person who adopts an unshakeable intention—for example, the tragic hero or the protagonist of a revenge novel or one of the cultural iconic figures who stand for our finest moral positions—we notice that in each case there is a figure who serves as witness or prime mover: a deity, or

Some of the subjects were not students of Lewin’s laboratory. Or Kamikaze pilots or suicide bombers, who consider themselves ”martyrs.”

 

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professor, or parent, or other important figure in whose name or for whose cause one intends to act. I assume there must be such a figure (who may perhaps take the abstract form of one’s sense of honor) to call on to witness one’s sincerity when promising and to reinforce one’s will to fulfill the promise. An important contribution of Lewin’s work is to show that there is a more general component to intention than the impetus of the beginning motive to do the task, an act of will. Lewin showed that an intention to complete the task can emerge merely from doing the task. What he called it a “quasineed” draws the subject to complete a task if it has a clear ending point; that is, the subject develops an intention that is quite apart from any wish to please the experimenter. In Lewin’s studies, the experimenters did not encourage or discourage the subjects from continuing the task but merely witnessed, that is, merely observed, what they did and later inquired into their experiences. In contrast, the tragic hero has an altogether different experience; he volunteers to witnesses, who grasp the perils of the course he has set for himself and typically and repeatedly test the resolve of the tragic hero by attempting to dissuade him from persisting in it. We may assume that the person who makes a serious promise, the witness on the stand or the tragic hero, once launched on his mission is impelled both by the original motive and by the additional and independent motive aroused by becoming involved in the task. Both sources of intention may coexist and reinforce each other as we see in chapters 6, 7, and 8.

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5 Developmental and Regressive Aspects of Making and Breaking Promises

The careers of our patients are strewn with broken promises and thwarted expectations, and the course of their treatment no less littered with disappointments. In fact, unfulfilled promises and unfulfilled commitments are such common clinical phenomena that for seasoned, or hardened, psychoanalysts they occasion neither surprise nor indignation. Softhearted (or softheaded) as we may be to devote ourselves to restoring a few broken individuals to a more effective place in society, we are hardheaded (and hardhearted) about promises. We seldom make promises to our patients and almost as infrequently solicit promises from them. Nor are we inclined to put much faith in the promises they spontaneously make to us. As a group, for all our willingness to listen intently, we are inclined to hold that actions speak louder than words. Yet reflect for a moment on the position of the analyst. Whatever technical system he believes effective, his basic therapeutic leverage derives from his commitment to his therapeutic task. His acceptance of a troubled person as patient implies a promise of steadfastness, selflessness, patience, and devotion. This promise is one sided. We expect nothing comparable of the new patient. But we know that, if the treatment is to be successful, the patient’s sense of commitment must come to approach ours, and the motive of pain that brought him to treatment must be replaced by commitment to a common purpose, to come to know himself honestly and without 47

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reservations. We look for and value the additional motive that evolves from investment in the therapeutic “task” itself. No doubt if we have a “hard-boiled” attitude toward patients’ promises, it owes something to reluctance lest they disappoint us. Surely, every therapist has had that painful experience with chronically promising and chronically unredeeming patients. One of my patients, for example, fit the expression, “a very promising person”—of whom people had “great expectations”—but who did not live up to his “promise.” He also made explicit and gratuitous promises, which often as not shared the fate of the expectations he implicitly aroused in others. So it was that I was led to look below the surface of promises kept and promises broken into the psychology of promising, the development of promising as a psychological act, and its significance in infantile and adult life and in certain forms of psychopathology. My general thesis is that the act of making a promise, with its overtones of commitment, morality, and honor, is a relatively mature achievement of the growing personality. Preceding it in developmental sequence is a stage in which the act of promising is complete in itself and is not merely a prelude to a later act of fulfillment. I call this earlier promising that is complete in itself “primary promising” to distinguish it from the more usual promising that is a prelude to fulfillment, which I refer to as “secondary promising.” When we encounter an adult who offers promises but does not fulfill them, we usually assume simply that he is one of those all-too-common persons who simply fail to keep their word, with all the implications that follow: untrustworthiness, dishonor, and immorality. We are unpleasantly reminded that promises can be broken as well as kept. However, perhaps what we are seeing is promising in the primary sense, in some way anachronistically still functioning for this person. I hope to demonstrate that this phenomenon occurs more frequently than we may expect, particularly among our patients.

Case Example The following vignette provides a commonplace example of the way promises may serve not as preludes to action, but as substitutes for action: During a period of business reverses, a patient, whom I shall call Mr. S, had accumulated a considerable debt for his analysis. He paid his 48

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current bill regularly and something on his old debt, but the “something” was far less than he could have paid had he been intent on paying the debt as quickly as possible. During a session when he was describing certain long-overdue expansive and expensive moves in his life, he spoke of his trepidation about his recent move from his dingy apartment (which in fact was inappropriate for his current station in life) to a more suitable one. He also mentioned his desire to reduce his analytic debt. When I indicated in a nonspecific way that I too was aware that he could have applied the funds with which he raised his standard of living to lowering his debt, Mr. S reacted with a great show of guilt. He told me he had said the same thing to a close friend, who, it seemed, deserved the full credit or blame for the idea to change apartments. He emphasized that he had told his friend, after moving to the new apartment, that he was appalled by the amount of money this new way of living was going to cost and he felt he ought to move into a cheaper apartment, in fact back to the old one, to save money so that he could pay off his debt. His friend told him this was a lot of nonsense. Mr. S repeated to me his offer to move out of the new apartment since he could not afford it and since he should be reducing his debt. I merely commented on the unusual emotional intensity with which he made these proposals. He then very quickly quieted down, his intense involvement in the subject faded, and he was soon talking about something else. When I pointed out the change of subject and loss of feeling, he was surprised. When we reviewed these events, it became clear that the patient had heard my comment about the intensity of his feelings as an echo of his friend’s reply of “nonsense” to his offer to give up the new apartment. Having offered to make this sacrifice and having had the offer rejected, Mr. S considered the incident closed. Just making the offer was sufficient to assuage his feelings of guilt and apparently, by the same token, to satisfy the transference object for whom I stood. It was relatively easy to help Mr. S see that the very extravagance of his offer, which had evoked the quite justified “nonsense” from his friend and which he expected I would repeat, was indeed intended to bring about its rejection. The offer did not represent an intention to do anything additional about his debt or to apportion his finances in a better way, and he did not replace the unrealistic promise with a more realistic one. For him, the act in itself was sufficient to assuage the angry and demanding parent figure. 49

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That incident mirrored in its construction the patient’s first interview, in which he begged that I not force him to lie on the couch and at the same time “offered me his life” if only I would relieve him of his intense anxiety. Although I tried to fulfill my part of the bargain, the patient regularly reneged on his offers; nor did he expect that I would attempt to collect. However, it remained for us to discover that this extravagant and unfulfillable promise was only the first of many that the patient would consider as “payment in full.”

A Bit of Theory Let us turn from clinical examples to remind ourselves about what is necessary, in the way of psychological structure, for one to be able to offer a promise one intends to keep and then to keep that promise. One must first have a well-developed sense of time and of continuity of one’s self over time. One must be aware that something stated now may have consequences later, even when the need or other circumstances that prompted the original statement may have subsided. One must be able to anticipate the future and foresee the possible situations one might be in at the time set to redeem one’s word. In addition, of course, one must be able to defer action as well as to remember value received vividly enough to be willing to pay for it later. In a situation containing both deferred pleasure and deferred payment, one must be able to invest oneself sufficiently in a future contingency. Basic to these preconditions, one must have an awareness of and respect for persons other than oneself and realize that one exists in a condition of mutual dependence with them. Also important, in a different but related developmental sequence, is that one be able to distinguish between, and deal separately with, thought and action. The other achievements that mark the growth of relatively autonomous structures for cognition and action are no less important. Piaget (1954) is one of the few writers who commented on the development of the experience of time, its passage, and the anticipation of future states in a way relevant to an understanding of promising. Piaget’s thesis is, to oversimplify it, that the early experience of the passage of time is in Joseph Smith (1968), discussing the child’s first lie offers a point of view concordant with the one I offer here.



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terms of concrete events. Telling him, “You can go in 10 minutes,” signifies little to the young child, whereas being told, “You can go when the big hand of the clock moves from here to here,” is at least potentially meaningful. Even more meaningful to the child, in Piaget’s terms, would be, “You can go when all your toys have been picked up.” In short, the perception of time in early childhood has to do with the occurrence of observable events and is not yet an abstract notion. The general correctness of this statement is apparent to anyone who has foolishly told a young child that her favorite television program will be on in just an hour. Unless the child is distracted, there are certain to be 30 to 60 queries about when the hour is going to be up. The significance of Piaget’s observations for my thesis is simply that they emphasize young children’s psychological unreadiness to make promises as they are commonly understood by adults, if only because children have no clear awareness of the future and have not yet detached themselves from their parents and reengaged with them as separate persons. To reiterate, making and carrying out a promise is an achievement of secondary-process functioning of the highest order and requires a psychological structure of considerable maturity. In contrast, the ability to make use of the verbal forms in which we couch promises is a considerably earlier achievement. We often hear from children verbalizations couched as promises and that adults sometimes tend to accept as promises, but that in the everyday, or secondary, sense are not promises at all. Children at a tender age are asked to promise, or they learn to volunteer promises, to be good, to behave themselves at the table, to go to sleep without fussing, to call mother the next time a toilet need develops, and so forth. Children, in short, soon learn that adults attach special value to statements cast in the form of promises, and they quickly come to appreciate the pragmatic usefulness of these ver This blanket statement must be qualified by taking into account the length of time between the making of a promise and its fulfillment, the similarity of the settings, particularly the emotional climate, at the time of promising and at the time of fulfillment, and the degree to which the fulfilling of the promise is in itself important to the promiser. Thus, a child’s fulfilling a promise to pick up her toys in order to watch her favorite television program obviously requires less maturity than her carrying out a promise to pick up her toys next week so that mother and father can go out to dinner earlier. Primary and secondary are not to be thought of as connoting mutually exclusive or even discrete categories; rather, they are poles on a continuum along which any act can be placed and judged as having had greater or lesser contributions from more or less mature processes.



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bal formulas, even if they remain for a considerable time unable to grasp the total significance these statements have for adults. When a child, under the threat of loss of the parents’ love, “promises,” we are likely to accept his token of surrender or submission and allow him back into communion with us. His “promise” has served its purpose; it has done what it was intended to do—to repair the breach between his parents and himself and ward off the threatened loss of love. A young child’s promise harbors no other intention. Certainly the young child has no clear idea about being “good” other than to do what mother (or father) wants her to do at any moment, and she is incapable of truly pledging a future of which he has no conception and over which he has even less control. I would like to paraphrase an idea of Ella Freeman Sharpe (1950) about “cautionary tales,” those little stories with a moral about children who have through disobedience or carelessness invoked some disaster. She tells us that these stories, which are worded in the past tense, are meant to control the child’s future behavior. I suggest we might invent the term “propitiatory tales” for promises that children make that are couched in the future tense but that are intended, like apologies, to correct the past, to undo a misdemeanor and the resulting alienation of the parents. Seen in this way, a “promise” as a “propitiatory tale” occupies a similar place with respect to secondary narcissism as the infant’s cry does to primary narcissism. Crying, we theorize, although originally an expression only of the infant’s discomfort, becomes, through its signal value to the parent, the means of relieving the infant’s discomfort. The cry magically brings back the parent and restores parent–infant unity. Similarly, a verbal promise comes to have the magical significance of restoring the somewhat older child to his parents’ graces and assuring the continuation of their love for him. We should not assume that because a primary promise does not imply later fulfillment it is valueless. At least during early childhood, such primary promises as, “I’ll be good” are the lagniappe for “I’m sorry.” For parents too are eager for peace and usually are glad not to have to act on their disappointed feelings toward the child. The token offered them in the form of a promise may thus be sufficient to clear the air and put an end to the painful state of disharmony with their child. An enlightened or intuitive parent (if I can assume for the moment that such paragons ever get into these predicaments), does not hear the child’s promise as anything 52

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more than a bid for peace and, especially with younger children, does not construe the promise to be the forerunner of a later act of fulfillment. An incident from a kindergarten class suggests that quite early, children develop an awareness of the uses to which adults put promising. The kindergarten teacher dismissed her class early one day after warning the children that other classes were still in session and they should be quiet going through the corridors. All the children save Tommy took the warning to heart and tiptoed through the halls. But no sooner was Tommy outside his own classroom than he delivered a war whoop that resounded in the stillness. The teacher angrily summoned Tommy back into the classroom. With him came Teddy, Tommy’s bosom pal, who customarily walked home with him. Teddy waited patiently while the teacher scolded Tommy, reminded him of her explicit warning, and otherwise vented her hurt and angry feelings about his misbehavior. Tommy stood silently taking his punishment, tears welling up in his eyes. The teacher quickly cooled off and saw that her reaction was more intense than the situation called for. Presumably in an effort to salvage her dignity, she asked Tommy to promise he would henceforth be quiet in the corridor. Tommy, who felt crushed by the scolding, just continued to stand silent and tearful as the teacher successively softened her demands until they amounted to a plea that he promise so that the incident could be closed. Finally, Teddy, who had been growing impatient, intuitively sensed the teacher’s dilemma and urged Tommy, “For goodness sake, promise her so we can go home.” This “intervention” was sufficient for the teacher to realize she did not require Tommy’s promise to preserve her dignity, and she sent the boys home without further ado. Sometimes children offer promises “to be good” when not immediately under duress of the parents’ or teacher’s displeasure. I think many parents intuitively understand such unsolicited promises in much the same way that they earlier understood crying as a bid for attention, for reassurance that the child is indeed lovable. For the promise, as a propitiatory gesture, seems to have its roots in the child’s spontaneous offering of his love and acknowledgment of dependency on the parents. These gestures are highly valued by parents, and for a considerable time they provide one of the major reinforcements for continuing to supply the child’s needs. Parents contribute innocently in yet another way to the primary establishment of promising as an act of magic. When we soothe a frightened 53

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child at night and promise that the bears will not eat him, or promise her that we will not go away and leave her, our pledge to the child is a primary promise in that it is not so much a statement about future events as an expression of our awareness of the child’s need for reassurance at this moment. Intuitive parents soon learn that to be effective they must couch reassurances in terms that respect the metaphor in which the child experiences his fears. I can draw an example from an experience with my younger child when he was beginning to learn from his older brother about the wonderful world of trucks, airplanes, and other mechanical equipment. Sitting with us, he wanted to join in the conversation between his older brother and me, which largely had to do with such matters. He developed a stereotyped phrase to gain my attention, “Someday we have a steamroller?” As I rapidly learned, I could not answer his question with a well-reasoned statement about the impracticability of his proposals, and any such attempt was met with a clear indication that I had quite missed the point. It proved quite sufficient, however, for me to answer, “Yes, someday we will have a steamroller.” This response satisfied him and apparently ended the matter. At least, I heard no more about the steamroller. I shall not speculate on all the possible meanings of the child’s request, but note only that through it the child told of his wish to be included in my orbit and share in these esoteric conversations. I believe he understood my “primary promise” as acknowledgment that I recognized his need and that he could “have a steamroller” right now in fantasy with me. The verbal formula “someday” seemed to serve for him much as “once upon a time” did for the older child: to signal we were about to share a fantasy. I have found unexpected confirmation of these ideas about the primary magical character of promises parents make to children. McKinnon (1959) was a student of John N. Rosen, who had developed a method of “Direct Analysis” for the psychological treatment of severely regressed schizophrenic patients. McKinnon related that Rosen, during intense exchanges with his patients, promised to marry them, adopt them as his own children, give them all the money they would ever need, and so on. She reported that patients did not reject Rosen’s “promises” as preposterous, which, in reality, they certainly were. Rather, the patients accepted the promises with obvious appreciation for the immediate gratification they offered as communications that tendered a badly needed sense of reassurance. If 54

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we were to translate these promises into secondary-process language, I believe their approximate meaning would be, “Yes, gratification is possible,” or “I understand how deeply you need to feel loved and protected.” Such promises, in Rosen’s usage, seem to be metaphoric expressions of the therapist’s empathy with the patient’s state of need and of his awareness of the patients’ regressed condition and hence limited accessibility to more abstract communication. These promises further express the therapist’s wish to gratify the patients’ real needs and hint, in primary-process terms, at his ability to do so. McKinnon reported that, when the patients remitted from their deeply regressed states, they remembered that Rosen made such promises to them; the patients seemed to understand that he meant the promises as a way of communicating with them in their regressed state, and they received the value of them at the time. McKinnon claimed that the patients gave no indication of wanting to hold the therapist to the literal terms of the promises either when they were in a regressed state or when they recovered. Perhaps I have sketched enough of the common phenomena of primary promising to permit reconstructing the line of development that has as its goal the development of mature or secondary-promising behavior. We might place the earliest precursor of promising in infants’ experiences of regularity in need fulfillment. We theorize that infants sequentially experience sensations of hunger; then, during the period of unavoidable delay, anticipate gratification as memories relating to fulfillment are evoked, cry; and finally, when placed at the breast, experience fulfillment itself. We assume this sequence to be at the roots of promising, as for most other accomplishments in cognition. As the period dominated by primary process goes through its developmental parabola, successive experiences of wish, delay, and fulfillment establish notions of causality. The regular arrival of satisfaction that follows signs of parental preparation to deliver That these phenomena must refer to a very special emotional climate can be attested to by anyone who has worked with schizophrenic patients and has expe­rienced how sensitive they often are to the least hint of unreliability in the therapist, especially a broken promise.  Observations that frustration of a drive in relatively poorly integrated organisms, such as infants, leads to dedifferentiation of behavior cast some doubt on the role traditionally assigned to oral frustration (at least of nutritive needs) in the development of thought organization. But whether it turns out that a component of the oral drive is implicated or some less peremptory motive, associated perhaps with the autonomous ego functions, the general form of this statement will probably continue to hold. 

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what is needed helps to establish firmly that certain signals foretell eventual satisfaction. As external realities intrude on the state of primary narcissism and the child comes to recognize his parents as apart from himself, he will, through efforts to appease and propitiate them, including primary promising, be driven to assure himself of their continued loving attention. Thus, from the behavior of the nurturing figures, the infant first gains appreciation that fulfillment regularly follows experiencing need. We could suppose that the soothing noises we utter while preparing the baby’s bottle signify to her what explicit promising will signify later on. Long before children are ready to live up to their own promises in any consistent way, they become remarkably acute about the promises made to them by adults and demand specific and immediate fulfillment. Young children also tend to construe even the vaguest kind of assent as a commitment to make specific delivery of what amounts to their own fantasies, about whose details the adult may have been only partly, if at all, aware. The mixture of primary and secondary functioning in such fantasying is poignantly evident when, for instance, a child approaches his father, who, engrossed in his newspaper, may grunt in response to an unheard question, only to be startled by the child’s expressions of delight because he has unwittingly “promised” they will go on a picnic the next day. This phenomenon is partly to be understood as the projection of the child’s infantile sense of omnipotence onto the parent, whose word or almost silent assent then becomes sufficient to make fantasy reality. Another contributing factor may be the tendency of preoccupied parents to say, “yes,” in a vague way, by which they mean not agreement but only a wish to put a temporary end to the child’s nagging. Such a circumstance, of course, is also an example of promising of the primary sort. During this time, the groundwork for further development is laid. As the child’s sense of reality improves, he first sharpens his perceptions and then retunes his anticipations of his parents; he develops “rules” for parental behavior that stress the sanctity of literal promises—parents’ promises! The child does not yet extend these rules to his own behavior, and indeed one can see in this double standard the child’s realistic awareness of his continued dependence on his parents. He must be able to count on his parents much more than on himself. More realistic notions of causality gradually displace the child’s sense of omnipotence, both in its native form and as 56

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projected. One of the results of this process, together with the processes of identification with the parents, is the formation of the ego ideal and the superego. In time, parents and child alike expect the child to behave with the regularity that the child first experienced only in the parents’ behavior. Thus, in coming to see his parents as being bound by their words, the child himself becomes so bound. We might consider this state the end point of the development of promising behavior. But, in fact we aspire to an ideal state beyond being able to make and keep an explicit promise, the state to which those arrive who have a well-developed sense of identity and are able to feel bound to a course of honorable action whether or not they have specifically promised to do so. In this kind of “post-promising” morality, one lives up to one’s sense of integrity rather than being bound by specific promises. Like any line of development sketched from the psychoanalytic point of view, the stages are neither distinct nor do they succeed each other abruptly. Rather, the sequence is gradual and the rate uneven. Nor are the forms of primary promising ever wholly supplanted by their secondary-process successors. As we know to our common sorrow, we do not attain full maturity in thinking but retain remnants of magical thinking to call on when needed. Often, earlier and later modes of thinking seem to exist side by side, with more or less interaction between them. This state of affairs may even obtain cultural sanction, as tourists discover when they visit countries in which a premium is placed on the outward forms of politeness. They may become exasperated with natives who, out of a wish not to disappoint the visitors, promise all sorts of things that they have neither the intention nor even the capacity to carry out. Yet these countries are involved in a modern economy that depends as much as ours on the orderly fulfillment of promises. We see similar inconsistencies closer to home. We know hardheaded people who nevertheless are eager to believe the spectacular promises of promoters of watered securities, of quack healers, or of preachers of the more optimistic faiths. Even the most righteous among us will lubricate our social interactions with conventional insincerities. Many of the forms of politeness could be viewed with profit from this vantage point. Thus far, to support the contention that there is a primary-magical form of promising that precedes the more familiar secondary form, I have cited instances of young children’s propitiatory gestures toward adults and the more or less self-conscious use of reassurances that sound like promises by most parents and certain therapists. We would expect, 57

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in conformity with our general experience that, under the pressure of regression, a pattern of behavior commonly seen in childhood may reappear in adult life. The treatment of a patient in psychoanalysis demonstrates the importance and the varied appearances of promising and disappointing in his psychopathology as well as the ways in which the form of primary promising complicated the picture.

Case Example, Continued The not so peaceful coexistence of forms of primary promising and secondary promising was a prominent characteristic of Mr. S, who had the faculty of arousing great expectations in those around him. His life was in many ways a fulfillment of the American rags-to-riches dream. His history had a truly heroic quality, for from humble beginnings he had managed to overcome a series of near-fatal handicaps through a few strokes of good luck, a capacity for hard work under adverse circumstances, a strong physical constitution, and an unfailing will to survive. For several years, Mr. S had been held in a prisoner of war camp from which only a few emerged alive. The camp was notorious for its brutal treatment of prisoners, who constantly were threatened with death and were turned against each other with the promise that only those who cooperated would live. Mr. S cooperated as much as he had to and, by remaining inconspicuous, avoided the worst of the bad treatment. At war’s end, he finished his education and associated himself with a growing company in which he rose to a position of leadership and great respect. As he took on increasing responsibility, he increasingly endangered his position by the paradoxical combination of displaying sure business judgment during the workday and poor judgment in both his leisure-time activities and his choice of companions. He was, and felt himself, constantly in danger of being exposed and of having his business reputation damaged by social indiscretions. In addition, he felt dissatisfied with his life. Although he had achieved material success, he found himself unable to commit himself firmly to any course of action, to other persons, or even to any single identity; one could describe him as having gone through life with his fingers crossed. While Mr. S’s attainments were real and many, he exploited them to imply endless promise of how much more he could do, rather than solid achievement. His pattern of inviting expectation through implicit or explicit 58

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promising was most clearly visible in his relations with women. Although he was divorced and known for having had many subsequent companions, he nevertheless succeeded in arousing the expectation in the woman, or in the two or three women with whom he might be involved at any time, that this relationship was special. He not only behaved in a promising manner, he often made gratuitous explicit promises, promises that usually he did not keep. He especially tended to make such promises when it seemed to him that his partner’s interest in him was flagging. He had been married for several years. His long-suffering wife finally left him, fed up with the repeated disappointments she had suffered at his hands. His indecisiveness at home and his unwillingness to live a regular and predictable life when away from the office left her always uncertain that she could count on him. In spite of herself, she found herself nagging and reproaching her husband, who would respond with a mixture of hurt and anger, sulking and self-pity, or with professions of love and entreaties that she not leave him. Typically, these incidents ended in tender scenes of reconciliation and with his promising to do better, promises he forgot not long after making them. When she left him, his wife still felt he was a man of great promise who could “give so much if he only would let himself.” In addition to his characterological difficulties, which did not bother him particularly, Mr. S suffered intermittently from a variety of symptoms, including paralyzing anxiety attacks during which he was sure he would die. There were also a number of obsessive fears, for instance, of driving into head-on collisions, and also transitory phobias and hypochondriacal preoccupations. The sum of these painful symptoms drove him unwillingly to treatment. As one might expect from that vignette, the patient’s analysis provided many opportunities to see his promising and subsequent disappointing in action. It was most evident during one prolonged phase of the analysis when the patient attempted to present himself as the hapless victim of his drives. He wanted to be “good,” to find a woman whom he could love enough to be faithful to. Although he insisted that the spirit was firm, the urges of the flesh invariably proved stronger. Repeatedly, his promises to be loyal and discreet were followed by mournful accounts of failure. Mr. S expected me to be angry and disappointed; I would not appreciate his own despair and disgust with himself at failing, and further, I would disbelieve the “genuineness” of his intentions. 59

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As a first approach to this pattern, I commented on the repetitiveness with which he offered unsolicited promises he had every reason to suspect he would not keep. Mr. S, recognizing his repetitive behavior, resolved to correct matters by promising not to promise, while construing my intervention to mean he was expecting too much of himself in the way of self-denial. Thus he continued much the same pattern of misbehavior, except that he preceded each episode with his hopes, rather than his promise, not to fail again. When I observed that he assumed his promised or hoped-for reform was for my benefit, we struck a snag. While Mr. S conceded that my observation was more or less correct, he refused to accept the idea that such a goal could be solely his own. For did I, his analyst, not stand for the values toward which he, the patient, was striving? How could I dissociate myself from them? He made it clear that, as his analyst, I had no choice but to identify myself wholly with his efforts to be “good;” my hopes and expectations should rise and fall with his promises, successes, and failures. As his analyst, I could not permit him to “get away” with his misbehavior. Neither could I, like a proper mother, disown him in the face of his promises to do better. Rather, I ought to be angry and he ought to be anxiously uncertain: Would I finally become fed up and throw him out of treatment, or could he once more promise his way back into my good graces? Gradually it became clear that the point of this sequence of ideas and behavior was the erotization of the sense of anxious uncertainty that made him feel alive and that culminated in a feeling of warmth and bliss when he felt he had won my forgiveness. It takes only a moment’s reflection to see the suitability of the pattern of promising and disappointing to express the libidinal and aggressive relationships of a child and his mother during the anal phase. The child promises and disappoints. The mother reproaches, urges, and cajoles to get the child to deliver on his promise. By withholding and disappointing, the child guarantees the intensity of mother’s interest in him and her continued participation in the struggle to force him to deliver the goods. It is not hard to reconstruct how the mother’s reproaches become libidinized by both mother and child. When the child finally delivers, as he inevitably has to, when the promise is fulfilled—how delicious is the reconciliation between the two. As one might expect, the predominant transference paradigm during this period was a sadomasochistic relationship in which, as the patient saw it, we were tied together by bonds of hateful dependency. An image he 60

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referred to frequently was drawn from a dream of this time; he and I stood on the bank of a rushing river, each in the position to push the other in, but only at the expense of being dragged in himself, and each of us was aware that neither of us could swim. It is tempting to speculate about the choice of illness of a patient whose neurosis one begins to understand. We can see how promising could serve in the economy of the patient’s neurosis—but why promising? What factors in the patient’s life predisposed him to choose this pattern of behavior when others might have served as well? Some historical data may point to an answer. Mr. S had been born into an Appalachian family who, during most of his early life, were desperately poor and frequently were victimized by social, political, and religious discrimination. His father was an artisan; his mother was barely educated and deeply superstitious. In the family’s background were several men who had entered the priesthood and the family valued a level of intellectual and cultural attainment that was all but out of their reach during our patient’s childhood. While it was the cultural tradition to favor the male children, it was, in fact, the daughters, of whom there were three older than the patient, who actually received most of the meager material comforts to make them attractive to suitors. Mr. S was one of several sons and soon showed that he was brighter than the rest. However, the next younger sister was the favorite of the mother as well as of the patient. His sister’s death during Mr. S’s childhood made an enormous impression on him, In treatment, he repeatedly recalled his feeling of dread and longing when hearing his mother’s keening at her funeral; he fantasized himself in the sister’s place and the object of his mother’s solicitude. In panic, he ran to the gravedigger and promised that he would be good if only the gravedigger would not bury him with his sister. With the death of still another sibling, the patient’s position in the family was confirmed. He was the one who was to go on to college (a next to impossible goal in those circumstances and at that time). He would become the savior of the family. The family saw him as the “golden child” who was to become a promising young man, and they expected much of him. Mr. S could recall his mixed feelings of pride and resentment as the family attempted to forget their empty stomachs by imagining how different things would be someday when, as he fantasized, he would grow up and support them all. One of his treasured memories was of when, as a boy, he sold a piece of his own handiwork for the price of a 61

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loaf of bread that he proudly presented to his mother for the family’s evening meal. Thus the family’s investment in the patient’s health and in his progress in school, like his mother’s earlier preoccupation with his toilet training, reflected not just family pride but also a keen, selfish interest in the patient’s performance. Mr. S’s image of his mother at this time was that she allowed no one to forget how much she suffered for the family and, in particular, how Mr. S’s birth had almost killed her. She had inordinately high expectations of him, and he recalled her as never satisfied with his efforts to please her. He was quick to learn how to maintain her interest in him by arousing expectations, but never letting her be sure if he actually would deliver. These experiences also seemed to provide the model for the patient’s efforts to earn love, to extort a sense of obligation in others, and to secure exemption from reality’s demands through conspicuous suffering. Meanwhile, back on the couch, our promising patient continued to utter phrases arousing expectations and foretelling fulfillment, none of which had redeeming features. He was always at least vaguely aware, and could be made acutely so, that he did not plan to fulfill these promises; yet, paradoxically, he felt that he was sincere in offering them. There was no doubting the reality of his anxious distress when he made his extravagant promises. And when I confronted him with the fact that no actual fulfillment was intended, he felt terribly misunderstood and unsympathetically treated, even when he could see that my comments were “objectively” justified. One might lump that behavior with the way persons in distress promise, cajole, bribe, threaten, or otherwise indicate they will stop at nothing to escape from a painful situation—unscrupulousness generated by the pressure of circumstance. Yet to dismiss the patient’s promises in this way would not do justice to his anxious eagerness at the time that he promised, to his feeling of being misunderstood when he sensed reproach from the promisee, or to the additional fact that he often offered these “promises” when there was no apparent need for a promise of any kind. Clearly, the main purpose of the pattern of promising and disappoint ing was neither a primary mendaciousness nor a basic desire to profit Here I mean not simply the act of primary promising alone, which of course does not contemplate the likelihood of nonfulfillment, but the behavior pattern that came to be built on the act of primary promising in part because of his parents’ intense reactions to his efforts at propitiation.



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through deceit, but rather to repeat an infantile method of maintaining his mother’s interest in him. While his misbehavior did bring him some excitement and pleasure, these gratifications were short lived, exceeded by the shame and lowered self-esteem he suffered in consequence of it. During a long period of the analysis, he could not conceive that as his analyst/ mother I could possibly be interested in him. He rationalized his failure to live up to his promises by accusing me of being interested only in my own success or failure in curing a patient, or because I was interested, in a scientific and impersonal way, in the museum of symptoms he could present, or perhaps I was willing to treat him for other selfish reasons. By stretching matters, he could concede I might have some general humanitarian concern about the acute suffering of a fellow human being. I recalled the urgency with which the patient began his treatment and then understood his presentation to mean, “It is not I who ask for treatment for me; rather, the pain and suffering speak for themselves. They, not I, demand your attention, I am here only under their duress.” Two facets of this manner of beginning proved to be important. First, he did not feel worthy enough to seek treatment for himself; and second, not having asked for anything for himself, he need not feel under any obligation to the analyst. The analyst treated the emergency—let the emergency pay for it. As with the burghers of Hamlin, once he had piped the rats out of the city, the value of the piper’s services diminished sharply. Unlike the burghers of Hamlin, though, Mr. S’s reluctance to “pay,” as distinguished from the act of promising itself, was motivated primarily by his wish to intensify his relationship with me by anticipating my anger and retaliation, and was motivated only secondarily and to a lesser extent by anticipating personal gain. This pattern of making promises that are their own fulfillment appeared not only in the patient’s behavior, but in his fantasies and memories as well. One childhood fantasy returned repeatedly during the analysis, always with a nostalgic mood signaling a wish to regress to that less complicated time in childhood when good intentions were sufficient. The fantasy apparently draws on a folk tale: A villager had outraged the community and is sentenced to lose his life. With full public ceremony, the offender is dragged to the scaffold where a pot of molten lead has been prepared. On his knees, the condemned man is readied to have the molten lead poured down his throat. He is resigned to this awful end and does not 63

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struggle. Demonstrating his willingness to die for his crime, he opens his mouth to receive the searing fluid. After a moment of anxious horror as, with eyes closed, he hears the preparations of his executioners, he feels something flowing into his mouth—not hot, but cool; not lead, but honey. With amazement and hope, he opens his eyes to behold the smiles of his erstwhile executioners and is welcomed back into the community. Only his willingness to die in atonement was demanded of him; it was not necessary that he actually pay the forfeit. It is possible to infer from this story probable incidents in the patient’s early life involving being forced to swallow things for his own good and finding, after swallowing the bitter, that the sweet followed. Certainly, these incidents reinforced an overvaluation of masochistic surrender or, rather, the willingness or promise to do so as a means of assuring parental love. Let us consider the foregoing examples as prototypes of acts of explicit promising in which forms of both primary and secondary promising participate. The prototypes establish a baseline in that they involve an explicit promise made to an existing other person. Departing from this baseline, I offer descriptions of some of the patient’s behavior that had the same basic structure as these prototypes, but in which one or both elements of the transaction—the explicit promise and the existing other person—were not present as such. Explicit promises can be made not only to external objects who are present but also to internal objects. An example of explicit promising to an internal object, who for the moment is externalized in fantasy, can be seen in a typical self-healing practice of Mr. S when bitten by remorse and in a low mood, a not uncommon state of mind for him. He would become preoccupied with the neglectful way in which he recently had treated his parents and siblings and would dwell nostalgically on the hardships they had all endured during his childhood. Then he would imagine himself in a fancy department store selecting gifts for them, things they had sorely needed in the old days and luxuries they would not have dreamed of owning. He fantasized giving these gifts to his family and almost would weep at his own generosity and at their touching surprise and gratitude; thereafter he would feel much better about himself. That kind of fantasying had its parallel in his analytic hours when, on occasion, Mr. S would feel a sense of warmth toward me or would notice a feeling of gratitude stirring within him. He spoke of these emo64

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tional stirrings in such a way that I had to listen sharply to penetrate the elaborately formulated subjunctive mode. Only then could I understand that he was speaking of how he would feel, or how he would think of himself as feeling, or, more directly, how he had felt only yesterday, but never, at that stage of his analysis, how he was feeling now. His talent for indirect expression occasionally took extravagant forms. For example, in one session when Mr. S was quite depressed and in much pain, his depression yielded to vigorous interpretation. Toward the end of the hour he was feeling much better. He closed the hour with pleasant fantasies of how he would like to tell me of his appreciation for what I had done for him, he would even fall on his knees and beg forgiveness for the nuisance he had made of himself, and so on. In his next hour, however, Mr. S spoke about these fantasies and their continuation with little feeling. It became clear, as all was pieced together, that what was being offered was not the expression of thankfulness that had been promised, but only a report of yesterday’s fantasies about it, a report he offered as a bit of historical narrative but without any quality of active giving. When I commented on this, Mr. S could see what his offering was and what it was not and could relate this event to his by now growing awareness of his general character pattern. Still he could not help but feel that I had misunderstood him; I had rejected and scorned his good intentions and had reproached and criticized him for his desire to express gratitude. This hurt and angry reaction, typical of the patient’s first responses to most interpretations in this area, was the bridge to the important adaptive style this way of promising and disappointing had come to serve. For it became clear that Mr. S felt resentment and anger toward me welling up even though he could see quite clearly that he had not really offered anything, not even the thanks that would have been appropriate for him to offer, and, further, that he had from the outset expected reproach and criticism from me/mother. As we explored this paradoxical situation, it gradually became clear that a pattern of promising that had originally served to propitiate the mother, magically to neutralize her anger and ward off the possibility that she would abandon the child to starvation, had served as effectively but in a different way at the anal stage to guarantee the integrity of the relationship with the mother. In addition, by anticipating the indifferent reception his “promises” would receive, promises that were empty in the secondary sense but rich in primary meaning, Mr. S was able to nourish 65

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his deep conviction that he had been treated unjustly, too much had been expected of him, and he therefore had a claim to be indemnified for his unwarranted suffering. He could thus justify his feeling that he should be an “exception,” free of ordinary human obligations and entitled to special indulgences on account of the mistreatment he had endured. His wartime experiences, terrible as they were, served also as a screen to hide the extent to which childhood experiences and fantasies had prepared the way for this character attitude. Certain phrases the patient used repetitively during one phase of his treatment contained another, much less explicit, form of promising. When he finally understood and absorbed an interpretation and tried to express something of what he felt, he almost invariably said, in a marveling tone, “This is the first time I really felt so warm toward you,” or “ . . . so sad,” or the like. He would repeat this phrase several times, sounding pathetically eager to be believed, while not at all sure that I would really believe him. The source of the repetition was the experience of the child who had disappointed his parents so often that he had every reason to believe that their lack of confidence in him was fully justified. Thus, now, when he did experience a genuine feeling, he had to dissociate himself entirely from his reputation and insist that what he felt now was brand new; he hoped in this way to convince me to have more faith in his future than I had in his past. “This is the first time” was an implicit promise that, “From now on things will be different, now that I have actually felt this new way.” A similar phenomenon, of course, is commonly seen in the “morning-after” vows of alcoholics. The motivation for Mr. S’s statement, as for his explicit promising, seemed to be his sudden fear of losing his mother’s love just when he felt warmth and need toward her, for at such a time he felt most vulnerable to loss. To keep her interest in him alive, to propitiate her and ward off her retaliatory withholding of herself, he felt impelled to try at all costs to arouse in her the hope of something new and different in him. With some analytic work the patient was able to see that the implicit meaning of “This is the first time” is that all previous claims to have experienced similar feelings were false. Thus, his assertion had the paradoxical effect of confirming the impressions he feared others had about him. The similarity of this behavior pattern to “crying wolf” deserves passing mention. The story of the boy who cried wolf is a classic caution66

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ary tale. Being eaten by a wolf, while it fulfills the requirements of ironic justice, has always seemed to me an excessive punishment for turning in a false alarm. As I recall it, the motive attributed to the young shepherd was mischievousness rather than viciousness; he just liked to see grownups come running, only to be frustrated and disappointed repeatedly. So it was with my patient, who had come to believe that, inexplicably, he had a primary wish to disappoint others by arousing false expectations. The foregoing discussion about “This is the first time” suggests what proved to be the case: rather than having a primary wish to disappoint or tease, he suffered from a primary uncertainty about his mother’s love for him. This uncertainty led to the kind of testing that guaranteed that, even if there were not a basic sense of love and trust between mother and child, there at least would be a firm bond compounded of mutual suspicion, mistrust, disappointment, and withholding. It is of clinical interest that as the patient became more clearly aware of these mechanisms and patterns, some of them became more ego alien. He became particularly sensitized to using promises to inveigle others to expect much of him, only to be disappointed and then to reproach him. He developed a private name for this pattern—“my sneaky little plans.” He also invented a name, the “little voice of insight,” for the agency that caught him at his “sneaky plans” and would no longer allow him to pursue them unobserved. While at first the “little voice of insight” was as welcome to him as a splinter under the skin of his ego, he later came to regard it as a true and reliable, if somewhat puritanical, friend who would often arrive just in the knick of time to save him from an embarrassing scrape. For a long time this “voice” was explicitly identified with me, who increasingly was experienced as accompanying not just when he felt he needed me, but also at those inconvenient times when he would rather have been left alone. This re-internalization of a superego function (self-observing) occurred gradually. Some hints of the genesis of this aspect of ego ideal and superego functioning were obtained during one session when Mr. S confessed that he did In an illuminating discussion of the “bad feelings” of disappointment and disappointedness, Schafer (2003) describes a patient who regularly aroused expectations in women and just as regularly disappointed them. Although Schafer does not mention that the patient made explicit promises that he failed to keep, the patient must in some way have promised implicitly in order to bring about disappointment in the other.



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not always listen to the “little voice of insight” and referred to it once as the little lamp of insight. His associations to this slip led not to the lamp of wisdom, as I expected, but to an early childhood memory of his mother in church when she lighted a votive lamp and prayed for the eternal rest of her parents. On this occasion the lamp slipped from his mother’s fingers and fell to the floor but did not break nor did the flame go out. This memory was the nexus of three lines of association: the patient’s awareness of his mother’s ambivalence about her own parents, husband, and children; the miracle that the little lamp, which symbolized the promise of eternal life, could withstand his mother’s hostility; and, further, that such a “magic lamp” could assure him of life in this world. It was shortly after this incident that the patient’s little sister, the mother’s favorite child, died; his mother retrospectively considered the dropped lamp an omen of this tragic event. The patient had a complex relationship with his little sister. She was, on one hand a lovable child and his own favorite, and on the other hand, she was his chief rival for mother’s affection. She died when the family was living in deepest poverty and one less mouth to feed literally meant an increased chance of survival for the rest. Mr. S’s chain of memories led once again to the most poignant of his recollections, his mother’s keening during the funeral of his little sister and his jealous wish that it had been he who had died and thus been the object of this demonstration. This fear and wish haunted the patient throughout his life and provided one of the roots of his claim to be treated as an exception. For he had once been willing to die to obtain life and (in fantasy) he was exposed to death. When a prisoner of war, his fantasized experience was actualized. Later, as he paid with anxiety attacks for the disguised repetitions of wishing the sister dead, through identification with her, and through accepting the punishment for his “thought crime,” he believed himself entitled to his sister’s favored position in the family, to be loved for himself as she was loved, not only for his performance. In all those instances, the patient was to a greater or lesser degree aware that the expectations his promises aroused would be disappointed, and he was prepared to accommodate himself to the ensuing anger of the disappointed party. But we should not infer that primary promising occurs only in such a context. Examples easily come to mind of persons whose desire to be loved and admired is so great and so childishly fixated that they are led to offer and promise far beyond their capacity to deliver. Also, like young children, they may produce some pitifully inadequate token of 68

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fulfillment with such a show of pride and with such expectation of pleasing that one is actually constrained to accept the offering in the spirit with which it was apparently given. Often the anticipated pleasure of the recipient seems to be the major reward expected. Lest I leave the impression that all is pre-oedipal, I should add here that the prominence of the pattern of promising and disappointing in the life of my patient was due not just to the strength of his pre-oedipal fixations, which were indeed strong, but also to a strong regressive trend in the face of oedipal anxieties. We could put this regressive defense into words as, “See I am harmless. I promise much, but deliver nothing, so you need not take me seriously as an active phallic contender for mother. I only want to be her little boy and to have her urge me to discharge my excretory functions. Without her demands and permission I can produce little. And even with her help and pressure, more than likely I will disappoint her.” A sample of material from the ending of the analysis will show how things turned out. After a number of years, Mr. S felt much improved symptomatically, he no longer had anxiety attacks, and his character structure was tempered. It seemed to both of us that we had done as much as might be expected for the time being. The analysis seemed to be winding down, and hints of ending had been “in the air” for some months. On a Monday, Mr. S opened the session by reporting that he was feeling no tension, “Maybe we can stop on April 15.” A fragment of a dream followed: “You have somehow made an appointment with two of us at the same time. The other is a little child who is very disturbed. I help you take him to the hospital.” Mr. S is not much interested in the dream but supposes that there really are two of me here and if I can help you take the child to the hospital, I can be excused. He returns to his preoccupation with his girlfriend, with whom he had had a very unhappy experience over the weekend. “I have been trying too hard to prolong this relationship and finally see that it is time to give up.” He even is tired of talking about it and gives up, telling me, “You were right; you told me it wouldn’t work.” I interpret that he was attributing “wisdom” (i. e., hindsight) to me, that he was reproaching me, as he had his mother, for getting pleasure from his failures rather than from his having learned about why he has dealt with women in ways that made them unhappy and ultimately bitchy. He agrees, reluctantly, and then returns to the idea of ending on April 15. 69

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As he elaborates the theme of ending, It becomes part of a larger fantasy about slowly paying off his debts; how good his employer has been about lending him the money for his analysis, interest free. He has warm feelings about it. If only his father could be here. He can visualize his father in his workshop, the marvelous tools he has, all neatly arranged and so unlike the mess his son lives in now. Suddenly Mr. S recalls a friend who never worked through mourning for his parents during the War. “I didn’t work through those losses either, but now I have these lovely feelings about them.” He returns to the fantasies about repaying the friends from whom he borrowed money; he thinks of writing letters to tell them “in a very nice way” that now he is more secure financially and can afford to pay them back. How unlike these letters would be from those he used to fantasize writing to them in which he would be very bitter and make it plain that the money (that he fantasized they wanted paid back immediately) would take the bread from his mouth. Mr. S speaks about the letters in such a real fashion that I, fearing I might have been inattentive, feel impelled to ask if he has written these letters or simply has fantasies about doing so. Mr. S responds angrily, “Just fantasies,” and falls silent. After a while he admits he is angry because I don’t have any appreciation for the enormous tenderness that is in him but that, admittedly, is restricted to his fantasies. Instead of being grateful for the goodness they imply, I ask for “cash on the table.” I act as his mother did when he was a child. Elaborating on the nature of his current fantasies, I point to the feelings that are revealed in them and the enormous gratification he gets merely from the fantasies of what he might do. Now he is in a position actually to repay the borrowed money. Yet the way he fantasizes repayment straddles whether the fantasies imply preparation for repaying or are still only a substitute for repaying. He begins to see that if he writes in one way, his friends would get very angry with him; if he wrote in another way, they would invite him for a visit, both outcomes being quite independent of his repaying the money. He is sad about all this; he has been over this so many times, and now things are quite different for him. He does mean to write to them, and he will do it (this last said with emphasis to indicate also that he would do it partly to “show me” he could). “But it is different now; I feel like paying these people back now; I enjoy the fantasy that I can, and I will.” At the same time he is sad to recall how much he has promised himself that he 70

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has failed to do, and he is sad about his girlfriend, who has every reason to be disgusted with him, as does his analyst.

Implications for Technique We can learn some lessons in psychoanalytic technique from experiences with promising and disappointing patients. The chief pitfall, I believe, is a tendency for us to be drawn into reenacting the patient’s childhood neurosis with him, and some special difficulties with such patients may make acting-out in the countertransference more likely than with other patients. One of these difficulties stems from the very procedure of psychoanalysis, which seems to encourage the analyst to be silent when he has nothing indispensable to say. After a few experiences with a patient who explicitly promises or indirectly arouses expectations, only to fail to fulfill them, the analyst, like the parents of the patient’s childhood, will tend to react with irritation, annoyance, reproaches, and distrust. While the skilled analyst will hardly yield openly to direct retaliatory acts, if he is not alert to the tendency he may find an easy way to seem to maintain a sound psychoanalytic stance and at the same time, by unduly prolonging his silences, give the patient “what he deserves.” Prolonged silence, whatever the technical rationalization, may also have the meaning in the countertransference of “turning a deaf ear to the patient.” Like the too often deceived shepherds of the “cry wolf story, the analyst may be inclined to ignore or disdain the patient’s efforts at propitiation couched as promises, and thus—as effectively as if he had actively rejected the patient —will reinforce the patient’s tendency to plead with him in this way with increasing desperation. I do not propose that, as the shepherd boy wished of the shepherds, the analyst should “come running” indefinitely, but rather that he employ a more active interpretive technique. The interpretive activity I advocate should stem from the analyst’s awareness that at these times protracted silence can amount to a quite “active,” though perhaps unintentionally punitive, intervention. On the other hand, a too ready acceptance of the patient as one from whom no more than primary promises can he expected can be disastrous to the treatment. If my experience is at all typical, the patient will be at least secretly aware of his desire to placate the analyst and also will be aware that he promises more than he can hope to deliver. However, he may not 71

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be aware of the connection between these two elements or of the degree to which his promises represent a bid for the analyst’s negative attention, and, in the transference, to reestablish a sadomasochistic relationship with the parents of his childhood. Some therapists, perhaps more than others, tend to get into difficulties over the issue of promises. After hearing me speak about these ideas, a therapist consulted me about the following problem. Mrs. J, a woman in a very difficult marriage had to be hospitalized because of repeated episodes of drinking. Her hospital doctor, who was also her therapist, understood her drinking as a way of escaping the marriage, her husband being very much like her father—brusque, unfeeling, and domineering—and did not appreciate her needs. Before her husband came to visit, Mrs. J had gradually earned an increasing measure of freedom that included town trips. But while she was out on a pass with her husband, she asked him to get her a bottle of vodka, which he did. She drank it and soon was stuporous. Her husband then became very angry and told her father. The father was also very angry, seeing the incident as further evidence she could not be trusted. Neither of them recognized the husband’s part in the matter. The doctor restricted the patient to the hospital but offered to restore her privileges if she would promise not to drink. Mrs. J refused to promise, for, if she were to promise, she would feel bound to keep it. So remaining in the hospital, she attended her prescribed activities in a desultory way and remained at an impasse with her doctor. The doctor did not understand why the patient refused to promise. I wondered aloud about the meaning of his demanding that promise, for, as the therapist and I discussed the case, it became clear that Mrs. J’s drinking was not the main problem, neither did she value drinking for its own sake. Her drinking was chiefly a way to communicate certain feelings to her husband and father, a way to elicit a reaction of anger and disappointment that she had long since learned to erotize. If she promised not to drink, she felt she would be without any way to engage them in this behavioral paradigm, the sole recourse she felt available to her in her current state of regression. Restricting her to the hospital had the same effect, for although she “behaved” her life had no meaning. I tried to help him see that he, as well as the husband and father, was as much a prisoner of this pattern as was the patient. Restricting her, either by withdrawing her privileges or by extorting a 72

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promise from her, simply cut off a needed means of communication. On the other hand, if not bound by his own ultimatum, the doctor would have the opportunity to interpret to the patient what was happening in their relationship and the relevance of this pattern to her relationships with husband and father. Another case example helps to point up the importance of understanding the various meanings of promising: A rather infantile and impulsive female patient, Ms. T, was in treatment because she had been unable to make anything of her life or to break away from her mother. Her therapist reported that she had surprised him with an outburst of anger and misbehavior. She had been discussing with him that she needed to get a job. She knew she had to get one and had been working toward it by going to business school. Her mother complicated the task by expressing mixed feelings about Ms. T’s moves toward independence. During a phone conversation, the mother hoped her daughter would not “take a job as a waitress or anything like that.” The patient got the message—whatever she did would not be good enough for her mother; her meager efforts would only embarrass her mother. Of course, the wish to embarrass the mother was, in fact, present. The therapist also had mixed expectations of Ms. T. While hoping she would find a suitable job, he rather doubted she had the capacity to hold one. When he saw the similarity between the mother’s attitude toward the patient and his own, he was able to work more effectively with the patient in this area. Ms. T made use of his assistance and during a subsequent hour presented a dream: “You and I are lying on a bed together; we are fully clothed. Nothing happens; then there are many people there—other doctors, colleagues of yours. You are standing there fully dressed except that you do not have your trousers on and I am trying to hide you from the other people there.” The patient mentioned, in connection with the dream, that she used to like to lie with her mother in bed. There was nothing sexual about this; they just would lie there and feel comfortable with each other. The same feeling tone was in the dream. The therapist interpreted the second part of the dream as signifying that Ms. T wanted to embarrass him, to show him to his colleagues as incompetent. During the next hour, she was, as the therapist described her, “swollen, angry, depressed, and paralyzed.” She had been telling other patients what a bad therapist he was and contrasted him unfavorably with a former therapist who had 73

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understood her. This sudden reversal was what the therapist brought into consultation as his problem. I first took up with the therapist his interpretation of the dream, which ignored the aspect relating to the issues he and the patient were working on. Rather than interpreting her concern about embarrassing him and mother by failing at any job she might get, he had interpreted the underlying wish to embarrass them. Interpreting the wish before ego attitudes and defense had had its customary bad effect. The patient reacted as if he had accused her of wanting to hurt him. Thereupon, she felt justified in doing just that. The therapist nodded understandingly at this point and supplied an additional piece of information. In a previous session, Ms. T had announced her firm intention to get a job, a proposal the therapist had endorsed. Then, when the patient became angry, she reproached him bitterly for not having understood her better than to take her words literally. The therapist now ruefully agreed; he guessed he should not have taken her “promise” so seriously. I took the opportunity to make the technical distinction I have already outlined. “Not taking her seriously” would mean that the therapist would allow the primary-promise elements in her intention to invalidate its secondary-promise aspects. His task was to separate (that is, analyze) the elements of primary-promise from the more mature elements of secondary-promise and to take both seriously, not to see one as neutralizing the other. Thus, he could have accepted the primary-promise element by acknowledging Ms. T’s wish to do what she said she wanted to do, and recognize too that she had made her declaration so strong because she was doubtful about her capacity to perform. She was angry at herself for having failed before and was fearful that she might fail again and embarrass both the therapist and her mother. On the other hand, he could accept the secondary-promise element by recognizing that getting a job would not be easy and assure her he was ready to help her with the difficulties she might encounter in putting her intention into effect. The technical point that example illustrates is that the therapist must understand the primary and secondary aspects of a promise separately and deal with them separately. A therapist’s naiveté or high expectations may lead him to take a promise wholeheartedly as only a secondary promise. His cynicism or anticipated disappointment may lead him to hear a promise only as a primary promise. The making of a promise and the carrying out 74

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of a promise are distinguishable developmentally, and under the pressure of regression, promises that are their own reward may regain their earlier prominence. Therapists must keep in mind the distinction between primary promises and the more mature secondary ones that imply fulfillment.

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6 Mature and Regressive Determinants of the Keeping of Promises

While making, accepting, and ultimately keeping a promise seems to be a common enough event, a little thought will remind us that we seldom are called upon to make a promise. Most of the time we get along with each other on the basis of common expectations; we generally do as others expect us to do and as we expect ourselves to do. We may state, matter of factly, how we intend to act whenever our impending actions are not obvious from the context, but we do not generally frame them as promises to act or otherwise declare our intention unless the circumstances are out of the ordinary. We offer a promise, or expect another to do so, only when we fear that our motives to do and not to do are in uncertain balance so that we cannot be sure that we, or the other person, will behave as expected. If we recognize that we have conflicting motives, we may allay these concerns by opting for one or the other and by promising specific performance. The most common and most unexceptional kind of promising is one that reinforces the cultural expectation of continuity and commitment when our possibly conflicting motives threaten that expectation. Oaths of office, of citizenship, and of witnesses in a court of law illustrate this usage. These oaths entail serious commitments and any failure to live up to them invokes serious sanctions. When we fail to live up to the terms of a less momentous promise, such as to pay bills on time, we incur definite but less drastic consequences. 77

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Possibly being broken is not the only pathology to which a promise is subject. Some pathological phenomena are at the opposite pole from the breaking of promises, especially when the promiser seems to feel compelled, often with overtones of moral obligation, to keep his promise regardless of consequences, even when fulfillment would be ill-advised, illegal, or self-destructive. There are forces within the personality that insist on the literal keeping of certain promises, quite apart from the motive with which the promise ostensibly was made and quite apart from the expectations or desires of others, including the one to whom the promise ostensibly was made. This chapter is concerned mainly with the contribution of these “darker” forces to the compulsive keeping of certain promises. First, we must recognize that promising takes place in a social setting in which many dynamics favor the keeping of promises. Although the cultural forces (see chapters 1–3) that urge one to fulfill one’s promises generally are internalized during development and so can be thought of as operating within the personality, for heuristic purposes, I shall refer to them as if they still were outside. To review briefly the forces that converge to help assure that we will keep promises,



1. There are social pressures, customs, traditions, common and statute law. 2. The counterparts to these social arrangements in individual development stem from growing up in a context of mutuality and interdependency and lead us to make promises when we are aware of a significant counter-wish or resistance within one that opposes the act in question. When one makes a promise, typically one invokes a sense of obligation that reinforces the possibly weakening intention to keep it. Often one makes a mental note, if not an actual one, to remind oneself not to forget; 3. The infantile magical roots of this developmental process that are entwined in the making and keeping of bonds (Roheim, 1945; see also chapter 11); 4. Occasionally, the tendency to repeat one’s actions may rise to a compulsion. I am referring here to the tendency to repeat in action what has already been expressed in words. Theodor Reik (1925) pointed to examples of

Ironically, making a note is not a foolproof way to assure eventual fulfillment of a promise. If the counterwish is strong enough and prevailing, the act of making the note may serve instead as a surrogate act of fulfillment; witness the common, sheepish excuse, “I made a note to remind me about the date of your party, but I mislaid it.”



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cultural artifacts, including the Catholic Mass and courtroom trials, that consist largely of repeating in words earlier deeds of great significance. 5. Promises, as representative of the larger class of intentions that derive from interrupted actions, are likely to create a tension system that of itself presses for discharge (Ovsiankina, 1976; see chapter 4). 6. Because of their inherent discharge propensity, certain of these tension systems are vulnerable to subversion by drives. 7. In the event of regression, a particular conflicting wish and counter-wish about keeping the promise may very well yield a compromise solution that satisfies other, darker, wishes as well.

One might think it remarkable, considering the battery of forces that favor completion, that any promise is ever broken. But experience tells us that failure to keep promises is common enough that, as one wit put it, “Nothing keeps like an unkept promise.” I am not at all sure that this list of “forces” that press for completion is complete or, indeed, if the forces are independent of each other. Some may merely be different points of view on the same processes. In any case, however much they may overlap, each may add some fresh insight about those occasions when a person seems driven to fulfill a promise, oath, or vow even though doing so no longer serves the purpose for which the promise was made, and when keeping it is destructive of that initial purpose and other dearly held values, and when even common sense argues against keeping it. My focus here is on two of them that offer an interesting contrast between the determinants in social and individual psychology. On first considering the matter, we might wonder what pathology could reside in a kept promise. Surely everything that we believe would lead us to conclude that promises are meant to be kept. And yet, with a moment’s reflection we might recall such clinical commonplaces as the following: A parent of a young hospitalized psychiatric patient who had seriously wounded himself in an attempt at suicide confessed to the boy’s physician that she “knew it wasn’t a good idea to give him the gun for his birthday, but what could I do? I promised him he could have it when he was 10.”

Because of the general significance that making and keeping promises has in the development of conscience, and because of the personal dynamic significance of a particular promise.



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Or: A young therapist came to his supervisor with an ethical dilemma. His patient had confessed to him, after receiving redoubled assurances that what a patient says to his therapist is completely confidential, that he had committed a serious crime. Now the therapist was on the spot, burdened both by the secret that he shared and his promise to the patient. He was not even sure if he should tell the supervisor what the patient had told him. Or: Following the assassination of President Kennedy, the police chief of Dallas, in spite of all the precautions that had been taken to thwart any attempt to “get Oswald,” the presumed assassin, chose to move the prisoner from the city jail to the county jail according to a prearranged and announced plan and in the presence of numerous newsmen. According to the Associated Press, he said, “If I hadn’t promised you people that I would not take Oswald until this morning, we would have taken him during the night. I told you I wouldn’t back down on my pledge.” Surely we are free to speculate about the several determinants that led to the literal fulfillment of each of those pledges and to the overriding of good judgment. However, the overvaluation of the promise by its maker and the sense of obligation to fulfill it no matter the probable consequence remains a problem. We might be quick to observe that both the parent and the therapist used the fact of having made a promise, albeit a foolish one, to bar the further exercise of good judgment. We might be inclined to observe with justified irritation that good parents, good therapists, and good chiefs of police don’t get themselves into such jams. With a bit more charity, we might be willing to take into account the parent’s ambivalent feelings toward her son, the therapist’s over-identification with his patient, and the police chief’s unwillingness to relinquish his moment in the sun. These dynamic factors, of course, might have contributed to the disastrous outcomes. But, in pointing to these sources of motivation, would we have explained how the promisecompliant behavior came about? Would we have explained, for instance, the peculiar sense of helplessness to do otherwise that parent and therapist, and possibly even the chief of police, experienced when they found themselves doing what they knew they should not do, against their better judgment and almost against their will? I hope these examples make plausible that the mechanism or process of promising, the psychological 80

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capacity to make a commitment, can be subverted in the keeping as well as in the breaking.

Case Examples I must make my point about promises that become fulfilled in spite of the conscious wishes of the promiser against the background of our realization that in everyday experience the connection between a promise and its fulfillment is not a simple skein but rather is a complexly woven fabric whose uneven texture reflects influences now from one source and then from another. This fabric of promising is so elastic, so responsive to inner reservations and external contingencies, to variables of circumstance and context, that the process ordinarily attending making a promise and its subsequent fulfillment requires a continual and delicate adjustment, a balancing of shifting attitudes and altered realities, and attending to the changing significance of one’s bond. Fulfilling a promise in a complex life situation is hardly an automatic process. The very complexity of the relationships between promiser and promisee, and the multiple influences to which a promise is subject on its uncertain course toward possible fulfillment, expresses what we call cryptically the autonomy of the ego. To put the matter in statistical terms, the greater the complexity of the situation, the more degrees of freedom it has; conversely, the simpler the structure of the situation, the less freedom there is in it. In the maturing personality, once the original identity of word and deed has been dissolved, it becomes possible to change one’s mind about carrying out an intention. This is simply another way of noting that there seems no extrinsic reason why a man should have to do what he says he will do. All the more remarkable, then, are those instances when it seems that without external compulsion and even against his own wishes a man must keep his promise, come what may. For example: A military guard, while at his post with another sentry, shot and killed his companion, who was also his friend. Investigation revealed no obvious motive: They had not quarreled and had no reason for enmity. But there had been some odd precursory events. In the squad of which the murderer and his victim were members, there had been an unusual amount of mutual teasing about someone getting shot. In a prankish way, the murderer told his victim that he was going to shoot him. A macabre countdown fol81

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lowed, as he reminded his friend that he had only 36 hours to live, then 24, then 8, and so on. When the fateful moment arrived, they were on guard duty together, and the murderer drew his pistol and shot his friend. The murderer could not explain why he uttered the words, or why he chose this friend as victim. The words, once spoken, seemed to assume an imperative quality of their own. I do not mean that we should accept as a complete explanation that the soldier did it only because he promised to. Doubtless an investigation in depth would be able to fill in some of the gaps and explain the sources and vicissitudes of the aggressive motives that culminated in the destructive act. But we would still face the problem of how the soldier’s spoken word, not even uttered seriously, found its way into action precisely as he had promised. Here are some illustrations from the behavior of a patient who avoided making promises as if afraid of just such an eventuality. Mr. R, a successful stockbroker had, through years of study and experience, developed what he thought was an excellent system for investing in the market. He was eager to try out his system, using his own funds, but found the greatest difficulty in doing so. He would promise himself to follow his plan to the letter, buying and selling by certain market indicators until he had given the system a fair chance. But, in his attempts to carry out his promise, he found himself inadvertently sabotaging his plan. Rather than waiting until matters developed to the point that his plan envisaged, he found himself second-guessing his plan, impulsively “improving” on it by buying or selling on hunches, and by doing so he almost invariably lost money. He could not explain why he had not given his plan a fair chance; he claimed that he did not realize until after the damage was done that he had effectively undermined the plan. Analysis linked this peculiar behavior to his behavior in other areas in which he was afraid to be trapped by any plan, commitment, or promise he might make. He permitted himself to make a commitment with only the greatest unease and then frantically tried to extricate himself, to break loose, to prevent himself from being imprisoned by it. This pattern of behavior reflected the fear of loss of his autonomy or independence, which would be threatened by any kind of commitment. He struggled against his own entirely self-generated plan, as if, once made, such commitment would acquire a motive force external to him, rather like one of his father’s injunctions. Each decision and plan he 82

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made had in it the seeds of a potential compulsion, and, to protect himself, he had to defeat his own plan before it defeated him. A promise or plan was more likely to become a trap for the patient if it was made in anger. On the golf course Mr. R became angry with a foursome that played too closely behind his. There were some angry remarks among his friends, and he thought it would serve one of the approaching golfers right if he were to pick up his ball and keep it. He was about to swear that he would do it, when he suddenly became anxious and started to talk soothingly both to himself and to his companions. He had suddenly “realized” that if he did pick up the ball with the intention of keeping it, nothing anyone said or did would make him give it up, even if he had to fight everyone to hold on to it. Mr. R fantasized the scene and scandal that would result if he were caught brawling on a golf course over someone else’s golf ball, and the danger was real enough for him to back away before he became the victim of his own intentions. A recent clinical report (Isaac, Mayans, and Jaghab, 2006) told of a 42year-old woman who was admitted to a hospital because of angry, agitated, and paranoid behavior. She refused to eat, required intravenous nutritional support, and at first refused to explain why she refused food. Eventually, she disclosed that when she became angry in the emergency room about being admitted, she had made a vow to God that she would not eat or drink in the hospital. It was a sacrifice to God—“Moses did it, and I can do it also.” She declared it to be a religious vow and nobody had the right to suggest that she should break it. Over the course of about three weeks and with the help of lawyers and clergy, she finally was persuaded to eat, that God would forgive her for breaking the vow she had made when so irrationally angry she could not understand the consequences, and that she need not feel guilty.

Promising and Psychopathology: Regression and Magical Thinking Those examples will strike analysts as familiar in some degree and will no doubt suggest dynamic hypotheses. It is the mechanisms that shape such behavior and not the motives that push it, however, that interest me. How 83

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is it that the act of promising becomes the point through which presumably repressed forces threaten to erupt? And how is it that fulfillment of a promise may require either mature reality-testing or magical reinforcement, or perhaps both? Fulfilling any promise (and the style of fulfillment) has as much to do with mediating structures as with initial intentions and even more to do with structures in the instance of promises that take on a life of their own. The mediating structures and capacities chiefly implicated in promising and in fulfillment of promises seem to me to be much the same as those subverted in obsessive–compulsive thought pathology. Of course, promising, intrinsically, is no more pathological than are the doubting, action-delaying, procrastinating, and intellectualizing characteristic of that condition. But all these acts, promising included, because of their origin and structure, are vulnerable to intrusion by unconscious motives and thus liable to subversion to serve neurotic purposes. We are familiar with how doubting or action-delaying, cognitive functions essential to reality-testing, can become symptoms expressing not a patient’s relative autonomy from wishes or external demands but, rather, her failure to come to terms with her deepest drives. So with promising; the capacity to make a contract or a commitment that can express the highest purposes of a human being may also be subverted and become the expression of less acknowledged aspects of one’s personality. We may see here a specific instance of Freud’s (1923) dictum about the close relationship between the superego and the id. The act of promising itself draws on some primitive elements of personality: it has regressive as well as progressive features; and it contains within its structure a chink through which primary processes and magical thinking can return and with them the destruction of the very hard-won, self-determining capacity, of ego autonomy itself. To encapsulate the theory of how secondary process develops out of primary process, we assume it builds on the occurrence of unavoidable delays in gratification of oral needs (Freud, 1911; Rapaport, 1951). The early involuntary experiences of hungry, expectant waiting encourage imagery of satisfaction in the infant’s mind (primary process). As these images do not actually satisfy the need, the infant shows its distress by crying, which effectively attracts the mother and feeding. The images and memories of associated experiences first organized by hallucinatory satisfaction later become organized as thoughts (secondary process). As sec84

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ondary process (thinking) becomes instituted, the capacity for reflective thought permits self-induced and self-regulated delay of impulse toward the state we term the “autonomy of the ego,” relative independence from external and internal stimuli. In this way, we become something more than stimulus–response organisms. But we should not forget that we are still animals and that in the end what matters is what we do, not just what we think. So we find that the growth of structure in the personality leads to the development of an autonomous but, by the same token, a more effectively acting organism in which the elements of delay, thought, choice, and reality testing become modulators, channelers for deciding about acting, not primarily preventers of acting. Through the acquisition of a sense of time and of the ability to predict the outcome of events on the basis of average expectancies and by becoming able to anticipate consequences, we gain a significant degree of control over our future. Because we depend on perceived regularities to map our behavior, it is only natural that we value order, stability, and predictability in our environment, particularly among the others who make up our social environment. Perhaps this need for order as a means of controlling the unknowable future may help to explain the high value civilized communities place on social control; the very idea of culture is expressed in law, tradition, customs, and personal commitments to behave in an orderly and predictable manner. Thus, while one of the tasks of early development is to establish autonomy from inner and outer sources of stimulation, one of the tasks of later development is to prepare for the subsequent recommitting of this relative autonomy, our freedom to act in accordance with our needs and proclivities. Of course, this description of the development of autonomy and its commitment as a two-phased process is accurate only in a rough sense, comparable in precision to the oversimplified description of psychoanalytic treatment as the development of a transference neurosis and its resolution. I have underscored this familiar bit of theory as a prelude to reminding you that the connection between word and action has a history of its own and is not to be taken for granted. It is paradoxical that we refer to the making and keeping of promises as an activity of a very high order, perhaps even the crowning achievement of the mature personality, while its essence, the invariable connection of word and action (as well as the temptations that promises put in our way to accept thoughts as actions) is not at 85

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all characteristic of secondary-process thinking. In fact, the establishment of the reality principle and the attainment of secondary process are based on the capacity to separate thought and action. The capacity to commit oneself fully and freely and to fulfill one’s commitments depends, I believe, on one’s having achieved a significant degree of secondary autonomy, which state implies that all the apparatus of the secondary process is potentially at the disposal of one’s commitment. This capacity has been labeled variously during the brief history of psychoanalytic thinking, but such terms as maturity, genitality, and generativity are conspicuous in the descriptions. Yet it is a paradox that mature commitment should be the ultimate result of a process of development whose immediate goals, ideologically, are quite in the opposite direction, for we are accustomed to thinking of the primary process as the state of mind in which thought and act are indistinguishable, in which an intended action and a completed act, a wish and its fulfillment, are not yet separable. The tasks of early development, mastery of which lead to the acquisition of a sense of reality, consist essentially in establishing these basic discriminations—between self and non-self, between wish and reality, between word and act. Only gradually, as we achieve these basic distinctions, does thinking become possible. And to maintain the sense of reality and efficient adaptation we need to be able to maintain the independence of the realm of thought and the realm of acts. Within this model of the developing ego, what happens when we make a serious promise? Do we not, in effect, compromise the separateness of the realms of thought and action that we were at such pains to achieve? When we promise, after all, we forge a link, a “bond” between our words and our deeds. Not knowing what the future will hold, we yet dare to commit a portion of that future by binding ourselves to act in accord with our intention. In this sense, we purport to determine what the future will hold. I hope I am making clear that I am describing a secondary-process version of omnipotence of thought. To the extent that we are serious about a promise and that it is a far-reaching one, we are giving up the freedom to base our future decisions on our perception of reality at that time. To I shall confine myself, except where I specify otherwise, to the simplest form of promise that might be defined as an act begun with a declaration of intent that is carried out at a later time. Negative promises to avoid some act or generalized promises to be true to some ideal require some additional consideration.



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that extent, we remove our future behavior from the influence of reality testing and judgment; secondary-process functioning itself, as well as secondary autonomy, becomes impaired. For some patients, at least, making a promise is tantamount to contriving and establishing a (possibly) transient compulsive symptom. “Here I stand—I can do no other,” Martin Luther’s heroic stance, has served as moral inspiration for centuries. But the sense of being helpless to alter one’s position or the direction of one’s efforts is also the experience of many people who have become the servants of intentions that have gotten away from them. There often is an expressed or implied threat contained in a compulsive symptom—a warning may enforce the compelled act, for instance, “Touch it (or avoid touching it), or your father will be killed.” The closeness of the formula of promising and the formula of magical thinking can be seen by comparing “I say it and I will do it” and “If I say it, it will happen.” These statements, which are, of course, entirely distinguishable at the level of mature secondary-process functioning, tend to become identical as regression alters the level of functioning toward primary process. Perhaps I should reiterate once more that I do not mean that promising is itself pathological; as Hartmann (1939) pointed out, the experience of “I must” does not necessarily imply pathology. While theories of mental health usually stress the presence of control by the conscious and preconscious ego, or by rationality in general, the normal ego must also be able to yield to “musts.” Hartmann links these “musts” to necessary stable automatisms in ego functioning and to higher order “central regulation.” The capacity to develop automatisms as well as other forms of “regressive adaptation” (p. 77) is necessary for adaptive functioning. Nevertheless, making a promise, I propose, is one of the “detours through the archaic” that Hartmann discussed (p. 78). Because it necessarily reunites thought and action (more precisely ideation and motor discharge), making a serious promise creates a point of vulnerability in psychic functioning, a point of lowered resistance through which unconscious impulses may find an easy route to expression. There is also the enhanced possibility that archaic modes of functioning, such as magical thinking in the area of the promise, will reemerge. Hence I propose that the act of promising itself reestablishes the functional equivalence between thought and action that the maturing ego worked so hard to differentiate during the establishment of secondary 87

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process. To the degree that the conditions of an earlier phase of development replace the accomplishments of a later phase, we can think of promising itself as a regressive act. In most instances, we can concede that this turnabout is a “regression in the service of the ego” (Kris, 1956). However, in any given instance, whether the promise is “in the service of the ego” or the ego has become the servant of the promise is a distinction of some theoretical and practical importance that can only be made in the context of a particular situation. Freud described the phenomenon of a promise that must be kept in his case of the “Rat Man” (Freud, 1909). This obsessional patient’s vow to repay the postal fee to Lieutenant A is a clear example of this kind. Freud accounted for this phenomenon partly as a regression from action to thought: “Preparatory acts become substituted for the final decision, thinking replaces acting and, instead of the substitutive act, some thought preliminary to it asserts itself with all the force of compulsion” (p. 244). To assimilate Freud’s example and part of his explanation within my own frame of reference, one could think of regression from action to thought or from thought to action interchangeably. At least in the circumscribed area of the neurosis a regression has occurred from secondary toward primary process functioning in which thought and action are interchangeable and psychologically indistinguishable. Under these circumstances, a thought well might become invested with the “force of compulsion.”

The use of the term regression in these several senses encourages confusion. Since man is an actor, the direction of psychological processes from percept to act is considered progressive (Freud, 1900). When a thought replaces an act subsequent to it in such a chain of events, we deem the process regression from action to thought. Yet much of the behavior we describe clinically as regressive implies, even if indirectly, that higher functions are replaced by lower order ones and that what should only be thought about is being acted upon. In everyday clinical usage, it is hard to avoid placing a value connotation on t he term regressive, the implication being that there is something “sick” about what is so described. But to use t he ter m accurately in its proper descriptive sense, one must divorce it from such connotations. For instance, based on the assumption that psychological functioning follows the sequence ‡percept‡thought process‡discriminative action, we may term this direction progressive. It follows that a movement in the opposite direction would be regressive. This is not to say that the action that follows any particular thought will necessarily be adaptive. It might just as easily be maladaptive. Thus, in our model of the psychic apparatus, the direction of functioning of a person who after deliberation decides to rob or murder would have to be called progressive in the formal sense, although his actions might from most points of view be considered ill advised.



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The Psychology of Intention Let me pause for an interim summary. Thus far, I have referred to two sources of pressure in the keeping of promises. The first is an omnibus factor, including all those forces that affect mature people acting in a responsible way in a social context. Shared value systems, reasonable self-interest, recognized obligation, and honor are significant terms in this area, theories of which are more common in social psychology and sociology than in psychoanalysis. A second factor is the structure of the act of promising itself. Because of the reuniting of word and act that is characteristic both of promising and of primary process, a point of low resistance to penetration by unconscious motives is established, resulting in some instances in a compulsive quality to the fulfilling of the promise. This second factor can be approached from another point of view, for promising can be subsumed both logically and psychologically under the more general heading of intention. A promise is an intentional statement —the first phase of an act whose execution is suspended. The psychology of such interrupted acts has been intensively studied by Lewin (1935) and his student Ovsiankina (1976), as I discussed in chapter 4, noting that Freud had observed as early as 1882 that only thoughts that had been broken off during the day appeared in his dreams. An intentional statement, whether a promise, a threat, or any other of its forms, has the character of a not yet completed task that leaves behind a tension system that continues to press for discharge. Such a tension system may pose a special problem for the defense and control capacities of the ego, for it is ever ready to serve as a preconscious scaffold available to be used by some unconscious wish that is pressing for discharge. I believe that the promise acquires this character through its structure—it being not only a verbal statement but an anticipator of, or a preparation for, and by that token the inciter of, a beginning phase of an action. A promise of future action is an interrupted act. It may seem to follow that we should not need to make special efforts to remember having made a promise as if it were a mislaid object (that is, absent a counter-wish to forget it), for the promise itself, like a wish, ought to remind us of its presence. Its undischarged tension system should itself be a strong spur to memory. Clearly, promises, like wishes, can be repressed and, like them, can return. Many of us have had the experience, 89

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of having an almost forgotten promise return, unbidden, to mind. Sometimes the reminder is timely, but often it occurs too late for appropriate action. Whether timely or not, I believe it usually is accompanied by a rush of anxiety bordering on panic that contains both motor and autonomic components; we scramble to find our appointment book, while a clutching feeling in the chest or gut tells us that what has returned is a farfrom-neutral memory. Even when the appointment book confirms that the meeting we feared we had missed is not until tomorrow, we are reminded unpleasantly that we have mixed feelings about attending it. Of course, it is a matter for fuller consideration to determine the degree to which material associated with drives or with superego is involved in such instances of painful recall. The semi-forgotten promise does not simply cease to exist. I assume that it remains as a memory with an associated tension system, albeit an attenuated one, and with a peculiar readiness to be revived in full strength at some subsequent time if the right circumstances arise. An example of “the right circumstances” might include hearing that the airplane we almost boarded has crashed—news that seems to gather to itself memories of previously indifferent events and through retrospective construction we experience them as traumatic after the fact. A similar fate may overtake certain promises we make to ourselves. Recall that the part of the self to whom we make promises originally was another person, who, through introjection and identification, has long since become part of the self. The “self system,” while a quite stable affair under many of life’s vicissitudes, under certain conditions can become disassociated once again. This phenomenon is seen most clearly in severe depressions when introjects split off and reappear as their original components. The self-reproaches characteristic of severe depressions often are based on old promises to the self and to others that have not been kept, or that the patient recalls were not kept sufficiently or in the right spirit. It seems likely that the residual tension systems of old and abandoned “intentions,” ones that when formed might not even have had the force of a literal promise to the self or intentions that were allowed to lapse when they no longer Comparing neglected promises with the unfinished business that provides the day residue for dreams, the durability of promises suggests that the promises may have considerably more tension associated with them as well as a more coherent structure.



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seemed convenient or important, may be seized upon and converted retrospectively, through displacement and the mechanisms associated with unconscious guilt, into broken promises of enormous and unforgivable import. It is as if the superego in depression seizes upon the still faintly charged memory traces of such unfulfilled promises and abandoned intentions and revives them once again in more than original strength. In the regression associated with depression, the promise forgotten becomes transformed into the “promise faithlessly broken” and may be experienced as unredeemable and so add to the crushing burden of guilt.

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7 Implicit Promising and the Implicit Promise

Analysts are rarely consulted by persons, such as the one I described in chapter 5, who explicitly make gratuitous promises and then fail to keep them, while at the same time protesting that they are sincere in promising. Psychoanalyis can be helpful to them and, as we have seen, analysts can learn from them about the psychology of promising. Far more common are two other groups of persons who, as it were, are afflicted by unkept promises. One group includes people who are pursued by a nagging sense that something has gone wrong in life, that they were “promised” much more than life has delivered, and they feel justifiably let down, embittered and entitled to get, however they can, what they have been denied. Another group (and there is some overlap between the two groups) includes the persons who are regarded by friends, family, teachers and employers , as showing “great promise” but who fail to deliver on the high expectations that the nomination evokes. Both groups wear an aura of disappointment and resentment, but only the second includes a circle wider than just the person himself.

The Person to Whom Life Has Failed to Keep Its Promises Through talent and hard work, members of the first group generally achieve notable professional, business, and social success. Often they are regarded by family, friends, and colleagues as having a “good life, ” as having “made it.” But to them, life is not satisfying; their achievements seem to them in 93

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retrospect less worthwhile than they seemed in anticipation. The recognition they are awarded is somehow for the wrong accomplishment and, in any case, is insufficient. These people feel disappointed in what they have done and are unexcited, even uninterested, by what they can look forward to. They may have been the brightest students in class and thought most likely to succeed. But, in a way that they cannot easily define, they feel they have been let down by life and have not become what they were supposed to be; and, as they know they were intended for great things, they also may feel that somehow they have failed to redeem their “promise.” If I were to refer such a patient to a colleague I think she would expect to find a person in a “midlife crisis,” an ideal patient for analysis. After all, when an analyst comes across a prospective patient who is bright and articulate, who has enjoyed reasonable success at a career, who bears the outward signs of a fair social adjustment, but who is dissatisfied with his life, the first thought is likely to be, “Why not analysis?” Indeed, as far as it goes, that brief description would fit many patients we might characterize as “neurotic.” That is, they suffer mainly from conflict-based inhibition and therefore could be helped considerably by analysis to fulfill their “promise.” The “catch,” though, is in the word suffer: the patient may have significant psychopathology from which he does not suffer and does not complain about directly. I propose that some persons who appear to be analyzable and who ask for analysis nevertheless should not be taken into analysis without careful consideration of the possible hazards. Schafer (2003) has labeled as disappointedness chronic disappointment that becomes “a fixed, hardened attitude attitude toward life in general” and he discusses the several dynamics that could lead to it. His case discussion demonstrates that the condition, including its characterological elements, is analyzable (pp. 14–36). The key to the analyzability of these patients, based in part on Schafer’s description, but mainly on my own experience, lies in the severity of the narcissistic element in a patient’s character structure: the more exclusive and “hardened” the narcissistic orientation, the more difficult will be the analysis and the less the likelihood of success. Consider the subgroup of prospective patients who complain of generalized disappointment and who have sufficient painful and disabling symptoms that seem to account for their lives being unfulfilling. Ironically, it is not because their presenting condition is unanalyzable that they 94

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prove to be problematic; to the contrary, aspects of it are eminently analyzable. I do not caution about the persons with fragile defenses who might regress beyond the point of safety. Most analysts are familiar enough with the danger that patients may decompensate in analysis. After all, any treatment that is psychoeffective, under some circumstances, may also be psychonoxious. Neither do I warn against taking into analysis patients whose defensive structures seem inalterably rigid. My concern is not with the patients who are unanalyzable, but, rather, with those for whom the result of a seemingly “successful” analysis may be socially disastrous. The class of persons I refer to are those whose “core” character structure is basically “narcissistic,” in ways that I will describe, and who also have chronic symptoms of neurotic conflict that are organized into what amounts to a “superimposed” neurosis, one that typically is mild and usually obsessive–compulsive in form. In the initial interviews, the analyst will find the prospective patient attractive, even charming. He is not necessarily seductive, though that thought will occur to the analyst. He is a bit aloof, not readily forthcoming, perhaps intriguingly mysterious, giving the impression that there is more there than meets the eye, but he answers questions fully. There is nothing alarming in his background as he tells about it, no obvious psychopathic tendencies, no cruelty to animals. He has been successful in life to this point, is likely to be in a profession or in business and able to afford a private fee. If he is in an appropriate profession and applies to an institute, he may even seem acceptable as a candidate; if subjected to no more searching evaluation, he may seem ideally suited for analysis and to be welcomed into the field as a promising colleague. In his analysis, which may go quite smoothly at first, he may complain mildly about a frank neurotic symptom, perhaps about the obsessive thoughts that occasionally crowd out of his mind things he would rather think about. More likely, he will be uncertain if he has a focal complaint; his “symptoms” tend to come and go. He is concerned mainly about a vague sense of being inhibited, “held back.” Although to outward appearance he is successful, he feels that his life is unfulfilling. He has a capacity To highlight the common elements among members of this subclass of patients, and out of concern for confidentiality, the clinical material I present is a composite of several patients. For convenience, I use the male pronoun throughout, and I state specifically if I intend to refer to one rather than the other gender.



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for hard and productive work when he feels like it; he generally gets what he strives for and is appropriately, if temporarily, proud of his real accomplishments. However, the results of his efforts turn out not to be what he wanted; but he is not sure what it is that he wanted. Whatever it is, it is elusive; it feels always just beyond his reach. He has never found satisfaction in intimate relationships; he tends to turn off when, for the moment, he has had enough. He has to force himself to remember that his partner too has needs; if he does remember, he makes allowance for them grudgingly or with little grace. He has an easy way with women. They find him interesting, even intriguing, a bit mysterious, but after a successful courtship he finds them boring and wants to move on. He also is bored with, and abides resentfully, the restrictions imposed on his “freedom” by the rules and regulations that most of us follow as a matter of course as the price of living in an orderly society. He has a fussy distaste for irksome restrictions and may even feel they are directed personally at him, just to be annoying. If he is accepted as a candidate by an analytic institute, the administrative staff soon regards him as a nuisance as he requires more than ordinary prodding to get his reports in and to meet other requirements. He claims to have friends, but has none of long duration, and no “best friend.” The people he refers to as his friends, that is, the people he spends some time with, mostly are younger than he and look up to him as an authority; indeed, he speaks on almost every topic with authority. They tend to call him; he rarely initiates social contacts. The analyst’s sense of the patient’s early life is that he was a lonely child. Indeed, he was raised for some time as an only child because he was so much older than his siblings; they were in awe of him. He regards himself as self-raised. His parents were immigrants, mother barely fluent in English, and they were struggling to make a success of a small business. His recollections of childhood were that it was uneventful, “Nothing happened; Things came easily,” including school. The neighborhood was in transition, and he was discouraged from associating with children of other ethnicities. After a few painful encounters with rougher kids, that restriction did not bother him. He avoided sports and spent his time with books. He rapidly gained the sense that he was superior to others and recalls always feeling contemptuous of his parents. In analysis, he disdainfully imitated his father’s accent whenever he spoke of him. There was never any doubt in the family that he was college bound, although his parents 96

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had to stretch themselves financially to supplement the scholarships he easily won. He took it all as a matter of course. As the analysis continues, the analyst comes to see that the bit of neurosis the patient complains of, his mildly obsessive symptoms, are not so troublesome as such, but are objectionable because they restrict his “will”; they inhibit him from doing what he wants to do when he wants to do it. The analyst gets the impression that the neurotic elements are not grounded in his patient’s character. That is, they do not seem to be of his essence but, rather, seem to be superimposed on his personality. They seem to be a confining “veneer” over, rather than an expression of, his narcissistic character structure that increasingly is becoming evident. As we know, neurotic symptoms yield more quickly to analysis than do malformations of character, and patients usually experience relief from pain long before they have had a chance to tackle, or before they may even feel any need to face, the tougher issues that are imbedded in character. Let us consider the situation of the typical patient we accept into analysis. We expect of any “suitable” patient that his initial motivation to be rid of pain soon will become replaced by more intrinsic motives, including curiosity about how his mind works. We also expect to see an increase in the patient’s feelings of attachment, both to analyzing as a newly vital endeavor, and to the analyst, the latter attachment composed of two fairly distinguishable elements, a regressive dependency based in transference and a realistically valued, and trusting relationship with the analyst. As the constraints of the neurosis loosen, the patient naturally feels better, even “well,” and his life expands. Although analyzing has freed him, more or less, of the complaints that brought him to analysis in the first place, he does not rise from the couch and walk away pleased with his “cure.” He has found that psychoanalysis has helped him to discover goals he previously could not have considered as well as to reevaluate earlier held goals, and facilitates the reaching of those goals that retain their appeal. In the course of becoming relieved of his presenting complaints, the patient discovers a new and less complicated way of relating to himself and so finds new reasons to be less than satisfied with how he deals with himself, with others, and with the world. We might put it that, now that the patient has come to see himself and his situation more clearly, he no longer is willing to remain as a mildly improved version of as he was; he can now envision himself in a new stance and wants to be there. Another way of looking at 97

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it is that the patient discovers new possibilities of being, new postures in relation to himself and to the world. How is it with the more problematic patient to whom life has not yet redeemed its “promises?” In contrast, after only enough analysis to free him substantially from inhibition, he sees little need to remain in analysis. Even if he can be prevailed on to remain, the motivation for change, of which one can see in retrospect there was barely enough to begin with, is now so diminished that not much more seems to happen; expecting little good to come of more analyzing, he finds attending sessions burdensome. He no longer complains about neurotic flaws and is now impatient to leave. He would reject, and would resent, any implication of smugness, that is, that he feels pleased with himself or is happy with his state of affairs. His mood is something closer to “grimly satisfied,” a mood that does not suggest that he has found whatever it was he was after, only that he is now freer to search for it, and he believes he is not likely to find it by searching “inside.” He is sure only that he wants more of something “out there” to make him feel complete and he is increasingly impatient to get about finding it. He grows more impatient as he becomes convinced that, for reasons of his own, the analyst is holding him back. If the patient is a candidate, he may feel that his cases bore him; he regards himself already an analyst and does not need to rely any longer on the opinions of supervisors. His supervisors found him bright and promising at first, but then puzzling. The first patient assigned to him left after a few weeks complaining that he was “cold.” Somewhat taken aback by this rejection, the candidate turned on more charm and three of the next four patients remained with him. A couple of his patients seem to be doing all right clinically. He is smart, can listen to his patients when he wants to, and has a small repertoire of the right things to say. He shows little compassion for patients’ pain; mostly he seems to feel they just ought to get on with it. He does not seem to want anything from his supervisors but recognizes that he has to put in his time with them, and he does so none too gracefully. Mostly he just listens to their suggestions with barely concealed condescension. None feel any positive response from him, let alone gratitude. I have also sketched here, of course, the history of the attitude of our field toward “cure,” or at least toward the goals of treatment, and the shift from rapid relief from hysterical symptoms to analysis of the ego and character, from relief from pain to personality change.



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As he waits, impatiently, to be released from his analysis, he even rejects the idea that it has helped him to make any gains, or that the analyst might have had anything to do with them. He speaks as if he had sprung fully-grown from the head of Zeus. While he feels he has little to be grateful for, he hopes, pro forma, that by saying so he has not hurt the analyst’s feelings or offended him. As he reconsiders the matter, maybe the analysis has helped him to be more honest; he notices that he now finds it easier to tell people what he thinks without pulling punches. The analyst wonders silently, “Since he feels that way, why doesn’t he just quit? The institute does not require reporting and there would be no record of how he ended his analysis, only that he ended it. What keeps him?” The analyst is concerned that if he raised the issue in those terms, the patient might take it as a challenge and quit. The analyst recognizes the countertransference in this fantasy; he feels provoked to counteract against the patient for his disdain. However, he cannot think of a way to address the matter analytically. Thus, the patient’s belief that he is forced to remain unwillingly stays in the air. Still, he seems to want something from the analyst, although he does not name it. The patient finally deduces that he has been waiting for the analyst to acknowledge him in his new presentation and accept him on his own terms. He states that he would prefer to leave with the blessing of the analyst, but, after allowing some time for the analyst to come around, he concludes regretfully that his affirmation is not essential. It becomes clearer that, while he “believes in analysis” for others, he regards it as a bothersome requirement for himself. He knows that he always has functioned at a level above most people and he would not settle for being merely “normal.” Although he is happy enough to be rid of the “few inhibitions” he mentioned at the outset of his analysis and feels good about having mastered them, as he looks back on it, they were not all that troubling. He does not quite say that he did it alone but seems ready to challenge the analyst if he claimed to have had some part in it. Unlike an ordinary patient, who is inclined to give the analyst too much credit for his progress—so much so that the analyst is tempted to say, “But I couldn’t have done it without you”—our problematic patient is averse to owing anything to anyone. I must hedge that last statement; it is rather that he prefers not to be indebted to any living person. Although the patient always was an omnivorous and searching reader, the analyst now suspects that he was searching for authorities he could respect but who also were sufficiently 99

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distant or sufficiently defunct so as not to be able to challenge his version of their thoughts, or to protest his wrapping himself in their cloak, as his teachers and supervisors would like to do when his pompous declarations cry out for confrontation. He may anoint himself as a disciple or the intellectual heir (it may not be clear which) of a fairly obscure theorist of a generation back who “had it right.” He quotes this authority liberally with the effect of putting an end to discussion since no one else is familiar with what that authority said or why one should genuflect before him, but no one is familiar enough with his work to argue. I should note that some problematic patients do not press for immediate release from the analysis once their symptoms are relieved. Their main motive for staying on, however, like that of the patient just sketched, is less to discover more about themselves than to gain the unqualified approval of the analyst. They want endorsement, not analysis. My impression is that this pattern, which also involves a transference-based wanting something from the analyst, is more amenable to analysis than is the dismissiveness reflected in the pattern of demanding early release, even though that too involves transference. To return to the situation of one of the more difficult of the problematic patients in this group, only after the inhibitions imposed by the neurosis had been relieved did it become clear to the analyst that the symptomatic relief the patient experienced also had some undesirable side effects. The analyst could see now that, although “the neurosis” had imposed some painful restrictions on the patient, it also had served several socially valuable functions. First, it dampened the expansionist, even omnivorous, proclivities of the patient’s core narcissistic character. The patient had complied resentfully with the inhibitions that kept him from reaching out at any moment to grab whatever seemed attractive and worth having. And his obsessive uncertainty, “Is that really what I want?” also held him back. Second, the neurosis, through its connections to objects in fantasy, seemed also to provide indirect connection to objects in reality. To be sure, as these connections were based on fleeting, unstable transferences, they made for distorted, disappointing, and short-lived connections. Nonetheless, these temporary connections were “real,” and they confronted him with the hurt feelings, disappointments, and anger of others who felt mistreated by him; thus they reminded the patient painfully of his own humanity. They forced on him some awareness that all of us have a common fate and, fitfully, they 100

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permitted (or forced) a degree of empathy with others. He did not welcome these painful reminders that we are all more or less alike, and he resisted learning anything about himself from them. Rather, as he did when feeling wounded by the recriminations of a woman he had callously jilted, he resolved not to get involved with “that kind of woman” again. As he always was able to blame the failure of a relationship on some shortcoming of the other person, he could hide from himself his own part in the difficulties. Once freed to some extent from the restraint of neurosis, he felt even less need for relationship; his fantasy of self-sufficiency both diminished the possibility of making empathic contact with others and left him an even more isolated and self-centered person. Perhaps in compensation, he enlarged his self-image by awarding himself the cachet of “one who has been analyzed.” Now he is even more entitled to the privileges that go with being an “exception.” He is exempt from ordinary life demands not only because of who he is, but also because he has suffered and has been “cleansed,” that is, analyzed. The analyst thought to himself that the way the patient viewed himself was analogous to the experience of being “born again” described by persons who have undergone a religious conversion. Unlike them, however, the patient felt under no moral obligation to evangelize; he was not about to bring the “word” to others. The self-righteousness and entitlement that always lurked just out of reach now were close enough to grasp. Before they were loosened by analysis, the inhibitions imposed by his neurosis, and the doubting and sense of uncertainty that his obsessionalism inflicted, kept his social behavior within bounds so that, with the superficially good manners of his social class, he appeared on brief acquaintance to be a “good person.” Now, no longer trammeled by doubt, the patient’s self-assurance is unbounded and his behavior more heedless. The vague sense of “promise” that seemed so attractive in this promising person on first acquaintance now seems to be only what was promised to him rather than a promise to be fulfilled by him.

The Promising, but Problematic, Patient as an Analytic Candidate When such a person applies to an analytic institute, the admissions committee may find his presentation troubling. The applicant is likely to announce, expecting applause, that he is applying to this institute because 101

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he has done his homework; he is seeking the “best” institute in which to obtain the “best” training” to become the “best” analyst possible. This laudable, if extravagantly put, objective may conceal a malignant need for narcissistic perfection, one fueled by a hidden, uncertain sense of worth. The applicant seems driven by the not wholly unconscious formula, “If I achieve it (perfection) then I can no longer be denied the adulation I crave and deserve.” These candidates are not lazy and they frequently are bright. They work hard and acquire cognitive mastery with relative ease. With less ease, they may even learn to simulate modesty and diffidence. But they are not satisfied with the intellectual pleasure that comes with understanding, or the pleasure that comes with helping another to achieve mastery or to resume growth; their goal is extrinsic to learning and helping. They expect “payoff” in the form of constant reassurance of their greatness and appreciation of their every deed. Interestingly, some such applicants, as well as ordinary persons with this character structure, do not seem to be greedy in the everyday sense of being driven to seek more and more wealth. When they do seek wealth, it seems more to serve to reassure them of self-worth than as an opening to a better life.

Detecting the “Narcissistic Core” of the Problematic Applicant Here are some signs of potential trouble that an initial interviewer can observe and evaluate when a seemingly promising person applies to a psychoanalytic institute:





1. The person’s desire for training is motivated more by what he wants to be or become rather than by what he wants to do or by the process of getting there, for example, “I want to have been analyzed,” or “I want to be designated officially as an analyst,” rather than, “I want to be able to do analysis” or “I want to have the experience of being in analysis.” 2. The person shows relatively little curiosity about himself, how his mind works, or, for instance, why he behaved in that odd way during an incident he described when telling about his life. If he is not obsessional, he may display little doubt about himself or what he might make of his life. 3. He wants to be analyzed by an analyst who is a “big man” in the field, one whose “greatness” he might absorb by association. 102

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4. If his desire for psychoanalysis is motivated by pain, the pain tends to be less a consequence of conflict, than to a sense of undeserved imperfection. 5. As he tells of his relationships, they include many transitory ones, broken off after disappointment; he describes few, if any, reciprocal, nonexploitative relationships. He may have difficulty describing a “best friend,” if he even admits to having one; and his account of a significant relationship does not impress the interviewer that he is able to know a whole person, “warts and all,” one not idealized. The interviewer will feel either that he is being kept out of the object world of the applicant or that the applicant’s object world is indeed as thinly populated as he all too accurately conveys. The applicant cannot convince the interviewer that he knows any other person intimately because he doesn’t. As might be expected, the applicant’s stories mostly convey a low sense of trust in others. His sexuality, narrowly defined, may be technically unimpaired, but he uses sex primarily to conquer, to achieve an end, rather than to enhance intimacy with a valued other. Of course, when some degree of neurosis is also present, as in the persons I described earlier, symptoms and inhibitions may impair sexual performance as they ordinarily do. 6. I believe this advice is sound for the evaluation of prospective analytic patients whether for training or not. I must admit, however, that, if you follow the advice, you still may not identify all such problematic patients in advance. In particular, this approach is not proof against conscious deception. (Later in this chapter, I offer a spectacular example of such a failure.)

To return to the problems such applicants may make for the institute: When an accepted applicant advances in training, the progression committee hears feedback from courses, and particularly from supervisors, about the candidate’s competitive attitude toward peers and patients. He seems to have difficulty, of which he seems unaware, making empathic contact with his patients and tends to show an absence of “heart.” He has no difficulty in the realm of ideas. He puzzles his supervisors by performing inconsistently. If not unduly frustrated, as by a patient who requires more interest and empathy than the candidate can muster, he seems to do reasonably well. He has learned to say the right words at about the right time, but the supervisor cannot figure where the words come from; they seem to be learned responses rather than emerging spontaneously from the candidate’s empathic engagement with the patient. But when frustrated either by a patient’s persistent withholding or by a patient’s accurate sense 103

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that the candidate is not fully “there,” the candidate tends to punish the patient by withdrawing into aloof silence, which he then rationalizes as abstemious technique. This sort of feedback from patients and supervisors could be of inestimable value to the candidate if he were to take it seriously, but he usually ignores it. He responds within his general stance that he is misunderstood and insufficiently appreciated. Although one would expect him to bring these confrontations to his analysis, by that time either he has withdrawn from his analysis or no longer views it, if he ever did view it so, as a source of support and insight. As we know, institutes, like other schools, are reluctant to revisit their admission decisions in search of possible error. Unless a candidate of questionable merit commits egregious errors in his work, indulges in obvious breaches of professional conduct, or is socially unbearable, the institute will prefer to pass him along. Institutes commonly play for time as they ponder what to do about an insufficiently talented or psychologically unprepared candidate; they generally hope that more supervision or more analysis will cure “the problem.” If the candidate merely is a slow learner, this conservative approach may work. Relatively untalented candidates put up with being held back from graduating for some time, accustomed as they are by now to being convoyed as long as they are polite and plug along uncomplainingly. Not so with our problematic candidate. By this time, neurotic inhibition no longer retards him. As part of his new-found freedom, he does not put up with faculty members who fail to endorse his specialness. He may even hint at becoming litigious if he feels held back unjustly. By this time, of course, the faculty will have accumulated grave doubts about him. However, they realize that their academic records are inadequate to make a winnable case for dismissal. They quail at the prospect of counseling him to drop out and may finally consider that they have no choice but to follow the prudent course of graduating him with the hope that then he will go away. It is perhaps fortunate that the problematic candidate may feel so disgusted by the faculty’s “dithering” and their failure to honor him that he may express his disdain by resigning. Of course, nowadays only a few psychiatrists, psychologists, or social workers aspire to become analysts. I believe it to be a salutary effect of the decreasing prestige of psychoanalysis that becoming an analyst no longer is the only conceivable course of advancement for an ambitious professional. 104

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People who enter the field now generally have an intrinsic interest in learning how the mind works. They apply because the teachers and supervisors from whom they have learned the most were analysts, and they have seen how their teaching benefits patients. Probably, they have profited also from personal therapy or analysis. However, problematic persons still show up in our consulting rooms. They hope to escape the constraints of neurosis but have no complaints about their character. A colleague to whom I mentioned I was writing about this topic said that one of his early cases fit my description precisely. He became deeply concerned when effective analyzing relaxed the patient’s inhibitions enough to reveal the previously unseen possibilities that lurked in the patient’s personality. The patient dropped out soon thereafter, and the analyst followed his subsequent career in the newspapers with horrified fascination. When he heard that the former patient had died, his first thought was, “Was it by drug or by bullet?”

Problems Arise as These Analysts Age

Problems for Analytic Education

Over the years, I have observed that when they graduate, the formerly promising but problematic candidate seems to be less interested in analyzing than in exploiting the status that becoming an analyst confers. Of course, since becoming an analyst no longer guarantees status, it is less likely to attract the status seeker, but some still may come for that reason. If the graduate does remain in the field and seeks to rise through the usual career paths an institute provides, the institute probably will allow him to teach. He is, after all, bright and knowledgeable, especially about theory. Ironically, he may become more like the teachers he once reviled as holding him back than like the revolutionary he once held himself to be. As a teacher, he does not age gracefully; he neither welcomes the coming generations nor sees that his immortality actually lies in helping them to become all they can be. Rather, as an aging teacher, he becomes increasingly bitter as he realizes that his time is passing and that, on this mistaken path of helping others, he may never achieve the personal greatness he believes he deserves. He may try to deny to these others what he was unable to grasp for himself, and so uses his power as a member of a faculty to hold back the revolution that the coming on of the next generation signifies to him. 105

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If this dire picture fits with your experience, you may remind me that not all such problematic graduates turn out that way. Some seem to relish remaining outliers so as to bedevil the establishment. They use their brilliance selectively, often picking on a flaw in conventional practice or theory that they write about and speak about at every opportunity. What they have to say may be a contribution to the field, even an important one. As in their student days, however, they offer their trenchant comments not so much to raise the awareness of their colleagues as to promote themselves as anti-establishment prophets. Since they clearly have something to say, we try to listen to them respectfully even as we try to ignore their misbehavior. They exploit the status they earn through their intellectual prowess, while their public standing increases so that the institute can neither ignore nor exclude them. Some may indulge in antics, both intellectual and social, that are scandalous and invite the kind of headlines that make the more subdued among us cringe with embarrassment. Unlike those I described first who become stern upholders of revealed truth as embodied in “standards,” not only do these teachers not age gracefully, they may not age at all; they are likely to burn out, figuratively or literally. Their antics, intellectual or social, become so extreme that, eventually, institute, society, or nature imposes the appropriate sanction. While their careers are spectacular, they generally spread themselves on the larger field so that they do not remain merely a local problem for the institute. Indeed, once the former problematic candidate has been graduated, he may find that the institute is too small a container for his ambitions. He may decide to advance himself by seeking office in a national or international organization. If that path seems to require too much kowtowing in the local institute and society, he may find it easier and more attractive to start his own shop and recruit students and followers. He may advertise that his institute, unlike the others, is based on sound educational principles and he guarantees that it will not stifle the genius of brilliant students as do the conformity-worshiping, hidebound, “traditional” institutes. I am referring, of course, to tendencies and generalities and intend no reference to any local situation, current or past. The history of organizations, not just analytic organizations, is replete with examples of personal and theoretical differences that lead to splitting. And there are complementary forces that may in time lead to reunion. In each instance, I believe the personality dynamics of at least one centrally located individual guided 106

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the actions of the organization. Nevertheless, I think that there would have to be a convergence of organizational dynamics and the professional and intellectual convictions, and personality dynamics of key individuals, in order either to disrupt or to reintegrate an established organization.

Problems for Terminating the Analysis of a Once Promising but Problematic Patient I did not intend to wander this far into the thickets of organizational dynamics and shall return now to the clinic, where I claim some expertise. My major recent interest is in the termination of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, an interest that culminated in the writing of Endings and Beginnings (Schlesinger, 2005), from which the following ideas are summarized. I view termination not as a fancy and proprietary synonym for ending psychotherapy or psychoanalysis but as only one of the ways in which a treatment may end, though by far the best way. I distinguish termination as the process through which an analysis “all comes together.” Its special feature is the working through of the patient’s fantasy that, to keep the gains he has made, he must maintain his relationship to the analyst rather than analyze that dependency. Too frequently, as we know to our sorrow, and with the problematic cases in particular, it does not “all come together” at the end. That is why the process of termination requires special attention in all analytic education, not only about the treatment of problematic patients. Still, these patients are particularly problematic when it comes to ending analysis. As I have described, some do not regard analysis as a collaborative project; they take matters into their own hands when they feel they have had enough. Even so, although the analyst might prefer that the patient invest in more analyzing, it may be possible, given a willing patient, to help him to terminate this episode of analysis. The devil is in that unruly detail, “the willing patient.” I have not experienced a patient of this sort, who, once relieved of pain, was willing to remain in analysis long enough to deal with the issues embedded in his (narcissistic) character structure. It is doubly difficult to work on termination, if we conceive of termination as helping the patient separate the gains he has made from fantasies, that they rest on transference when the patient resists even recognizing some aspects of transference. Some of the patients I have described 107

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credit themselves with any gains and, at most, thank the analyst for renting them the couch on which they could treat themselves. Have I really been saying that the job is impossible? Hardly. The task is difficult, certainly, but not impossible. If an analyst has fully evaluated the risks and the possibilities of working with a patient, the analyst will be in a position to estimate whether or not to offer the patient a chance at analysis. If the analyst thinks him analyzable but too difficult, perhaps he will refer him to another analyst better suited to the task. In any event, the analyst must recognize from the outset the importance of addressing the relationship of the neurotic elements in the patient to the narcissistic character. That central issue must not remain unaddressed until the ending is near. For all patients, termination is too important a matter to be left until the end of the analysis. Indeed, I believe the analyst should have the idea of termination in mind throughout the entire course of the analysis and especially when evaluating the patient for analysis. Estimating how the treatment will end is as important an issue as whether or not the patient is analyzable, and yet it is one often ignored by beginners. To borrow an aphorism from surgery, getting in is easy; getting out can be a problem. The analyst knows that all treatments end, one way or another, but it is essential to ask, “Does this treatment I am about to undertake seem terminable?” How might one answer that question? I assume for this discussion that we are considering the evaluation of a prospective analytic patient by a candidate who has a knowledgeable supervisor to consult. We may expect that there were many clues of the sort I sketched above both in the patient’s presentation and in his history. The stigmata of the patient’s narcissistic orientation will be more or less apparent, but the candidate may overlook or minimize their significance because of the understandable attraction of working with a bright and articulate person who says he feels impeded by something, a something that keeps him from becoming all he can be, from fulfilling his promise. Perhaps attributing his distress to “some thing” might be a clue, implying that he attributes cause to a force that is not quite an aspect of himself. That way of putting it, thinks the candidate, however, is too ordinary to serve as a marker without further supporting evidence. “Anyway,” thinks the candidate, “He looks like a natural for psychoanalysis. After all, everyone has a ‘narcissistic core’” to some degree. Is there not such a thing as healthy narcissism?” I have put these questions as an 108

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eager beginner might put them if afraid his supervisor is about to take an attractive case away from him. In any event, the supervisor is likely to tell him that the answer to all these questions is, “Yes, the attractive patient’s neurotic symptoms would make him a ‘natural’ if they were in a less problematic character setting. Still, it might be reasonable to go ahead provided you are aware of the likely difficulties ahead. Especially to estimate the possible difficulties in terminating, you would do well to look further into the patient’s history of relationships with an eye to predicting the kind of investment or commitment he is likely to make to the analysis and to you, and when and how he is likely to want to separate.” I agree with this thoughtful supervisor. Assuming the supervisor’s impression from the initial study of the patient is somewhere between reasonably encouraging and not altogether disqualifying, there is still the matter of how to keep the issue of terminability in mind throughout the analysis. Terminability involves maintaining focus on the patient’s character as well as on his symptoms, and especially on how symptoms and character interact with each other. It is particularly important to note the way the symptoms and inhibitions function both to keep the patient’s narcissism in check and also to keep this trait hidden from the patient. In short, character analysis must proceed apace with symptom analysis; if we anticipate the problems of termination, we hope not to discover them only when the patient decides to take his leave of us. Perhaps you are thinking that such obvious psychopathology could not be masked so completely by neurotic inhibition that a competent interviewer would see no signs of it while evaluating the patient for suitability. However, in the cases I summarized in my sketch of a composite patient, the potential problems were not at all obvious to the analysts doing the evaluation. Possibly they were not looking in the right place; possibly they did not follow up a line of inquiry that had been opened; or possibly, perhaps because they had seen so many attractive and “promising” features, they lowered the index of suspicion. We might consider that they might not have wanted to discover disqualifying features that might keep them from working with an otherwise suitable case. My best guess includes all the above, and, with hindsight, I believe that paying more attention to the I have offered a fuller treatment of this issue elsewhere (Schlesinger, 2005).



