261 - Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence

Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence
By Erik H. Erikson
474 pp. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1969. $10.00.

The publication of Gandhi's Truth has become the occasion for wide-spread consideration in the popular press of Erik Erikson's work. It is, of course, a long overdue hearing. Although this particular book is not the summing-up of a great thinker in his maturity, it is an engaging document that weaves together psychoanalysis and history in a way that illuminates the psychological foundations of great leadership and the significance of militant nonviolence.

Erikson has already demonstrated his psycho-historical agility in his study of Luther. The approach to Gandhi, however, is a bit more circumspect, particularly with reference to the significance of childhood traumata. There is, Erikson suggests, a certain inviolacy of spirit that Gandhi maintained throughout childhood, albeit impulsively, which defies standardization. Nonetheless, the task of a psychoanalytic approach to historical analysis remains the same. It is to investigate the qualities of a particular leader who at a particular historical time captures the imagination of a particular people in such a way as to move them in a particular direction.

Gandhi's satyagraha required enormous discipline both of its leader and its followers. It also required insight not unlike the goal of psychoanalysis in terms of truth, self-suffering, and nonviolence. "In both encounters only the militant probing of a vital issue by a nonviolent confrontation can bring to light what insight is ready on both sides" (p. 439). Both satyagraha and psychoanalysis entail an action which maximizes mutuality and minimizes the violence caused by unilateral coercion. Satyagraha, says Erikson, is a ritual elaboration of instinctive nonviolent or pacific behavior that -requires reconstitution and reinnovation. "If truth is actuality, it can never consist of the mere repetition of ritualized acts or stances" (p. 436). Despite the possibility that pacifism or nonviolence may be as instinctual as aggression, Erikson

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adds an ethical note that rings true for our own social upheaval. "Non-violence, inward and outward, can become a true force only where ethics replaces moralism" (p. 251). Riots and excess follow repression when the restraints have been blind or autocratic and devoid of an ethical base. We are learning that fact painfully.

In a very real sense, Erikson's book on Gandhi is not a biography. It is rather a description of a moment which not only helped a movement that produced a nation but an action that made truth actual. Quite by accident, Erikson's lecturing in India brought him to Ahmedabad where he met the mill owner Gandhi had opposed when he fasted for the first time in leading the strike for higher wages. This "event" which Gandhi himself had mentioned only briefly and which most biographers have ignored is the "demonstrable crisis in the middle age of a great man" (p. 47) which Erikson uses as the focus of his quest for "Gandhi's truth." I agree with Erikson's assumption that the full measure of a man cannot be understood apart from his most creative action.

Gandhi's own life was not without blemish. In 1906, after an enforced early marriage that began when he was 13, Gandhi took the vow of continence which, because it did not consider the feelings of his wife, seems inconsistent with a style of loving non-resistance. Gandhi's sexual asceticism had disastrous effects on his two sons and on a nation that desperately needed reasonable practices of birth control rather than an unreachable ideal of sexual continence. Furthermore, he was a man filled with self-doubt. Even though his affection and admiration for Gandhi is evident, Erikson does not glamorize Gandhi.

Erikson's shift from the "young man Luther" to a "middle-aged Mahatma" reflects his own desire to flesh out the entire human life cycle. Until recently, very little has been written in the personality sciences about adulthood. Freud makes passing mention of love and work as the central issues beyond puberty. This study of Gandhi adds significantly to the growing body of material dealing with the various crises of middle adulthood.

The virtue which Erikson attaches to this stage in the human life cycle is care. By that he means an interest in producing life and maintaining it. Erikson uses Gandhi's maternalism as the occasion for stating that men need to learn to care more the way women do if the earth's plight is to be improved. Gandhi "undoubtedly saw a kind of sublimated maternalism as part of the positive identity of a whole man, and certainly of a homo religiosus" (p. 403). Those who can identify some " mothering" inclinations in themselves might "take heart" from Erikson's treatment of Gandhi's maternalism.

Erikson's suggestion that women have a "productive inner-bodily

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space" may well be a psychological sleight-of-hand to circumvent penis envy. I agree, however, that the qualities of inwardness and caring-for and warmth of presence usually attributed to women are necessary for all people and especially those in positions of leadership. Gandhi was such a person. Admittedly, he had abstinences and interests that to our "enlightened" eyes may seem pathological or quaint. But Gandhi's weakness was a strength that shocked the British Empire. In our culture, men are scorned who manifest sensitive emotional qualities. Perhaps Pickering's line in My Fair Lady ("Why can't a woman be more like a man?") should be reversed.

Those of us who feel we must be powerful and pragmatic to influence the course of human life need to listen to Gandhi. Moreover, there was a noumenous quality to his presence which recalls the infant's experience of hallowed presence in the mothering one. The reappearance of the noumenous in the exercise of leadership could save America's preoccupation with technocratic efficiency from dehumanizing sterility.

Herbert Anderson
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey