japa new author prize

Diane E. Donnelly is the inaugural winner of the JAPA New Author Prize for her article “The Function of Suffering as Portrayed in The Scarlet Letter and Reflected in Clinical Work” (JAPA 60/6).

JAPA New Author Prize

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DOI: 10.1177/0003065112460576

Diane E. Donnelly 60/6

THE FUNCTION OF SUFFERING AS PORTRAYED IN THE SCARLET LETTER AND REFLECTED IN CLINICAL WORK

Suffering is commonly seen as an unconscious effort to alleviate painful feelings of guilt. However, suffering also aims at averting loss of ego func-tions and hence loss of mental stability. This second function of suffering is discussed in the light of Freud’s observations of characters wrecked by success and Weiss’s ideas about mutual love as a threat to mental stabil-ity. Hawthorne’s portrayal of Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter (1850), biographical material about the author, material from his diaries, and material from a psychotherapy case and an analysis illustrate the function of suffering to preserve mental stability in the face of heightened success and happiness. Hawthorne, it is argued, intuitively grasped this function of suffering in his novel.

Hush Hester hush! . . . the law we broke! . . . the sin here so awfully revealed!—Let these alone be in thy thoughts! . . . [God] hath proved his mercy most of all, in my afflictions. By giving me this torture to bear upon my breast! . . . By bringing me hither, to die this death of triumphant ignominy before the people! Had either of these agonies been wanting, I had been lost forever!

—Arthur Dimmesdale’s dying words to Hester Prynne

It is generally agreed that an unconscious aim of suffering is to alleviate painful feelings of guilt. Accordingly, psychoanalytic literary critics

attribute the suffering of Arthur Dimmesdale in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter to guilt over incestuous fantasies and past adulterous behavior. However, suffering aims also at averting the loss of higher mental func-tions. Using Hawthorne’s portrayal of Dimmesdale, biographical material

Faculty, San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.The author is indebted to Jules Weiss, without whose ideas this paper would not

have been possible, and to Michael Zimmerman, Alice Jones, and Ian Faerstein for feedback and encouragement. Submitted for publication June 4, 2011.

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D i a n e E . D o n n e l l y

about Hawthorne, an entry from his journals when he was fifty years old, and material from a psychotherapy case and an analysis, I will show that suffering not only alleviates guilt but simultaneously preserves mental stability in the face of mutual love and related experiences of success and happiness. I suggest that Hawthorne intuitively understood both of these functions of suffering.

THEORETICAL IDEAS ABOUT THE DANGERS OF SUCCESS AND HAPPINESS

The idea that mental breakdown can be precipitated by heightened suc-cess was first raised by Freud (1916) in “Those Wrecked by Success,” a section of “Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work.” Observing that certain individuals fall ill when a cherished wish is ful-filled, Freud discusses two cases: a woman who became increasingly paranoid and eventually psychotic when she was on the verge of marry-ing a man who loved her deeply; and a man who became severely depressed and unable to function following fulfillment of a cherished career ambition. Turning to literature to explain why success might induce such a complete mental collapse, Freud discusses Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth but is dissatisfied with his attempts to explain her descent into madness. He then turns to Rebecca Gamvik, the heroine of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, and argues that the source of her anguish and suicide is unbearable guilt over incestuous wishes that had in reality been gratified. In this paper, Freud is preoccupied with finding reasons for the mental collapse he observed following episodes of heightened success. He draws the conclusion that the breakdown he observed involved guilt over the unconscious magical belief that one’s oedipal wishes had actually been gratified. Applying Freud’s ideas to The Scarlet Letter, psychoanalytic literary critics have attributed Dimmesdale’s suffering to efforts to allevi-ate guilt about unconscious incestuous fantasies that he unconsciously (and therefore magically) believes he has gratified through his adulterous affair with Hester Prynne. I argue, however, that the reasons Dimmesdale inflicts pain on himself go beyond efforts to alleviate guilt.

All of the individuals described by Freud (1916) as “wrecked by success” (two cases reported to him and two literary figures) were individuals whose mental breakdown by its very nature entailed unremit-ting anxiety and distress. For my purposes here, the extreme distress

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THE FUNCTION OF SUFFERING

inherent in mental breakdown will be distinguished from the self-imposed suffering of individuals who possess relatively intact repression and a capacity for reality testing. This self-induced suffering can be understood as serving to ward off the more extreme anxiety and distress entailed in losing one’s higher mental functions.

Extending Freud’s observations about individuals wrecked by suc-cess, Jules Weiss (1989, 1996, 1999, 2006) argues that success in love, which would be the experience of mutual love, universally poses a threat to mental stability. He stresses that while guilt about unconscious oedipal wishes magically coming true is to some extent mobilized in mutual love, “guilt” does not begin to capture the reasons for the anxiety many people experience when they find love reciprocated, or the suffering individuals inflict upon themselves in such situations.

