A family’s private reality behind a public image

After so many biographies debunking the great and glorious, after so many news stories exposing the crimes and vices of the glamorous, the important, the famous and the rich, one would think that by now we all would have grown cynical about celebrities. Yet despite all the evidence that our idols have clay feet, the allure seems indestructible.

Perhaps one shouldn’t be surprised. Playing the board game Careers as a child, I always picked fame over wealth, or even happiness, assuming that the first automatically entailed the latter two. Nor is this merely a modern delusion. Homeric warriors, Renaissance explorers, poets, statesmen, athletes and scientists have all been spurred by the desire for fame, that “last infirmity of the noble mind.” As the daughter of one of the most widely read and admired psychoanalytic thinkers of the postwar era, Erik H. Erikson, Sue Erikson Bloland grew up in fame’s shadow and developed an acute understanding of it:

“We have become convinced,” she observes in “In the Shadow of Fame,” “that fame is the ultimate in human achievement -- that there is no more absolute measure of a person’s worth than the attainment of celebrity. We imagine that the famous have not only achieved a unique social status, but actually have triumphed over the exigencies of the human condition.”

Not true, as Bloland knew all too well from personal experience. But it was a long time before she was to trust her own impressions. Her father had become famous as the author of “Childhood and Society,” and he and his wife, Joan, were both charismatic figures. The father and mother whose flaws and failings were evident to little Sue were embraced by the rest of the world as “quintessential parent figures -- exceptionally wise and knowing and comfortable with the most sensitive of interpersonal issues.” In short: perfect parents. But, of course, they weren’t.

In a funny way, Bloland recalls, they were better at relating to other people’s children than to their own and blossomed in social situations: “I don’t mean to suggest that they put on an empty show. They felt different in social settings ... their interactions with admiring friends revitalized them ... in a way that family life could not.”

There was a certain hollowness, a lack, in the private life of this family, which was graphically demonstrated when Joan gave birth to a child with Down syndrome in 1944. While his wife was recovering from surgery, Erikson consulted two trusted friends, Margaret Mead and Jungian analyst Joe Wheelwright, as to what should be done. Experts agreed: institutionalization. “Furthermore, [Mead] warned, if Mother were allowed to see and hold Neil even once, it would be more difficult for her to relinquish his care to others.... “

Sue, who was 6 at the time, remembers being told her new baby brother had died at birth, and this was the story told to almost everyone.

Although this attitude was far more prevalent back then, Bloland, now a psychoanalyst herself, analyzes her parents’ behavior as a manifestation of their individual psychologies. Not only does she show how this decision marred her parents’ otherwise solid relationship, but she also elucidates it as part of a pattern of subordinating private reality to public imagery.

Bloland’s book is less a conventional memoir than a study of fame. Her writing style, however, at times sounds almost like a comic parody of an article in a psychoanalytical journal. But Bloland’s hard-won insights about fame are astute, and her analysis of its workings is unusually thoughtful. Fame, as she concludes, is a two-way street: Just as ordinary folks see the famous through a haze of rosy illusion, so too the famous, endlessly hungering for public acclaim, maintain a public image at the expense of an authentic identity. And in the end, the public homage they crave so fiercely can never fully satisfy them because they know it’s for the mask they’ve created and not for the person behind the mask.

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Merle Rubin is a contributing writer to Book Review.*