#1...
Ferment
Vol. XII #5
September 24, 1998
Editor, Roy Lisker
8 Liberty Street#306
Middletown, CT. 06457
Note: A tribute was presented to me on my 60th birthday
( September 24th, 1998) in the form of a webpage. It contains photographs and news clippings about me going back to the activism of the 60’s; also writings, and commentary from Kenn Thomas, editor of Steamshovel Press, ( a free wheeling political conspiracy magazine published in St. Louis.) Its’ better than any resume I’ve ever put together on my own. Internet access is at
Book Review:(Part II)
Sylvia Nasar: “A Beautiful Mind”, a biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr.; Simon & Schuster, 1998; $25; ISBN: 0-684-81906-6
The first article of this series concluded with some remarks on the pervasive ‘genius infatuation’ of “A Beautiful Mind”. We continue with a visit to Sylvia Nasar’s meditations on the erotic charms of a genius.
Her views on psychiatry and schizophrenia lay the foundation for her theories of the causes of John Nash’s insanity, and for its remission. A final essay on the many uses of the word ‘importance’ in mathematical discourse includes a short assessment of the importance of Nash’s work for mathematics, science, history, and all civilization.
It may have been from an intention of enlivening public interest in her subject, that Sylvia Nasar never passes up an opportunity to remind us of the uniqueness of John Nash’s sex appeal. Her frequent references to his cute legs seems to suggest that these continue even today to dominate all other attractions. On page 196 Joyce Davis, classmate of Nash’s ex-wife , recollects 50 years after the fact that it was indeed his legs which attracted Alicia to Nash, to which she adds: “He looked like Rock Hudson. ” I encourage readers of “A Beautiful Mind” to browse through the photographs grouped after page 224 , to see if, in any of them, John Nash bears the least resemblance to Rock.
On the same page Nasar startles us with the revelation that even the name “ John Nash” has the power to arouse sexual desire. Its’ twin monosyllables, explains , “John” followed by “Nash”, signify some kind of high-born Anglo-Saxon ancestry: anyone who thinks I’m making this up is invited to consult the passage in question. In context, it seems to indicate that Alicia would have turned down her nose at some fellow ethnic suitor with a name like “ Jose Domingo Loyola Gonzalez Rivera de San Miguel y Salamanca ” ! Warding off the implication that she herself considers Alicia to be a member of some sort of sub-standard ethnicity, Nasar assures us that although Alicia was born in El Salvador, her roots sink deep into the humus of royalty.
Page 191 is certainly the most depressing - shall we rather say appalling- performance in the entire book. After setting the tone of high pulp with the sentence “ Alicia glowed like a hothouse orchid. ” , Nasar reveals that noble blood runs in Alicia’s veins, Romanov or Hapsburg, she’s not sure which, and, for good measure, Bourbon as well. Side-stepping possible ties to Prince Norodom Sihanouk or the dynasty of Ibn Saud, this pretty much covers the terrain. From the footnotes we learn that this entire fabric of legend reflects the beliefs of uncle Enrique L. Larde. In his son’s self-published book [1] , the assertion is made that Enrique is the post-Mayerling bastard son of Archduke Rudolf. I did some work for vanity presses in the 60’s, and I immediately recognized the kind of testimonial that provides the bread-and-butter of those shysters.
Sylvia Nasar also suspects that these cobwebs of Enrique’s brain may not be credible - all to the good, given that Alicia didn’t inherit the Hapsburg nose/chin connection - so she digs up additional support for her thesis , that the Harrison-Lopez- Arthes -Larde family fits snugly into El Salvador’s ‘social elite’ . She knows this because, back in the 30’s, it “mingled with [El Salvador’s] presidents and generals. ” Which, if true, can only mean that : (1) they were among the 300 families owning 98% of the nation’s wealth, and, (2) they were welcome to come and go at the homes of card-carrying Nazis.