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degree of investment in the patient’s relationships, and the quality of these relationships, would have given the interviewer some inkling about likely developments in the analysis. Common to these patients was lack of empathy for others, or outright indifference to the feelings of others, especially if what it took to maintain a relationship conflicted with the patients’ other interests or ambitions.

Another Variety of the Problematic “Promising” Patient All the patients who comprise the composite case example of a person who was disappointed because life had promised him much but had delivered little were male and mainly were obsessive in chacterological orientation. Occasionally, one encounters a “promiser” who does not fit this mold. In the immediate instance, the patient was female and had an apparently hysterical overlay to her core narcissistic character. The patient was young, energetic, and bright, and, although intense and emotionally volatile, she seemed adequately reflective and in touch with her inner world. Altogether, she appeared to be an attractive patient with many unfulfilled capacities who, for neurotic reasons, seemed to get in her own way and to spoil her opportunities. She seemed interesting to know, related herself easily to the interviewing analyst, seemed frank and open in telling her history, and was as clear as she could be about why her life thus far had been so disappointing. Psychoanalysis seemed to be the obvious way to release her from her self-defeating ways. The patient was self-supporting. Professionally trained as an organizational consultant, she was employed in a responsible position by a large firm. Her main problem, she said ruefully, is that she was at loose ends. She had recently divorced her husband because she no longer respected him; he was a failed project. She had failed to convert a promising boyfriend into a proper husband. She considered herself to be a devoted parent. In contrast, her husband attended to the children fitfully at best, and lackadaisically most of the time. Although she despaired that he ever would be an adequate parent, she felt guilty, nevertheless, about depriving her small children of contact with their father. She hoped to gain from analysis the ability to choose a better man. She was also beset by a variety of nonspecific anxieties that she was able to master through submissiveness and by being “goody-goody,” and with the help of small amounts of appropriate medication. 110

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During the diagnostic evaluation, the analyst caught some signals that there might be trouble ahead. One signal was that, in the second interview, the patient matter of factly announced that she had been thinking about getting back together with her former husband. She did not voice spontaneously that this plan might conflict with one of her stated goals, to understand why she seemed unable to attract or be attacted by a suitable man. When the analyst merely mentioned the contradiction, she immediately dismissed the idea and dropped all mention of it. The analyst felt that further inquiry off the couch would not settle the remaining matters about which he still felt uneasy, and, wanting to shorten the evaluation, he asked a psychologist colleague, an experienced clinician, to administer a full battery of psychological tests. The testing, however, revealed no evidence of significant psychopathology beyond the hysterical structure already noted by the analyst. While it still seemed to the analyst that there was something vaguely “off” and unsettling in the patient’s presentation, his discomfort was so vague that he thought it would become clear only in analysis. The analyst was only too correct. After about a year of analysis, what was hysterical in the basis of the patient’s anxieties had been understood and worked through sufficiently so that the patient no longer required medication. The other main initial complaint, her inability to find a suitable man, was replaced by an erotized transference with narcissistic features that bordered on the delusional. She flew into a rage, for example, on seeing a magazine about saving the environment in the analyst’s waiting room and screamed, “You shouldn’t care about other people or causes, only about me!” She proposed repeatedly that they stop the analysis and start a new life together as lovers. Once analyzing relieved the hysterical anxieties and her obligatory submissiveness and eagerness to please, the malignant triad of severe narcissism (narcissistic, paranoid, and antisocial features) stood out in bold relief. Her violent shifts from expressing passionate love to hatred and vengefulness when she felt thwarted, her loss of the ability to modulate affect, and her lack of a stable sense of identity all fit the diagnostic category of a severe personality disorder with narcissistic features. Bits of history emerged piecemeal, unconnected and out of context. If they had been disclosed during the evaluation, that information might have dissuaded the analyst from proceeding with analysis. For See Zetzel (1959) and Allen and Houston(1959) for cautionary tales.



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example, the patient mentioned, by the way, that once she had become so fed up with a boyfriend who would not comply with her demands that she searched the internet for some toxic substance that was both easily available and left no traces so as to be able to dispose of him undetected. The treatment ended badly. When the analyst learned that he would have to suspend practice for medical treatment that would require at least several months of convalescence and might not be successful, he decided to close his practice and tried for several weeks to work with the patient about continuing treatment with one of his colleagues. The patient said she could not tolerate the idea of a separation and refused to accept any referral. In a rage, she repeatedly intruded on analyst in his hospital room at all hours, and when she succeeded in getting past the staff who were on guard, berated the analyst for abandoning her. In the course of her remonstrations, the patient let slip that she was already in treatment with another therapist and that she had begun this new treatment even before the analyst told her he would have to interrupt the analysis. Eventually she sued the analyst to recover the fees she had paid for this “worthless” treatment. Her suit did not succeed. What are we to make of these findings and suggestions? Certainly we should add to the usual contraindications to analysis persons who lack essential honesty, if the analyst can discover it during the evaluation. Unmodified psychoanalysis is a fine tool for helping patients to deal with self-deception but it is poorly equipped to deal with persons who intend consciously to deceive others. One tends to take for granted honesty and essential morality in those who come to us for help. Regretfully, I shall add this exclusion to my short list. What else? Is the lesson that we should avoid taking into analysis patients whose complaints reflect a neurotic condition that serves to keep a severe narcissistic orientation in check? Here the answer is less clear. Consider, these persons are likely to get treatment for what troubles them one place or another and with little likelihood that the treater-elect will understand the relationship of complaints to the underlying narcissistic orientation, and with results likely no better than those I have described. Consider, The analyst was not certain if the patient was deceptive in failing to mention these matters during the evaluation, or if they did not seem exceptional enough to her, that is, sufficiently “out of character,” to be worth mentioning.



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too, that working with narcissistic conditions is challenging even under the most favorable conditions, and it is even more so if the analyst is not sufficiently alert to its presence and the way it interacts with a presenting neurosis. But if the analyst is prepared, as he must always be, to work both with the patient’s complaints and with the underlying character, I think the patient will have the best chance of emerging from analysis both relatively free of symptoms and as a reasonably responsible person. At least, I know of no better way to treat these problematic patients and I can think of no honorable way of evading the challenge. Freud told us a great deal about what our sometimes-strange behavior might mean, and Darwin told us that odd behavior, like odd coloration, might have an evolutionary advantage for the species. Helping patients through psychoanalysis requires that we deal both with the dynamic meaning and with the current function of their behavior as accurately and persistently as possible. For the students with whom I have worked, understanding the meaning of behavior in dynamic terms seemed to come to them easier than grasping the current and historical function of the behavior, for example, ”Why is it here now? Why was it adopted in the first place?” The analyst must be able to help the patient understand that his anxieties and inhibitions are not merely excrescences to be removed as quickly as possible, but that they belong to the patient, they are part of the way he gets along, they have a function in his current economy. By keeping this idea in focus, the analyst can link the neurotic elements to the character structure and will have a chance to analyze the narcissistic underlay in the personality. Whether or not the analysis is likely to succeed depends, of course, on how one defines success and how close to it patient and analyst must come to be satisfied.

The “Promiser” Who Fails to Live Up to His “Promise” Persons who are disappointed with themselves because they have failed to live up to their “promise” fortunately are more common than those who feel disappointed because the world has failed to keep its promises to them; at least they are more commonly seen in the consulting room of analysts and are more amenable to successful treatment. Consider this example: The patient was a woman in her late 30s who recently had divorced her huband of seven years because of his drinking and philandering, 113

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traits that were quite in evidence when they were courting. Now, with two small children and feeling bitter that she had thrown so much of her life away, she wondered if a new beginning would be possible for her. In high school, she was among the brightest students, widely admired by faculty and students both for her ability and achievements and for her grace in helping others and in offering public service. She also was a fine violinist who had been urged by her teachers to apply to the leading conservatories. She did and was awarded scholarships at two of them. Instead, she accepted a scholarship at a prestigious university that also had a fine music program because she wanted a broad liberal education, not just training in music. Although she loved to perform, she was uncertain about a career as a soloist, preferring the collegiality of chamber music. At college, she repeated her success as a student, winning academic honors and recognition as a good citizen. As graduation neared, she had the choice of a graduate fellowship in her major field of study and a chair in a well-known quartet, whose second violinist had just retired for reasons of health. Her parents, with whom she was close, told her they would support either choice and wanted to make it possible for her to accept both, or at least to enroll in graduate school on a part-time basis as the quartet’s touring would allow. A few weeks before graduation, to the surprise of all and, later she admitted, to her own surprise as well, she eloped with a fellow she had been dating more or less casually. He was from a wealthy family and had no particular career plans or ambitions, but was assured a position in the family business. Reproached by family and friends for “throwing her promise away,” she defiantly stopped practicing the violin and determined to make a success of her marriage. As she discovered, it takes two to make a marriage, and her husband was less than half-hearted about the project. As the children grew out of infancy and took less of her time, she could not avoid realizing that she could not make a career of marriage alone. Recognizing that she was becoming depressed, she sought counseling and began to recognize that she frequently had been reluctant to take advantage of opportunities that she actually had earned but that she, and only she, felt she did not deserve; and if she did overcome her reservations and accept an opportunity, she then would feel guiltily compelled to over-fulfill the responsibilities that were entailed. Seeing this lifelong pattern, her counselor recommended that she seek analysis. 114

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In analysis, her self-defeating patterns became even more obvious to her and became linked to what she had considered a family secret: an older brother who had died before she was born and who never was talked about. She “knew” that her parents never mentioned him because it would hurt too much to recall the loss, and because they did not want to hurt her by reminding her that, if her brother had survived, she would not have been needed. She “knew” that she was intended to make up to her parents for the loss of this superior being, and she accepted the responsibility, knowing all the while that she could never do it adequately however she tried. The prizes and honors she had won were rightly his and it would not be right to accept them for herself. She helped to preserve the secrecy that surrounded Fred, the name she had given her brother, for she had never felt she could ask about him; it would crush her to discover that he was even more perfect than she had believed. It turned out that she had no recollection of ever having been told about him by her parents or by any relative who certainly would have known him, and she never saw any photo of him or other memorabilia about him. It slowly dawned on her that at a very early age, she had invented Fred to fill out the requirements of her “family romance.” By installing Fred as an ideal to be served and a cautionary figure to help her to keep her place in the family, she was able to perform at her best; she could be a “winner” on the sole condition that she not profit from her efforts. The winnings belonged to Fred. As she worked through the early guilt that made this complicated arrangement necessary, she became freer to live up to her abilities, to enjoy what she did, to share the fruits of her successes freely, and to choose her path in life without having to find a way to explain away her achievements. She came to see that by choosing a man to marry whom she did not have any reason to respect she was also expressing her resentment of the obligitory “second-fiddle” role she had adopted. She recognized that she had forced herself to idealize this unworthy specimen and to value a disappointing life as morally correct. The depression that followed her “failure” to make a go of the project both reproached her parents for not having her first, and punished her for the wish to supplant her imaginary brother, who stood in for the forbidden father. She realized that she did not owe anybody to fulfill her “promise” but could allow her gifts to play out as opportunity allowed and to select freely from among several highly valued choices. We can see in those brief case examples the clear difference in personality organization between a patient whose characteristic stance with 115

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regard to disappointment rests on not having received what was “promised” to him, and the one who is organized more on the principle of reciprocity and who believes he must have failed to earn the rewards that seem to come more easily to others. Both represent instances of failed promise, but with altogether different significance.

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8 Promising in the Clinic

Promises of Patients In the ordinary course of practice, we hear patients utter statements cast more or less seriously as promises or threats. While we understand the content of a patient’s statements in context, we also understand that by casting his intention as a promise or a threat, a patient is indicating that he has a conflict about it that deserves consideration in its own right; he needs to call upon the additional reinforcement of the promising form to overcome a countervailing intention. We may want to call the patient’s attention either to the use of the promising form or to the way he voiced it, which often enough will betray the uncertainty that required him to reinforce his intention, for instance: T: P:

I hear a note of resignation as you recall that promise to take your daughter to the movie. Well, it isn’t a convenient time for me to leave the office, . . . and anyway, I’m not sure that it’s the right thing for a girl her age to be seeing, all about sex in surburbia, . I just don’t feel comfortable sitting there with her watching all that, . . . I feel beaten down about it; all her friends have seen it, and I felt I had to promise her because she knows I don’t want to take her.

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Clinicians who work in hospitals will hear patients promise or threaten what they will do when let out. A clinician must assess such a statement and the patient who makes it to determine its seriousness, that is, the likelihood that the patient will act on it. A patient may make such threats when he first finds himself confined and so can safely express the mixture of dismay, anger, resentment, and relief he feels. The patient does not usually repeat the threats after he has had a bit of time to settle down and can sit with the clinician to review the events that led up to admission. Occasionally, however, a patient persists in threatening to commit suicide as soon as he has a chance. A clinician properly takes all such statements at face value until he can gain a better understanding of the patient’s intentions. If the clinician is aware of the various meanings that promising and threatening may have, that awareness can improve understanding of particular instances. In particular, the clinician will want to determine if the threat of suicide expresses the depressed patient’s possibly temporary sense of desperation and the belief that no other choice is open to him, or if it expresses the patient’s desire to exert power over the clinician, for instance, to prevent being discharged from the hospital. These alternative understandings would lead, of course, to different treatment. The clinician also understands that, if he attributes a motive to the patient that hints at a degree of disbelief in the threat, the patient may take it as a dare to “put up or shut up” and feel compelled by pride to take an action he formerly did not fully intend to take. Clinicians encounter psychopathology cast as explicit promising in outpatient treatment as well. In particular, obsessional patients are likely to make promises to the self to do, or more frequently, to avoid doing, something to mitigate anxiety or relieve guilt. Similar in form to prayers by the religious to make a gift or sacrifice if God restores one’s health or wards off a calamity, the promise of an obsessional patient is intended as “payment in advance,” often in unredeemable currency, to obtain temporary relief. On close examination, such promissory arrangements or contracts can be seen to be hedged by complicated provisos, loopholes, and escape clauses to assure that the painful penances offered will not actually have to be delivered in full. The more or less conscious expectation that the patient builds into the contract is that the authority he is contracting with is likely to default as well. When the patient fails to live up to the letter of his promise, for instance to avoid masturbating for a defined period, he may 118

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deal with the resulting attack of guilt by making an even more extravagant promise to abstain. Children often pass through a period of obsessional behavior that may not be conspicuous enough to be noticed by parents. If one inquires, one may discover that the child has “discovered” that by observing a bedtime ritual, arranging the bedclothes just so, or kissing the pillow a certain number of times, he can relieve anxiety sufficiently to go to sleep. We uncover implicit forms of promising even more frequently than we uncover explicit ones in the way some patients attempt to solve their oedipal conflicts. We may understand the common solutions for an unconscious conflict as a “compromise” between the conflicting forces. Often, the compromise takes the form of a promise, bargain, or contract the patient (acts as if he believes he) made long ago with the parents. Although, we find this self-dealing far less troubling than the threats of suicide, it may be more resistant to treatment. Analyzing seemingly good behavior; when the patient seems to do all that we expect, requires that we notice that his “goodness” does not advance the treatment, but for reasons not yet clear, serves the patient’s preference to maintain the status quo. We may understand the implicit meaning of the patient’s behavior in the transference as a version of an unconscious contract he believes he made with his parent: “If I am ‘good’ [that is, if I am a good patient] you (father/ mother) will some day give me what I have always wanted. I am being ‘good’ by doing all you said you want me to do, and I am waiting patiently for you to live up to your end of the deal.” A tenacious resistance may be based on this formula expressed in the transference. The entire procedure of analysis—free association, coming on time, paying on time, even agreeing with the analyst’s formulations—has come to be construed as what the patient does for the analyst in the expectation that sooner or later the analyst will fulfill the wishes that the patient fantasies his parent once promised to make good to him. By living up to what he considers his end of the bargain, the patient magically expects to restore, in the person of the analyst, the promising but yet unredeeming parent figure. As analysts we may be quite susceptible to living out our own unconscious wishes to be “good parents,” especially under such subtle inducements, let alone how reluctant we might be to disturb a seemingly ideal, trouble-free clinical situation. Especially interesting is that this pattern of neurotic solution of an infantile conflict involves, along with the other examples of promising behavior I 119

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have mentioned, a subversion of secondary process. It is not possible for one to contrive such a neurotic solution to the Oedipal conflict unless one has achieved a considerable degree of psychological maturity, for the solution rests on the developed capacity for voluntary delay of impulse discharge. What makes the solution neurotic is that, rather than using the ability to test reality to reject or modify the infantile wish, the patient puts the capacity for delay in the service of magical thinking. He represses the wish with the implicit hope or expectation that what a parent unfairly denied him in childhood may still be forthcoming if he meets certain expiatory or propitiatory conditions. Thus, he construes the forbidding parent to have asserted only a conditional prohibition—“You may not have this unless or until you do that.” Typically, the effect of such an exchange of unconscious promises is that, rather than renouncing the wish, the patient renounces certain possibilities of realistic gratification in the vain hope of assuring ultimate gratification of the infantile wish sometime in the indefinite future. In the transference neurosis, we see these hopes and promises revivified, and as the patient strives to be “good” in fulfillment of his end of the bargain, the analyst may find himself unwittingly pressed into the mold of the parent. I mention this common clinical phenomenon here because we usually refer to it in terms of inhibitions or symptoms. From the point of view of ego psychology, we are led to look at the kind of bargains or promissory arrangements that are involved and focus not just on what the patient suffers but on what he hopes to obtain through his suffering. Not the least of the advantages of these promissory arrangements, of course, is that the patient is able to maintain his hold on tabooed objects and fantasies by displacing or projecting the time of fulfillment into the distant future. Shengold (2006) described in illuminating detail a patient who lived out the fantasy that she was the beneficiary of an inexhaustible promise her father had made to her. Shengold stressed the narcissism inherent in the sense of specialness the fantasy afforded her. He compared the analytic resolution of her fantasy to the theatrical resolution of Nora’s fantasy that a “miracle” would preserve her fantasy and her marriage in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879). He compared his patient’s courage in surrendering or attenuating her fantasy, and risking the change such action entails, to Nora’s sudden influx of inner strength that permitted her to walk out on her marriage when she realized that her husband, whom she had invested with the mantle of her father, was unworthy. 120

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Promises of Clinicians We seldom make explicit promises to our patients; we especially do not offer the promise of cure that patients would most like to hear (although they might not believe it if offered). We do, however, surround ourselves with strong suggestive elements, ranging from white coat to hushed atmosphere, that implicitly reinforce patients’ expectation that good will be done for them. One could say that the suggestive effect of these arrangements is a legitimate expression of the placebo effect. Additionally, and unlike some other specialists, psychotherapists and psychoanalysts who practice an open-ended form of treatment also implicitly promise that the treatment will continue until the patient is satisfied that he has accomplished as much as he is likely to. Beginners, whose first experiences at doing psychotherapy is on time-limited rotations in public clinics, may have difficulty in appreciating that they implicitly have offered this assurance or promise. A beginner’s first cases are likely to be resentful patients who feel they were abandoned by the departing members of the preceding class. It can be a traumatic experience for a would-be therapist to realize that all too soon he too will violate that implicit promise as he rotates off the service regardless of the needs or wishes of his patients (Schlesinger, 2005). There are two important exceptions to the general forbearance of clinicians, one so routine as to pass notice, the other flagrantly obvious and resorted to when deemed urgent by the clinician. Exception 1 The first exception often occurs at the very outset of therapy when the therapist discusses how he expects to conduct the treatment and responds to the patient’s expectable questions (Schlesinger, 2003). As they come to agreement about the conditions under which they will work together, the days and times of meeting, the fee and how it should be paid, either explicitly, or more usually implicitly, the therapist will convey that he expects the patient to attend sessions regularly and on time. He may announce at this time when he expects to be unavailable and may state or imply that he expects the patient to conform his own planned absences, such as vacations, to those of the therapist. Frequently, and usually at the end of this discussion As a cynical witticism puts it, if you go to a physician, you can expect to get another prescription; if you go to a psychotherapist, you can expect to get another appointment.



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of arrangements, the therapist also announces his policy, as if “by the way,” about appointments the patient fails to attend, most usually that he expects to be paid for them. Depending on his expectations of how the treatment will go, he also may tell the patient what to do in case of an emergency. I include this kind of one-sided negotiating because it involves a form of promising. Even though it does not make explicit use of any of the usual formulae of promising, it does establish expectations in both parties. Some clinicians (e.g., Clarkin, Yeomans, and Kernberg, 2006) refer to this process as making a “contract” with the patient. They believe this contract establishes the “frame” for the treatment, that is, the “rules,” which, in principle, should govern the behavior of both parties. However, the frame exists in the mind of the clinician, who uses it to judge if and when he believes the patient is “acting-out,” that is, breaching the contract or “violating the frame.” This is pretty standard stuff. Of course, the patient has to know, at least in general terms, how the therapist will conduct the treatment. He must agree to a schedule of appointments and a fee, and generally he will swallow, if not wholeheartedly agree to, the therapist’s last proviso, that he expects to be paid whether or not the patient attends his sessions. In general, we are careful to set the fee at a level that fits the circumstances of the patient, that is, at a level that neither is trivial nor excessive and fits within the economic boundaries of what we have established as necessary for our livelihood. Most therapists have a sliding fee scale of some breadth to accommodate the economic circumstances of a reasonable range of prospective patients. When they begin treatment, some patients are dependent on parents, spouse, or trust fund for economic support, and experienced therapists recognize that depending on financial support for the therapy will likely become an issue in the treatment when matters of dependency and independence become salient. We do not usually raise that potential problem at the outset of treatment because we believe it would not be timely to do so. And I know of no therapist who ever noticed that a patient stopped nodding agreement when he announced his policy about payment for missed sessions, or tried to help the patient express his I must qualify this last statement, which seems to ignore what every therapist soon learns: that in addition to the explicit rules the therapist announces, and however free the therapist would like the patient to be to say what is on his mind, most patients are constrained by rules they import (i.e., transfer) into the therapeutic situation and feel anything but free to say what comes to mind.



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objections more openly. I believe the reason for us to put this proviso last is not only that, logically, it is subsidiary to the other arrangements and hardly could come earlier, but also because putting it last makes it more difficult for the patient to question it without seeming to question the whole arrangement for treatment, which, until that point has been more or less unexceptionable. The analogy may seem harsh, but it is also the way used car salesmen withhold a final unpalatable condition of sale until the customer feels he owns the car and is salivating to get into it. The situation of a patient entering psychotherapy is much like that of a patient facing surgery. The surgeon, hospital, and all others responsible for what will happen must obtain the patient’s informed consent to the planned procedures. It is now a matter of law that patients be “fully informed.” While obtaining written consent ostensibly is intended to protect the patient, in effect, it actually protects the interests of the providers. Consider, the worried patient facing the knife is in no position to read, let alone understand, the document thrust before him with the expectation that he will sign it immediately. Like the patient facing psychotherapy, he feels in no position to quarrel, question, or haggle; he wants to put his faith in his doctor and in the institutional setting to do right by him. He does not want to get on the wrong side of them by questioning whether they know what they are doing—even though, during his brief stay in the hospital, there (probably) already have been enough minor slippages in attention, unexplained delays, and intrusions into his body for which he felt unprepared, to worry him. I have belabored the familiar details of setting up treatment sufficiently to support my contention that this ordinary way of doing it establishes anything but a contract, not even a metaphoric one. A contract, to remind you, is a formal agreement between (let us assume) two parties to exchange goods or services that will serve each of them equably; contracting is expected to be fair, that is, mutually advantageous. The essence of a contract is that, when they entered into the formal agreement, there existed a “meeting of minds” between the parties; that is to say, both knew what they were agreeing to. This proviso excludes making a contract with a minor, who is Such as the sale price will be renegotiated if the seller is unable to get the assumed selling price set for the customer’s trade in.  See the discussion of the policy of paying for missed sessions in Schlesinger (2003), pp. 242–247. 

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deemed incapable, legally, of making a contract, as well as with persons deemed not of sound mind. Persons entering a contract must be presumed to understand fully what they are getting into and thus are willing to be bound by the terms of the contract, even though some circumstance on which they are counting may fail to occur (as in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice). This proviso also permits either party to challenge the validity of the contract if he believes that he was deceived by the other either by deliberate fraud or by withholding information the other would need to have to establish a meeting of minds, that is, equality of position. Finally, a contract binds both parties and is enforceable. The therapeutic “contract,” of course, is not enforceable, and this is one more reason not to refer to the arrangements between therapist and patient in terms more suited to commerce. Indeed, whether or not the therapist refers to the arrangements for therapy as a contract, much of the treatment will be conducted in what I have called the “languages” of time and money (Schlesinger, 2003). The patient will find he is able to express his transference-laden resentments more easily by withholding compliance around the two matters the therapist has declared are important to him: prompt and unvarying attendance at appointments and prompt payment of the fee. Consider also that the positions of therapist and patient are not equal as they should be to enter a contract. The patient must be able to count on the superior knowledge of the therapist and be certain that it will be applied for his benefit, that is, he must be able to count on the commitment of the therapist (see Nesse, 2001a, b; Schlesinger, 2003, 2005). The therapist, like the surgeon, knows much more than the patient about what is likely to happen in the treatment, and even how the patient is likely to feel at various junctures. The surgical patient will have the benefit of anesthesia and post-surgical analgesia so as not to know what is going on. In contrast, the psychotherapy patient, comes to have his consciousness raised, not diminished. Sooner or later, he will recall, emotionally, if not cognitively, that his nominal agreement to pay for services he did not receive was extorted and now it feels intolerable; he feels his consent was deformed, not informed. I refer, of course, to developments in the transference and the tendency of patients to express their unconscious feelings for ancient mistreatments in more or less justified resentment about actions the therapist took or Even though he may also be medicated.



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failed to take. The particular action I refer to here is not necessarily the clinician’s policy of charging for missed sessions, although I have opined on the shortcomings of that policy (Schlesinger, 2003), but in the clinician’s failure to take up the patient’s unspoken reservations about it when he announced the policy. What might an alternative to ignoring the withheld feelings of the patient be? Consider the possibility that the therapist, now more knowledgeable, notices that the patient suddenly has stopped nodding silently to the conditions the therapist is establishing for the treatment. Instead of taking the patient’s silence for assent and moving on, he pauses and observes: T: P:

Your expression changed when I mentioned that I expect you to pay for any sessions you might miss. (The patient swallows silently, and then admits) Yes, I suddenly recalled that my dentist also has that policy on his wall, but I don’t recall that I ever was charged for missing an appointment. It only happened once or twice and I did let him know at one of those times. The other time I just clean forgot, so I suppose it would have been OK for him to charge for that missed appointment, but he didn’t.

Before I resume the account of this possibly painful comparison and confrontation, let me note merely that I would not care to be the clinician in that example, nor do I believe would any of you. The patient clearly understands that his dentist posted a policy he thought he needed to deal with the few patients who regularly are inconsiderate about keeping appointments and delinquent about payment. This policy is directed impersonally like the fine print at the bottom of commercial bills that states the interest that will be charged on slow paying accounts. And yet his dentist, unlike a credit-card company, considers him a “good patient,” not a potential deadbeat, and considerately forgives or overlooks occasional and understandable lapses. Now, the therapist, who suddenly understands these matters at least as well as the patient, implicitly is called on to clarify his position, to spell out the fine print in his “therapeutic contract;” that is, is his interest in the patient mainly commercial, or will he show his benevolence and include this new and mostly unknown patient among the “good patients” who may be allowed a certain slack without endangering either the treatment or the therapist’s livelihood? 125

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These issues are infused with transference, and they arise in most dynamically focused psychotherapies; but many therapists, I believe, would consider it inopportune to have to deal with such transference-laden issues at the very outset of treatment and while listing the very few realistic arrangements to which the patient must consent if he is to have treatment. I can only offer the advice that, when making these initial arrangements, the therapist should introduce no fine print that he hopes he will not have to defend. If he insists on including such provisos, he should not slip them in at a time and in a way that makes it difficult for the patient to question them. Of course, if the therapist wisely (in my estimation) makes no such proviso, the patient likely will introduce it himself. In that event, the therapist has the choice of whether to deal with the question literally as a practical “What would you do if . . .?” question, or (better!) take it as an indication that the patient still is uncertain about beginning and shows it by anticipating that he might prefer not to come some day. Then the therapy would begin as I believe it should, around the observation that the patient is here in body, but not yet wholly here in spirit (Schlesinger, 2005). To return to the patient who, when invited to voice his objection to the therapist’s policy of expecting to be paid for missed sessions, invidiously compared the therapist’s seeming commercial attitude toward him with his dentist’s more benevolent attitude. The therapist swallowed uneasily once or twice and in the instant, recalled ruefully that some teachers had warned him about that policy, and he recalled also his own resentment when his analyst imposed that same condition on him. In a burst of reformation, he realized he had put his foot into it, and it was now up to him to extricate himself and his patient. He nodded acceptingly and thoughtfully to the patient’s comparison and offered: T: P: T: P: T:

You’re not sure how I would apply that policy. Would I be as fair and considerate as your dentist? (patient instantly draws back and says defensively) I wasn’t questioning your fairness. No, I didn’t mean that you were, but a policy like that could be applied unfairly. But I don’t think you would be unfair; if I thought so, I wouldn’t be here. (nodding agreement to the reasonableness of the patient’ stance) But hearing me say that gave you a moment’s pause. 126

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P: T:

P:

(gulping, patient agrees) I wondered what you would do if I were sick or if there was an emergency of some kind that kept me away. And you also figured that I would be fair. [patient nods agreement] But for a moment it still worried you. [patient keeps nodding and looking expectantly at the therapist] If you know that you will have to miss an appointment, I would appreciate your calling me as soon as you know. [patient nods agreement vigorously, muttering, “Of course,” but still looks expectantly at the therapist who realizes he has to address another, unspoken question] I guess you are wondering about possible emergencies. No, I know I can count on your fairness, but there is another matter I wasn’t about to raise. My wife and I always take a winter vacation in February, and she was hoping we wouldn’t have to change our lifestyle in order for me to have this treatment.

The therapist figuratively kicked himself as he realized that he did not have to announce his “policy” at all; this patient was quite prepared to behave appropriately in regard to absences he could anticipate. Also, the therapist recalled ruefully that, as he did not have the heart to uphold a uniformly tough-minded policy of charging for missed sessions no matter what the reason, he invariably forgave any reasonable absence. He realized that he had put himself in an odd position by announcing a policy he did not mean to carry out. And he realized, too, that he had not said anything yet about his own planned absences for conferences and vacations. It occurred to him, belatedly, that he had already judged that the patient, as he becomes absorbed in treatment, will not want to interrupt it unnecessarily, but will try to plan his own vacations to correspond with the absences of the therapist. Now the therapist figuratively kicked himself again for perhaps losing the opportunity to deal with the “vacation issue” as a matter within the therapy, rather than an external “business” policy. Ruefully, he went on to explain that he generally took the month of August as vacation and a week in winter and late spring to attend conferences and hoped, in the interests of continuity of treatment, the patient could coordinate his planned absences to fit. The patient seemed to relax as he nodded agreeably, saying he certainly would try to. Some patients respond differently to the setting up of the therapeutic “contract.” They are so fearful of “doing it wrong,” or annoying the doctor 127

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that they accept the conditions proposed without objection and carry them out without exception. Quietly and without calling attention to what they are doing, they regularly exceed the norms of conventional behavior in regard to payment and promptness and act as if they had promised to live up to the letter to the therapist’s expectations. Some bring a check to the session when they expect to receive a bill; others mail their checks ahead of time. They never miss an appointment or come late. In my experience, only a rare therapist comments on this convenient behavior and even fewer consider the behavior pathological. If they do realize that this behavior might be of dynamic interest, and they raise the matter with the patient, they are likely to hear the patient explain that he is afraid he might forget if he doesn’t pay at once, or that he cannot stand the feeling of obligation that an unpaid bill imposes. The therapist then might realize that by accepting the patient’s “good” behavior, he has been complicit in keeping a compulsive symptom out of the treatment and that paying and attending in this scrupulous fashion amounts to self-treatment for the anxiety that might emerge were the patient to face his contrary feelings. Exception 2 The second exception to the general avoidance of promising by clinicians occurs when the clinician is worried about a patient’s misbehavior, particularly if it threatens to endanger someone. These days, therapists typically seem to be taught that they should try to avert such dangers by getting the worrisome patient to “contract” not to harm himself, that is, to promise not to do so; and if he is not willing to “contract” that he won’t harm himself, he must either accept being hospitalized or understand that the therapist will not treat him. It is another example of extorting compliance, imposing a “contract” when there is no meeting of minds. In my experience, when therapy gets to such a point, that is, when the patient has gotten the therapist into a corner where he feels he has to “do something” (other than conduct therapy), most of the time in the showdown of threats that ensues the patient blinks first and agrees once again to be forced to agree to accept conditions he does not (consciously) believe in. Once again, of course, I am describing the unsatisfactory and temporary resolution of a common I allude here, of course, to the possibility that the patient intends, unconsciously, to force the therapist to take control of him, as did the (perhaps) fantasized parents of yore.



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transference–countertransference reaction: the therapist, at that juncture, joins the patient in acting out his conflict rather than verbalizing and reflecting on it. By counteracting against the patient’s act of transferring, by becoming an actor in the patient’s dramatization of his unconscious fantasy, the therapist instates himself as part of the problem. Ironically, he joins the patient, once again, in replaying the ancient conflict they had agreed to explore in order to free the patient from it. Often, a therapist who practices in a hospital is faced with the dilemma over how much freedom to allow a patient who seems to have recovered from the acute disturbance that led to his being hospitalized. The patient requests to leave the hospital on pass to take care of some business. It sounds like a reasonable request, but should the therapist allow it? He muses, “Suppose he immediately returns to drinking or drugging and loses the gains just made? My judgment will be questioned. Won’t I look incompetent if he relapses? But he will be discharged in a few days anyway, so what’s the point in holding him in now?” In such a situation of uncertainty, a therapist may try to resolve his dilemma by asking the patient to promise, or contract, to behave himself while on pass. The therapist who depends on the patient’s extorted promise to calm his own worries has merely transferred the burden of doubt to the patient, who may resent the transaction and thereby gain an additional and unsought reason to fail. The therapist has good reasons for his concerns, and it is possible that the patient mirrors his worrying. After all, how confident can the patient be that he can manage judiciously a sudden grant of liberty? Only a few days ago, he felt out of control. Maybe he is asking for the pass to find out if his therapist has the confidence he himself lacks—or to find out if he has the good clinical sense to know that the request is premature and has the guts to turn it down. On the other hand, maybe the patient is fearful about returning to life outside; by relapsing while on pass he could demonstrate that he is not ready without having to confess his qualms. The situation is complex and there is no easy answer so long as the therapist puts the problem to himself solely in the terms the patient used to define it—as “Should I or Shouldn’t I grant the patient’s request.” An alternative to feeling that he had only the choice to grant or not grant the patient’s request, is that he might respond by helping the patient to bring his inner monolog about the matter into the open, to air the doubts that surely were in the patient’s mind, the conflicting fears that the therapist 129

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would hold him back, and the fear that he might not be ready to take on the responsibility of a pass. If the therapist were to bring up the matter in this way, he might also provide an opportunity for the patient to air his matching concern. In that way, the “testing” aspect of the patient’s request could be brought into the open and could be dealt with separately from the patient’s desire to have a pass. The patient might decide that he does not really need to have a pass just now, or he might decide to modify his plans to reflect his improved understanding of why he wants to go. It might even turn out that the patient wants to go although still worried about whether or not he can make it. Under such a circumstance, one patient said, “I think I could make it if I promise you that I will be back on time and that I will not drink. It would help me feel you are with me, and that will give me strength.” A therapist might even offer the patient the opportunity to promise as a crutch to the patient’s will power. In both of these last instances, promising takes on a reinforcing role with altogether different significance than a promise extorted by the therapist as a condition of granting a request that perhaps ought not be granted.