Such anxiety, in Weiss’s view, can be accounted for only if one rec-ognizes the full nature of the danger of mutual love, which he believes is the possibility of losing one’s mind. Just as Freud (1905) observed that “the finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it” (p. 222), so Weiss (2006) reminds us that the happiness evoked by experiences of mutual love and admiration trigger an automatic reexperiencing of the most blissful time in our lives, which is infancy and very early childhood when we are in the presence of our adoring mothers and the world is a magical place. But since mutual love triggers the reexperiencing of the state of mind we were in during these earliest years, Weiss maintains that it auto-matically and simultaneously threatens a regression in ego functioning to the more rudimentary levels present at that time, which is a time of life when repression, reality testing, judgment, morality, and a stable identity are nonexistent or weak. In other words, mutual love can lead the indi-vidual to suffer a “weakening of the repression barrier between conscious and unconscious content leading to heightened awareness of unconscious thoughts,” a “weakening of the wall between fantasy and reality,” a “loss of the wall between the idea of good as opposed to the idea of evil,” and a “weakening of the wall that supports one’s stable identity as contrasted with the identity one adopts with the loved one through the process of identification” (Weiss 2006, p. 21). The threat of the weakening or loss of these “walls” (and hence of the loss of higher mental functions) is what makes mutual love so dangerous.

Individuals in love may also manifest a “hypomania in their thinking and behavior”; in addition, experiences of heightened success and happi-ness in areas “other than love” (such as work) and the “concomitant

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experience of having great power” can also give rise to a loss of repression and a regression to early childhood thinking (Weiss 2006, p. 21).

So at those times in life when we experience great joy, when we are thrilled because our deepest wishes are coming true, we are simultane-ously threatened by a weakening or collapse of our capacity for reality testing and other higher mental functions. Instances of such intensely happy moments in our lives can include being accepted into the college of our choice, being promoted or receiving significant recognition in our career, finding the person we want to marry, or discovering we are going to have a child. Since such successes mean our greatest wishes are com-ing true, they intensify early childhood (magical) thinking and thereby heighten the difficulty in distinguishing between our real powers and magical power (Weiss 1999). Weiss’s formulations shed light on the rea-sons for the mental collapse occurring in all four of the cases Freud describes as wrecked by success.

On the other side of the coin, according to Weiss (2006), “frustrating experiences . . . experiences of physical or mental pain . . .” serve to “reinforce repression and other adaptive ego and superego functions” (p. 22). Frustrations force us to pay close attention to reality and help us get our minds off distracting thoughts aroused by great joy, and in so doing they strengthen the repression of unconscious content. Frustrating experiences also reinforce reality testing and offset whatever magical thinking we continue to possess, because if we are feeling frustrated, we are discovering that our wishes are not coming true. Regular experiences of frustration throughout life are thus critical for the development and maintenance of higher mental functioning. If sufficient experiences of frustration do not exist, we must then find ways to torment ourselves and suffer, in order to protect ourselves from the potential danger of a regres-sion in our thinking (Weiss 2006).

Consistent with Freud’s and Weiss’s observations and formulations, it is not accidental that after his blissful time in the forest with Hester, the only time in the novel when Dimmesdale is free of pain and suffering, he temporarily loses repression, is flooded with disturbing unconscious con-tent, and experiences a terrifying collapse in his reality testing. Nor is it accidental that only by throwing himself into work, putting happy thoughts of Hester out of his mind, and preoccupying himself with pain-ful thoughts, is Dimmesdale able to regain repression, reinstate his reality testing, and retain his identity as the eloquent and anguished minister.

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THE SUFFERING MINISTER IN THE SCARLET LETTER

Tormented by guilt and shame over his adultery and his unwillingness to reveal it to the Puritan community, the young clergyman in The Scarlet Letter regularly inflicts physical pain upon himself, scourging himself in private, fasting, and keeping vigils night after night in which he is tor-mented by visions of the mocking, disapproving faces of old friends, of his mother, and of Hester. Applying Freud’s ideas about symptom forma-tion to Dimmesdale, the onetime psychoanalytic literary critic Frederick Crews (1966, p. 142) portrays the minister’s physical suffering and men-tal torment as a compromise formation in which Dimmesdale masochisti-cally gratifies sexual urges while punishing himself because of uncon-scious incestuous fantasies that he magically believes he has gratified through his adulterous affair with Hester.

While most would agree that Dimmesdale’s suffering is in part a consequence of his guilt, Dimmesdale does not suffer from guilt alone. As will be evident shortly, he also experiences a temporary loss of reality testing during his vigil on the scaffold and a sudden and much more ter-rifying loss of repression just after his time in the forest with Hester when they plan to run away together. Although Crews accurately points to this “weakening of repression” (p.146) as Dimmesdale walks out of the for-est, he claims that after writing his sermon, Dimmesdale “is no longer suffering from repression” (p. 148). Crews is one of several psychoana-lytic critics (Oberndorf 1942; Levi 1951; Arden 1961; Small 1980) who attribute Dimmesdale’s suffering to guilt and to excessive repression. But the key to understanding the function of Dimmesdale’s pain lies not in his guilt, but in the relation between success in both love and work and the threat of mental breakdown.

