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and “we” when referring to trauma, hinting at self-knowledge.
However one is never sure whether she herself has experienced a
traumatic event or if she is referring to vicarious trauma through
her work and volunteer experiences. Later in the book she refers
to certain experiences such as when a patient crushes her hand in
a New York City psychiatric ER and Salzer alludes to some of
the side effects of the event such as feeling shaken and becoming
jumpy at work, but she does not fully take us through her own
journey using her own healing steps and methods. She may
have thus lost an opportunity to anchor her methodology and
experiential credibility. Salzer does however use many clinical
examples to make her thought processes accessible to the reader.
Back to Life at first glance seems to reflect a new way to
gain coping skills and hope; however, she neglects tackling the
possibility that these steps might not work. She does not address
options to address the situation if the reader has difficulty finding
new ways of thinking, being, and finding social and cultural
supports to establish a future orientation. It would be prudent to
caution readers to find additional supports beside this book to
assist them on their journey to help avoid retriggering the trauma
experience itself if the goals are not achieved by the end of each
chapter.
Salzer makes an attempt to provide the general population
with hope and answers about how to get “past your past” as she
declares having found a new and different approach to dealing
with trauma. To be sure, there are some useful elements that will
help the reader gain insight and create cognitive strategies for
coping. She encourages the reader to compose a list of needs
and to learn to ask what he needs from his support networks.
However the book seems rather one dimensional in its approach
and relies heavily on basic existentialism and CBT techniques
without suggesting ways to access formal therapeutic support.
Back to Life often seems recipe-like and superficial, instead of
exploratory and suggestive. Therefore readers of Back to Life
may once again become unable to get “past their past” and risk
exactly what the book is trying to avoid, retraumatization.
A Movie Review of Anonymous
Richard M. Waugaman, M.D.
www.oxfreudian.com
Roland Emmerich’s new film, Anonymous, is inspired by a
theory that gripped Sigmund Freud during the last dozen years
of his life - that “William Shakespeare” was the pseudonym and
front man of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (1550-1604). Freud
was the first prominent person to endorse this unorthodox theory.
And Emmerich is the first director to make a major film about
it. For that, psychoanalysts are in his debt. As a profession, we
have mostly trashed Freud for his heretical opinion about who
Shakespeare was. No matter how much prestige Freud once had
for analysts, that was no match for analysts’ hunger for popular
acceptance, which may be one reason they did not dare challenge
the Shakespeare “experts.”
Some of the acrimonious reviews of Anonymous prove Freud’s
observation that we know so little about the traditional author that
we can imagine he was every bit as great as his works are. Our
idealizing transference toward the Bard collapses, though, once
we look at de Vere up close.
Anonymous chooses one among many possible narratives about
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de Vere’s choice of Shakespeare of Stratford to serve as his front
man. Further, it depicts the theory that the offspring of de Vere’s
possible affair with Queen Elizabeth was the Earl of Southampton.
This was the Earl to whom Shakespeare’s two long poems of 1593
and 1594 were dedicated. Further, many of us believe that Sonnets
1-126, the so-called “Fair Youth” sonnets, address Southampton.
But this is precisely where any consensus disintegrates. Some
of us believe the bisexual de Vere had an affair with Southampton.
Others—possibly because of their discomfort with de Vere having
been bisexual—instead claim that Southampton was de Vere’s son
by Queen Elizabeth. They can then explain the unusual warmth of
these sonnets as reflecting paternal love. Incest is a theme in the
film. The allusions to incest in the plays might reflect de Vere’s
quasi-incestuous relationship with his first wife—they grew up
as virtual step-siblings.
Confused I’m not surprised. Anyway, don’t you have to
be a snob and a conspiracy theorist to doubt that Shakespeare
wrote Shakespeare Well, Elizabethan authorship was a bit more
complicated than it is today. Most plays were published without
the author’s name. Literary anonymity and pseudonymity were
common before the 20 th century.
Rhys Ifans departs from his past film roles to become the older
Edward de Vere. He brings to life de Vere’s passion for writing,
his awareness that “All art is political,” his reckless impulsivity,
and his resigned awareness that he would not receive credit for
his politically polemical works. Ben Jonson plays an intriguing
if invented role in the film. His admiration for de Vere’s literary
genius stirs deep envy in him. Here, the screenwriter John
Orloff was making his homage to Amadeus, which was a major
inspiration for him.
When his wife Anne pleads with de Vere to stop writing plays,
he replies, “The voices! I can’t stop them. They come to me. I
would go mad if I didn’t write down what the voices say.” This is
an intriguing surmise about de Vere’s creative process, as though
his Muse speaks to him aloud. In fact, I suspect that some form
of unusual awareness and tolerance of multiple self states plays
a crucial role for some literary geniuses such as de Vere. Part of
Shakespeare’s magic is that he evokes specific self states in us.
Great authors tap into several of their own respective self states
when they write. Writing under pseudonyms may loosen the grip
of the author’s central self state, and activate a wider range of ego
states. Psychoanalysts are in a unique position to elucidate the
psychology of literary anonymity and pseudonymity. The evidence
suggests that keeping one’s authorship secret helps promote what
Keat’s called Shakespeare’s “negative capability”—keeping his
own identity in the background as he created hundreds of utterly
convincing characters.
In a sense, Edward de Vere’s most magical character of all
was his pseudonym and front man, “William Shakespeare.” With
some likely assistance from the man from Stratford, this character
lives on for most people more vividly than does de Vere himself.
Why did de Vere have to conceal his authorship For many
reasons. Nobility did not write for the common theater. They
rarely published poems under their own name during their
lifetime. And the plays of Shakespeare spoof many powerful court
figures, and comment on various court intrigues. Attributing the
plays’ authorship to a commoner helped conceal some of their
provocative critiques.
Even so, the Elizabethan theater audience as depicted in the film
recognized the character Richard III as a spoof of de Vere’s hunch-