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9 Promising as an Element of Form and Content in Greek Drama

Psychoanalysts and Literature Beginning with Freud, analysts have sought to understand the exploits and fates of characters whose purely literary existence has impressed generations of readers even more than have the deeds of fleshly figures. Analysts, who spend their days aiming, as it were, at moving targets, have welcomed the opportunity to test out their theories, particularly of motivation, on the lives of finished characters who, conceived in the imagination of an author, have lived importantly in the imagination of others. They have often succeeded in penetrating obscurities left by authors to fill out the essential psychological integrity of those contrived lives. Drama, and to some extent poetry, have a special place in literature. I suppose that most of us prefer to do our reading alone; then we are free to interrupt at our convenience or put the book down to reflect on the ideas. In contrast, we best appreciate drama when it is performed, and when we are part of a larger audience, on a specific occasion set up by the producers and actors. It is not surprising, then, to realize that drama grew out of the religious service and that, as performed, drama retains some of the ritualistic practices of its origin.

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Freud (1916) and Jekels (1933) threw some light on the craft of the dramatist. They pointed out that well-written literary works make use of not only the motives, conscious and unconscious, that we have come to know from our patients, but also the mechanisms our patients use both to conceal and to reveal their inner drama from themselves as well as from the analyst/audience. Dramatists, too, present the way the hero unwittingly lives out his fate; his actions conceal from himself, while simultaneously revealing to the larger audience, the truth about human nature that the dramatist discovered intuitively. For instance, Freud (1916) called to our attention the dramatist’s tendency to present a single whole personality with strong conflicting tendencies as a pair of characters on the stage (for example, MacBeth and Lady MacBeth). Jekels (1943) also called attention to the dramatist’s tendency to present important motifs twice, often with different degrees of explicitness (for instance, in the characters MacBeth and MacDuff), paralleling the common tendency of our patients to tell us the same “story” several times by acting out, memories, fantasies, and dreams. Much of the impact in dramatic writing is conveyed, as in music, not only by its content, but also through its form and structure. A formal structural analysis of dramatic writing considers such elements as contrast, tempo, repetition, and irony. To this list, which Freud, Jekels, and others have augmented, I add the dramatist’s use of promises, vows, or threats as necessary elements in the content of the drama as well as formal elements in it (see also Kerrigan, 1999).



1. The central idea of classical tragedy, that man is subject to fate, is dramatized by placing man in opposition to fate. Although he may be unaware of the full depth of his challenge, the tragic hero makes rash vows or promises in an attempt to alter his fate or to evade the destiny that has been made known to him by prophesies; he defies the prophesy; he declares himself an exception. 2. In the course of the drama, we follow the relentless and inevitable working out of the promise or prophecy to its final fulfillment and the death of the hero, who becomes aware too late that he has inadvertently made himself the agent of the prophesized fate he tried to evade. In its formal structure, the drama consists of the repetition in action of what was already stated in words (Reik, 1925). 132

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3. The dramatist signals the opening of the ultimate phase of the drama by having the hero make a rash vow, or promise, and then has him repeat the promise with increasing passion. In this way, he heightens the dramatic tension of the action on the stage, marking each twist in the closing net of fate as the hero struggles to avoid carrying out the fateful prophesy.

The Tragic View of Life What may we assume a member of the audience for a Greek tragedy would understand, perhaps intuitively, about the nature of man and the significance of making oaths and vows? We know that the dramatist’s aim was to instruct rather than to amuse; but inasmuch as the audience attended voluntarily, the dramatist had to create the play as a work of art able both to draw an audience and to hold its attention while the dramatist reinforced its understanding about the proper relationship between God and man and the relationship of both to fate. The dramatist then, as now, achieved his purpose by personifying these elements as characters, agonists and antagonists, in conflict with each other or within themselves, and by demonstrating the consequences of violating the established order. Although the convention of tragedy requires that a hero pit himself against superior force and die, he can elevate his heroic stature if he accepts the hopelessness of his cause while persisting in his losing course. By persisting, he shows his superiority to other men and in a sense, he transcends even the force of fate that is overcoming him. In the tragic view of human existence, man must learn to live without hope and without the consolation of a belief in divinely inspired justice; and he must live with the knowledge that his fate is preordained. Within this grim view, the dramatist tells us that the tragic hero exemplifies the highest possible aspiration for man. For by setting himself, with courage and determination, against the inexorable current of necessity, the hero proclaims through his actions that the human spirit can conceive of a victory it cannot hope to attain. Through the ages, man’s idea of the nature of fate has changed. During the fifth century BCE, when the great Greek dramatists wrote, fate was a mystical, sometimes personified force that shaped the destinies of men. At other times, it was a destiny that rational man partly could determine for himself. As Grene (1967) put it, “What the fifth-century theatergoer meant by fate was a shadowy road, with numerous turns and bypaths, the road’s 133

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destination being hinted at, threateningly or encouragingly, by authorities of no certain credibility” (p. 148). The idea of tragedy also has changed with the fashions. Not all heroes or heroics strike us as tragic. Nowadays we have all manner of heroes. The daily press awards the debased title hero freely for any unusual feat or achievement in the face of personal risk. Some of these acts of daring are impulsive ones undertaken thoughtlessly, and the fame that they bring usually is fleeting. The heroes who set a more lasting grip on the public imagination, however, are those whose acts are more deliberate than impulsive. However, not all deliberate acts of daring have this effect. We admire the skill and courage of the daring young man on the flying trapeze, but we do not call him a hero. We award the uncorrupted title of hero to those whose careers have shown a continuous commitment to a moral purpose that carries with it exposure to personal danger. The nature of the danger may be as obvious as that which faces a soldier or a policeman, or it may be much less evident. In any case, when he first commits himself to action, the hero-to-be may not know the specific danger against which he ultimately will prove himself. The hero-to-be sets on a course and dedicates himself to a purpose; he declares how he will act henceforth, and, by this act of self-assertion, he commits himself without knowing what the ultimate consequences of his decision will be. Note the similarity of this formulation to the one I referred to earlier as a secondary-process version of omnipotence of thought. Sometimes undertaking such a commitment is entirely an internal affair, for instance, a promise made to oneself. Even in such instances, though, it is likely to have more or less obvious external concomitants that later will lead others to say, “He was the sort of person from whom one could expect heroism.” More often, the internal commitment has an externally clear beginning. By a solemn ceremony with magical overtones that marks his taking an oath of office, by a swearing in, by a taking of vows; he makes a promise that sets himself off from others. He has become a “professional,” a dedicated person, an official. He has said, in effect, “Come what may, I will act in accordance with the principles and values of my calling and in pursuit of its purposes.” That much is necessary, but not sufficient either for the development of a tragedy or the making of a secular hero. However, in those personal histories that evolve into tragedy, one may see the setting of the stage in 134

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the initial act of dedication. The potential tragedy becomes manifest only at some later time when the hero faces a particular danger. Then, in effect, he reaffirms in action the words of his oath by choosing to play out the role that fate has awarded him. The secular hero-elect remains on his chosen course, even as he can imagine the possible consequences, of which he was previously unaware. Thus, even as he comes to know that by remaining he is doomed, the soldier stays at his indefensible post; the heroic sea captain goes down with his ship, each choosing death to dishonor. There is another paradox to be explored in tragic experience, one of special interest to my present thesis: Why is the tragic hero called on to serve as an example in this way? Why is it his fate to be cut down at a certain moment in history? This puzzle has preoccupied critics from the very first, and contemporary fashion has supplied solutions befitting the era. Let me sketch the progression of solutions. In brief, the Homeric Greeks apparently did not raise the question at all—for them a man’s fate was just that. The “Moira” of Greek myth often as not led to apparently undeserved calamity; no question of justice or correctness entered into it. Only later came efforts to rationalize the workings of fate by attributing the hero’s downfall at least in part to his human weakness or flaw (Hamartia). Thus, it came to be believed that a man’s fate (if in an inscrutable way) is his just reward. The not infrequent spectacle that the wicked prosper while the innocent are destroyed, and the seeming disproportionateness of extravagant punishment for petty fault have always posed a knotty problem for those who would reconcile the obvious unfairness of everyday life with the doctrine of divine justice. This problem also plagued both Old Testament and New Testament authors. Some critics such as, Raphael, (1960) argue that formal classical tragedy is incompatible with Judeo-Christian religious tradition, for the victory of necessity over the tragic hero is irreconcilable with the idea of divine justice. One has only to think of the examples in the tragic literature of trivial crimes or “errors” for which ordinary standards of responsibility cannot be maintained but that nevertheless were punished severely; Romeo’s rashness, Juliet’s allowing herself to fall in love at first sight; Desdemona’s defiance of her father in marrying a Moor, Oedipus’ unwittingly committing incest and murder. Surely, taken on their face, the events for Or in the history embedded in a well-known myth that is being dramatized.



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which the tragic heroes seem to be punished are entirely disproportionate to the fate they suffer. Yet, paradoxically, the audiences of classical tragedies do not react with indignation at Oedipus’ blinding, as they well might if disproportionateness, injustice, or unfairness were what the action on the stage communicated to them. The effect is not at all like that of watching, for instance, the undeserved calamities of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. If we apply the insights gained from psychoanalysis to the myths and to the dramas based on them, we are led to suppose (as in the compulsion neuroses) that the punishment somehow must fit the crime, although the crime may not be what it seems to be and may not even be what the tragic hero confesses to. To an analyst, disproportionateness of penalty to crime is not a new phenomenon. Every neurosis treats a forbidden thought as if it were a forbidden act, and it imposes painful penalties that befit that act even though the act might only have been imagined. We need merely to look at the mechanism of depression or of compulsion neurosis to see the degree to which actual punishment is exacted for thought-crimes. We are accustomed to explaining these instances of disproportionateness by referring them to an archaic system of morality stemming from the earliest phases of development of our patients. By analogy, we may be led to look at the earlier periods of cultural history to see the sources of the apparent disproportionateness that puzzle us in the classical tragedies. The archaic Greek view of man was that he was predisposed to sin against deity and, as might be expected, that deity regarded man with implacable hostility, jealous of any success or happiness that might for a moment lift his mortality above its inferior status and so begin to encroach on the prerogatives of deity. In this tradition, the essence of sin resides in man’s efforts to exceed his natural station or even to wish to. We repeatedly observe in many cultures and in many phases of history that the major sin is hubris, that is, arrogance, pride, and presumption. Within this view, the tragedy of being human not only is that sin must be punished, but sadder still, that man must inevitably sin. The primal evil of willfulness is part of his nature; the tendency for man to sin—to strive to exceed his portion—is universal. The tragic heroes of legend and drama personify the fate of man when he yields, as he must, to the temptation to assert himself to exceed Neurotic disproportionateness may amount to suffering real pain for a fantasized crime as well as suffering a fantasized punishment for a real crime.



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his station. Thus, whatever he is specifically accused of, the underlying charge against the tragic hero is hubris and the punishment is death, the invariable wages of sin, which was thought even in Homer’s time to be the established way of mankind. Man’s wish to know the future, as distinct from attempting to control it, was gratified unpredictably through prophesy, that is, only when deity desired that man should know what would be in store for him. In times of great peril, man might consult the priestesses of Apollo at Delphi, who maintained his oracle (Dodds, 1959, p. 75). Then he would hear a cryptic message, clearly ominous, but of unclear import. We have some support for that line of thinking from classical scholars (e.g., Dodds, 1959) who agree that promises, oaths, curses, and threats have a special character and provide a nexus in experience between the events of conventional experience and the supernatural. It is at such points that God, or demons, or forces of the irrational (até) intervene in the lives of men. Earlier, I called attention to the peculiar structure of the act of promising that makes for a point of vulnerability through which unconscious demonic forces may erupt. Perhaps we can see why the act of making a promise lends itself so easily to the dramatist’s purpose. For in the ancient tradition, to make a vow or to take an oath was in itself an act of presumption, arrogating to oneself the God-like function of determining the future. At root, it entails the sin of pride, which at the Oedipal phase implies a wish to be better than the father, unconsciously to kill the father and take his place. Thus the act of promising itself comes to stand for arrogance, the gratuitous act of self-assertion that marks the tragic hero’s rash storming the gates of heaven. Moreover, it marks the moment when the supernatural forces of fate itself are invoked to begin the slow work of bringing the hero down to his merely human status by defeating his purpose. For the tragic hero is not himself a god (although in Greek myth often enough he is the son of a god). His ambition exceeds his grasp. By committing the act of hubris, the hero guarantees the dominance over him of the very fate he challenged. He cannot attain the victory that he conceives in his imagination because he suffers from a “fatal flaw.” In speaking of commitments and promises fulfilling themselves willynilly, we have brushed against a thorny issue: the problem of compulsion versus free will. A critic (Alexander, 1955) took issue with those who suggested that there is no free will in Greek tragedy. Alexander noted that 137

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the hero makes a succession of choices: “He chooses as the artist himself chooses, and his will is finally identified with the service he accepts, as the will of the artist is identified with his art. We may call men like Bach or Beethoven or Rembrandt slaves of their art, if you like, or regard the man who trains to ride the Grand National on his own horse as a slave to sport, but only if we are so degenerate that we can do no more than envy or malign those who venture on those pinnacles and steeps of hardship on which we have turned our backs. It is we who are the slaves and they who are the free men. And so it is in the tragedies of Sophocles—the protagonist you may call a slave to this or that, but his slavery proves on examination to be one of those passions or services that glorify men” (p. 109). Alexander’s thinking is consistent with the psychoanalytic view that the task of early development is the maturation of ego-autonomy, while the task of later development is to prepare one to be able to commit that autonomy. It may be the essence of the tragic hero that he is a man who is capable of committing himself irrevocably to what he senses to be his duty once he sees it. That his commitment may lead to unfortunate consequences (in the worldly sense) for himself or for others is less important than that he make his fate his own. He accepts his fate, not in a passive sense but in an active, self-dedicatory sense.

Promising as a Formal Element in Greek Drama As a dramatic mechanism, the hero’s promise, generally offered in its strongest form as an oath or a vow, is a means of conveying to the audience that what the protagonist has declared to be his purpose will happen regardless of any subsequent qualms or opposition. The hero, representing man in the broadest sense, who has asserted his independence of the gods and fate by swearing, will simply flounder inextricably in the nets and snares that they weave for him as he tries to escape the forces turned loose by his rashness. Sophocles’ central purpose was to justify the law of God against the presumption of man. In his choosing the legend of Oedipus to dramatize, we can see this purpose well exemplified, for from beginning to end, the Note the similarity here to the mechanism of duplicated themes to which Freud (1916) called our attention.



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story moves on his efforts to escape his fate. Let me review the back story of Oedipus the King. Recall that it had been prophesied to Laius and Jocasta, King and Queen of Thebes, that a son born to them would kill his father and bed his mother. The mythic reason is that they were to be punished for the sins of earlier generations, whose guilt they had inherited. We surmise that the audience understood this background, including what the couple did about it, but these details are not part of the play. At any rate, the couple accepted the prophecy as true and possibly that it was just; still, they attempted to thwart its fulfillment by abstaining from sex, and so for a long time, they avoided having children and the danger that that would come from parenting. One version of the legend on which Sophocles based his play has it that Jocasta undermined Laius’s chaste resolve by getting him drunk, and so in time a son was born to them. To salvage their self-sabotaged efforts to frustrate the prophecy, they deputized a messenger to pin the feet of the child together to immobilize him and to leave him exposed on a hillside to die. That done, and assuming him as good as dead, they relaxed in the conviction that they had successfully evaded their fate. However, their son did not die. A shepherd rescued him; possibly he was the one who named the boy Oedipus (that is, swollen-footed), and eventually the boy was adopted by Polybus, King of Corinth, who raised him as his son. When Oedipus, now grown to manhood, consulted the oracle of Apollo, he learned that he was destined to kill his father. He fled Corinth to avoid fulfilling the prophecy upon the person of Polybus, whom he reasonably supposed to be his father. As he distanced himself from Corinth and, he believed, from the horror of committing parricide, Oedipus neared Thebes. On the road, he encountered a rude traveler who disputed the right of way. Oedipus won the fight with this unknown stranger and killed him. The stranger, of course, was Laius. Unwittingly, Oedipus had fulfilled a portion of the prophecy that Laius, Jocasta, and he had gone to such pains to frustrate. Continuing on his way, Oedipus encounters the Sphinx, a terrifying chimera with the body of a lion and the head of a woman, who has been holding Thebes under her curse. She challenges him to solve her riddle and when he does so, in shame she kills herself. When Oedipus arrives at Thebes, he finds the people of the city in mourning for King Laius, whom they believed had been killed by bandits, but they were so grateful to Oedipus for freeing them from the Sphinx that they awarded him the throne. Oedipus then unwittingly 139

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fulfilled the rest of the prophecy by marrying his true mother Jocasta, the widow of King Laius. Settled down with Jocasta, who no longer was fearful of bearing offspring, together they raise four children to maturity. Sophocles’ play opens at this late time in the life of Oedipus. Thebes is again cursed, suffering in the grip of a plague. Again, the oracle of Apollo is consulted and this time divulges that Thebes will suffer until it ceases to harbor the murderer of Laius. When this news reaches King Oedipus, he, quite properly in his role as king, vows to save Thebes by discovering who murdered Laius and by bringing him to justice. Once again, Oedipus, who, like his presumed parents, conspired against destiny by fleeing Corinth, has, by taking this vow, made himself the explicit instrument of fate: “I will bring this to light again. King Phoebus fittingly took this care about the dead, and you too fittingly. And justly you will see in me an ally, a champion of my country and the God. For when I drive pollution from the land I will not serve a distant friend’s advantage, but act in my own interest. Whoever he was that killed the king may readily wish to dispatch me with his murderous hand; so helping the dead king I help myself. Come, children, take your suppliant boughs and go; up from the altars now. Call the Assembly and let it meet upon the understanding that I’ll do everything. God will decide whether we prosper or remain in sorrow.” (pp. 16-17) Sophocles has Oedipus reaffirm his vow several times with increasing passion and determination. With each iteration, Sophocles makes the audience feel that the final dénouement is more certain. Oedipus persists in his search despite the chorus’ vague but insistent warnings of impending doom, in spite of the reluctance of the seer, Tiresias to cooperate in the search, in spite of Jocasta’s reassurance that his dreaming of incest is normal, and despite her coaxing him to desist from his quest. Once hav140

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ing vowed, Oedipus proceeded step by step to discover that it was he who murdered Laius and that he had bedded his mother. Through unwitting but effective effort, he had fulfilled the prophecy made to Laius and Jocasta as well as the prophecy made to him. In spite of their contrary desires and counterintentions, all the key figures on the scene were drafted to become accessory instruments of fate. Aristotle (ca. 330 BCE) regarded Sophocles’ version of the Oedipus legend to be a model play that illustrated his theory of the effect of drama on the audience. As the members of the audience ready themselves for the play, they permit a more relaxed state of mind, suspend disbelief, and allow the play to evoke awe, fear, and pity in them. In psychoanalytic terms, they allow themselves to regress, to indulge temporarily in magical thinking, and to identify themselves with the hero, who unknowingly strives to achieve one intention only to bring about its opposite. The ironic reversal finally brings insight to the hero, “discovery” in Aristotle’s terms, and inevitably suffering, but not necessarily wisdom. As depicted in the rest of the trilogy, Oedipus’ character is not altered by his experiences. Oedipus sees himself as the ignorant instrument of God, and yet he admits that his own hands committed the crimes. He accepts, even demands, punishment and yet remains bitter about his fate. In the play, and in the background myth, there are several reversals of the kind that acting on one intention brings about its opposite. Recall that in the play Oedipus hears successive hints about the truth of his condition; he seeks to refute each hint by demanding more evidence while ignoring the advice to leave well enough alone. Each bit of new evidence only adds weight to the truth he wants to deny. The final ironic confirmation of the horrible truth of his condition is brought by a messenger from Corinth, who arrives to congratulate him on his accession to the throne of Corinth; King Polybus has died and the people want Oedipus to be king. At first relieved because of the news that Polybus, the man he thought to be his father, died a natural death, he declines the offer out of fear of fulfilling the rest of the prophecy—that he will marry his mother. With the best of intentions, the messenger offers the ironic reassurance that there is no danger, for Oedipus is The experience of audience members is less determinate; some of them, like some who attend church services, report that the experience of attending a good play, or a vital church service, is mind altering.



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not the true son of King Polybus and Queen Merope. Oedipus then realizes that his efforts to evade his fate have been in vain and that, rather than being pursued by fate, as he believed, he has unwittingly been pursuing it. He has fulfilled his vows as well as the prophecies of the oracle. Freud referred to the play and the myth repeatedly in his writings, mainly to instate the Oedipus complex as man’s main dynamic and the inevitable outcome of infantile sexual development. The psychoanalytic literature is replete with elaborations and glosses on this theme. I will not comment on the dynamic significance of the complex or on its place in psychoanalytic theory. My interest is in the way dramatists use the act of vowing or promising to increase the tension among the members of the audience, to augment their experience of awe and pity as they observe and participate vicariously in the aspiration, the hubris, of the hero, and in his inevitable downfall. Freud (1933), calling attention to the structure of the play, noted that the slow process of discovery with the bit-by-bit disclosure of important information, and its effect on the hero, parallels the process of discovery and self-confrontation a patient experiences in the course of psychoanalysis. The Greek tragedies that were drawn from Homer include many examples of the dramatic fulfillment of a vow. Both Euripides and Sophocles dramatized the story of Electra, telling of the revenge of the surviving children of Agamemnon, Electra, Chrysothemis, and Orestes against their mother, Clytemnestra and her former lover-become-husband Aegisthus, who murdered Agamemnon when he returned triumphant from the sack of Troy. As in Oedipus the King, the legendary motives expressed in a succession of the vows that drive the action are not in these plays. The background story was dramatized by Euripedes in Iphigenia in Aulus, first produced in 405 BCE, some 20 years after the staging of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. The legend on which both Iphigenia in Aulus and Electra drew is that Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, was a sister of beautiful Helen, whose elopement with Paris ultimately brought on the fall of Troy. Each of the princely suitors for Helen’s hand, sore losers all, had threatened to kill any other who won her. Helen’s father, Tyndareus, cleverly he thought, as the price of accepting their suit, made each of them swear that he would defend the winner against anyone who would take her from him. Helen chose to wed Menelaus, the brother of Agamemnon, but when Paris, Prince of Troy, 142

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arrived on the scene, he and Helen fell in love and Paris stole her away. This theft activated the vow each of the other suitors had sworn and they gathered their armies and ships to restore Helen to Menelaus. The action of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulus begins when the Greek ships are becalmed at the port of Aulus, unable to set sail for Troy. A prophet, Calchas, has informed Agamemnon that only if he sacrifices Iphigenia, his youngest daughter, to the goddess Artemis, will the wind arise so that their armies can take Troy. At first, Agamemnon recoils in horror at the prospect, but he is persuaded to sacrifice her by Menelaus, who appeals both to his honor and to his venality to send for her. Agamemnon writes to Clytemnestra to bring Iphigenia to Aulus saying that he has promised her to Achilles as wife, Achilles knowing nothing of this deception. Troubled by conscience, he writes again to Clytemnestra to ignore his earlier message, but Menelaus intercepts the messenger and denounces Agamemnon for changing his mind. Agamemnon, in turn, denouncing Menelaus, argues that “the gods, being favorable, rid you of A wicked wife, and now you want to win her back! As to the suitors, marriage-mad, with evil In their hearts, they swore an oath to Tyndareus. Yes, I grant that, but a crazed hope which I believe a god inspired affected all, Not any influence or strength in you. Make war with them—they’ll join you in their folly! But in heaven there is intelligence—it can Perceive oaths bonded in evil, under compulsion Sworn. So I will not kill my children.” (p. 313) While the two kings argue, a messenger approaches to tell that Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, and her young brother, Orestes, have arrived at the Greek camp. Moved by Agamemnon’s tears and his arguments, Menelaus now reverses his stand and begs Agamemnon not to sacrifice his daughter merely to regain Helen, his faithless bride. Again, Agamemnon reverses his stand and, after thanking Menelaus for his willingness to release him from his vow, he reaffirms, 143

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“But we have arrived At a fateful place: A compulsion absolute Now works the slaughter of the child.” (p. 313) Agamemnon supports this reversal (and the dramatist has him display his character) by sliding from a moral argument to a practical one while shifting the blame for his planned act to the gods. He supposes that, even if as Menelaus suggested they try to suppress the news that the sacrifice has been called off by killing the prophet Calchas, the cunning Odysseus will announce to the army that Agamemnon has folded: “so will he not Stand up in the midst of the army and Tell the prophecy which Calchas spoke And how I promised to sacrifice My victim to Artemis —and how I then Annulled my promises? Oh, with these words Will he arouse and seize the very soul Of the army, order them to kill you And me–and sacrifice the girl. If I should escape to Argos, they then Would follow me there, and even to The Cyclopean walls to raze them To the earth and the land destroy utterly. Such is the terrible circumstance in which I find myself. Now in my despair I am Quite helpless, and it is God’s will.” (pp. 320–321) Now set upon his course, Agamemnon begs Menelaus and the Chorus to keep secret from Clytemnestra his plan to kill Iphigenia until he has done it. The rest of the play tells of Iphigenia’s initial protest and pleas for her life and then her noble acceptance of her fate; she believes that her father honorably holds the Greek cause higher than her own life and that her sacrifice is essential. Iphigenia in Aulus ends as Euripides has Iphigenia ask her mother, Clytemnestra, not to hate her husband. However, as Sophocles (ca 410 BCE) 144

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tells it in the play Electra, Clytemnestra was not to be placated. Agamemnon eventually suffers the fate he feared the Greek army would exact for forswearing his vow, but, ironically, he dies by the hand of his wife. The back story of the play Electra is that Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon on his return from Troy, married her lover, Aegisthus, and banished her son, Orestes. As the play opens, her daughters, Chrysothemis, discreetly, and Electra, flagrantly and annoyingly to their mother and to Aegisthus, mourn their father and hope that Orestes will return to avenge the murder of Agamemnon. It is noteworthy that the Agamemnon mourned by his children in Electra as noble and falsely betrayed is a different man from the Agamemnon that Euripedes described as weak, fearful, vacillating, murderous, and deceitful. By that standard, Agamemnon fully deserved the death at Clytemnestra’s hands. When Clytemnestra answers Electra’s reproaches about murdering her father by reminding her of her justification, that Agamemnon had killed Electra’s sister, Iphigenia, Electra rejects her argument with an alternative version of the legend, that Astarte, the goddess who had demanded the sacrifice, had taken pity and instead transformed Iphigenia into a hind. Electra denounces her mother as having slain Agamemnon so that she could be with her lover, Aegisthus. Clytemnestra slinks away, vowing to kill Orestes, who she believes, on the basis of a dream, will take revenge, as indeed he does and in the same bloody fashion as his mother slew his father. Kitto (1960), while doubting that Agamemnon’s ambition amounted to hubris, also called attention to it in a way that is central to my argument. He observed that, although Agamemnon murdered his daughter seemingly at the urging of a god, we are not to suppose that the gods approved of his deed; witness the variant of the myth that has the god transform Iphigenia into a hind when her father would have slain her. In this respect, he is like Oedipus, who was informed by the oracle of Apollo that he would murder his father and bed his mother, but there is no implication that Apollo endorsed such goings on. Agamemnon shows himself to be an evil, bloodthirsty man who regularly transgresses moral law; that is, he exceeds the bounds of acceptable human behavior. Recall, he accepted the charge Cicero (ca. 60 BCE) offered another, more practical view of these matters. He considered Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia an appalling crime and insisted that he would have done better to repudiate his vow.



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laid out in his oath to Tyndareus to retrieve Helen from her abductors. However, he exceeded the requirements of justice that could have been satisfied by restitution, a fine, and some punishment of Paris. Not satisfied with mere justice, Agamemnon, however, went on to destroy Troy utterly; his revenge was a new and more serious crime. Aeschylus (ca. 470 BCE) makes Agamemnon’s relationship to the gods and to fate clear. On his return from Troy, a herald announces him, at the close of a speech of ominous praise, with: “He comes, lord Agamemnon, bearing light in gloom to you, and to all that are assembled here.. Salute him with good favor, as he well deserves, the man who has wrecked Ilium with the spade of Zeus vindictive, whereby all their plain has been laid waste. Gone are their altars, the sacred places of the gods are gone, and scattered all the seed within the ground. With such a yoke as this gripped to the neck of Troy he comes, the king, Atreus’ elder son, a man fortunate to be honored far above all men alive; not Paris nor the city tied to him can boast he did more than was done to him in return. Guilty of rape and theft, condemned, he lost the prize captured, and broke to sheer destruction all the house of his fathers, with the very ground whereon it stood. Twice over the sons of Priam have atoned their sins.” (pp. 50–51) Earlier, Clytemnestra, knowing the man for his excesses, dreads the likely enormity of Agamemnon’s triumph and prepares the audience to expect his downfall with these words. “And if they reverence the gods who hold the city and all the holy temples of the captured land, they, the despoilers, might not be despoiled in turn. Let not their passion overwhelm them; let no lust seize on these men to violate what they must not. The run to safety and home is yet to make; they must turn the pole, and run the backstretch of the double course. 146

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Yet, though the host come home without offence to high gods, even so the anger of these slaughtered men may never sleep. Oh, let there be no fresh wrong done!” (p. 45)

The Tragic View of the Hero If we view the hero as capable of unswerving dedication to a cause, we must ask if either Oedipus or Hamlet qualifies as a hero. The amount of resistance offered by the tragic hero to the designs of fate seems to vary in different dramas and at different points within dramas. Perhaps by dramatic convention, each of these plays has a biphasic structure. At first, the dramatist shows the hero as resistant, avoiding, complaining, temporizing—in short, acting not at all like a decisive hero. Then, at some inflection point, the hero accepts his heroic assignment, confirms his commitment, and through this act (often it is an explicit promise or vow) he makes himself the instrument of fate. The dramatist creates a character who holds our interest by drawing him as we see ourselves, conflicted and mostly unaware of why. In Oedipus the King the inflection point occurs before the play begins. We know, not from Sophocles, but from our knowledge of the legend on which the play builds, that Oedipus’ parents had been engaged in a series of evasive and hardly admirable, let alone, heroic moves they hoped would thwart the fulfillment of the prophecy that their child will murder his father. Oedipus, however, on learning of the prophecy, takes a more heroic stance. He leaves Corinth and forswears the throne he would have inherited in order to prevent the prophesized murder. As we will see in chapter 10, the inflection point in Hamlet takes place in the very last moments of the play; most of the action of the play occurs around Hamlet’s temporizing and the disasters to others it causes. The play Philoctetes, also by Sophocles (ca. 409 BCE, illustrates a third pattern. Recall that Philoctetes was one of the Greek warriors who accompanied Agamemnon on his expedition to restore Helen to Menelaus. He owns an invincible bow, and a prophet has told that Troy will not fall without its use. However, Philoctetes has suffered a wound from which he neither dies nor can recover; and the stench of the wound is so unbearable to his ship147

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mates that they maroon him on an island from which he cannot escape. Without him and his magic bow the war goes badly. Finally, Agamemnon sends Odysseus and Achilles’ son to bring Philoctetes, or at least his bow, to help the Greek cause. Philoctetes has spent years on the island bewailing his fate, the pain and stench of his wound, his loneliness, and the perfidy of his former comrades. He behaves in this hardly heroic fashion until the emissaries return to bring him to Troy. Then, with deliverance at hand, Philoctetes can choose, and he chooses not to go with Odysseus. He refuses to help the Greek cause but instead will remain in the very situation that until this moment he has utterly rejected. With this decision, to accept his fate, he assumes a truly heroic posture. In the rest of the play, there seems to be a reversal; as Sophocles tells it, Philoctetes changes his mind only when he comes to understand that it is the will of God that he must aid the Greeks. Then he complies with that higher will and leaves the island. Subjugating one’s will for what one understands to be the will of God is characteristic of the Greek outlook of the time, but it seems anticlimactic to the modern sensibility. Still, his yielding to higher power does not diminish his earlier heroic stance when he embraced his dismal state rather than acquiesce to the importuning of his erstwhile comrades. The heroes of Greek plays were not always noble characters worthy of emulation in the modern sensibility. Ajax, one of the earliest of the surviving plays of Sophocles, tells of the downfall of this mighty warrior who brought down Hector, the best and noblest of the Trojans. Ajax is a far less admirable person even than the other Greek heroes. He is conspicuously rash, arrogant, and willful, and sulky and murderous when he feels himself slighted. Sophocles (ca. 470 BCE) tells us that when Ajax left for Troy, his father, knowing him for the brute he was, offered his blessing with an admonishment: “Son, be resolved always to win your fight but always win with God to help you win.” The herald reports about Ajax’s retort, “Haughty and senseless was his answer:” “Father, with gods to help, a nobody can win as well as any man. But I, even without them, trust to grasp renown.” (p. 229) Ajax’s defiant proclamation seals his doom by inviting the enmity of Athena; she drives him mad and later forces his suicide. The bulk of the 148

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play considers the question whether such a man, for all his faults, has served his cause well enough to deserve a hero’s burial.

The Tragic Hero in Relation to Personality Development The view of the tragic hero who achieves his heroic stature by choosing to accept his tragic fate finds a parallel in individual development from a psychoanalytic vantage point. It corresponds to the shift from passive actor, moved by external forces, to active agent who chooses and directs his own fate. As often must happen in life, the tragic hero does not have a wide range of choices but must choose from the short list that life offers; that is, he recognizes necessity and makes himself its instrument. It is not so much that he lets himself “relax and enjoy it” in the face of the inevitable, as that he identifies himself with what must be and actively helps to bring it about. We find this same switch from passive to active as a principle marking the assumption of heroic status in many modern works. It has become almost a cliché in the theater that a soldier—grumbling, shirking, only slightly-better-than-animal, fearful of dying—offered the option of surrendering suddenly finds the will to resist; he becomes the hero who spits in the eye of the overwhelmingly powerful enemy and prepares to resist to the end. The sheriff of “High Noon” becomes a hero when, given every excuse to abandon his post, instead chooses to do what he feels he must do. One might say that the purpose of the initial phase of plaintive grumbling, or evading duty, or temporizing, is to show the humanity of the tragic hero, to make his later choice to grasp the nettle the more meaningful and exemplary. Were he able to be thoroughly stoic at all times, his later act would not seem heroic at all. This is an idea similar to that expressed in the paradox: Can a man be considered brave who does not experience fear? Or is only he brave who acts in spite of fear? Perhaps it is this transition, this metamorphosis from passive to active that is essential to the understanding of the tragic hero. Perhaps this transition makes the experience of watching tragedy more moving by helping the audience transform what might be only a passive one into an active experience and thus attain catharsis through identification with the hero. The We must keep in mind the cynical view that what we regard as courage is merely a lack of imagination.