Like the two talented individuals Freud observed, whose cherished wishes came true, the young minister in The Scarlet Letter has repeatedly experienced the adoration of his congregation, as well as the love of Hes-ter, a truly extraordinary woman. Hawthorne tells us that Dimmesdale is blessed with a voice that is “tremulously sweet, rich, deep and broken” (p. 49) and with the ability to deliver eloquent sermons. We are told that Dimmesdale has achieved a “brilliant popularity in his sacred office” by virtue of his “intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, and his power of experiencing and communicating emotion” (Hawthorne 1850, pp. 93–94). So we learn not only that Dimmesdale is filled with the knowledge that Hester loves him deeply, but also that he faces, daily, the adoration of his

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congregation, all of whom “deemed the young clergyman a miracle of holiness” (p. 94) whenever he spoke. In line with Weiss’s observations that success in love poses a threat to mental stability, it is evident from the novel’s very beginning that Dimmesdale is engaged in an exhausting struggle to maintain his repression and capacity for reality testing. Driven to seek out newer and ever more painful ways to suffer, Dimmesdale regularly inflicts physical pain upon himself, scourging himself in pri-vate, fasting “until his knees trembled beneath him,” and keeping vigils night after night in which he is tormented by visions of disapproving faces (pp. 95, 96).

But Dimmesdale is not only wracked by guilt and shame. His repres-sion is weakening and his reality testing is becoming increasingly shaky in the face of the “agony with which [the daily] public veneration tortured him,” and it is only by an effort of will that he is able to convince himself that his nightly visions “were not solid in nature” (p. 96). Faced with daily reminders of the public’s adoration and filled with the knowledge that Hester loves him so deeply and passionately that she wished she might “endure his agony, as well as [hers]!” (p. 49), Dimmesdale engages in an ongoing struggle to maintain his mental stability. His efforts to preserve his sanity are impeded by his difficulty distinguishing between his very real power to win the love of a woman as extraordinary as Hester, as well as the adoration of the entire community, and the terrifying beliefs he undoubtedly has about possessing magical powers. His search for new and more painful ways to suffer is not only an effort to alleviate guilt; it is an attempt to maintain awareness of something “solid in nature” in the face of overwhelming evidence that he is revered and loved, evidence that could only strengthen his unconscious ideas about having magical pow-ers and weaken his capacity for reality testing. By torturing himself with scourges, fasts, and lengthy vigils in which he tells himself he is “alto-gether vile, the worst of sinners” and that his anguished thoughts are “the only truth that continued to give [him] a real existence on this earth” (pp. 95, 97), Dimmesdale avoids awareness of his gifts and of any feel-ings of happiness about Hester. His suffering allows him to focus his attention on one thing, his loathsome self, and in so doing get his mind off the rising tide of thoughts and visions that are threatening to over-whelm and distract him at every turn. His suffering is an effort, therefore, to maintain repression and his capacity to distinguish fantasy from reality. As F. O. Matthiessen (1941) observes, “Dimmesdale . . . remains in touch with reality only in proportion to his anguish” (p. 271).

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Dimmesdale first experiences a more serious weakening of repres-sion, leading to a confusion about reality, when he attempts to put himself in Hester’s shoes by holding a vigil on the same scaffold she stood on during her “first hours of public ignominy” (p. 97). During one of his anguished nights, he thinks he might achieve momentary peace of mind by standing in the same place Hester had stood. It is during this vigil, when he realizes there is “no peril of discovery” since the town “was all asleep,” that he loses self-control twice and experiences a “crisis of ter-rible anxiety” followed by a fleeting inability to know whether he had merely had a thought or had expressed it aloud (pp. 97, 99). Imagining the universe “gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast,” he becomes aware of “the gnawing and poisonous tooth of bodily pain” (on the part of his chest where he has repeatedly scourged himself); unable to restrain himself, he shrieks aloud (p. 98). Subsequently, as the Reverend Mr. Wilson passes by the scaffold in the darkness, Dimmesdale momentarily believes that he has revealed his presence by calling out a mocking greet-ing, but quickly realizes it was just his imagination. Shortly thereafter, “unawares, and to his own infinite alarm,” he bursts into loud laughter as he imagines being discovered the next morning, half frozen to death and overwhelmed with shame, by the elders and young virgins of the com-munity appearing indecorously in their nightclothes (p. 100). As he stands on the scaffold where Hester had undergone her ordeal but without the “peril of discovery” and temporarily free of his familiar scourges, fasts, and vigils, Dimmesdale is caught unawares by sinful thoughts, twice loses self-control, and becomes momentarily confused about whether he actually said something or just thought it (p. 97).

Given Freud’s observations of individuals who experienced a mental collapse when a cherished wish came true, it does not seem accidental that it is precisely following Dimmesdale’s absolutely blissful time in the forest with Hester, when he is, for the only time in the novel, free of suf-fering, that the minister experiences a truly terrifying loss of repression. Walking home from the forest, after he and Hester plan to run away together, he experiences “unaccustomed physical energy” followed by an unexpected and horrifying feeling that he has lost his sense of reality (p. 137). Caught between a sense of strangeness and yet familiarity as he passes under the walls of his church, the minister feels confused about whether he has seen the church in a past dream or whether he was dream-ing about it then and there. Continuing toward home, Dimmesdale expe-riences a “revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling . . . nothing

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short of a total change of dynasty and moral code” in which “at every step he was incited to do some strange, wild, wicked thing or other, with a sense that it would be at once involuntary and intentional” (pp. 138–139). In a series of five encounters with members of his congregation, the “unfortunate and startled minister” experiences overwhelming urges to express wicked, blasphemous thoughts, restrains himself only with extraordinary effort, and immediately afterward is unable to recall what he said or whether in fact he had spoken at all! (p. 138). Having just been shown a path out of his misery, when Hester declares her desire to run away to Europe with him, where there was “happiness to be enjoyed,” Dimmesdale now experiences the greatest of all dangers, that of losing his sanity (p. 127).

