22 Myron SharafFury On Earth
persons who make the implicit demand: You must change your life if you are truly to under-
stand what I have discovered. In his biography of Gandhi, Erik Erikson has commented very
well on the various ways of neutralizing such innovators:
I, for one, have rarely met anybody of whatever level of erudition or information, in
India or elsewhere, who was not willing and eager to convey to me the whole meas-
ure of the Mahatma as based on one sublime or scandalous bit of hearsay. And some
formulas sanctify him in a manner which dispose of a true man just as totally as do
the formulas which define him by what he was not not a saint or not a statesman, not
a true Indian or not a literate man... .It is as though a man had passed by who simply made
too great demands on all as well as himself and must, therefore, be disposed of somehow. Thus, the
funeral pyre which consumed his remains to ashes often seems to be an elemental act
of piety and charity compared to the totem meal by which his memory is now being
devoured by friends and adversaries alike; many feed on him, deriving pride from hav-
ing owned him, from having intelligently disposed of him, or from being able to clas-
sify the lifeless pieces. But nobody thereby inherits ... what held him together and
what gave him and through him, millions a special kind of vitalizing aliveness which
does not seem expendable in this world. (Italics mine.)^21Even a balanced biography of Reich, one that would neither glorify nor demean the
man, would “intelligently dispose” of him. Psychobiographies in particular can isolate the mes-
sage of a great person’s work and life. It is all too easy to segregate him from the rest of our
lives, in the manner of Sundays-only religion. We can admire the great man and see how his
achievements reflected the rich texture of his health and illness. Yet we still avoid the full
meaning of his life for us.
My aim is to overcome this separation of the extraordinary individual from the rest
of us. I find it ironic that psychobiographers so intent upon relating a great man’s life to his
work rarely give specifics about the relation of their lives to their biographies. Usually they
offer a quite general statement of interest and attitude, with some caveats about possible bias-
es toward their subject. They leave aside the details of their own involvement with the person
they are portraying, usually on the grounds that the reader is interested in the life of the great
individual, not the life of the biographer. In so doing, they behave in a way analogous to the
therapist who refuses to disclose much about his or her own feelings and experiences on the
grounds that “here—in therapy—we are dealing with yourproblems, not mine”.
This will not do. Just as the therapist sees the patient through the prism of his own
personality and experiences, just as Reich brought all of his being to his work in a way that the
reader needs to know, so I shall bring all of myself to writing about him. Since you, the read-
er, will be seeing Reich through my eyes as well as your own, it is important for you to know
who I am.
This approach is essential not only so that we can try to make explicit the possible
sources of distortion in our evaluation, but also so that we you and I can apply more effec-