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sense of mastery, or as Alexander (1955) called it, “reconciliation,” has a humbling aspect, to see oneself as human with human failings and only as part of the larger design of things. And it also has a transcendent aspect; by converting traumata that might be experienced only passively into experiences that one can grasp actively, the human spirit rises above itself. Thus, he is free who can choose to commit himself to what we might call secondary goals and purposes. And only he who has freed himself from subservience to primary goals and purposes is able to choose, that is, only he who has achieved secondary autonomy through acquiring the capacity to delay and the other accomplishments of secondary process. Dramatists depict man as aspiring to choose and use the mechanism of promising to announce the tragic hero’s readiness to choose and so to commit himself. The hero’s subsequent and inevitable fall punishes him for overreaching, for presuming to determine what the future will hold, in itself an act of hubris. This is not to say that choosing is itself portentous. After all, our daily acts of choosing, for instance what to wear or what to eat, are trivial. Dramatists, however, invariably have the tragic hero face serious, daunting, and defining choices. In the clinic, a person suffering from an obsessive– compulsive disorder helps to bridge the conceptual gap between momentous and quotidian choices, for to him, there are no trivial choices. The line between the praiseworthy conscientiousness of the upright citizen and the paralyzing scrupulousness of the suffering obsessive can be a fine one indeed. For the latter, every impending decision, no matter how insignificant it may seem to others, has possibly fearful significance and is bound to result in harm. The sufferer feels imprisoned by the necessity to choose and by the certainty that he will choose wrongly and with incalculable consequences. He does not know why he cannot choose blamelessly or what the consequence will be if he errs, and the clinician will discover, if he presses the sufferer to detail his fears, that he does not know and is not supposed to know about the dread outcome with any clarity.

“Do I dare to eat a peach?” (Elliot, 1917).



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10 Promising in Shakespearean Drama

As Kerrigan pointed out (1999), when one looks at Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets with promising in mind it is everywhere, and in all variety, from bombast to solemnity, virtuously kept and basely forsworn. Shirley (1979) observed, “Shakespeare uses the oath as an organizing device . . . either to guide a character on a course of action that will influence the whole direction of the play or, generally, when there is forswearing, to cast light on the way a larger number of people behave” (p. 25). Unlike the heroes of the Greek dramatists, many of Shakespeare’s leading characters swear mightily and casually, and mostly break their vows, either with specious justification, or none at all. They forswear and suffer the consequence in loss of reputation and worse. Others keep to their vows valiantly and deliberately, even unto death, and still others find at last that they have kept their vows even though they had renounced them. These patterns illustrate the several vicissitudes of promising that I outlined in earlier chapters. In this chapter I discuss several of the plays briefly to show the prevalence of promising in them and the varied way that Shakespeare had his characters make, break, extort, and worry over their promises to depict aspects of their personalities. My focus is particularly on two of the plays, Hamlet and Richard III, because they illustrate how Shakespeare employed as a dramatic device the theme of how a serious oath once made, takes on a life of its own and seems to fulfill itself despite the reservations of the promiser.

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First, Titus Andronicus (ca. 1585), one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, is certainly one of his bloodiest, replete with murder, rape, dismemberment, and lesser acts of violence. It also is remarkable for its large number of vows, oaths, and promises. The play’s most extended vow of revenge occurs in the third act, when Titus gathers his surviving family members and swears a mighty oath to avenge the murders of his wife and children. Anderson (2003) points out that earlier critics have attempted to clarify the moment of the vow in order to account for its peculiar force. To visualize this moment, imagine Titus surrounded by the gruesome evidence of the crimes committed against him, his own dismembered hand, the bloody body of his wife, and the severed heads of his children. He speaks: “Come, let me see what task I have to do You heavy people, circle me about, that I may turn to each of you and swear unto my soul to right your wrongs. The vow is made.” (III.ii.) Anderson proposes that the violence vowed by Titus as the eventual outcome of his purpose is also inherent in the vow itself. He notes that, “Titus himself explicitly associates his vow with the remnants of violence that are part of his promising ritual . . . [the] embodied vow reflects his attempt to collapse his promise of revenge and its violent effects” (pp. 1, 2). I prefer not to rely, as Anderson does, on the horror of the visual reminders of what Titus has suffered, horror that depends on stage directions accreted by successive editors and that are not in the original publication. We may rely instead on the fervor of Titus’s speech and the satisfaction he expresses in rising to this moment of dramatic declaration to conclude that his vow is complete in itself. At that moment (and depending, of course, on the skill of the actor) the audience can feel the power of Titus’ intention and may tremble in empathic awe at his furious resolve as well as in anticipation of the awful deeds that will be its fulfillment. Although Titus later carries it out in full, his furious vow carries such weight that, like a primary promise (see chapter 5), it is a significant part of an act that is interrupted, and is powerful enough in its expression for the audience to have the emotional conviction that it is complete in itself, that it is as good as done. Although 152

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it foretells future horrors as well, in Searle’s (1969) terms, Titus’ vowing emphatically is a speech-act. We can see a far more refined use of the act of promising to move the action along in Hamlet (ca. 1600a). Like Sophocles in his version of the Oedipus myth, Shakespeare put the seeming impetus to the tragedy of Hamlet in events outside the hero. Recall: Sulky Hamlet is moping about the palace, unhappy about how things have been going since the death of his father, and about the hasty remarriage of his mother to her brother-inlaw, Claudius. Hamlet has come home from college at Wittenberg for his father’s funeral and is planning imminently to return to school. As yet, Hamlet shows no sign of heroic potential. Indeed, he shows no inclination to act on his sadness and disappointment at his father’s death and dismay at his mother’s hasty remarriage until his father’s ghost tells him the story of his assisted demise and makes Hamlet promise to avenge him. Clearly, vengeance is not Hamlet’s idea and Hamlet, like Oedipus, is clearly of no mind to carry out the unwelcome assignment that his father’s ghost has thrust upon him—the rest of the play details Hamlet’s efforts to avoid carrying out the charge and his searching for reasons to procrastinate. Freud (1900) proposed the now widely accepted account of the dynamics of Hamlet’s behavior, and Jones (1910) elaborated Freud’s account. They supposed that Hamlet was reluctant to act because he too deeply identified with his uncle’s actions in displacing Hamlet’s father on throne and in bed and so could not wholeheartedly punish his uncle for wishes he (unconsciously) shared. If we read Act 1, scene 5 closely, we will notice that: Like Oedipus, Hamlet seems not to know, until his father’s ghost reveals it to him, that his father was murdered, although by implication, it was known or highly suspected by others. Consider, as the ghost parcels out the story of Claudius’ perfidy bit by bit, Hamlet utters a cry of surprise; “What?” to the ghost’s telling that Hamlet will be bound to take revenge (in a way not yet specified). So far, Hamlet has sworn only to hear the ghost’s story; that is all the ghost has asked of him. We may wonder why the ghost would have to demand a promise that Hamlet hear him out, unless he is aware that Hamlet would rather not hear what he is about to say. Hamlet next cries out, in dismay, “Oh, God,” to the ghost’s assurance that he is indeed the ghost of his father and that he has a horrifying story to I offer a close reading of the text.



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tell. Aghast, Hamlet cries out, “Murder!” when he hears the ghost’s charge that he must avenge his father’s murder. The ghost does not reveal the final fact, that the murderer is his brother Claudius, until Hamlet importunes the ghost to reveal it, “Haste me to know ‘t, that I, with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love, may sweep me to my revenge.” (Act I, v, 5-47) That utterance of high resolve, spoken before he learns the identity of the murderer, may be Hamlet’s last expression of eagerness to seek revenge, for when the ghost continues to add to the details of when and how he was murdered and, finally, by whom, Hamlet reacts with shock: “Oh my prophetic soul! My uncle!” I think it fair to assume that the expletive, “Oh my prophetic soul!” may be understood as “I suspected as much; I should have known it for certain.” We might wonder if Hamlet would have expressed such eagerness for revenge had the ghost told him in the first place who was to be the object of it. In the long, uninterrupted speech that follows, the ghost completes the story of his murder and ends with the admonition, “Howsoever thou pursuest this act, Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive Against thy mother aught: leave her to heaven, And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once! The glow-worm shows the matin to be near, And ‘gins to pale his uneffectual fire: Adieu, adieu! remember me.” (I.v.) Note that, although the ghost’s first demand was for revenge, his last plea to Hamlet is only that he remember him. Note, too, that, although Hamlet’s next to last response to the ghost is to swear revenge, his last response is to swear that he will remember; and to assure that he will remember, he enters a memorandum of it in his copy-book (in the text, in his “tables”). A fair implication is that, unless he makes a written memorandum, Hamlet fears he might forget the whole matter. The ghost, seeming also to trust Hamlet’s good intentions more than his memory, urges him to remember Reminiscent of a bit of dialog from Through the Looking Glass (Carroll, 1960): “The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, never forget!” “You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it” (pp. 189, 190).



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rather than to act, and even to refrain from acting against his mother, as he might well have expected him to do on his mission of vengeance. We note further evidence along these lines that, when Shakespeare has Hamlet’s companions query him about what the ghost said, Hamlet refuses to tell them, although he has already sworn them to secrecy. He does allude elliptically to what the ghost told him, however, after demanding assurance once more about their discretion: “There’s ne’er a villain dwelling in all Denmark But he’s an arrant knave.” (Act I, v, 48–105) To which Horatio retorts, with justifiable irritation, “There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave to tell us this.” (Act I, v, 48–105) I think we may understand that Shakespeare is telling us that the villainous character of Claudius, if not the brutal facts of the King’s murder, was well known. It follows that Hamlet’s surprise at hearing the ghost indict Claudius is either disingenuous or an expression of his unwillingness to know the facts, a function of his identification with Claudius. Like the actions of Oedipus, of whom it is said his tragedy was that he did not know who his parents were, Oedipus’ and Hamlet’s actions suggest, rather that they did not want to know the troubling facts. The scene ends with Hamlet refusing to tell his friends what the ghost told him, and then, oddly, insisting that they swear again, and re-swear on his sword, held up as a cross, that they will not tell of the events they have witnessed. When the friends demur at swearing again, insisting their original oaths should stand, the voice of the ghost joins Hamlet in ordering them to swear. Kerrigan (1999) finds this scene to be “pointless proliferation,” “bordering on the gratuitous” (p. 209). Shakespeare may have nodded, as Kerrigan believes, but he also may have had a point to make, that the ghost realizes that the promise to avenge his father’s murder weighs heavily on Hamlet. Consider the despairing words with which Hamlet ends the scene: “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!” (I.v.) Perhaps Shakespeare is telling us that the ghost knows his son and so knows that, because of his reservations, Hamlet will need time and forbearance 155

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to fulfill his revenge duty, and must bear that burden alone. Hamlet’s need for his companions ends at this point, and we do not hear of some of them again; fortunately, their oaths enjoined them from gossiping that could have spoiled the rest of the play. In the rest of the play, Hamlet, in every way possible, puts obstacles in his own path. He develops fits of melancholy, contemplates suicide, seeks proofs where he needs none, tempts his uncle to take action against him, drives his fiancée to suicide, kills an innocent, if garrulous, father-figure, allows himself to be shipped abroad, arranges to murder two erstwhile friends, and finally does what he must do in an inordinately complicated way involving a great deal of happenstance. Like Oedipus, Hamlet seeks to avoid doing what he swore to do, but both proved powerless to halt the march of fate they evoked in their vows. When discussing Hamlet, and especially the forces that shape his actions, we should understand the significance of the revenge motif in human life as well as a dramatic theme in Elizabethan England (Lawlor, 1960). The very essence of revenge is its disproportionateness, its excess beyond the offense. Revenge is characterized by escalation. Talion justice demands no more than an eye for an eye; revenge demands two eyes or more. For Hamlet to refrain from killing Claudius, as he easily might have done as he watched Claudius pray, speaks not only to Hamlet’s indecisiveness, but also to his awareness that the obligation his father placed on him was for revenge, not merely justice. In Hamlet’s words, a quick dispatch of Claudius at the earliest moment would be no more than “hire or salary,” not revenge. Some critics have concluded that Shakespeare was not fond of the revenge theme, which was highly popular in his time. Indeed, comparisons of Shakespeare’s treatment of the theme with that of less inhibited dramatists demonstrate the extent to which this attenuation or humanization can be seen not just in Hamlet but in his other plays that deal with the same problem (e.g., Lawlor, 1960). To return to Hamlet, it is clear that Hamlet is reluctant to do his revenge duty. Hamlet does not question that he ought to do it (both hell and heaven urge him to it), and it is clear from the play that he does not know why he does not want to do it and that he tries to spur himself forward with selfshaming invective. While Hamlet hesitates about avenging his father and contemplates the alternative paths his revenge might take, the work of sworn vengeance 156

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proceeds inexorably. Although Hamlet delays acting on his father’s charge to take vengeance against Claudius while sparing his mother (“leave her to heaven”), he manages to become the agent of destruction of another woman, Ophelia, onto whom his hatred for womankind has become displaced, and of another father, Polonius, who stands in his way to her. Whatever other purposes the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia might serve in the play, they also demonstrate the characteristic helplessness of man in the grip of a vow-become-compulsion. Delay as Hamlet may, his vow fulfills itself as much through his efforts at avoidance as by his more direct actions and sweeps the innocent and the guilty, agonists and bystanders before it. In support of the theory that Hamlet could not acquit his obligation to avenge his father’s murder simply by bringing Claudius to justice, notice that at the very end of the play Hamlet finally achieves justice. After Laertes stabs him with a poisoned sword, and Hamlet dispatches him in turn, Hamlet turns the sword on the King as well. Now Claudius’s death is assured and justice is served, but Hamlet’s revenge is not, inasmuch as he could have slain Claudius in the same way while Claudius was kneeling at prayer. As Hamlet himself is dying, he becomes the avenger in the true spirit of that role by forcing the poisoned wine between the lips of the already-dying Claudius. Thus Claudius dies twice: once in an unpremeditated and ironic way with the poisoned foil he had prepared for Hamlet, and again in acquittal of the premeditated vengeance that Hamlet held in mind for him throughout the play. Hamlet’s reluctance to be the avenger persists to the end; constrained by unconscious guilt, he does not act the avenger until he too is about to die, and until the murder he has planned and delayed has become redundant. Once Hamlet, like Oedipus, has reached the point of no return, there is no way out but to allow his promise to animate him, come what may, until its ultimate resolution. We cannot imagine Hamlet, or the hero of a Greek tragedy or of a grand opera for that matter, prudently changing his mind once he had sworn upon a course. The driving force and meaning of the work of art would be lost. The dramatic power of the work rests on the audience’s expectation that, come what may, the hero will become the instrument of his vow and will fulfill his promise, in spite of all obstacles and in spite of his own reservations. Recall that the charge contained in the prophecy that Oedipus vowed to carry out was merely to bring the murderer of Laius to justice, not to avenge his death.



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Action and Delay in Psychosexual Development Clinicians can see in Hamlet’s vacillating a bit of what the obsessive patient experiences about any decision. Ella Freeman Sharpe (1948) commented on Hamlet’s procrastinating that the organic functional basis of the whole play is revealed, for example, in the fact of Hamlet’s procrastination. If we disregard for the moment the more familiar Oedipal explanation in relation to the killing of Claudius and consider only the effect of procrastination and its final result, we get both a simple pattern of bodily functioning as such and a basis for Aristotle’s recognition of the cathartic function of great tragedy. Procrastination increases tension. Opportunity after opportunity to kill Claudius is presented to Hamlet and allowed to pass. Tension mounts. We are made aware of how great the gathering momentum is by the spasmodic outbursts that occur, for instance, when Hamlet kills Polonius on the spur of the moment, or leaps into Ophelia’s grave and fights Laertes. These sudden releases of pent-up energy do not lessen our awareness of mounting tension; on the contrary, they increase the feeling of movement to the inevitable debacle. In spite of our actual knowledge of the play’s end, we are emotionally captured by the physical and emotional integrity of the experience of procrastination. We share it because we too have known it. Such procrastination from emotional causes must come to its predestined end when tension can no longer be endured in body or feeling. The final, complete discharge clears the system, physically and emotionally. This is the bodily pattern of purgation on which Aristotle’s theory rests. The catharsis of feeling we experience at the close of the play is engendered in us by the poet’s having effected such catharsis for himself in the very creation or re-creation of the tragedy. The genius of the poet lies partly in the fact that long-forgotten psychophysical experiences remain accessible through the framing of symbolic and metaphorical word-bridges; continuity between past and present is unbroken. (p. 99)

Sharpe reminds us about the infantile source of procrastination that: An infant’s emotional and bodily discharge is immediate and spontaneous and procrastination plays no part in it. The ability to procrasti158

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nate, which is so distinctive of the play as a whole is a memorial to a later emotional situation which resulted, not in return to heaven, but in dethronement and banishment. A young child who has acquired sphincter control may revert to incontinence under emotional stress, e.g., in reaction to his mother’s pregnancy or the birth of another child. He may also express resentment and hostility by disobedience, i.e., by failure to do what he knows he should do at the time and place desired by the parents. In other words, a child may procrastinate by withholding his bowel contents until evacuation can no longer be prevented and a “‘catastrophe” occurs. (p. 100)

In that passage, Sharpe refers to some fundamental facts about human development that are important in understanding promising. She reminds us that procrastination, that is, the capacity to delay, is not part of the psychology of early infancy. The acquisition of the ability to delay also represents the beginning awareness of time, at least in the sense of being able to tell “now” from “not yet.” It also is the beginning of mastery over impulse, of the development of thinking independent of acting, and of the development of the sense of autonomy from parents and from instinct. The ability to say “no” in the first instance when the infant turns his face away from the breast carries with it the beginning of a sense of having will (Spitz, 1957). In holding that the development of autonomy is first manifested in the ability to delay, with roots in anal psychosexuality, Sharpe bids us notice that the autonomy achieved is, by this very source, limited. It is a relative delay, a relative autonomy. What the bowel has promised it must sometime deliver. Likewise, the separation of thought and action so based is limited. That which must come must come. That which shall be shall be. Jones (1910), in his introduction to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, describes the act of creation in a way that hints of links not only to unconscious sources but to psychosexual ones as well. The artist dissociates the impelling motor force from his conscious will, and sometimes ascribes it to an actual external agency, divine, or demonic. D’Annuncio, for example, in his Flame of Life makes his artist-hero think of the “extraordinary moments in which his hand had written an immortal verse that it seemed to him not born of his brain, but dictated 159

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by an impetuous deity to which his unconscious organ had obeyed like a blind instrument.” Nowhere is the irresistible impetuosity of artistic creation more perfectly portrayed than in the memorable passage in Ecce Homo where Nietzsche describes the birth of Thus Spake Zarathustra, “an involuntary character has been plainly indicated by most great writers, from Socrates to Goethe.” It is clear from the many reminiscences of those who have experienced artistic creation that idea and impulse become one again. The creator is the vehicle, almost the involuntary servant, the instrument of the process, not its author. Creation is moved by a force that cannot be denied. (p. 8)

We can see that the act of promising, swearing, prophesying or predicting has a structural affinity with the act of creation. One might think of it with some justification as representing the topmost layer, the most organized and the most reality-bound of the hierarchy of acts that involve the recombining of idea and impulse, of thought and act. When we speak of regression in connection with creativity, we generally append the attenuating phrase “in the service of the ego” to mitigate the implication that untrammeled drive is loose. However, with the aid of regression, the act of promising vehemently may lose its mooring in reality; it may gain impulsion of an intensity that betrays unconscious sources. In the same way, prophecies and predictions may reveal themselves as wishes, expressions of infantile omnipotence. At the bottom of the hierarchy, we face that in the primary organization of what later will differentiate as idea, affect, and action; it is not that word leads to act but that impulse⁄word⁄act is still undifferentiated, still unitary. When loosened by regression, the structure of secondary thought organization, the relative autonomy of thought from act, and of ego from id, based on the ego’s capacity to delay and procrastinate may come tumbling down.

Promising as a Device Dramatists Use to Heighten Dramatic Tension

A Gloss on Oedipus and Hamlet

My reasons for retelling the familiar stories of Oedipus and Hamlet are twofold: First, I want to reemphasize the degree to which the action of the play moves along despite all efforts to interfere with the workings of fate. 160

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The second purpose is to point up the way in which dramatists invoke the participation of the audience. There are enough differences in the significance of drama to Sophocles’ audience and that of Shakespeare that, although much of what I say can apply to both, my attention here is mainly on the earlier one. The audience for a Greek tragedy expected to be instructed and attended to participate vicariously in the action on the stage and to be captured emotionally through the retelling of the myth. They would be purged, catharsed (in Aristotle’s terms) through their vicarious participation in the acts of the hero. I think it not too much of a stretch to suggest that the position of the audience with regard to the actors on the stage is analogous to that believed to exist between God and man. Like the gods of Olympus, the members of the Sophocles’ audience watched the affairs of the hero, not with disinterest, but in a highly involved and partisan way. They watched how a man struggles against overwhelming odds and yields nobly and inevitably to his fate. The gods are different from men not in being less subject to fate, but simply in knowing more about it. While man goes to his destiny blindly unless a god chooses to enlighten him through an oracle or omen, the gods are burdened with knowledge, although powerless to interfere with what truly has been ordained. So it is with the audience watching a tragedy. Knowing full well how the play will end, they still watch helplessly and with mounting tension (because they watch but cannot interfere) as the tragic hero confirms his destiny with actions whose ultimate significance he does not know and cannot understand until it is too late. They watch Oedipus, the one-time savior of Thebes, as he vows to save it again, an undertaking whose consequences he cannot foresee. He becomes the instrument of his own undoing, pronounces judgment, and executes sentence upon himself. It is the dramatist’s job to assure that the members of the audience involve themselves fully with the action on stage. Sophocles intensifies the experience of the audience in part by building the play around a series of promises. Even before the play begins, as an audience familiar with mythology would know that King Laius, Queen Merope, and Oedipus himself have received prophesies (statements of what will be) from the oracle of Apollo. During the play proper, they hear from Oedipus’s own lips a succession of promises and vows, oaths and curses, all of which he 161

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fulfills by the play’s end. We may ask about the functions these promises have in the play. First, we can see in Oedipus’s promising his efforts to quell intimations of doubt about his own righteousness. There are hints in the play that Oedipus could have known more about himself and his origins than Sophocles portrays him as knowing. Several of the major characters, Jocasta, Creon, Tiresias, and the shepherd all seem to know more about the circumstances around the birth of Oedipus than they have told previously. And they seem to know more than they say about the death of Laius. Curiously, until then there was little vigor in Thebes to discover Laius’s murderer; Oedipus remarks upon that several times. To add to the back-story, Oedipus also showed little interest in finding out his parentage. His original query of the oracle about his true parentage came only after his peers teased him that he was not the son of Polybus. Clearly, others knew what he did not. However, following his visit to the oracle to find out, and hearing the chilling news that he would commit murder and incest, he seemed to lose his curiosity about whose son he actually was. Thus, Oedipus’s promises and threats to discover Laius’ murderer and to bring him to justice have a touch of bravado; he speaks louder and louder as if to convince himself of his innocence and to drown out the faint voices of doubt and guilt. In this connection, too, note his wild accusations against Tiresias and Creon, who try to restrain his zeal. Like the gambler who raises his bets as he fearfully hopes to change his luck, Oedipus aligns himself with the prosecution, shouts imprecations against the unknown murderer of Laius, and so fulfills a superego injunction. His zeal contains his undoing; each reiteration of his promise digging him deeper into the pit. Thus, Oedipus’s promises, spoken with such passion, are also an expression of poetic justice or irony; what he calls down on the nameless murderer will fall on him. Oedipus’s wild, impetuous seizure of authority contrasts with the modest behavior of Creon, who when challenged on several occasions, refuses to say more than he knows, refuses to act without the gods’ confirmation, and refuses to exceed his role. In contrast, Oedipus’s rash promising clearly constitutes hubris. We may compare Oedipus’s behavior with much of the oath taking, swearing and promising we see in everyday life that has a clearly histrionic character. Such promising serves to display to others the intensity of one’s purpose, it demands public recognition of one’s righteousness, and, incidentally, it makes it more difficult to change one’s mind. Much swearing, 162

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and the posturing that goes with it, can clearly be understood as bombast. In short, the promising that is contained in the conspicuous acts of taking an oath or swearing is less a way of preparing to assure fulfillment than it is a way to enhance one’s stature, to emphasize the sincerity of one’s intention, whether for the benefit of self or to reassure others. Our taste in heroes has changed over the generations. At times, we have been inclined to hold up for admiration the man of “quiet purpose,” one whose life is guided by the post-promising morality that reflects his capacity to make firm and correct decisions, but who does not feel called on to announce them in any public fashion. The silent heroes of some Western motion picture epics are of this kind. The audience knows what the hero will do, what he must do, and becomes as absorbed in his tragedy as the Greek audiences must have been in Oedipus’s rise and fall. But Oedipus is not Gary Cooper. Like many other tragic heroes, he does not fit within the moral norms of prudence, duty, temperance, and moderation that were the explicit ideals for Greek behavior, norms that, incidentally, Jocasta and Tiresias and the chorus all urge on Oedipus. The nature of this hero is in sharp contrast to the classic ideal—he exceeds, he aspires, he dares. Thus, Oedipus’ repeated, rash promises are quite as consistent with his character as was his offhand murder of Laius. It is the dramatist’s genius that he uses the device of the repeated promise or oath to show Oedipus’ way of tempting fate and how he becomes the instrument of his dependency on fate. Repeated promising becomes a kind of leitmotif that underscores the tragic irony of the certain outcome that must befall one who presumes to thwart destiny. As Oedipus becomes firmer in his resolve to avenge Laius’ murder, the dramatic tension heightens and sweeps the audience along. They are forced to watch but are powerless to intervene, just as those on the stage who try to dissuade Oedipus from his course can have no effect. They feel aghast at Oedipus’ rash behavior and are filled with awe and pity, as he slowly learns that it is not man against whom he struggles but a larger design against which his heroic posturing and his efforts at evasion alike are unavailing. I have so emphasized the idea that man and his gods are subject to fate that I might leave the impression that, as exemplified by the tragic hero, man is but a puppet moved by forces external to him; the working out of a tragedy would then be little more than a mechanical exercise. In these plays, however, as distinguished from the legends on which they were 163

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based, fate does not act through the injection of supernatural forces but only through a kind of limitation of the tragic hero’s field of choice, limitations that are wholly consistent with the hero’s real experiences. Although the power of the gods, or fate, or providence is paramount in the universe, these forces do not override the workings of individual character any more than the laws that govern the physical universe override the properties of natural bodies. The hero is forced by his own nature to make the choices that invoke disaster. One might say, that, as an agent with free will, Hamlet may choose for better or for worse. Could he not choose justice or even forgiveness as well as revenge? However, he chooses as he does; first by temporizing as he must, and then by acting as he must. He delays and acts “as he must,” with impaired will because he is divided within himself and does not know why he feels pushed one way and then the other by conflicting motives. The spectacle of man propelled and retarded by forces within him that he does not understand (and as the dramatist hints, does not fully want to understand) is, I believe, the essence of human tragedy. Medieval and later apologists for the theater found reason to approve of play watching by arguing that since man’s will is free, the tragic hero’s fate must stem from his sinning. Thus, man should watch tragedies and be warned by the downfall of princes that sin invariably is punished. It is of the essence of the Freudian insight that a will that is free to choose between good and evil is partly fiction. The freedom to choose is real but limited; the freedom to choose depends completely on knowing what choices exist and how repressed wishes and other inner commitments affect one’s weighing of those choices. As long as the hero knows as little about himself as most of us do, his will can hardly be freer than his capacity to see and make use of alternatives. It is in this sense that psychoanalytic treatment attempts to free the will of some of its unconscious determinants. By increasing one’s self-knowledge, analysis makes more choices available. Let us look again at Oedipus in connection with self-knowledge. Recall that his first intimation of what is to come is through a prophecy that he is fated to commit parricide and incest. Thus, his fate seems to come to him as from an external source. His reason and his will rebel against these terrible ideas, and he acts in an entirely virtuous manner (to use this term within the tradition that began with Plato and continued through Aquinas and later commentators). He flees the place he believes to be his native country and finds his way to Thebes, where the well-known events of 164

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the play take place. But Oedipus acts virtuously on the basis of the only knowledge he has. It is what he does not know that undoes him—his not knowing who his parents really are. You will recall that it was to find out about his parentage that led him to the oracle in the first place. However, he dropped that question to flee Corinth (and from further knowledge) and did not learn the answer to his first question until the dénouement of the play. I agree with those who hold the opinion that the tragedy of Oedipus lies precisely in his not knowing who his parents are. Moreover, he willfully mistook appearance for reality; at each point when new information emerged, he turned away and vowed with ever more force to act on his declared intention. He was not disposed to understand himself; because of his character and his conflicts, he was unable to follow the classic Greek advice, “Know thyself.” Thass-Thienemann (1957) called attention to the etymology of the Greek root of the infinitive “to know.” It contains the ideas both of having carnal knowledge and of gaining intellectual knowledge—another instance of the antithetical significance of important words. By not “knowing about his parents” cognitively, Oedipus came to “know” them carnally as he unwittingly became a victim of the fate he sought to avoid. Psychoanalysis places within him the fate from which he cannot flee; psychoanalysis sees the motives that drove him as being within his own nature, part of the unconscious heritage of all mankind. Hamlet suffers, too, from lack of knowledge about himself. If he had been aware of his conflicted Oedipal strivings, his revenge duty would not have stumbled upon his unconscious sense of guilt and the play would have ended with Claudius dead and Hamlet triumphant—as indeed the story ends in the ancient saga of Amleth, from which Shakespeare borrowed the theme. Thus, both Oedipus and Hamlet are unable to avoid acting on the impulses of their infancy. Unable to remember, they are forced to repeat. The repressed knowledge that amounts to their “fatal flaws” shows itself in their driven behavior and in their repeated vows that override their doubts and permit them to ignore the quiet calls to heed reality; they confirm the intention to continue on course, come what may. It is clear that the secondary motivational structures set up by these promises and vows were invaded by the very repressed impulses they were intended to thwart. The working out of the tragedy that ends in self-destruction testifies to the efficacy of this unholy alliance. 165

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The Comedies Several examples of promising can be found in the comedies. We might expect to find Shakespeare using the various forms of the act of promising in a lighter way in his comedies, and we would not be disappointed. But lighter does not necessarily imply trivial, for here, as elsewhere, he uses promise making, breaking (often inadvertent breaking), and outright forswearing to illuminate what is essential in his characters, but only occasionally in the fateful way we have seen promises used in tragedy. The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare, ca. 1597b), considered a comedy possibly because most of the characters end up happy, is a serious play on the theme of obligation, as Kerrigan (1999) observed. All the characters are involved with vows and oaths kept and broken. The devilish antihero, Shylock, anticipated and then relished the merchant Antonio’s breaking his promise, that is, his inability to repay his debt; Shylock prefers to collect the forfeit. Shakespeare gave Shylock some of the best lines, lines that make his bitterness and obduracy plausible if not likeable. A possibly false note is having Shylock rationalize as a religious obligation that he cannot forgo his implacable demand for the literal repayment of the debt Antonio owes him by a pound of Antonio’s flesh. He insists he may not alter his vow despite the several appeals and inducements that Portia, in her guise as lawyer, offers him in the names both of mercy and venality. Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, who is bound to obey him by vow, law, and custom, breaks her vow and weds outside their faith and while doing so, awards herself a substantial dowry from her father’s treasury, including a ring of great sentimental value to Shylock, which she then sells to buy a pet monkey. Portia, while rooting for Bassanio, the man who has won her heart, keeps to the condition her dead father laid on her to marry only the man who guessed which of the three caskets contains her picture. Bassanio, who first pursued Portia to mend his fortunes and whose need for money even to finance his courtship led his friend Antonio to borrow from Shylock, proves unable to keep his vow to Portia to hold fast to the ring she gave him; he surrenders it in gratitude to the young lawyer (Portia in disguise) who saved his neck. The seemingly jocular interplay about this broken vow seems to me less comic relief than a continuation of Portia’s proving herself to be a bet166

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ter man than any she has met. When others failed to move Shylock, and when her high-minded appeal to mercy or her appeal to his greed also failed, she put herself forward with strength, purpose, and wit to win the case against Shylock at law and throughout remained steadfast in her own vows and obligations. Ironically, Shylock’s oath in refusing compromise and insisting on the strict fulfillment of the bond, “My deeds upon my head! I crave the law” is almost immediately fulfilled on his head, by virtue of the law. Shylock loses not just his case, his vengeance, his daughter, his faith, and half his fortune, but also whatever moral stature he earned through his defiant stance. In Measure for Measure, a comedy also by courtesy, Shakespeare (ca. 1600d) has hypocritical Angelo being placed in charge by his brother, the good Duke Vincentio during his supposed absence. Disguised as a friar, Vincentio intends to watch while Angelo cleans up the town. One of the outcomes of this dark comedy is that the moralist Angelo, who had broken his marriage vow to Mariana, is tricked by his own lust for Isabella, a young nun, to sleep with his former betrothed, thinking her to be Isabella. And so he redeeems his broken marriage vow in spite of his changed intentions. Shakespeare (ca. 1600c) gives much of Act 4, Scene 1 of As You Like It to Rosalind’s witty teasing of Orlando. She confuses him with her rapid approaches and avoidances of him and ends her speech with a threat to be done with him if he fails by a minute to return to her at two o’clock from a dinner with the Duke that he is obliged to attend. “By my troth, and in good earnest, and so God mend me, and by all pretty oaths that are not dangerous, if you break one jot of your promise or come one minute behind your hour, I will think you the most pathetical break-promise and the most hollow lover and the most unworthy of her you call Rosalind that may be chosen out of the gross band of the unfaithful: therefore beware my censure and keep your promise.” (IV.i.) Rosalind makes clear in the next lines that the extravagance of her demand is defensive, that she is so much in love with Orlando that she fears to display it, and berates Cupid for his hold on her. 167

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“I cannot be out of the sight of Orlando: I’ll go find a shadow and sigh till he come.” (IV.i.) The threat is not sincere, but the feeling it attempts to disguise is; and the promising form serves very well to tell us of this strong woman’s struggle to maintain her pride and dignity in the grip of passion and tenderness that until now have been foreign to her. As in the other Shakespeare comedies, it is not clear what attracts the relatively stronger women characters to the feckless men who ignore them, or pursue them, or both. Perhaps it is, as Shakespeare (ca. 1600b) put in the mouth of Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “So I, admiring of his qualities: Things base and vile, folding no quantity, Love can transpose to form and dignity: Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;” (I.i.)