And Nazis they were in those days! From 1932 until 1944, the year in which the Larde family fled to the United States, El Salvador was ruled by a real loony-bunny of a fascist dictator, General Maximiliano ( ‘El Brujo’) Hernandez Martinez . After a coup-d’etat in which he ousted the elected government of Arturo Araújo, Martinez consolidated his power with La Matanza , a massacre in which 30,000 people were murdered in 2 months. Martinez soon established close diplomatic relations with Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan and of course the United States. El Salvador’s army was trained by German colonels, its air force stocked with planes from Italy:
“ In January 1932 Martinez permitted local elections to be held with the participation of the Communists ... After the Communists had won the vote [in certain districts ] the generals refused to allow them to take office. The Communists called for an uprising ... the uprising came to grief due to the division between the pure wage owners and the colonos and worker-peasants. The generals butchered between twenty and thirty thousand workers.
Martinez found a modus vivendi with the Salvadoran bourgeoisie. The military kept the office of President and the politically important ministries, while the key positions in economic policy were filled by representatives of the bourgeoisie..” ( El Salvador, Central America in the New Cold War; Grove Press, 1981 ;Harold Jung, ”Class Struggle and Civil War in El Salvador ” , pg. 73 )
It is significant that the Larde family waited until 1944 to escape, the year in which Martinez was forced out of office by a coalition uniting left- and right-wing elements. The rise to prominence of which Nasar speaks , had to be bound up with this modus vivendi .
This is not to imply that the Lardes were, or are, fascists, ( except for uncle Enrique, who seems to fit the part ) ; yet such connections hardly qualify them as aristocrats, or upper class, or distinguished, or elite, or whatever. Nasar continues through several pages to imply that they do . On page 193 she relates , in hushed tones of awe, that “Admission [ to Marymount High School for Girls in New York] was based strictly on families’ social standing; the El Salvador ambassador wrote Alicia’s letter of reference, attesting to the Lardes family social position. ”
While establishing the claims of Prince John and Princess Alicia to the thrones of the Romanovs, Hapsburgs, Bourbons and, presumably, Plantagenets, Nasar takes time out to ogle Nash’s physique. At age 20, she writes, (page 67) :
“ He had the build, if not the bearing of an athlete, ‘a very strong, very masculine body’, one fellow graduate student recalled. He was, moreover, ‘handsome as a god’, according to another student.”
Lest we think that Nasar is merely quoting citing 50-year old recollections of former class-mates, she adds:
“ His high forehead, somewhat protruding ears, distinctive nose, fleshy lips and small chin gave him the look of an English aristocrat.”
Imagine what Daumier would have done with that recipe ! In between she casts a few side glances at other mathematicians, telling us that (page 71) “ John Milnor ..was..tall, lithe, with a baby face and the body of a gymnast. Milnor was only a freshman but he was already the department’s golden boy.” And that (page 73) Emil Artin, refugee mathematician from Germany, “ looked like a 1920’s German matinee idol. ”
Back to Nash. On page 149, she reminds us that “ Nash was built like a Greek God. ” The legs surface again in a few places, even, on page 385, at the age of 70. Nasar’s personal opinions, free from the protective coloration of quotation marks, emerge, resplendent in shameless nakedness when , on page 196, she calls him “A genius with a penis. ” Here is the exact quote:
“ It was his good looks, however, that made Alicia’s heart beat faster, ‘ A genius with a penis. Isn’t that what we all want?’ an actress once quipped, and the quip captures the combination of brains, status and sex appeal that made Nash so irresistible.”
I guess I’m bemused, and more than a little flattered, to learn that mathematicians have any sex appeal at all, It makes me want to consider going back to doing mathematics full time. I doubt that I’d be able to reconcile the effort involved in fighting off all the women eager to get at me, with the long hours required for my research.