Pimple (1993), in an essay on Dimmesdale’s moral character, char-acterizes the young minister’s increased energy when he leaves the forest as “very like the symptoms of a man who has just fallen in love or has just been unexpectedly released from prison” and states that “Dimmes-dale’s exhilaration is due to a sudden sense of his own power” (p. 267). In the light of Dimmesdale’s ongoing experience of being loved and revered by his congregation, it seems a bit more accurate to attribute his renewed energy to a suddenly heightened sense of power after an experi-ence in which a cherished wish (being with his beloved Hester) has unexpectedly come true. His “unaccustomed physical energy” also recalls Weiss’s formulation (2006) that love and extreme happiness can lead to the threat of a hypomanic state, which in Dimmesdale’s case rap-idly leads to a more serious loss of repression and the capacity for reality testing.

Arriving home after he experiences this terrifying loss of repression, and desperate to force out of awareness the horrifying unconscious thoughts that had suddenly emerged into consciousness, Dimmesdale takes refuge in his study, the place where he had suffered, where he had “gone through fast and vigil . . . borne a hundred thousand agonies!” (p. 142). Throwing himself into the writing of his Election Sermon “with such an impulsive flow of thought and emotion that he fancied himself inspired,” Dimmesdale directs all his attention to writing the sermon, which he works on until dawn (p. 143). By immersing himself in a proj-ect demanding his attention and getting his mind off happy thoughts about Hester, Dimmesdale instinctively and adaptively reinstates the repression of wicked thoughts that had too abruptly entered conscious-ness. In this manner, he also reinstates his identity as a minister, another

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higher mental function he was in danger of losing after his blissful time with Hester.

By the time Dimmesdale marches in the processional to the meeting-house to deliver the Election Sermon two days later, he has pushed Hester out of his mind and appears “so abstracted” that Hester felt him “remote from her own sphere, and utterly beyond her reach” (p. 152). Having eliminated all thoughts of Hester and their love from consciousness and having become preoccupied instead “with a procession of stately thoughts that were soon to issue thence,” the minister has by now firmly reinstated his identity as the anguished clergyman (p. 152). He has successfully repressed all blasphemous thoughts, recovered his ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, and regained his sanity. Following his delivery of the sermon, as he ascends the scaffold to confess to being the father of Hes-ter’s child, his words to Hester are telling. “Is this not better,” he mur-murs, “than what we dreamed of in the forest?” (p. 160). Tormented by guilt and sensing he is about to die, Dimmesdale is relieved by the knowledge that he is about to unburden himself to a public he will never have to face, hoping he might redeem himself in the eyes of God. But alleviation of guilt is not the main thing Dimmesdale means when he murmurs “Is this not better . . . ?” Having had the terrifying experience of nearly losing his mind, Dimmesdale knows firsthand the dangers of a cherished wish come true, and so his words “Is this not better than what we dreamed of in the forest?” capture Hawthorne’s intuitive awareness of the threat posed by an experience of great joy.

Dimmesdale’s revelations to Hester in the forest further demonstrate Hawthorne’s intuitive understanding that suffering is not only a response to guilt but an effort to preserve sanity. Reflecting his need to be despised, Dimmesdale exclaims to Hester, “Had I but one friend . . . to whom I could daily betake myself, and be known as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my soul might keep itself alive thereby. . . . But, now, it is all falsehood! . . . all death!” (p. 124). If we recall the mental breakdown of Freud’s patients when their wishes came true and Weiss’s formulation that repeated experiences of gratification in love reinforce magical think-ing (1989), Dimmesdale’s wish to be told regularly that he is the “vilest of all sinners” can be understood not only as arising from guilt, but as reflecting a desperate need to reinforce his weakened capacity for reality testing through experiences in which his wishes (to be loved and admired) do not come true. Supporting Weiss’s ideas about the impor-tance of frustrating, unhappy experiences for the maintenance of reality

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testing, Dimmesdale is in dire need of someone to whom he can be known as the “vilest of all sinners” to counteract the ongoing adoration he experiences daily and to eliminate the frightening confusion he feels about whether he in fact possesses magical powers.

Dimmesdale’s behavior on the two occasions in the novel when he anxiously tells Hester to “hush” further supports Weiss’s idea that happi-ness and related experiences of great power threaten the dissolution of higher mental functions. Dimmesdale first tells Hester to “hush” in the forest scene, when she reminds him that what they did “had a consecra-tion of its own. We felt it so! We said so to each other! Hast thou forgot-ten it?” (p. 126). Anxious at being reminded of their mutual love and of how passionately Hester loves him, he quickly tries to silence her. His dying words to Hester again reflect his anxiety about being reminded of their mutual love. Unwilling to satisfy Hester’s plea for reassurance that they will be together in the afterlife, Dimmesdale tells her to think only about the law they broke (p. 162). As a man whose counseling and whose sermons move his congregation “like the speech of an angel,” Dimmes-dale has had ample evidence of his extraordinary appeal and power over others and plenty of reason to think that his thoughts and words have magical power (p. 48). Terrified by Hester’s declaration of love, since it would reinforce any ideas that he has divine powers and weaken his reality testing even further, Dimmesdale silences her once again.