The Historical Plays The very multiplicity of swearing, promising, vowing, and oath taking, and of forswearing, reneging, and oath breaking in Shakespeare’s historical plays raises the question if all these variants display the dynamics of promising that have been proposed. In Oedipus and Hamlet, the audience follows the career of the hero, the sole promiser, as he promises and repromises his way into fulfillment and destruction. In the historical plays, Shakespeare gives us an uninspiring glimpse of the misbehavior of royalty in the pre-Elizabethan era; kings and courtiers, royalty of every rank of distinction vaunt their sincerity while dissembling their motives. In the Henrys, Richards, and John, Shakespeare has all the major and minor characters swear and counter swear mighty oaths while figuring the angles as to whether it would be more advantageous to keep an oath or to break it. After all, how valid and binding could the oath be, for instance, in view of the uncertain legitimacy of the monarch in whose name it was made? What would be the consequences of forswearing? Do I have to worry about the moral consequences of an outright breach? Clearly, all the nobility had deep and abiding concern for the sanctity of vows in general, and each would become outraged about the duplicity of his peers. They condemned 168

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the oath breakers even as they recanted their own vows and tried to evade the opprobrium they knew their behavior deserved. The unworthy behavior of these royal characters says much about their personalities, their character, and their capacity for self-deception; but what about their promises? What was their fate? Consider the Duke of Gloucester, soon to be Richard III (Shakespeare, ca. 1597a), who laid out the case for the righteousness of his seizing of every advantage because Nature had cheated him by giving him a crippled form. After seducing the widow whose husband he had murdered, Richard confides in an aside to the audience, “I . . . seem the saint when most I play the devil” (p. 800). Clearly, the moral climate of Elizabethan England was different from that of ancient Greece and from the unspecified ancient time of Hamlet. Nevertheless, although the agency responsible for the outcome had different names, the outcome of their vows was the same. In ancient Greece, fate ruled the affairs of men. In Elizabethan England, although nominally it was God who punished sinners, Richard died on Bosworth Field by the hands of the few he had not managed to kill earlier; the death he had planned for them ironically befell him. As Kerrigan (1999) remarks, Fates of every kind converge on that end: narrative structure (a moralizing tragedy of one who rose through murder and treachery must end with his fall), mythic structure (the hunchbacked scapegoat, forced as he himself says, to “buckle fortune on my back/ To bear her burden whe’er I will or no” [3.7227-28]), blood-feud logic (when someone has committed murders on both sides, the two factions can unite in taking revenge on him), political (the ousting of a demon king clears the skies for the glory of the Tudor dynasty), providential justice (again the Christian God, as he will in the end, punishes sin), authorial design (an entire tetralogy written with his end in mind), audience satisfaction (somewhere around the slaughter of the princes, we have had enough). (p. 68)

Indeed, all manner of causes were served by Richard’s ironic ending, which had him cursed by all, even by his mother. With so many converging curses in play, is there any reason to weigh Richard’s self-recriminations and self-cursing more heavily than the others? Kerrigan thinks not. He adds, 169

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Cursing surely belongs to the rhetorical design of the play. I would not classify it as a variety of promising. It takes us back to the transformation of grief into revenge and can be viewed as a special case of that transformation of grief into revenge and can be viewed as a special case of that transformation. Cursing is what happens when a griever who would become a revenger wants the power to exact revenge: the hate-speech of the powerless. But cursing is, it seems to me more an omen than a cause of Richard’s downfall. Even Margaret, the queen mother of cursing, is not sure whether such malediction breaks through to the ear of God: “Can curses pierce the clouds and enter heaven [I.3.195]? (pp. 69–70)

Despite this firm stance, Kerrigan cannot keep from worrying the issue. Shortly after these comments, he adds, “Whatever aura of fear or plausibility that might surround a specific curse arose, not from theology or church sanction, but popular sentiment” (p. 70). He quotes Stoll (1907), who also held that Shakespeare merely exemplified the beliefs of his age when he noted that all his curses, including, by the end of the play, those by nearly all the other characters against Richard, are fulfilled, as they are in folklore and precisely as invoked. As Stoll put it, “We have been dealing with his art, but his art was the frank, unconcerned utterance of his belief. And of that of his age, to be sure” (p. 232). It is difficult for me to understand the importance of the distinction Kerrigan and others insist on, to put it briefly, that it is not the curse that causes the downfall. To the contrary, clearly folklore at various times has it so. A curse, vow, or promise expresses the hatred, fears, and hopes, in short, a person’s mixed intentions, whether in life or in a play. When uttered within the compressed lifetime of a drama, the vow expresses the dramatist’s sense of the way man’s character contains his fate and how it plays out relentlessly toward the only end possible. The folklore of all eras embodies the same conviction, and as fashions have changed, authorities in religion, law, philosophy, and literary criticism have had to come to terms with this unchanging belief. Let us follow Richard as he plots and schemes, uttering what Kerrigan (1999) considers to be “minor” oaths, until the second wooing scene. Then, lusting after the remaining daughter of Elizabeth, whose sons he had murdered in the Tower, he caps his career of swearing and forswearing by trying to convince Elizabeth of the sincerity of his expressed beneficence 170

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toward the young Elizabeth, her daughter. He successively calls upon more fixed and trustworthy witnesses to vouch for his sincerity, raising the ante as, at each turn, Elizabeth confronts him with his record of deceit. Kerrigan notes, “With these oaths, Richard seals his fate . . . a great deceiver broken at last by the very structure of an oath, which turns out to be, in the words of the play, a well-contrived instrument for demonstrating human trustworthiness” (pp. 82–83). We can hardly say about Richard III, as we said about Oedipus and Hamlet, that he lacked self-knowledge. Through most of the play, he revels in awareness of his duplicity and delights in his ability to get away with murder and lesser crimes. Only in his final, tortured, conflicted confession, just before he goes out onto Bosworth Field to die, does he confront himself with the enormity of his behavior. At this inflection point, his eyes open to view perhaps the only truth he has avoided knowing about himself: that he has a conscience, not the shriveled remnant we might have suspected, but a conscience great enough to demand a final accounting. He has kept it long buried under blankets of rationalization so that it was not able to prevent his depraved behavior, but it emerged in time to assure that he is punished for it. Like the audience of the Greek dramas, the audience for Richard III is instructed by his career and downfall and has its moral convictions confirmed: even kings are punished for their sins, not least among which is audacity and the crimes it leads them to commit.

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11 Forms of Promising in Religious Practices

Although we do not believe that human history recapitulates human development any more precisely than ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, we still may look for and learn from developments in the history of the culture of mankind that seem to have analogs in the development of personality. We are fortunate to have entrée to the cultural history of a significant portion of mankind from the layered archaeological remnants of the ancient civilizations of the Near East, where the art of writing also began. Using archaeological records and surviving clay tablets, parchments and papyri, experts have reconstructed the memories of earlier oral traditions, their stories, laws, and commercial transactions. The process of constructing a plausible cultural history of these eras is still unfolding. Early man was confronted daily by the brutishness and brevity of life. All archeological evidence tells us that once his technology was sufficient to guarantee his immediate survival, man became preoccupied with longterm continuity, that is, not only his physical survival but also his place in eternity. From the unceasing quest to know his origins and his fate have come man’s highest achievements: his sciences, his philosophies, his art and literature, and his religions. It should not surprise us, therefore, that side by side with records of commercial transactions and legal decisions we find institutionalized expressions of human curiosity and creativity in which the major themes have to do with man’s wish to know and control his fate. But man’s wishes to know his origins, to know where he came from and where he is going, have been constrained not only by the natural 173

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limits of his capacity to know, but also by moral concerns about what is proper for him to know, and thus what he should and should not aspire to know. The wish to know has often been expressed in a negative form, by fears and taboos about his right to know his fate. In every culture of which I have some knowledge, man’s efforts to learn about the future through oracles, prophecy, or divination, and to control the future through promises, oaths, vows, or prayers have been beset by prohibitions and taboos. Man’s right to know about and control the future, that is, his fate, invariably was understood to be a restricted and contingent right, one not to be exercised frivolously and, when exercised, mostly to be regretted. Wherever man’s remains are found there is evidence of concern about his uncertain future. With the acquisition of a sense of time and with it the ability to predict based on average expectancies, and thus to anticipate consequences, man gained a significant degree of realistic control over his immediate future. Extrapolating to the near future from the record of the past and taking steps to control it are expressions of man’s capacity to test reality. But as long as man’s anxious imagination can frame questions and worried concerns that his “science” (that is, his knowledge) cannot answer, he will seek assistance and reassurance from magical thinking, usually embedded in myths and institutionalized in religious ceremonies. Man obtains magical assistance to predict and control the unknown future by taking part in ceremonies, rituals, and other prescribed religious practices as well as by improvising personal acts of worship. These practices make use of thought structures related to the act of promising, for instance, prayers, vows, sacrifices, oaths, ordeals, covenants, and prophesies. In chapters 8 and 9, I showed that some of the important works of literature, particularly the most honored works of tragedy, could be understood as stories about heroes driven by conflicting inner forces who were compelled to fulfill vows they had made, vows the consequences and ultimate significance of which they were ignorant. They did not find out the consequences and significance of their vows, if they found out at all, until it was too late to correct matters. Literature has its roots in the same human concerns that led to the development of religion. Throughout history, drama particularly has been closely associated with religious purposes and ceremonials. The vows that dramatists used to move the play along have analogs in religious ritual. 174

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Here we will trace some steps in the historical development of two other forms of promising, the form of the covenant, and the form of the oath. Myths, biblical sources, archeological findings, and anthropological evidence demonstrate some impressive parallels between the development of these forms of promising in the life of each individual, as we can study them in our children and patients, and in the cultural development of man. First, a brief review of our basic assumptions about the psychic situation at the earliest stage of human life, the so-called stage of primary narcissism, which we assume is never completely outgrown. However mature a person becomes, or however mature a culture becomes, one can still see in daily life vestiges of earlier phases of development. They are not “relics” in the sense that, like museum specimens, they are visible, perhaps instructive, but no longer functional. On the contrary, they include the familiar practices of our daily lives; many traditions, customs, and characteristics of our language can be viewed as hangovers from earlier periods of cultural development. Although somewhat anachronistic, however, they do not appear to us as curiosities that belong on our psychic whatnot shelf because along the way they have acquired secondary, socially adaptive functions. Now, to perform them is expected, and to omit them would be conspicuous. Take, for example, shaking hands on meeting, saying goodbye on parting, or saying gesundheit or God bless you on hearing a sneeze, or raising the right hand to be sworn. All these “rituals” are truncated vestiges of ancient, once intensely meaningful acts, and most of us who practice them daily and automatically could not explain why we do it. Despite these analogies, I am not offering a simple parallel between individual psychic development and the cultural development of our species. At least from Hegel’s time, the idea that cultural history advances through stages has appealed to social theorists much as the idea that personality matures through developmental stages or phases has appealed to personality theorists. The idea that cultures develop in stages can be a useful heuristic device if we do not take it too literally. The most common We expect to find such instances multiplied among our neurotic patients, whose lives in large part may be governed by practices (or omissions) intended in some magical way to ward off unknown dangers. Such vestigial practices are even more common in the so-called primitive cultures of today and in the records of vanished civilizations, for example, the rites of sacrifice in the Old Testament.



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error, and logically the most suspect one, is to assume equivalence between the thinking of infants and children in our culture and the thinking of either present-day “primitive man” or the peoples of ancient civilizations. Wherever contemporary “primitive man” is observed, we find that he thinks in magical and narcissistic ways in some areas and in sharply realistic ways in other areas. The presence at any time of magical thinking is a function of the degree to which one experiences helplessness, that is, the inability to appreciate reality (Stern, 1964). Modern biblical archeologists (e.g., Albright, 1957) have pointed out that a protological (or magical) kind of thinking governed religion, and to some extent art and literature, roughly to the late second millennium BCE and characterized magic and mythology to a much later period in the Near East. However, from archeological evidence, we judge that in his everyday activities, man understood causality adequately and could make use of practical, reality-attuned thinking. The presence of such realistic thinking can be traced back as far as history permits. Such effective everyday thinking, however, need not have involved the ability to formulate concepts or to systematically classify data or employ deductive logic, accomplishments that represent a higher order of thinking. Still we can maintain that the idea of development (as distinguished from progress!) is as necessary to understanding history, as it is to understanding human beings. If we do not take a too simplistic view of individual development and remember that maturity is never completely realized, that old forms continue to exist side by side with later ones, that temporary regressions are common—and if we recognize that in cultural development a similar overlapping of earlier and later forms, as well as returns to simpler and older forms, regressions, if you will, is also common, then perhaps the parallels that I mean to demonstrate will seem plausible.

The Covenant Form Modern historians of religion agree that the Judeo-Christian religions have their roots in totemism. In an early work, Totem and Taboo (Freud, Or civilized man, for that matter. Some readers who believe that scripture is to be believed on faith without question may object to the very premise of my investigation. The fundamentalist prohibition against knowing or inquiring into forbidden areas may be a modern version of earlier absolute prohibitions against man’s curiosity, prohibitions against wanting to know more than is good for him.

 

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1913), which remained one of Freud’s personal favorites, he took totemism not as the beginning of religious history but as an endpoint. He saw it as a highly developed form whose source in guilt about the primal crimes of father murder and incest far antedated recorded history. Freud’s ideas in this area were not taken seriously by professional anthropologists and historians, whose grounds for disbelief were that no evidence for such a stage of human history could be found either in contemporary “primitive” cultures or in the archeological remnants of extinct cultures—notwithstanding the evidence of myths, many of which are quite explicit about such events. Exceptionally among anthropologists, Margaret Mead (1963) drew upon newer findings about the prehistory of the human species to show that Freud’s ideas are plausible, if the historical period he referred to is the stage before the precursors of man acquired the distinctly human attributes of a latency period and a biphasic sexual development. If the precursors of man, like the higher apes of today, matured physically and sexually between the ages of five and nine years of age, then the possibility of acting rather than merely fantasying about oedipal wishes would be immanent. However, if we look behind totemism as a social-religious system, and Freud’s derivation of it from the Oedipal situation, we can see in it a source of the covenant form. We consider that one of the earliest phases of magical-religious thinking of which we have evidence relates to the magic of the hunt. We assume that Paleolithic man drew game animals on cave walls to assure that they would remain available. It seems a safe assumption that those ancient men were aware of their dependence on those nourishing animals, and were aware too that episodically and mysteriously the animals diminished in number, leaving the tribe exposed to hunger. From a psychoanalytic point of view, we assume that the awareness of potential loss of supply could recapitulate the awareness of separateness from the original nurturing object, the mother. We could then view the cave drawings and any ceremonies associated with them as having the larger meaning of a wish to restore the original sense of oneness—to regain a sense of control over the ultimate source of nurturance. Out of such a matrix, man could devise ceremonial practices, acts, and avoidances intended to placate the needed animal and assure that it would not abandon him. By identifying himself with the animal, the hunter could 177

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form a kind of totem bond to reassure him that his interests and those of his nurturing objects were identical. By giving up some of his sense of omnipotence to the animals, earliest man would have recognized that these animals, and indeed perhaps events outside himself, had a degree of freedom from his will. We could consider that his magical ceremonials, in a general sense, were an effort to restore his sense of omnipotence, in part by reuniting with the object onto which he had projected it. A much later development in religious thought placed God in the position of the totem animal. The theologically approved form of repairing the breach with God is to subjugate oneself to Him, to restore the unity with Him by becoming one with Him and doing His will. By being willful, man seems to identify God with himself, rather than himself with God. Perhaps we simply have here another version of the problem of object relations at the oral phase, putting the question as, “Who eats whom?” There have been stages in religious practice when both answers have been institutionalized, as in the conception of the totemic meal at which the god is ingested, vestiges of which can be seen in the Passover meal and the Catholic Mass. The rites of sacrifice and many of the ceremonials of Greek and Middle Eastern religion also have to do with feeding the god. The practice of human sacrifice belongs not only to myth but also to recorded history (Money-Kyrle, 1930; Yerkes, 1952). Putting these changes in the formal positions of God and man along the dimension of “who eats whom” does not imply that the ideational content or moral significance of these acts remains unchanged. We can draw a clear line of ethical development that begins with the conception of a hypothetical stage of killing and eating one’s father. Later we find various versions of this act in the sacrifice of a ceremonially sanctioned totem animal; to sacrificing firstborns to an earth spirit or making an animal or vegetable first-fruit sacrifice to placate a god or an expression of thanks to Freeman (1967) argued that the totemic meal is, by all anthropological evidence, a rare event and that Freud was wrong in believing that eating the totem invariably was associated with totemism. Yet Freeman concedes that prohibitions against eating the totem are almost universal. We accept the formal equivalence, at least in the unconscious mind, of the act and the prohibition against it; there hardly would be a need for the prohibition if there were not at least the wish to perform the forbidden act. In this connection, note that some Bible scholars (e.g., Zimmerli, 1965) lean toward the idea that the scriptural account of the giving of the Decalogue on Mount Sinai refers to the autumnal festival at which the renewal of the Covenant was celebrated.  Whether it is at base a historical deed or prevalent fantasy is not germane to this discussion. 

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a god; to the current attenuated, symbolic version of taking (that is, achieving) communion through wine and wafer. Withal, the magical significance of the act remains even though the social context and stage of cultural development have changed radically. We could make similar observations about the development of the ideas of justice and of judicial inquiry, which also have roots in religious ceremonials. The ordeal, as a way of discovering the truth of an allegation, persists vestigially in the swearing of jurors and witnesses (Reik, 1925). I have taken a generally developmental position in this sketch of history. Those who favor a cyclical theory may find support for their view in my account in the several reversals in form of worship as well as in the reversals in the ideational content of Greek religion in which the fear of freedom and the extolling of freedom alternated. Contrast, for instance, the cultic propitiation of God in the Homeric myths with Sophocles’ treatment of the myths, in which he stressed the fear of presuming beyond one’s allotted portion. Aristotle, praising the intellect as divine, believed that to the extent that man can live at that level, he transcends mortality. Zeno held that man’s intellect was more than godlike; it was a portion of the divine substance in a pure state. Less venturesome, Epicurus proposed that with the truths of philosophy, one could live like a god among men (Dodds, 1959, p. 238). We have less information about the ideational forms that characterized intellectual and religious life when the wandering tribes of Hebrews settled into cities, but the experiences and symbolizing capacity needed to arrive at the idea of the covenant were present. From such a beginning, it would not require much expansion of the covenant idea to see it as assuring an identity of purpose among men and a loyalty among blood brothers who have in common their mutual dependency (Brenner, 1952). We may derive the idea of the covenant from the earliest experiences of infants as well as from the dependency of ancient man on oral supplies. It can serve to express the resolution of other conflicts, too, as well as serving cultural purposes. Freud attributed the relationship among the members of the tribe and between the tribe and its totem animal to the Oedipus complex. In contrast, Roheim (1945), as do I, stresses the conflicts at the oral stage. I see no conflict in principle between these positions; each complements the other. Thus far, in considering the derivation of the covenant form, I have considered only the positive side of the ambivalent feelings in the oral 179

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phase. When we examine existing or historical covenant rituals, however, it becomes clear that an additional purpose served by forming a covenant is to assure mutual forbearance in the presence of mutual distrust or hostility. The covenant is a ceremonial way to guarantee the unity between man and the nourishing (totem) animal by neutralizing their mutual hostility. At a later stage of religious thinking, the covenant has the same hostilityneutralizing function for man in his relationships with the deities who control events. Man projects some of his own sense of omnipotence to these supernatural beings, and the covenant thus reflects man’s effort to regain control of some of his lost sense of omnipotence and omniscience. One can see in this striving to regain the projected omnipotence an additional source of the “primal crime,” conceived of as man’s pride, presumption, willfulness, or hubris. These terms refer to the major sin in all Western theology. Such strivings would be dangerous to man and to his relationship with God in direct proportion to the firmness of man’s concept of deity and the sharpness of the distinction he draws between the prerogatives of God and of man. In cultures that worship gods only as long as the gods produce the benefits desired by their constituency, the danger of overstepping man’s prerogatives would be less. It is a long step from covenants between man and supernatural beings and the prosaic contracts that men make among themselves. Yet even a brief examination of the latter shows that they have important similarities. The most ancient contracts of which we have authentic historical records were sealed with an oath (Roheim, 1945), and the god(s) or king was called upon to witness the oath of the covenant, to help the covenanters to keep to their good intentions or to enforce the curses that are to befall the breaker of the covenant. Clearly, the possibility of a breach of contract was a major concern expressed in the records of ancient covenants, as well as in modern ones. However, we can demonstrate that the prohibitions, sanctions, and punishments invoked to ward off a breach of a mundane civil contract, as well as of the more portentous covenants between kings and with gods, concerned not just the possible breaking of an oath, but also the daring to make an oath in the first place. Recall that one can see this attitude in the retelling of the Greek myths by such conservative upholders of the powers of the gods as Sophocles. For him, the primal crime is hubris; man’s On the model of the modern-day “nonaggression pact.”



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efforts to assert himself, to act on his wish to know more than he should, and to regain the power he had long since delegated to the gods; invariably these misdeeds were punished by his downfall. The lessons are plain: in striving beyond his assigned portion, man risks the envy and retaliation of the gods; by seeking to avoid his fate he succeeds only in bringing it on himself. This outlook on the relationship between God and man and the nature of the primal sin not only is associated with the tragic view of life held by the Greeks, but also transcends cultural boundaries. In our own biblical tradition, this picture of man’s presumption—the primal sin to want to know and thus to become (like) a god is told plainly in the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall. The story of creation recorded in the Old Testament is, of course, not how man created God, but is the projected version of how God created man and what happened when man defied the limits set upon him.

The Covenants of the Old Testament We can see this same pattern in the successive stories about how the Hebrews interacted with their God. Those stories being all of the same formal kind, I shall discuss only one, the covenant between God and Abraham. In secular usage, the term covenant has come to mean an agreement reached between equals that provides appropriate benefits to both parties, entails mutual obligations, and is equally binding on both parties. The Covenant of the Old Testament is not of this character. Just as the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis tells not of the creation of God by man but of God’s creation of man, so the story of the Covenant tells not of man’s In this last connection, we might ask if these ideas represent another of the Hellenistic importations that colored much of the life in the Bible lands at certain times. The question becomes less meaningful, however, when we take note of the recent discoveries that show that even in the millennia before the Old Testament period there was a great deal of significant cultural interchange among the inhabitants of Palestine, Asia Minor, Crete, and Greece. Indeed, many of the early portions of the book of Genesis, the story of the creation, the flood, the Tower of Babel, and various Sumerian loan words most likely came to Palestine with the Amorite migrations from Mesopotamia (Albright, 1967).  0ne tradition has it that God expelled Adam and Eve from Paradise because he could no longer trust them. Their initial defiance led them to eat of the tree of knowledge of “good and evil” (the use of paired autonyms is a traditional way of expressing a knowledge of everything, or omniscience). Fearing that their defiance might lead them to sample the fruits of the tree of immortality, which was also in the Garden, God sent them away before they might attempt to cross the line that ultimately separates man from God (Graves and Patai, 1965). 

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efforts to renew his relationship with God and so restore some of his lost sense of omnipotence, but, rather, God’s efforts to establish a relationship with certain of his creatures—a chosen people. We tend to overlook that the Covenant, which is the heart of the Old Testament religion, is a unilateral affair, imposed on man by God. In the Old Testament account, God promises his protection to the seed of Abraham not on a quid pro quo basis but as an example of his grace. The power to make the Covenant is clearly God’s—not man’s—and through the Covenant, man becomes the slave of God (Mendenhall, 1954; Albright, 1968). When God announced himself to Abraham and promised that his seed would become God’s chosen people, the announcement provided the basic dynamic and the unifying theme for the Old Testament. This Covenant was foreshadowed, of course, by God’s earlier promises, for example, the promise to Noah never again to send a flood to punish humankind for its wickedness, and it was succeeded by the successive renewal of God’s promises to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and subsequently by the giving of the Decalogue to Moses. An inquiry into the derivation of the covenant based on biblical documents alone is necessarily limited because all prebiblical sacred texts presumed to have been drawn upon in the assembling of the Old Testament have either been lost or, more likely, suppressed by priestly editors intent on reconciling conflicting accounts as well as out of desire to expunge some

As is discussed later, covenant forms were well known in the Near East before biblical times. The highly civilized city-states of Mesopotamia relied heavily on contracts and covenants. Recently excavated, a vast number of clay tablets recording such contracts give a clear picture of the commercial and cultural life of this age. Since one of the more primitive relationships between a people and their god(s) was of a contractual type (itself an advance over even more primitive types closer to animism and sympathetic magic), the source of the covenant between God and the Hebrews has been of deep concern to biblical scholars. Their general conclusion is that the covenant between God and the Hebrews was of a higher form. But many of the practices concerning vows in the books of the Old Testament clearly are grounded in more primitive conceptions, such as, “I vow to sacrifice . . . if God hears my plea and grants me . . . “Despite the cultural advancement since those times, this concept of a contractual relationship with a deity is still popular, although the external forms have changed somewhat. I cannot resist adding this charming bit of testimony from a Peanuts cartoon strip in the first two panels of which Lucy offers the prayerful ditty, “Starlight, Star Bright, first Star I see tonight; I wish I may, I wish I might . . . ” “I wish I had a pony . . . ” The third panel shows her looking all around, but finding no pony. The final panel shows her screaming, “YOU STUPID STAR.”



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of the more obvious references to polytheistic and cultic practices.10 We can find traces of such references as well as open or concealed references to a mythic literature in the biblical texts. A comparative study of these myths reveals many parallels both in form and content with those common to the other Near Eastern peoples of biblical and prebiblical times, not only in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, but also in Crete, Asia Minor, and Greece. Although by using the text of the Bible alone, we cannot trace the earlier history of the Covenant in Hebrew literature, recent archeological discoveries tell us that the covenant form was common in the second millennium BCE. Of the various kinds of covenant that were extant, the Old Testament Covenant seems derivable in its form from the suzerainty treaties of the Hittite kings, who were identified with God (and with the sun), with which they established a bond with their vassals (Mendenhall, 1964). The text of these covenants make clear that they were made by the king, who conferred certain privileges on a vassal, not because they were owed to the vassal or because of any merit the vassal might possess, but as a matter of favor or grace by the king. In exchange for the explicit protection of the king and the right to hold his vassaldom, the vassal was obligated to conform to certain stipulations, chief among which were various expressions of loyalty to the one true king and a prohibition against engaging in any independent foreign relations, that is, against trafficking with other kings (or gods). It is important for my argument that the model covenant of this era is not that of a contracting between equals (for which forms also existed in the prebiblical Near East) but is an arrangement imposed by a powerful king on a totally dependent subordinate to bind him. The Abrahamic Covenant is of this type. It differs from its Hittite model chiefly in that it does not stipulate any obligations for Abraham and his seed other than they accept the covenant relationship itself. We understand the requirement of circumcision not as an obligation, but as a “sign of the Covenant.” Like Incidentally, one of the advantages of studying polytheistic civilizations such as the Egyptian, Assyrian or Sumerian is that they were less concerned with reconciling their various myths, traditions and practices to fit the current state of belief than were the redactors of the Old Testament. The Egyptians, for instance, tended to add new gods and practices, borrowing from those peoples they conquered, or were conquered by, or with whom they came in contact, but seldom discarded any, at least they were for the most part; under no pressure from their gods to expunge all references to other gods (Albright, 1957).

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the rainbow following the flood, it is a sign of God’s protection. The later Mosaic Covenant, on the other hand, carried with it the specific obligation that the Hebrews were to adhere to the Decalogue as a condition for retaining God’s favor. Fortunately, their frequently wavering adherence to the Law, or even their occasional outright flouting of it, somehow did not provide God with sufficient grounds to declare a breach of covenant with his chosen, but “stiff-necked” people. The major stipulations and obligations placed on the Israelite tribes by the Mosaic Covenant are similar to those in the Hittite suzerainty treaties. The major stipulation is that the Hebrews could owe allegiance to no other gods. One practical effect of this stipulation was that the Hebrews interpreted it as forbidding their making treaties or covenants with foreign kings and so insured a degree of political isolation for the tribes. Even if the covenant form of the time did not explicitly call for recognizing a foreign king as a deity himself, it would surely have involved acceptance of that king’s gods as witnesses and enforcers of the covenant. Thus the effect of the Mosaic Covenant, while profoundly important for the growth and solidarity of the Hebrew federation and ultimately for the Judeo-Christian tradition, was not different in intent from the analogous wishes of the Hittite kings, who reserved the field of foreign relations to themselves and forbade it to their vassals. It is important for the sake of historical accuracy to note that the Hittites were not themselves the originators of the covenant form but must have borrowed it from other, more easterly cultures before the second millennium BCE. I, however, regard these biblical covenants as relatively late forms of the cultural development of promising. Unlike the polytheistic religions (at least some of them) of the cultures that surrounded it, the religion of the Covenant contained strong ethical and moral imperatives and stressed justice. Each family was under the direct protection of Jehovah and so could not be harmed without risking his vengeance (Jeremiah 2:3). In the same way, the Hebrew tribes and communities were united and protected from each other.11 While we can see in this early phase of biblical history a stage of institutionalized morality based on religion and of a high ethical level, we also can discern vestiges of earlier phases of its development in the form of the covenant and in references to other actions and ceremo11

Cf. Freud’s (1913) idea about the totem brotherhood after the primal crime. 184

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nies. For example, the covenant with Abraham was not established solely by God’s word, but by a deliberate act that God performed.12 Abraham was told (Genesis 15:1-21) to “offer a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old she-goat, and a three-year-old ram; also a turtle dove and a wild pigeon.” The scripture tells us that Abraham cut the heifer, the goat, and the ram into halves, leaving a path between them, and killed the turtledove and a pigeon and laid one on either side. Then in the thick darkness that followed, a smoky flame like that of a torch passed down this lane as God repeated his promises to Abraham. This passing through the divided animals implies that God made the covenant and bound himself by it. In biblical Hebrew, where we would use the term to “make” a covenant, the verb in the text reads instead as, to “cut” or to “pass through” or to “cut into” or “stood in” all references to this solemn form of oath taking (Graves and Patai, 1965, p. 15). We can see probable relationships to the earlier practice of totemism in that the animals God chose for Abraham were sacred to the several deities recognized in the area, not only to the main deity, the bull-god El. The heifer was sacred to the Canaanite’s moon-goddess; the she-goat was sacred to the Philistine goddess, the mother of the Cretan Zeus, whom the Greeks knew as Amaltheia; the ram was sacred to the Sumerian sky-god and to the ram-headed Ammon of Egypt. The pigeon was an emblem of Israel, and the migratory turtledove represented the nomadic Ishmaelites and their kinsmen, the Edomites (Graves and Patai, 1965). The taking of an oath on a divided animal is also found in Greek myth; for instance, Helen’s father required all her suitors to swear on the severed pieces of a horse, the animal sacred to Poseidon (Graves and Patai, 1965, p. 15) to protect the interests of the man she might choose to marry. The recently excavated archives of the city of Mari, one of the most important cities of third and second millennia Mesopotamia, yielded many letters referring to the establishment of peace treaties between nations. Consistently used to designate the treaty is the idiom, khayaram qatalum, an Amorite phrase; but both words also occur in Hebrew. The literal meaning, “to kill an I stress this point because it permits me to link this epochal promise to other common forms used to bind oneself to a future course of action. The action ascribed to God is similar in its effect to raising the hand when we swear to tell the truth or signing our name to a contract. The action establishes the promise as an act begun but suspended for the moment and symbolizes it as accomplished. It makes one’s word one’s bond; once sworn, it is as good as done.

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ass,” refers to the ritual of dividing an animal that accompanied taking an oath of alliance. In one letter an official writes to Zimri-Lim (king of Mari), “I sent that message to Bina-Ishtar, (and) Bina-Ishtar replied as follows: ‘I have killed the ass with Qarni-Lim, and thus I spoke to Qarni-Lim under the oath of the gods: If you despise (?) Zimri-Lim and his armies, I will turn to the side of your adversary” (G. Dossin, quoted by Mendenhall, 1964). We find an even more graphic example in the text of an oath that forms part of a treaty between a king of Assyria and a ruler of a district west of Hana (734–745 BCE). For this ceremony, a ram was taken from the herd and beheaded to typify the fate of the perjurer. A free translation of the inscription reads: This ram is taken from the herd not as an offering, neither for the brave war-loving Ishtar nor for the peacemaker, Ishtar, neither on account of sickness nor to kill it but in order that an oath be taken between AsurNirari, king of Ashur and Mati’ilu may be made. If Mati’ilu sins against the oath, just as this ram is brought forth from his herd never to return to it, and nevermore be at the head of his herd, so shall Mati’ilu together with his sons and daughters, and the people of his land be brought forth from his land, never to return to it nor to be at the head of his people. This head is not the head of the ram, it is the head of Mati’ilu, it is the head of his children, the elders, and the people of his land. If Matiilu sins against these oaths, as the head of this ram is cut off . . and the teeth in his mouth are laid out, so the head of Mati’ilu will be cut off...And so with this Shir Zag. It is not the Shir Zag of the ram, it is the Shir Zag of Mati’ilu, the Shir Zag of his sons, his elders, and of the people of his land.13 (G. Dossin, quoted by Mendenhall, 1964)

While we need have no doubt that if such a treaty were broken the offended king would likely march against his erstwhile ally, perhaps believing himself to be the instrument of the offended and avenging gods, the treaty itself mentions none of this. Its penalties, its curses, are religious in character and thus are held to be self-fulfilling. The practice of dividing an animal is also found as a part of oath ceremonies unrelated to the making of covenants and in other situations where the idea of a threat, whether direct or conditional (but usually the Shir Zag probably means the phallus (Mercer, 1911).

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latter), is implied. Thus, by sending a yoke of oxen so divided through his kingdom, King Saul let the warriors know that they would either join up to fight beside him or be treated like the oxen (Samuel I 11:7). Although some authors regard this kind of oath-making practice as a sacrifice, I doubt that this inference is justified; the animals were not offered to God and the expectation of self-fulfillment seems to be a residue of the kind of sympathetic magic that derives from animistic thinking, forms of which can be seen in much later times—as late as medieval times in Europe, when to swear on one’s sword implied the expectation that the sword itself would turn against the perjurer. Similarly, the fate of the severed animals would befall the breaker of the covenant. Thus, in principle, the covenant was self-enforcing; the words would enact themselves. A covenant (or treaty, or blood brotherhood), then, contains either the explicit or the implicit threat that, if the covenant is broken, dire punishment will befall the breaker. The form of the punishment seems at first to be a physical representation and later a spiritual representation of the feared act of separation that made the covenant necessary in the first place. It recalls the inevitable separation of infancy. In attempting to overcome the trauma of separation by restoring the sense of unity, the oath to enforce the covenant provided that the offender would suffer “separation,” either by literally being divided, as were the animals between whose severed bodies the oath was taken, or, in later times, by being excommunicated. The conditional curse adds binding force to the treaty, the implication being if one dares to go back on one’s word, one will bring evil upon one’s head. I view this curse as representing a displacement from the original danger of making an oath altogether. The danger stems from the revival of the dangers associated with omnipotence of thought—when words are indistinguishable from acts. When an oath binds word and deed irrevocably together again, no one can tell what evil will come. Bloodthirsty as it sounds to the modern ear, the formula of the oath serves to control the danger somewhat by specifying its limits. Like the talion law that specifies that one shall be punished by the loss of no more than an eye for an eye, the formula protects the community by directing the evil to the swearer himself, or to the thing sworn upon, by segregating it to a particular section of the covenant ceremony. The formula gives the stating of the evil consequence of a breach a new function, as an imprecation intended to compel performance of the covenant. 187

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In chapter 6, I offered an analysis of the coercive power of a promise to support the contention that invariably, an action is required to seal the oath. Serious promises, oaths, and vows14 invariably are sealed by an act, never merely by words alone.15 The act may be an extended and bloody one, or merely a token or a symbolic version of it, or it may be vestigial such as raising one’s hand, or placing the hand on a Bible, or even merely repeating the words of the oath. The oath, like other forms of promise, is a contingent action; that is, it is an act begun, and suspended, and (conditionally) fulfilled in due course. Earlier, I compared the promise as a suspended action to an uncompleted task and discussed the experimental evidence (see chapter 4) showing that, when one is interrupted at a task in which one has become involved, a tension system builds up that leads one to attempt to resume the task and complete it when opportunity arises. The implication that I would like to draw from this brief survey of biblical and prebiblical usage is that, in essence, the making of covenants was forbidden to man. In evidence, I offer that the Noachic, Abrahamic, and Mosaic covenants were all made by God on the model of the Hittite suzerainty treaty, whose form was also unilateral, and that the making of covenants with other nations and their gods was forbidden to the Hebrews. In the exceptions we find in the Bible, for instance, the covenant between Jacob and his father-in-law (Genesis, 31:44-55), which sets a boundary between them, God is involved as a witness, a helper, and an enforcer. At most, these exceptions may soften my assertion to read, perhaps, that man alone may not make a covenant. In further evidence, we may look to the practices of the Essenes revealed in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Brownlee (1950) noted that, aside from the detailed oaths with vast consequences for breaches that neophytes had to swear on admission to the community, the Essenes were prohibited from all other oath making.

The Oath Form Despite the preferences of an orderly mind, there is plenty of evidence that apparently contradicts the assertion that for man making vows and covenants is, in essence, a forbidden act. The Old Testament, especially 14

Especially, but not exclusively, those involving a threat or an ultimatum. But see Austin (1962) for whom all speech is speech-act.