Psychiatry
The topic of ‘schizophrenia’ is treated at some length in “ A Beautiful Mind” . In the first article I stated that ‘schizophrenia’ is known abroad as ‘the American diagnosis.’ My source for this refers to the 50’s, (the period of Nash’s first hospitalization) , and I’m sure it’s still true today. Here is the reference:
“...a given patient might be diagnosed quite differently from one country to another...The English call almost any kind of emotional trouble ‘neurosis’, said Henri Ellenberger, the great historian of psychiatry, in the mid-1950s. ‘The French apply the diagnosis of feeblemindedness very liberally.’ As for the Swiss, ‘The French say that the Swiss diagnose schizophrenia is ‘90 percent of the psychotics and 50 percent of the normal”’
But nobody used the diagnosis of schizophrenia more often than the Americans. Schizophrenia was the great foible of American psychiatry. ..In one study, 46 American psychiatrists and 205 British psychiatrists watched a videotape of ‘patient F’, a young man from Brooklyn who had a hysterical paralysis of one arm and a mood fluctuation associated with alcohol abuse. Afterward, 69 percent of the Americans diagnosed ‘schizophrenia’, 2 percent of the British’ ( pg. 296, Edward Shorter, “A History of Psychiatry”, John Wiley and Co, 1997)
Sylvia Nasar’s theories of schizophrenia are no worse than the fantasies current in modern psychiatry. Since she is a painstaking referencer, one need only consult her footnotes to learn the sources of her ideas. For the most part they come from the books cited in her bibliography.[2] These writers emphasis the genetic theories of schizophrenia and the neuroleptic drug regimes in use today.
Although Nasar does not regard psychiatry with my acerbic skepticism, she should not be charged with accepting all of its dogmas at face value. Here is her description of psychiatry as practiced at McLean’s hospital at the time of John Nash’s first incarceration:
“ Fagi [Levinson] recalled that Alicia’s pregnancy was thought to be the culprit. ‘It was the height of the Freudian period-all things were explained by fetus envy.’ [Paul] Cohen said : ‘His psychoanalysts theorized that his illness was brought on by latent homosexuality’...... Freud’s now discredited theory linking schizophrenia to repressed homosexuality had such currency at McLean that for many years any male with a diagnosis of schizophrenia who arrived at the hospital in an agitated state was said to be suffering from ‘homosexual panic.’” ( pg. 259)
This, together with the above citation from Edward Shorter, implies that American doctors considered the density of repressed homosexuality in American society to be greater than that of England by a factor of 35 ! Which, combined with the oft-quoted figure of 1% for the percentage of schizophrenics in the human race, plus the ratio of 6 to one for the population of the United States over that of the United Kingdom , implies that......
Mazel Tov!
If Nasar’s picture of the symptoms and causes of schizophrenia lacks coherence, this is only because the contemporary psychiatric identifier , ‘schizophrenia’, is not coherent. Drawing from the books of such psychiatric authorities, Nasar spreads the following list of ‘schizoid’ symptoms across the pages of ‘A Beautiful Mind’ :
...The ‘schizoid state’ is ‘characterized by a sense of meaningless and futility’ .
...John Nash was exceptional because ‘ Men of scientific genius, however eccentric, rarely become truly insane’ ,
... schizophrenia has a genetic basis and ‘tends to run in families ’
( Most of the literature in defense of this assertion can be traced to a single research finding, the Copenhagen twins study done in 1995 , a remarkable example of shoddy science. See Peter Breggin, “Toxic Psychiatry”, St. Martin’s Press, 1991, pg. 97 )
... Schizophrenia ‘leads to a lifelong pattern of social isolation and indifference to the attitudes of others’ .
... consistent with her reactionary , even monarchist tone, she explains on page 271 , more or less, that radical political activity ‘ has long been a hallmark of a developing schizophrenic consciousness. ’ This assertion, if true, stands in stark contradiction to the one just above it.
... ‘voices... are the most characteristic delusion of schizophrenia.’ . What this statement says is that when a patient tells his psychiatrist that he’s hearing voices, the psychiatrist is likely to write down a diagnosis of ‘schizophrenia’.
....schizophrenics are ‘insensitive to physical pain’ .
