Volume 8, Number 3 · February 23, 1967
Dangerous Acquaintances
By Meyer Schapiro
Friendship and Fratricide, an Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss
by Meyer A. Zeligs M.D.
Viking, 476 pp., $8.95
In answer to the appeal of the English judge, Earl Jowitt, that American psychiatrists look into the 'baffling' case of Chambers and Hiss, a psychoanalyst has spent six years investigating the two men. There was the difficulty that Chambers would not let himself be interviewed and died in the course of the investigation. However, he had left enough evidence in the court records and a published autobiography, as well as in the memories of friends and acquaintances, to enable Dr. Zeligs to piece together a psychoanalytic portrait. There was the further difficulty for an 'analytic biography,' as he calls his book, that while Hiss gave Dr. Zeligs many hours and a full volume of letters, he was not submitted in any sense to psychoanalysis by the author. One will object that a true relation of analyst and analysand would have made it impossible for the analyst to write this book. But does not the whole enterprise of an 'analytic biography' of a living person risk indelicacy and violation of a doctor's code? And if the man has been convicted of a crime that he continues to deny, is there not a contradiction or at least a paradox in anyone's undertaking to make a portrait of him 'in depth' while pretending, as Dr. Zeligs does pretend, that his standpoint is one of 'careful analytic neutrality'? He tells us that his study was made 'in the spirit of pure inquiry,' that he has maintained 'a proper equidistance' from his two subjects and has 'no political ax to grind.' 'It was not my intent,' he writes, 'to confirm the guilt or establish the innocence of Hiss'—as if our understanding of a man's life and character can be independent of the judgment of guilt or innocence in such a case. Obviously, the story would be different for an investigator who accepts the verdict of the court than for one who doesn't.
Review, 4961 words
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