15

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the early books, contains many references to covenants, oaths, and vows made by the patriarchs and by lesser figures. However, such inconsistencies are to be expected when antithetical ideas and ambivalent feelings are operative. As with the symptoms of obsessive patients, who after all, show in exaggerated form what is true for all of us, we see at one time the expression of the forbidden impulse and at another its prohibition and undoing. Similarly, in Old Testament history, as in Greek religion, we see phases when the ideal held up for man was to submit to the gods and fate, and other phases when man himself was exalted as godlike. My reason for supposing that taking an oath should be considered in essence a forbidden act comes from a psychological analysis of the significance of the act. My analysis agrees in major detail with the conclusions reached by cultural historians (e.g., Hastings, 1924) that an oath, which, in its later forms and more recent times, served as a formal guarantee of truthfulness, or of informed intention to follow an agreed-upon course of action, at earlier phases of cultural (and individual) development essentially was a self-fulfilling imprecation that drew its coercive power from the magic of words. Inasmuch as the distinction between word and deed was not yet fully established, people believed that what one said, particularly with angry intensity, was likely to come true. Many myths and superstitions attest to the widespread belief in the magical power of words, particularly the belief that once one speaks an intentional word (for example, a wish or a curse), one has begun a deed that will be fulfilled. Clearly there is much danger in such a state of affairs; an incautious word could let loose demonic forces. Under such circumstances, one would need protective measures, (e.g., to knock on wood or to cross oneself). From a dynamic point of view, we understand that the gestures that accompany making an oath symbolize both beginning a hostile act and avoiding or annulling it. As we project the sense of omnipotence on to external natural forces or to deity, so too we assign responsibility for the course of future events. The grounds for conflict then are laid between primitive word magic and the stirrings of an ethical sense that there ought to be a distinction between the powers that belong to man and those that are reserved to God. Also, as the sense of omnipotence is partially reinternalized through identification with deity (in individual development, one might refer to it as the development of superego), a new and internal coercive force arises, the beginnings of another aspect of morality, the sense of “I ought to.” Since this process 189

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of reinternalization also moves the embedded conflict about acting versus restraining to a more symbolic level, the resultant compromise frequently is a fulfillment of the “word” (wish or oath) perhaps in disguised or displaced form. From this line of reasoning, we might expect that, in the struggle between man and his god(s), that is, between man and his projected sense of omnipotence (as well as with his conscience and superego), we would see various aspects of the struggle reflected particularly in the practices and customs and laws relating to oaths, promises, and vows. These forms of thought are particularly suited to expressing the struggle between man’s willfulness and his obligatory subservience, his wishes to individuate and to reunite, and his wishes to know and control the future and his reluctance to face inconvenient truths. Several books of the Old Testament spell out the Law and show that a number of laws bear directly and indirectly upon my thesis. Most directly relevant is, “If anyone utters with his lips a rash oath to do evil or to do good, any sort of rash oath that men swear, and it is hidden from him, when he comes to know it, he shall be guilty” (Leviticus, 5:4-5). The law further provides that the guilt shall be relieved by confession and by making a guilt offering. It is interesting that the Law provides for a descending scale of acceptable sacrifices for the guilt offering. If the offender cannot afford a lamb, two doves or pigeons will do. If he cannot afford birds, then an amount of flour will do. The implication seems clear that violations of the law against making rash oaths were common enough so that a sliding scale of penalties had to be adapted to the circumstances of all classes of society. For my purposes, the crucial aspects of this law are that it specifies that the crime is in the uttering of an oath; that it does not matter what the content of the oath is or whether the intent is to do good or evil; and that the oath is sworn in the heat of such strong emotion as to be considered rash. When the person becomes aware of what he has done, he shall be guilty and may not be cleared of guilt until he confesses and makes a guilt offering to God. The Law clearly specifies that the oath maker has offended against God, not against the fellow that was the object of the oath. Regarding the importance of one’s awareness of having sworn rashly, two references seem to be in conflict (unless the text is imperfect). One reference (Leviticus, 4:27-28) implies that, if one sins unwittingly, one becomes guilty only when made aware of it; then one must follow the pre190

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scribed provisions for a sin offering. In another section (Leviticus, 5:17), the Law states that if anyone sins, “though he does not know it, yet he is guilty,” and it also prescribes a sin offering. In the same connection, consider the Law that states, “Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart” (Leviticus, 19:17). This sentence implies a higher ethic that takes account of attitudes as well as deeds; it also may hearken back to an understanding of word magic; that is, secretly harbored intentions may lead to overt acts, perhaps without the full awareness of the holder of the intentions. Several laws denounce swearing falsely and especially swearing falsely by the name of God (Leviticus, 6:3,5 and 19:11,12). The prophet Hosea (Hosea, 4:15) seemed to inveigh against swearing in general, with the words, “Swear not, as the Lord lives.” There is also a specific provision that the Hebrews shall make no covenants with the inhabitants of the Promised Land or with their gods (Exodus, 23:32). On the other hand, several laws contain the principle that if one makes an oath one must keep it. For example, “When a man vows to the Lord or swears an oath to bind himself by a pledge, he shall not break his word.” (Numbers, 30:l-l6). Such a categorical stipulation must have been difficult to live with, for a number of exceptions follow. One exception gives a husband the right to revoke his wife’s vow or any thoughtless utterance of her lips by which she has bound herself if he does so on the same day that he hears about it; and there are similar exceptions seemingly intended to preserve domestic tranquility. Another law states that when a man vows, he “should not be slack to pay it, for the Lord your God will surely require it of you, and it would be sin in you.” However, the same law states that, although it is no sin to refrain from vowing, one should “perform what has passed [one’s] lips, for you have voluntarily vowed to the Lord your God what you have promised with your mouth” (Deuteronomy, 23:21-22). We find references to the inviolability of oaths also in the myths and legends that make up parts of the book of Genesis. Recall the story of the way Jacob deceived his father, Isaac, and obtained his blessing, thus cheating Esau out of his birthright as the firstborn son. Even though Isaac discovered the deception, he could not revoke the promise he had made to Jacob (Genesis, 27). The story of Joshua provides another example. Joshua, who was enjoined not to make covenants with the Canaanites, was tricked by the 191

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inhabitants of Gibeon , who, fearing they would be destroyed by the invading Israelites, pretended that they had come from a great distance and thus induced Joshua to make a covenant with them. Joshua was angry when he discovered that a group of locals had deceived him. Although his followers urged him to turn on them, he nevertheless felt bound to keep his oath and did not destroy their city. The story of Jephthah also tells of an inviolable oath. To win victory over the Ammonites, General Jephthah vowed to God that, if he were given victory, he would make a burnt offering of “whoever comes forth from the doors of my house to meet me when I return victorious” (Judges, 29:40). Though agonized by what he feels he must do, Jephthah does sacrifice his only daughter as he had promised. The exegetes often used this last scripture as a cautionary tale about the inadvisability of making oaths and vows. Throughout history, man has devised many customs and convoluted magical practices around swearing to contain and direct his own willfulness and to protect himself from its consequences. He established hierarchies of “light” and “weighty” oaths that made use of a range of objects, persons, and ideas to swear by (Hastings, 1924). It is worth repeating that the curse portion of the oath ceremony, which sounds so barbaric to our modern ears, contains an ethical advance in that it channels the punishment toward the swearer and limits, by naming it, the evil that may be set loose upon him. The principle here is similar to that of talion law as codified, for instance, by Hammurabi. “An eye for an eye” may seem barbaric unless we understand that it required no greater punishment than an eye for an eye. Recall too, that when Oedipus undertook to find the murderer of Laius, he wanted to save the city of Thebes from the plague they were suffering under; the entire population was being punished for a deed committed by a single, unknown person. If we compare this ancient sense of justice with the system of penalties exacted in England as late as two centuries ago, when children were hanged for stealing bread, the talion law seems humane indeed. Other passages in the Bible offer direct evidence for my thesis that knowing the future, and trying to learn about it, and perhaps trying to control it are the prerogatives of God. Several provisions in the Law forbid the practicing of “augury” or “witchcraft,” and forbade the Hebrews from turning to “mediums” or “wizards” (Leviticus, 19:26-31). The Law 192

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threatens “that if a person turns to mediums and wizards, playing the harlot after them, I will set my face against that person and will cut him off from among his people” (Leviticus, 20:6). And, “There shall not be found among you . . . anyone who practices divination, a soothsayer, or an augurer, or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or a medium, or a wizard, or a necromancer,” and those who practice these abominations shall be driven out (Deuteronomy, 18:l0-12). Later laws are even more severe. A man or a woman who is a medium or a wizard shall be put to death; they shall be stoned with stones until their blood shall be upon them (Deuteronomy, 18:l0-12). Prohibitions against augury, necromancy, and the other dark arts may seem remote from the swearing of oaths. Recall, however, that oath making, vowing, and swearing are constituents of a larger class of contingent statements that attempt to bind the future. There is a close relationship between the wish to know what will happen and the wish to influence it in one’s favor. Clearly, magical efforts to discover what the future will hold conflict with the purpose of God to keep these matters in His own hands and to be the only source of knowledge about such things for His people. The biblical rationale for the prohibition is that these foul practices were indigenous to the idolatrous people that God was dispossessing in favor of the Hebrews (Deuteronomy, l8:14). Several laws speak to the equivalence of word and deed. One, sounding like a bit of modern case law, tells the story of a man who in the midst of a quarrel blasphemed the name of God. From this instance comes the law that whoever curses God shall bear the consequences of his sin: “He who blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death” (Leviticus, 24:10-16). The same penalty is provided “for every one who curses his father or his mother” (Leviticus, 20:9, Exodus, 17) and for anyone who strikes his father or mother (Exodus, 50); more evidence for the equivalence of word and deed. There are other biblical references to the use of oaths, in the sense of ordeals (Exodus, 22:7-10), to determine the truth of an accusation or to purge oneself of suspicion. These laws provided ways for a man to swear to his innocence when there were grounds to suspect that he had converted another’s property or had betrayed a trust. By making an oath in the presence of God, he could clear himself of the obligation to make restitution to 193

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the person who suffered the loss. To accept making an oath as a substitute for making restitution, the ancients must have believed strongly that to swear falsely would risk divine punishment. Those biblical laws clearly stem from the customs and practices of the ancient city-states of the Near East. The best known of the ancient codes, that of Hammurabi (Pritchard, 1958), dates from about 1730 BCE, or about 1,000 years before the inscribing of the biblical laws. It includes two references to ordeals. In one, the judgment of the god is sought by throwing a person accused of sorcery into the river Euphrates (the populace considered the river to be a god). By emerging alive, the suspect proved himself innocent and would take over the estate of his accuser, who would be put to death (Albright, 1957). In the other instance, a wife accused of infidelity but who was not caught in the act was expected to undergo the same ordeal of being thrown into the Euphrates (Law #132). Alternatively, the accused wife could take an oath of purity (“makes affirmation by God”) (Law #131). Thirteen other laws provide for swearing by a god as a means of establishing truth, particularly in instances when there was uncertainty about foreknowledge of wrongdoing, or of intent, or in other instances (as when there was an unwitnessed loss) when direct evidence was not available (Laws # 23, 96, 103, 106, 126, 131, 206, 207, 208, 227, 240, 266, 281). The shorter (perhaps fragmentary) Code of Eshunna (ca. 2000 BCE) is similar in form to that of Hammurabi and antedates it by several hundred years. It contains two references to swearing an oath. In one instance, the oath serves to establish that a person who has seized the slave girl of another has, in fact, no claim on the owner of the slave girl. By swearing the oath, the rightful owner becomes entitled to full payment for her (Law #22). In the other, a person who, while holding another’s property loses it through some calamity, can avoid making reparation by swearing that he, too, lost property in the same way and has done nothing improper or fraudulent (Law #37) (Pritchard, 1958, pp. 135–136). We can infer the probable effectiveness of that form of ascertaining the truth from a cuneiform tablet that records a lawsuit tried at Nuzi, an Assyrian city on the Tigris River, from about 1500 BCE. Two brothers disputed the witnessed claim of their youngest brother that their father had given him a female slave to be his wife. The judges asked the complaining brothers to “Go and take the oaths of the gods against the witnesses of your 194

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brother.” Since they refused to take the oath, the judges decided the case in favor of the accused (pp. 169–170). As the Hebrew tribes gave up their nomadic ways and became city dwellers engaging in commerce, they needed contracts. Forms for making contracts came into existence and became instated in law. The people also needed various changes in religious practices to convert their worship of a desert deity into forms of worship, and a conception of God and of a God’s will more suited to a settled, urban form of life. As their way of life changed, the Hebrews found that they needed changes in other social forms as well. For instance, they adopted and adapted the idea of kingship and other concepts and practices of long standing in the Near East to their changing circumstances. We suspect that the priesthood rationalized the biblical prohibitions against making oaths and vows by the need to stamp out persisting polytheistic worship. Still, it remained usual to make vows to assure God’s special help by promising a sacrifice if a plea were heeded, just as they were in the polytheistic religions from which the form was borrowed. It was difficult to suppress these popular practices (which the priestly tradition supported, no doubt because the priests ended up consuming the sacrifices), and the evidence can be seen in the numerous references and warnings about them in the Old Testament. Many of the warnings caution against failure to fulfill one’s vows, but the stance of the prophets, who wanted to purify man’s relation to God, was to decry the very practice of making vows and sacrifices as being opposed to the spirit of the Covenant and the Law. The later commentators continued the tradition of vacillation that we have seen in these references to the laws both by inveighing against oaths and vows in general and by going into meticulous detail about the possibility of annulling vows and the conditions under which they must be kept. As often is the case, society and religion attempted to regulate what they could not stamp out in human nature. In the Talmud, we find several treatises devoted to the subject of vows. The idea that to make an oath, to swear, or take a vow is itself a sinful act reappears throughout religious writings. In the New Testament, Jesus is reported to have said, Again you have heard that it was said to the men of old, You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn. But I 195

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say to you, do not swear it at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let what you say be simply, ‘Yes or no’; anything more than this comes from evil” [that is, the Evil One] (Matthew, 5:33-37).16

Clearly it is Jesus’ stance that oath making is inspired by Satan, that is, by man’s impulse to oppose God and to usurp his place. It is also clear that these admonitions against swearing hold up a higher morality for man; one should not need to invoke magical assistance to compel one to do right. We thus have another example of the confluence of motives representing the highest and the lowest in mental life. The matter of swearing appears in the Decalogue as the Third Commandment, “You shall not take the name of your God in vain.” Over the centuries, authorities interpreted it variously as that one is forbidden to make trivial oaths, or that one must keep the oaths one does make, or that one shall not make oaths or swear allegiance to other gods. More recently, it is understood as prohibiting swearing and making oaths in their most serious form, as witnessed by God, and, by extension, as a prohibition against swearing in general. In a complex society, such an absolutist position is difficult to maintain, and so together with the prohibition we find laws describing means of getting around it, for instance, to assure that commercial agreements will be kept. The words of Jesus gave his disciples and interpreters no end of trouble, particularly since the Gospels reported that Jesus, at least by implication, took an oath when he testified before the Sanhedrin. Through the years, several Christian sects have taken the prohibition against taking oaths quite literally; and, as their insistence usually ran against the customs of the time, often they were persecuted. Only in relatively recent times have the laws requiring the taking of oaths, as in the swearing of witnesses, been modified to permit Quakers and other objectors to testify in good conscience (Hastings, 1924). Even today there are many in whom swearing an oath, or even a less fervent assertion about the future, pro16

See also James 5:12: “But above all, my brethren, do not swear, whether by heaven or by earth or with any other oath, but let your yes be yes and your no be no, that you may not fall under condemnation.” 196

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vokes anxiety. The pious disclaimer, “God willing,” softens the implication of hubris. These citations at least make plausible the thesis that by making oaths and vows man is driven by a need to master some of the insults to his narcissism that his growing awareness of reality inflicts on his fantasy of omnipotence and, by knowing and commanding the future, to make the world a more secure place. In doing so, man realizes that he risks encroaching on the privileges that he has come to understand belong to Deity and that he trespasses at his own peril. If he does not receive punishment under statute, there is a good chance that the oath he makes itself will trip him up. Like the oath of the ordeal, or the vow of Jephthah, what he swears may fulfill itself in spite of his subsequent wishes and against his own interests. The alternations between admonitions about the sanctity of vows and the prohibitions against making them remind us of the doing and undoing proclivities of sufferers from an obsessive–compulsive disorder, an association called to our attention by Theodor Reik (1915) in connection with the formula prescribed for Kol Nidre, the thrice-repeated ritual of invocation that precedes the ceremonies of the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish year. It calls for the congregation’s response to the cantor’s singing of the following text: All vows, prohibitions, oaths, consecrations, konam-vows, konas-vows, or equivalent terms that we may vow, swear, consecrate, or prohibit upon ourselves—[from the last Yom Kippur until this Yom Kippur, and] from this Yom Kippur until the next Yom Kippur, may it come upon us for good—regarding them all, we regret them henceforth. They all will be permitted, abandoned, cancelled, null and void, without power and without standing. Our vows shall not be valid vows; our prohibitions shall not be valid prohibitions; and our oaths shall not be valid oaths.

On its face, the text would seem to require a blanket forswearing and also to license deception, a conclusion hard to sustain in view of the many other references to the sanctity of vows and the prohibitions against making them. It seems to stand as a puzzling exception to the severe ethical position maintained by the Law. Many commentators have tried to rationalize it, for instance, as applying only to vows made to the self or only to 197

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God.17 Reik’s persuasive argument compared it both to a form of an obsessional symptom and to the other ceremonies in which forbidden impulse is allowed symbolic expression followed by a reinstatement of the prohibition against it. He found in it the rebellion against the Covenant imposed on the Jews by God and its subsequent renewal and noted that the same doing and undoing was expressed earlier in the totem meal in which the father-principle was killed and eaten, only then to be followed by identification with it. This view assimilates the Kol Nidre rejection of making promises and vows to the general understanding that predicting or binding the future is a prerogative of God and is not to be trespassed by man. One can understand the repeated and vehement repudiation of promises and vows in the ritual of Kol Nidre the same dynamic that Shakespeare alluded to in MacBeth; we could paraphrase it as, “Methinks the penitent doth protest too much.” What is missing in the ritual itself is the recognition that telling and binding the future is reserved to God, a recognition that is present in all the other efforts to put the general prohibition into regulatory form; that to conduct business and adjudicate disputes, one still must be able to assure that quotidian promises and contracts will be kept. Exceptions must be made; compromises must be reached, business is business.

17

It is noteworthy that the psychoanalytic literature (as represented in the P-E-P archive 6) lists only two citations mentioning Kol Nidre. One is by Freud (1918) telling Karl Abraham about the reception Reik received when he gave his paper on Kol Nidre to the Vienna Society, the other is Abram Kardiner’s (1932) review of Ritual (Reik, 1946), which reprints that article. I suspect it is not a topic that analysts like to address. 198

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Epilogue Since the dawn of history, man has assigned to his god(s) the power to know and create the future. It is inevitable that, as he convinced himself that he was created in God’s image, man would aspire also to retake those very attributes, to be godlike in function as well as form. Man partially resolved the conflict between projecting and regaining omnipotence by attributing to deity the privilege of appointing agents or intermediaries, prophets, seers, shamans, and oracles and authorizing them to reveal to man what he wanted man to know. Refusing to stay in these permitted channels, man persisted in presuming upon the prerogatives of deity by willfully declaring what was to be. In so doing, man used ceremonial forms of the vow and oath that made clear that he was aware of treading on forbidden ground and risking the ultimate sin of hubris. As the early wandering tribal societies settled into organized societies, it became increasingly necessary for trade and commerce that men be able to count on the regular performance of duties and the fulfillment of proper expectations. Toward that end, man’s invention of money, as well as promises, assurances, contracts, and leases, made possible and convenient the orderly conduct of social, political, and commercial affairs. When entering on these essential, and less portentous, binding of words and future deeds, man often called upon deity to witness, and to that extent, approve the agreements and even to guarantee them. Thus, although the vows man uttered vehemently were sinful, even hubristic seizures of godlike omnipotence, he domesticated the syntax of the vow into the ordinary promise and called upon the formula whenever there was reason to doubt someone’s future performance or the security of expectation. It has become a cornerstone of morality that we ought to keep our promises, while much of daily 199

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life depends on our living up to a post-promising morality of unspoken but well-understood expectations. A maturing child develops cognitive skills, regulates emotional expression, and becomes moral along a path that follows in a rough way a sketchy outline of cultural development. For many years, the child’s cognitive and imaginative powers exceed his physical strength and capacity for independent living; he attributes to parents the power to make good things happen and to prevent what should not happen. Parents’ promises have to be more believable than the child’s. Only with time and in a nurturing social environment does the child develop a reliable conscience by identifying himself with the benign and regular fulfillment of expectation he first experiences with his parents. Clinicians find represented in their patients’ behavior examples of both the making of promises that are better understood as efforts at propitiation not meant to be kept, and the obligatory keeping of promises, a keeping that violates the spirit in which the promise was made. As we come to understand the fantasies and conflicts in which both pathological forms of the promise and the struggles about breaking and keeping them are embedded, we have the opportunity to consider both the broken promise and the compulsively kept promise from the contrasting vantage points of the expectations we hold of mature persons and the travails of infant development.

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207

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Index A

Abend, S., 31fn Aeschylus Agamemnon, 146 Akhtar, S., 33 Albright, W. F., 176, 181fn, 182, 194 Alexander, P., 138, 150 Anderson, T. P., 152 Aquinas, 164 Aristotle, 141, 161, 179 Aron, L., 6 Astington, J. W., 39 Austin, J. L., 5, 188fn

B

Bok, S., 24 Brenner, A., 179 Brownlee, W., 188 Burton, R., 37

C

Caper, R., 33 Carroll, L., 154fn Cautionary tale, 63, 66, 192 Charlois, C., 37 Cicero, M., 2, 146 Clarkin, J., 122

Colarusso, C. A., 30 Coles, R., 37 Commitment, 7, 47, 58, 81, 85, 86 fear of, 82, 83 Communion, 32, 179, 187 Conflict, See Intention, conflicting Contract, 7, 8, 124, 180, 185fn, 195, 199 therapeutic, 122-125, 127, 128 (See also Promise(s), extorted) Countertransference, 119, 129 Covenant, 175, 177-181fn form in ancient Near East, 182fn, 183-188 Old Testament, 178fn, 181, 183-185, 188, 191, 195 Culture, 2, 3, 18, 37, 85, 136, 173-175, 180 ancient Near Eastern, 17, 184 and implicit expectations, 15–19, 77, 78 primitive, 175fn-177, 180 and promising, 9, 57 and socialization, 4, 16, 17 and value systems, 17, 18, 25, 41, 85, 89 West African, 16, 17 Western, 16-18

D Darwin, C., 113 Decalogue, 22, 178, 181, 196

209

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Index

Deity, See also God(s) man’s concept of, 32fn, 45, 136, 182 fn, 184, 185, 189, 195, 199 prerogatives of, 20, 137, 197, 199 De Rivera, J., 42 Development, cognitive - ability to distinguish internal and external, 29, 30, 85 memory from perception, 20, 28, 29 present from past and future, 29, 85, 159 primary from secondary promising, 74, 75 reality from fantasy, 56, 84, 86, 89, 165, 174, 197 self from other, 29, 40, 50, 86 word from deed, 30, 40, 50, 85-87, 159 Development, psychosexual action and delay, 84, 85, 120, 150, 157-160, 164 anal phase, 60, 158, 159 ego ideal and superego, 56, 66, 79, 200 Oedipal phase and conflict, 69, 120, 137, 142, 177, 179 oral phase, 84, 159, 178, 179 passive to active, 33, 138, 149, 150 Dietre, C., 37 Disappointment, 47, 48, 58, 66-69, 72-74, 93, 115, 153 Dodds, E. R., 137, 179 Drama, Greek, 131, 133, 137, 138, 142, 148, 151, 157, 161, 171

Examples, clinical a boy given a gun for his birthday, 79 a disappointing daughter, 73 a gratuitous promiser, 47, 48, 58–70 an impulsive stock broker, 82, 83 a man with a narcissistic personality, 94–110 a therapist burdened by a secret, 80 a woman in a difficult marriage, 72 a woman who could not live up to her promise, 113–115 a woman who vowed to starve herself, 83 a woman with a narcissistic personality, 110–113 Examples, non-clinical a military guard who shot a friend, 81, 82 a police chief who had to keep his word, 80 Exception, psychology of the, 66, 68, 101, 132 Expectation, 58-61, 66, 68, 73, 74, 77, 78, 121, 122, 200

F

Fatal flaw (hamartia), 135, 137, 165 Fate avoidance of, 132, 133, 139, 142, 144, 160, 181 and character, 136, 138, 170 embracing one’s, 135, 138, 148. 149, 163 man as instrument of, 33, 132, 133, 137, 140, 141, 147, 163 nature of, 132, 133, 135-137, 146, 163, 164, 173 wish to know one’s, 137, 172, 174, 181, 190 Ferenczi, S., 31 Freeman, D., 178fn Free will, and choice, 3, 44, 137, 138, 164 Freud, A., 28

E

Egner, I., 16, 17 Ego, autonomy of, 81, 84, 85, 159 Elizabeth I (Queen of England) and blasphemy statute, 24, 25 Epicurus, 179 Eshunna, Code of, 194 Euripedes Iphigenia in Aulus, 142-145 210

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Index

Freud, S., 1, 3, 29, 42, 84, 88, 89, 113, 131, 132, 142, 164, 176, 177, 179, 198 and Hamlet, 153 and interrupted tasks, 43 and morality, 1 Freud, S. (works) The Ego and the Id, 43, 84 Formulations on The Two Principles of Mental Functioning, 31 The Interpretation of Dreams, 31 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 6 Letter to his Fiancé, Martha Bernays, June 30, 1882, 43 Letter to James J. Putnam, July 8, 1915, 1 Letter to Karl Abraham, May 28, 1918, 198 Mourning and Melancholia, 43 Notes on a Case of Obsessional Neurosis, 88 Some Character Types Met in the Course of Psychoanalytic Work, 132, 138fn Totem and Taboo, 176 Fukuyama, F., 15, 16

prerogatives of, 21, 136, 143, 145, 148, 161-164, 169, 180, 193, 196-199 as witness, 6, 20, 22, 48, 180, 184, 186188, 191, 196, 199 Graves, R., 181fn, 185 Grene, D., 133 Grice, H. P., 5, 17 Guilt, unconscious, 26, 157

H

Hamlet, See Shakespeare Hammurabi, Code of, 192, 194 Hartmann, H., 87 Hastings, J., 189, 192, 196 Hegel, G., 175 Hero, See also Tragic hero idea of the, 134, 142 Homer, 135, 137, 142, 179 Hubris, 136, 137, 142, 145, 150, 162, 171, 180, 181, 196, 199

I

Ibsen, H. A Doll’s House, 120 Inflection point, 147, 171 Intention conflicting, 7, 12, 19, 40, 77, 117, 118, 147, 164, 170 empirical studies, 40-46 and interrupted actions, 79, 89, 189, 191 and promising, 5, 77, 84, 152 Isaac, G., 82

G

Gandhi, M., 3 Gaster, T. H., 22 Gert, B., 1 Gilligan, J., 1 God(s), See also Deity man’s concept of, 181, 182fn, 184, 185, 189, 195 man’s struggles with, 133, 136-138, 146, 179-181, 190. 196, 199. See also Hubris of the New Testament, 195, 196 of the Old Testament, 181, 182-185, 189, 191, 192, 195, 196, 198. See also Covenant and prayer, 32, 83. 118

J

Jackson, S., 16 Jaghab, K., 82 Jeckels, L., 132 Jones, E., 153, 159 Justice divine, 133, 135, 140, 146, 157fn, 169 211

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Index

and rules, 35, 174 stage theory of, 36, 37, 48, 175 Moral (ethical) sense as defined by keeping promises, 4, 15, 21, 25, 38, 43, 57, 78, 80, 85, 184, 200 is self-evident, 1, 2, 3 and taboo against knowing, 174, 176fn, 189 Morality and moral law (See Law, natural or divine) post-promising, 57, 163, 196, 200 theory of, 1, 2 Murphy, M, 2 Myth, 136, 137, 141, 142, 145, 153, 161, 174, 177-180, 183fn, 185

idea of, 23, 67, 146, 157, 162, 164, 179, 184, 192

K

Kading, D., 21 Kant, I., 1, 2 Kardiner, A., 198 Kernberg, O., 122 Kerrigan, W., 132, 151, 155, 166, 169-171 Kitto, H. D. F., 145 Kohlberg, L., 36, 37 Kol Nidre, See Vow Kris, E., 88

L

Law of Ancient Near East, 173, 192, 194 biblical, 184, 188, 190-197 Natural or divine, 2, 138, 145 talion, 156, 187, 192 Lawlor, J., 156 Lewin, K., 21, 41-46 and interrupted tasks, 42-46, 89 Lickona, T., 4, 36 Luther, M., 43, 87 Lynch, P., 38

N

Narcissism, primary, 52, 56, 175 Narcissistic personality (the problematic patient), 94, 95, 97-113, 120 and aging, 105, 106 and conscious deception, 111, 112 detecting, 102, 103, 108-113 fantasy of self sufficiency, 101, 197 narcisistic perfection, 102, 103 and termination, 107-10 Nesse, R. M., 124 Newman, H., 1

M

Magic and magical thinking, 13, 22, 52, 57, 78, 120, 141, 174, 175, 177179, 182fn, 187, 189, 191, 200. See also Promising and magical thinking and theory of mind, 31, 37, 39, 40 Mayans, J., 82 Mead, M., 177 Mendenhall, G., 182, 183, 186 Mischel, W., 16 Money-Kyrle, R., 178 Moral development empirical studies of, 35-40

O

Oakley, E., 38 Oath, See also Vow; Promise(s); Promising of allegiance, 24, 186 boastful, 9, 162 danger of making, 187, 190, 193, 196, 197 forceful, 22, 138, 151, 152, 167, 199 as a form, 175, 186-188, 199 inviolable, 191, 192 212

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Index

and ordeal, 174, 179, 193, 194, 197 solemn, 8, 23, 77, 166, 170, 179 testimonial, 5, 8 Obsessive-compulsive behavior, See Psychopathology Oedipal conflict, See Development, psychosexual Oedipus, See Sophocles Omnipotence of thought, 30, 56, 86, 134, 160, 177, 178, 180-190, 197. See also Magic and magical thinking Oracle, 137, 139, 140, 145, 161. 165 Ovsiankina, M., 42, 79, 89, 188

of clinicians, 121, 128 of confidentiality, 24, 80 duplicitous, 9, 168, 171 explicit, 18, 56, 58 extorted, 8, 23, 26, 72, 123, 124, 128-130 factors that favor keeping, 20, 41, 78 of God (See Covenant) gratuitous, 48, 58, 62, 93 implicit, 47, 58, 66, 93, 119, 121 and informed (or deformed) consent, 123, 124 as interrupted acts, 89, 152, 185, 188 not yet redeemed, 93, 113-115 or threats, 118, 128, 168 parent’s, 53, 56, 117, 199 patient’s, 118, 119, 130, 200 as propitiation or expiation, 51-53, 57, 64, 66, 118, 120, 200 as reassurance, 53, 57 sanctity of, 25, 38, 56 sealed by an act, 185-189 serious, 7, 8, 42, 46, 86, 188 as an unfulfilled fantasy, 93, 101, 110, 120 as vehicle of fate, 33, 163 Promising act of, 23, 63, 84, 85, 87, 137, 174 and choice of illness, 62, 63, 64 and cognitive development, 19, 20, 40, 48, 50-58 as compromise solution, 119 corrupted by unconscious forces, 4, 79, 84, 87, 89, 160, 165 to heighten dramatic tension, 160, 161 and hubris, 20, 21, 188 to an internal object, 64 inviolable, 191, 192 and magical thinking (See Magic and magical thinking) oneself, 82, 90, 134 person, 48, 59, 61, 93 to prevent loss, 120 primary, 9, 48, 52, 57, 58, 64, 65, 68, 74, 88, 152

P

Patai, R., 181fn, 185 PEP, Archive 6, 198fn Peterson, C., 37 Piaget, J., 35-37, 50, 51 Plato, 164 Prayer, of supplication, 32, 182fn, 195 Primary process, 56, 84, 86, 87, 89. See also Promising, and primary process Pritchard, J. B., 194 Promise breaking, 4, 6, 7, 12, 40, 47, 78, 90, 91, 156, 166, 168, 180, 187, 200 and forgetting, 37, 89, 90 and morality, 2, 4, 5, 12, 37 Promise keeping compulsive, compulsory, 20, 38fn, 78-82, 85, 87, 88, 144, 157, 166, 174, 191, 197, 200 conditional, 25, 78. 120 loopholes to avoid, 118 and maturity, 4, 31, 85 and morality, 15, 37, 38 vengeful, 118, 152 Promise(s) children’s (See Development; Promising, primary) 213

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Index

and psychological structure, 2-7, 50, 51, 58 and psychopathology, 83, 118 and rational choice theory, 12 and regression, 20, 26, 79, 83, 88, 91, 160 as reinforcement, 117, 130 secondary, 48, 57, 58, 64, 74, 77, 88 to suppress doubt, 162, 165 and theory of mind, 27 and values, 2, 25 and voluntarily assumed obligation, 44, 45 witnesses of, 5, 6, 20, 41, 45, 46 Prophecy, 132, 137 efforts to thwart, 147 gods enlighten man through, 132, 139, 141, 143, 161, 164 Psychoanalysis, 20, 31, 41, 89, 104, 156. 165 and one person, two person, and three person theory, 6 as therapy, 58, 71, 97, 103, 107, 108, 110, 112-115, 119, 142 Psychopathology anxiety, 89, 90 depression, 90, 91, 118, 136 obsessive-compulsive, 95, 118, 128, 135, 136, 150, 189, 197 suicide, 118 Pumpian-Mindlin, E., 28

Religion, 3, 174, 176, 180. See also Prayer Greek, 179, 189 Judeo-Christian, 176, 178 Near Eastern, 179, 183 Revenge, 146, 152-157 Roheim, G., 78, 179, 180

S

Schafer, R., 94 Scherman, H., 10 Schleifer, M., 37 Schlesinger, H. J. Endings and Beginnings, 28, 107, 109fn, 121, 123fn-125 The Texture of Treatment, 28, 121, 124, 126 Schultz, T., 37 Searle, J., 16, 153 Secondary process, 31, 32, 51, 56, 84- 87, 120, 134, 150, 160 Shakespeare, W. audience of, 161, 168, 171 Hamlet (character), 147, 153-160, 164, 165, 168, 171 and promises, 24, 151 and revenge, 153, 154, 156, 157, 164, 165, 169, 170 Shakespeare, W., plays As You Like It, 167 Hamlet, 147, 151, 153, 159, 160 168, 171 MacBeth, 132, 198 Measure for Measure, 167 The Merchant of Venice, 124, 166 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 168 Othello, 135 Richard III, 151, 169, 171 Romeo and Juliet, 135 Titus Andronicus, 152, 153 Sharpe. E. F. cautionary tales, 52 on procrastinating, 158, 159 Shengold, L., 120

R

Rapaport, D, 84 Reality testing, See Development, cognitive Regression, 26–28, 69, 72, 74, 77, 79, 87, 90 of cognitive functions, 28, 84, 160 and magical thinking, 33, 57, 83, 84, 87, 176 in service to the ego, 28, 88, 160 Reik, T., 22, 78, 132, 179, 197, 198 Ritual, 198 214

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Index

Shirley, F. A., 24, 151 Siegal, M., 37 Sin, 136, 164, 180, 190, 191, 199 primal (See Hubris) Smetana, J., 37 Smith, B., 16 Socrates, 3 Sodian, B., 37 Sophocles, 138, 179, 180 audience of, 161, 163, 168 Oedipus (character), 135, 136, 138-142, 145, 147, 155-157, 160-165, 171, 192 Sophocles, plays Ajax, 148 Electra, 142, 145 Oedipus the King, 139, 141, 142, 147, 160, 168 Philoctetes, 147 Spitz, R., 159 Stern, M., 176 Stoll, E., 170 Stritchartz, A., 37 Superego, ego ideal, and conscience, 56, 90, 91, 162, 171, 189, 190, 200 Swearing, See Oath

as temporizing, 147, 149, 153, 154, 156, 157 as unwilling to know, 155, 162, 164, 165, 171 Tragic view of life, 133, 181 Transference, 124, 125 and compliance, 127, 128 sado-masochistic, 60, 64 and termination, 107, 109 as unconscious contract, 119, 120, 122 unstable, 100, 111 Trevelyan, G. M., 22

V

Voltaire, F., 33 Vow, See also Oath as a dramatic device, 33, 132, 133, 138, 140-142, 147, 151-153, 157, 161, 165-167, 170 as a forbidden act, 174, 188, 193, 195, 197, 199 and hubris, 137, 138, 140, 145, 187, 190, 199 and Kol Nidre, 197, 198 marriage, 5, 7, 8, 18, 19, 167 morning after, 9, 13, 66 religious, 6, 8fn, 83 and sacrifices, 118, 143, 144, 174, 182fn, 187, 192, 195 sanctity of, 25, 134, 168, 191 that must be kept (See Promise keeping)

T

Technique, psychotherapeutic, 70-74, 108110, 126, 129, 130 Testament New, 135, 195 Old, 135, 175fn, 181, 188-196 Thass-Thienemann, 165 Thinking, See Secondary process Threats, See Promises or threats Totemism, 176, 178, 180, 185, 198 Treaty, See Covenant Tragedy, See also Greek drama; Shakespeare idea of, 132-135, 158, 163 Tragic hero, 45, 46, 132-138, 147-150 confirms his fate, 161, 164

W

Wechsler, D., 2 Wolff, P., 36 Wright, K, 37

Y

Yeomans, F., 122 Yerkes, R., 178 215

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Index

Z

Zeigarnik, B., 42 Zeno, 179 Zimmerli, W., 178

216

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