HAWTHORNE’S JOURNAL ENTRY

As we have seen in his portrayal of Arthur Dimmesdale, Hawthorne was intuitively aware of the link between heightened success and mental breakdown that Freud observed more than half a century later and of the role of suffering in both alleviating guilt and preserving mental stability. A journal entry when he was fifty years old provides a fascinating insight into Hawthorne’s reactions to his own heightened success and happiness. Married and the father of three, Hawthorne had been living in England with his family for a year and a half, having been appointed to the posi-tion of United States consul in Liverpool by his good friend, President Franklin Pierce. On December 28, 1854, four years after publication of The Scarlet Letter to wide acclaim and at a time when Hawthorne was experiencing success in both England and America, he made the follow-ing entry in his journal:

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I think I have been happier this Christmas than ever before—by my own fireside and with my wife and children about me. More content to enjoy what I had—less anxious for anything beyond it in this life. My early life was perhaps a good preparation for the declining half of life; it having been such a blank that any possible thereafter would compare favorably with it. For a long, long while, I have occasionally been visited with a singular dream; and I have an impression that I have dreamed it even since I have been in England. It is, that I am still at college—or, sometimes even at school—and there is a sense that I have been there unconscionably long, and have quite failed to make such progress as my contemporaries have; and I seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and depression that broods over me when I think of it, even at this moment. This dream, recurring all through these twenty or thirty years, must be one of the effects of that heavy seclusion in which I shut myself up for twelve years after leaving college, when everybody moved onward and left me behind. How strange that it should come now, when I may call myself famous and prosper-ous!—when I am happy, too!—still that same dream of life hopelessly a failure! [Hawthorne 1835–1862, pp. 177–178].

In the light of Hawthorne’s description of the suffering minister who struggles to maintain his sanity following the experience of a cherished wish come true, this journal entry offers a glimpse into Hawthorne’s own difficulty tolerating happiness at a time of great success. Reflecting momentarily on the fact that he is happier than ever before, sitting by the fireside with his wife and children, Hawthorne quickly turns to the idea that his early life was “such a blank” that anything good in the upcoming “declining” half of his life would compare favorably. According to his biographers, his early years were anything but empty and depressing. Notwithstanding the likelihood that at age fifty he was undoubtedly anticipating the “declining” part of his life, his immediate shift from happy thoughts to unhappy/depressing thoughts and his melodramatic and bizarre reference to his early life as a “blank” raise the strong pos-sibility that dwelling on his happiness for more than a brief moment made him anxious, and that turning to painful thoughts was a way of circumventing anxiety. Also striking is the fact that Hawthorne reports that he has a painful recurring dream of failing at school and wonders why this dream should recur right then, at a time in his life when he was, in his words, “famous and prosperous!—when I am happy, too!” (p. 178). Given that his dream recurred just when he was famous and happy, it would appear as though Hawthorne unconsciously needed to reverse his actual success in life by having a dream of failure, a dream in which he feels “shame and depression” as he faces his contemporaries who have

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surpassed him; a dream in which he is “ever a schoolboy, unfit for life” (Arden 1961, p. 50). The dream and his remarks before and after he reports it, illustrate Hawthorne’s defensive use of unhappy thoughts to ward off the danger of reflecting for long on how happy he felt sitting by the fireside with his wife and children. In view of his portrayal of the anguished minister who loses his mind after experiencing a cherished wish come true, it would seem that Hawthorne is protecting himself from Dimmesdale’s fate both consciously and unconsciously; consciously by shifting from happy thoughts to painful thoughts, and unconsciously by reversing his actual success in life and having a dream of failure.

HAWTHORNE’S L IFE

According to his biographers and contradicting his journal entry, Haw-thorne’s early years were anything but “a blank,” suggesting that Haw-thorne had a defensive need to distort memories of his childhood. Despite losing his father at age four, he had a mother and two sisters who idolized him and two maternal uncles and a maternal grandfather who took great interest in him, providing for his education and playing an active role in his upbringing. Idolized by his mother and sisters, married to a woman who was lively, smart, artistic, and devoted to him, and loved by his three children and by loyal friends of both sexes, Hawthorne paradoxically had a reputation for regularly withdrawing from friends and family. If extreme happiness is a threat to mental stability, which Hawthorne unconsciously knew (as evidenced by his portrayal of Dimmesdale), then his frequent retreats, which would heighten one’s loneliness and tendency toward mor-bid preoccupations, can be viewed as a necessary means of ensuring a certain amount of unhappiness in his life and avoiding anxiety that would be aroused in the regular presence of devoted family and friends. As another means of ensuring adequate suffering, Hawthorne avoided secure employment for most of his adult life, repeatedly struggling financially and rationalizing his poverty by claiming that he and his wife had “noth-ing to wish for, except a better-filled purse, and not improbably, gold would bring trouble with it” (Miller 1991, pp. 237–238).

Echoing the idea that he intuitively knew that happiness is a threat to mental stability, Hawthorne wrote in his journal about trying to read the last scene of The Scarlet Letter to his wife just after completing the novel: “my voice swelled and heaved, as if I was tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state then,

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having gone through a great diversity and severity of emotion, for many months past” (Hawthorne 1835–1862, p.191). In a letter to his good friend Horatio Bridge about the new novel, Hawthorne wrote, “it is posi-tively a hell-fired story into which I found it almost impossible to throw any cheering light” (Wineapple 2003, p. 216), suggesting that Hawthorne was aware he had written an extraordinary novel that would be well received. So it was not by coincidence that Hawthorne, according to his biographers, was in a “very nervous state,” which he subsequently man-aged to escape by becoming “gloomy again about the success of his romance” (Miller 1991, p. 300; emphasis added). As further evidence of his unconscious awareness of a universal need to suffer in the face of impending success, he remarked that after reading the last chapter to his wife, she “went to bed with a terrible headache—a good sign of the book’s success” (Wineapple 2004, p. 216; emphasis added).