Finally, on page 258, we are provided with a bargain - basementful of symptoms:
“...simultaneously grandiose and persecutory beliefs - tense, suspicious behavior - relative coherence of speech - ( relative to what? To other mental diseases? To what one ought to expect? To normal people?) - blankness of facial expression - extreme detachment of voice - reserve to the point of muteness ...... ”
By now we begin to realize that the word ‘schizophrenia’ is a grab-bag into which one is welcome to throw anything that may be considered abnormal. This conclusion is evaded by Nasar’s psychiatric experts through the use of traditional political loopholes of the form:
“ Symptoms vary so much between individuals and over time for the same individual that the notion of a ‘typical case’ is virtually non-existent”
“ ...self-contradiction is also characteristic of schizophrenia, every symptom being matched by a ‘counter-symptom...” , and so forth.
Finally, as if to exculpate psychiatry from its vagaries , a former psychiatrist of Nash at McLean Hospital suggests , (page 318, footnote 36) , that Nash may not have been suffering from ‘paranoid schizophrenia’ at all, but ‘bipolar disorder’: “ The quality of ...two papers [written between 1965 and 1967] - the first of which geometer Mikhail Gromov called ‘amazing’ - constitutes the single strongest reason for questioning Nash’s diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. ”
Being both everything and nothing, ‘schizophrenia’ can be conveniently employed to say everything and nothing. Nasar’s account of modern psychiatric dogma is competently done, though I feel that she takes too much of it at face value. Unfortunately, she then abandons her doctrinal moorings to wander far out to sea with numerous theories, all of a sentimental, ad hoc or silly character, about the causes for Nash’s insanity and its long-postponed remission in the late 80’s. Most of these theories are her own, some were proposed by Nash’s colleagues. Nash’s own theories shed an interesting light on his character. Among them we find:
.... teasing in elementary school ( page 188)
.... the stress of teaching ( page 125. Proposed by Nash himself)
.... fear of being drafted into the Korean war ( page 126)
.... the horrible stories his father made of about what would happen if the Japanese invaded West Virginia. ( page 36)
.... McCarthyism at MIT ( page 154)
.... dismissal from RAND after his arrest ( page 188)
.... because Emilio di Giorgi published his research on parabolic partial differential equations a few months earlier than his own (page 220. This theory was proposed by mathematician Gian Carlo-Rota )
.... agonizing too much over the contradictions of quantum theory ( page 221. Another Nash theory )
.... the rejection of his amorous advances by young logician Paul Cohen ( page 243)
.... his failure to win the Bocher Prize ( page 243)
.... the humiliation he was exposed to after the presentation of his proof of the Riemann Hypothesis ( Quote:, page 232: “ Nash’s compulsion to scale this most difficult, most dangerous peak proved central to his undoing.” )
Apparently unaware of what she was doing, Sylvia Nasar systematically followed each account of every misfortune or setback suffered by Nash, with a statement to the effect that this was probably the cause of his mental collapse. It must be admitted that, given that ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ psychiatry overlap so completely in our own day, her list of theories stands up fairly well against ‘fetus envy’, ‘homosexual panic’ and the like.
Nasar’s views on the causes of his remission are grouped together in the 20 pages starting at page 335. Here she claims that “Princeton functioned as a therapeutic community.” The assertion is not unreasonable , although 20 years does seem like a long time for therapy to reveal its benefits [3]. There exist mathematics departments that are dangerous for certain kinds of people, functioning as negative potential wells, in which they risk getting stuck in stable regimes for decades, sometimes their entire lives. The department at Stanford University apparently had that effect on Ivan Streletsky. His 20 years sojourn in its doldrums led to a major tragedy in the early 80’s with the brutal murder of his thesis adviser .
This Twilight Zone phenomenon is known to everyone who has spent a fair amount of time wandering about the mathematics community, yet I’ve never seen it described in published accounts . My own encounters with it have been at U. Pennsylvania, M.I.T. and U.C. Berkeley. It’s very easy, by the way, to get typed as one of these individuals . They acquire a reputation as fixtures hanging around in the lounges and libraries. They may show up at lectures and colloquia where they tend to ask questions that have no connection with the subject matter. The public reaction to their remarks on these occasions hovers between a suppressed laugh and an embarrassed silence.