Consistent with his impulse (evident in the journal entry) to avoid thinking for very long about his good fortune are remarks Hawthorne was said to have made to friends on two different occasions. In 1852, on meet-ing his old friend Franklin Pierce in Washington to discuss writing Pierce’s campaign biography, Hawthorne is reputed to have told him, “Frank, I pity you. . . . But after all, this world was not meant to be happy in, only to succeed in!” (Wineapple 2004, p. 259). A year and a half before he died in 1862, Hawthorne brought Rebecca Harding, an author and journalist, to the new graveyard in Concord, called Sleepy Hollow, and according to her squatted down and joked, “Yes, we New Englanders begin to enjoy ourselves—when we are dead” (Wineapple 2004, p. 367).

Like Dimmesdale, Hawthorne has been described by friends and acquaintances as having a “magnetic and enduring” impact on people, with eyes that had a “hypnotic effect on many viewers,” a “low musical voice,” and an air of mystery (Miller 1991, pp. 3, 5). Portraits and photo-graphs bear witness to his arresting appearance and striking good looks. According to his sister Elizabeth, strangers would stop and comment that he was “the finest boy . . . they had ever seen.” Anthony Trollope, the popular English novelist, reportedly insisted he was “the handsomest Yankee that ever walked the planet” (Miller 1991, p. 3). In addition to praising his genius, dozens of friends and acquaintances spoke in par-ticular of his eyes, recalling them as “soft-flashing unsearchable eyes,” as “Wonderful, wonderful eyes! they give, but receive not,” and as “eyes that would darken visibly under the touch of passing emotion, like the waters of a fountain ruffled by the breeze of summer” (Miller 1991, pp. 3, 4).

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Years after his death, an acquaintance remembered that “when some-thing witty was said, his dark eyes lighted up as if flames were suddenly kindled behind them” (Miller 1991, p. 4). Not surprisingly, many have noted that Hawthorne rarely established eye contact. A professor of his at Bowdoin College recalled his “averted look” (Miller 1991, p. 4). Biogra-phers have mentioned that he rarely looked a person in the eye, instead “lowering his eyes bashfully and modestly,” and others have referred to his “downcast eyes” and his “sidelong glance from very shy eyes” (Miller 1991, p. 4). In view of the powerful effect he had on others, it is tempting to speculate on why Hawthorne averted his eyes. Like Dimmesdale, he may well have unconsciously believed that he had magical powers given his very real power to evoke the fascination of others. The anxiety engen-dered by his uncertainty whether he indeed possessed magical powers could account for his oft-mentioned habit of frequently isolating himself from family and friends. It is not surprising that one of his biographers concluded that “Hawthorne’s acute knowledge of his personal mystery . . . at times proved more than he could bear” (Miller 1991, p. 9).

TWO CLINICAL ILLUSTRATIONS

In clinical work one encounters people like Hawthorne and Dimmesdale, men and women who possess a magnetic and appealing personality or unusual talents, yet seem unable to “bear” their success for very long. Instead they are preoccupied with thoughts of death, withdraw regularly from friends and family, and often find dramatic ways to stir up trouble for themselves, as though happiness poses a terrible threat.

One such instance is that of a strikingly competent and appealing woman, A., who entered analysis at age forty-nine because of constant self-tormenting thoughts and unhappiness with her husband, a bright but self-absorbed man who was addicted to marijuana. Continually berating herself for her supposed failings, despite impressive accomplishments in her career and as a mother, A. revealed a history of involvement with self-absorbed men, noting that the one relationship she had ever broken off herself was with a man who paid her a lot of attention and loved her dearly. On the verge of being “wrecked by success” a week after giving birth at age forty-two, A. was hospitalized overnight because she expressed the conviction she was going to die. Tremendously agitated in the week following the birth of her daughter, A. felt she was on the verge of a breakdown.

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Years later in analysis, A. recalled feeling “a terrible sense of danger” when her daughter was born, adding that she felt “very needed and very powerful.” Aware of her subsequent need to mitigate this sense of danger in the face of her joy at being with her child, A. remarked, “ I have heart-burn when I look at my daughter now and realize how much I love her . . . at times it is so painful to be that loved by her that I have to take a Klonipin.”

Further memories of A.’s unbearable anxiety when her daughter was born emerged a year after A. had made the difficult decision to separate from her husband. Pleased with her gains in analysis and feeling pres-sured financially because of the separation, A. had cut back on our ses-sions from four times a week to two. Given my awareness that A. had a central remaining goal, that of finding and enjoying a relationship with a man who was the opposite of the self-absorbed men she had been with in the past, I told her I thought we had one remaining task, that of under-standing the reasons she gravitated toward self-absorbed men, so she would not repeat the pattern. I said that to accomplish this, we ought to think about going back to four sessions a week. A. reacted to my recom-mendation by telling me she had a “knot” in her stomach and wanted to run out of the office. Over the next several months, she struggled with feeling torn between her wish to ignore my suggestion and stop her therapy altogether, and her competing wish to understand why she felt so frightened by it. Increasingly, she recognized that her panicky feelings about seeing me more frequently paralleled her anxiety imagining a rela-tionship with a man who would love her so much he would want to spend a lot of time with her. Evidence that she repeatedly tormented herself after experiences in which she felt highly valued and loved emerged again and again, reminiscent of Weiss’s observations about the need to preoccupy oneself with painful thoughts to escape the anxiety mobilized by experiences of happiness.

Besides knowing how invaluable she was to the success of her com-pany and how thrilled her bosses were with her, A. knew, from our years of working together, that I admired her tremendously for her gifts as a mother and as a professional, for her courage in facing issues that aroused great anxiety, for her determination to achieve her goals, and for her capacity to extract the maximal benefit from our sessions. So I told A. that I thought what terrified her about my suggesting we go back to four sessions was the same thing that frightened her about being with a man capable of really loving her: that by telling her I wanted to see her more

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often, she was faced with undeniable evidence of how much I love her, how important she is to me, and how much I enjoy being with her. Since she had also told me how pleased she was with her gains in analysis and how much better she felt as a result of our work, I said that I thought that something about our mutual happiness in working together, which would likely intensify if we met more frequently again, was truly terrifying to her.

In response to these discussions, A. came in one day and reported that in thinking further about what I had said, what arose in her mind was the thought that being loved by someone she cared about was “like hav-ing their life in my hands.” She then described in detail her anxiety in the week following her daughter’s birth, a time when she experienced, in her words, “the most horrendous anxiety” she had ever felt. Remarking that her stomach was knotting up “just recollecting” that time, A. revealed that she had been determined to nourish her daughter solely by breast-feeding. A few days after her daughter’s birth, she found that her daugh-ter, who weighed a healthy nine pounds at birth, had lost a bit of weight. Two days later, A. experienced the most unbearable anxiety she had ever felt. Unable to sleep between feedings because her stomach was churn-ing, she was preoccupied with the thought that “any minute now someone is going to fling open the bedroom door and tell me it is time to feed the baby again.” Convinced that she was “going to die” and unable to bear her anxiety any longer, A. got out of bed and found her husband, who took her to the emergency room. Hospitalized overnight, she was released with firm instructions that she was to sleep a minimum of six hours nightly and that her husband was to give their daughter formula for the midnight feeding.

In the context of my recommendation that she and I meet more fre-quently and my speculation that what frightened her about this was that it heightened her awareness of how important she is to me, A.’s thoughts wandered to a time when, in Freud’s words, an “unexpected and cher-ished wish came true,” the birth of her child. By telling her I thought we should see each other more frequently, A. was faced with a heightened awareness of how much I enjoy working with her, which in turn reflected how lovable she was. My admiration and love for her was also a wish come true for A., since she felt the same way about me. Not surprisingly, in light of Weiss’s idea that mutual love and admiration trigger an auto-matic reexperiencing of the most blissful time in our lives, A.’s thoughts wandered to the birth of her child. The panicky feelings she experienced

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when I recommended that we meet more often reminded her of her anxi-ety following the birth of her longed-for child, and reflected her convic-tion that if we met more often, and became even more important to each other than we already were, she would surely die. Her belief that she would die can be understood as a fear that she would lose her mind, if one recalls Weiss’s formulation that mutual love threatens a regression in mental function to the primitive levels of thinking we possessed during our blissful earliest years with our mother.

Another patient, an extraordinarily gifted and happily married young violinist with two children, experienced an unremitting series of successes in his career and found a somewhat less dramatic way than A. to suffer in order to “bear” his success. A recent graduate of a prestigious conserva-tory, with an appealing personality and a striking appearance, B. sought psychotherapy because of intense anxiety during performances and because of an experience in which he desperately wished he would be in a car accident while on his way to a renowned music festival where he had been invited to perform. A few years before seeking treatment, just after a series of highly successful performances overseas for which he had received rave reviews, B. experienced a Dimmesdale-like state of confusion in the midst of a performance, such that he was unsure whether his instrument was actually out of tune or whether it was just his imagination. Adjusting his instrument in the midst of the performance, he then realized he had made it out of tune. He tormented himself about this for days afterward.

In a session several months after beginning therapy, B. spoke of feel-ing “excited” at being invited once again to perform at this renowned festival and of feeling very satisfied with the work we had done. As he spoke, I was reminded of how much I admired him and enjoyed working with him. In the following session, B. reported feeling panicky during a performance the evening before. Overcome by “racing thoughts” during a solo, he was unable to judge whether he was playing well or poorly and was only slightly reassured when he received compliments from fellow musicians after the performance. His symptoms can be seen as confirm-ing Weiss’s observations (1996) that experiences of success and great power can induce a regression in mental functioning and a weakening of repression such as that occurring in hypomanic states. Like Dimmesdale, who was confused and agitated after his blissful time with Hester, B. experienced intense anxiety and racing thoughts after an experience in which he received heightened recognition that elated him. Not by accident, his symptoms appeared directly after a session in which he

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undoubtedly sensed my admiration of him. Fortunately, and unlike Dimmesdale (who was caught unawares by the emergence of frightening unconscious thoughts), B. was able to maintain adequate repression, though he experienced a frightening inability to accurately evaluate his performance.

In a session about two years into treatment, B. reported something “foolish” he had done over the weekend that made him feel “disgusted” with himself but “calmer.” Occurring days after a series of unexpected career successes that made him extremely happy and that undoubtedly heightened his sense of power, B.’s action, which I will describe, can be seen as an adaptive effort to guard against the extreme distress and men-tal confusion he had experienced prior to treatment in the face of his successes. On his way home after a performance, B. was looking forward to attending a party with his fellow musicians, when suddenly he had the idea he would get a massage because his arm had been hurting lately and he was concerned about developing tendonitis. Discovering that the place where he usually got massages was closed, he noticed a massage parlor across the street that was open for business. He then had the thought that maybe it was “one of those shady massage parlors,” but he brushed off the idea and decided to enter. Sure enough, about fifteen minutes into the massage, his masseuse propositioned him, whereupon B. felt “foolish and terrible” and hurriedly left. At the party that evening, he was filled with thoughts about how disappointed and disgusted his wife, friends, and fellow musicians would be if they knew what he had done.

What is significant about B.’s action is that he chose to do something that he unconsciously knew would cause him to think poorly of himself, right after experiencing an extraordinary string of successes. A few weeks before the massage parlor incident, he had experienced anxiety right before playing a solo, but was able to successfully dismiss the anx-ious thought from his mind and play the solo perfectly. Also shortly before the massage parlor incident, B. had been invited, as one of a hand-ful of violinists, to audition for a major European ensemble. In the ses-sion in which he reported the massage parlor incident, he remarked that he had performed a piece recently that he hadn’t played in several years, and realized how much better a musician he had become. Moreover, a month earlier he had been invited to perform as guest soloist with an orchestra in another city and later heard that the conductor thought his performance was “incredible.” Two days later, after performing as part of a chamber music ensemble with this same conductor, who was also a

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composer, he was told his performance was outstanding. Not only that, this prominent composer informed him that he had long toyed with the idea of composing a sonata for violin and was so “inspired” by B.’s play-ing that he had decided to compose one specifically for him.

Reflecting on the shift in his mood from mounting tension before the massage parlor incident to intense self-condemnation afterward, B. remarked that the experience made it really clear to him that his action was a way of reducing anxiety that had become unbearable. By torment-ing himself with thoughts of how foolishly he had behaved, he gave himself ammunition to think less highly of himself and to imagine how poorly his wife, his friends, and I would think of him if we knew what he had done. He thus succeeded in completely ridding himself of all thoughts of how gifted he was, of how much I and others admired him, and of all feelings of happiness about his recent string of successes. Gifted enough to inspire a prominent composer to decide to write a sonata specifically for him, and one of only four violinists in the world to be invited to audition for a major European ensemble, B. was faced with undeniable evidence of his extraordinary talents. In the light of the men-tal collapse of Freud’s patients when their cherished ambitions were ful-filled, and of Weiss’s observation that experiences of success and great power in love and work can give rise to a hypomanic state and weakened repression, it is not surprising that B. experienced mounting anxiety that was difficult for him to tolerate. Like Dimmesdale and Hawthorne, he gave himself a reason to torment himself in order to diminish the per-ceived danger of his successes. Adding to his anxiety was the fact that in addition to his musical talents, B. was striking in appearance and pos-sessed an appealing personality that inspired the love and admiration of all who knew him. This undoubtedly served to intensify the danger he experienced, since, like Dimmesdale and Hawthorne, his many gifts served only to heighten his difficulty in distinguishing his very real power to inspire others from fantasied magical powers.

CONCLUSION

I would like to return to The Scarlet Letter and to two statements, men-tioned earlier, that Dimmesdale makes to Hester: the first as he ascends the scaffold to confess publicly that he is the father of her child; the sec-ond, as he lies dying in her arms. His words capture the link between

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success and mental breakdown observed by Freud and the special danger of success in love and the value of suffering, as formulated by Weiss.

Ascending the scaffold to confess to the community that he is the father of Hester’s child, Dimmesdale murmurs to Hester, “Isn’t this better than what we dreamed of in the forest?” Convinced he would lose his sanity were he to run away with the woman he loves, Dimmesdale believes that any alternative is “better.”

Dimmesdale’s final words, as he lies dying in Hester’s arms, high-light Hawthorne’s intuitive understanding of the function of suffering. Afraid to think that they have a chance for happiness even in the afterlife, Dimmesdale warns Hester not to dream about being together one day but to dwell on one painful thought only, and he tells her why this is so important. Here are his final words: “Hush Hester hush! . . . the law we broke! . . . Let these alone be in thy thoughts! . . . [God] hath proved his mercy most of all, in my afflictions. By giving me this torture to bear upon my breast! . . . By bringing me hither, to die this death of triumphant ignominy before the people! Had either of these agonies been wanting, I had been lost forever!”

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S. Bradley, R.C. Beatty, & E.H. Long. New York: Norton, 1961, pp. 267–277.

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weiss, J.M. (1999). Carmen and her brother: The effect of early and pro-longed incestlike experience on the development and analysis of a self-defeating woman, with reflections on the analytic process and its scien-tific nature. Journal of Clinical Psychoanalysis 8:511–564.

weiss, J.M. (2006). Further reflections on the analytic process. Paper pre-sented at Western Regional Child Analytic Meeting, San Francisco, October.

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