Chapter 47 - One Weary Man: Part 2 - Man The Unknown

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

By mid-February, Mira had reached Argentina. Although she and Alfred had just experienced the biggest blowup they had ever had in their relationship, they kept in frequent contact throughout her time away. Mira wrote more often than Alfred, who at times didn’t feel he had much new to tell her other than the fact that he was working very hard and worried about her health. He needn’t have worried. Even in this early part of her time away, she had begun to feel better. She was gaining weight as well as perspective, was beginning to meet people, and working out plans for getting painting commissions among the social elite of Mar del Plata and Buenos Aires. 

Mira felt just as concerned about Alfred’s health, given his tendency to push himself. His report that he was drinking very little, repeated often in his correspondence throughout the year, must have reassured her. He also wrote to her in February that he was trying a pill Lynn had suggested to him—benzedrine sulfate, a form of amphetamine just starting to get widely prescribed as an ‘energy booster’. Rather promiscuous prescription of the drug continued through the 1960s, when its addictiveness and damaging side effects became more widely understood. Korzybski confirmed the energizing effect of the drug on himself in his letter to Mira. It’s intriguing to wonder how long he continued to take it and what effect it might have had on his behavior. I’ve found no direct evidence of long-term amphetamine use by him. His astounding capacity for work in later years could have been explained by amphetamine use. On the other hand, his exceptional endurance had been noted by others, long before he had the opportunity to take the drug.

On March 7, as his Harvard seminar was going on, Alfred’s friend and mentor William Alanson White died. White had been Alfred’s first and main teacher in psychiatry through his writings, the hours of personal discussion, and through the opportunity he had given Alfred to study at St. Elizabeths. White had grasped the importance of bridging psychiatry with the physico-mathematical sciences. Despite the press of his own affairs he had consistently attended to Alfred’s peculiar efforts along that line. Alfred would always remain grateful to White for his encouragement. And White had also learned from Alfred. Traces of Korzybski’s influence appeared in the last book White had published, his 1936 Twentieth Century Psychiatry.

In 1937, the wave of psychiatric interest in Korzybski’s work that White had helped start was continuing to gather momentum. The January 1937 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry had carried Douglas Campbell’s article “General Semantics: Implications of Linguistic Revision for Theoretical and Clinical Neuro-Psychiatry”. The May issue of that journal included Alfred’s review of Man, The Unknown, the 1935 best-seller by Nobel Prize-winning medical researcher Alexis Carrel.

TIME Magazine Cover: Dr. Alexis Carrel -- Sep. 16, 1935

Alfred and Mira had read Carrel’s book soon after it came out and Alfred had begun recommending it to his seminar students. In his two St. Louis papers he had referred to Carrel’s discussion of the role of language in science and medicine. Carrel had criticized the regrettable tendency of scientific/medical “schemata” to emphasize ‘abstract’ “universals” over the ‘concrete’ individual and thus to objectify verbal fictions.

Korzybski’s laudatory 1937 review, written a year previously, emphasized Carrel’s mid-decade survey of the various specialties providing knowledge about humans. Carrel saw a pressing need for a future synthesizing effort to develop “the science of man” which would—according to Carrel—reduce the dangers of over-specialization by emphasizing “the human being in his entirety.”(3)  

...[m]odern civilization absolutely needs specialists. Without them, science could not progress. But, before the results of their researches are applied to man, the scattered data of their analyses must be integrated in an intelligible synthesis. 

Such a synthesis cannot be obtained by a simple round-table conference of the specialists. It requires the efforts of one man, not merely those of a group. A work of art has never been produced by a committee of artists, nor a great discovery made by a committee of scholars. The syntheses needed for the progress of our knowledge of man should be elaborated in a single brain. (4)    

Such a synthesis would constitute the basis of an over-arching “superscience”:

This superscience will be utilizable only if, instead of being buried in libraries, it animates our intelligence. But is it possible for a single brain to assimilate such a gigantic amount of knowledge?...It seems that such an accomplishment is not impossible. In about twenty-five years of uninterrupted study one could learn these sciences. At the age of fifty, those who have submitted themselves to this discipline could effectively direct the construction of the human being and of a civilization based on his true nature. (5)  

Korzybski pointed out that the world didn’t have to wait for another 25 years. He had already produced at least the foundation of the kind of synthesis Carrel had envisioned. Carrel’s dream of a science of man—expressed in the old language—seemed unworkable if Carrel and others continued to neglect the foundational issues that Korzybski had already brought to the fore (evaluation, extensionalization, neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic environments, etc.). Despite this criticism, Korzybski appreciated Carrel’s 1935 diagnosis of the degenerating condition of modern civilization. But in subsequent years, Korzybski would have to qualify his enthusiasm.

After retiring from Rockefeller University in 1938, Carrel would return to France. In 1941 he became an official in the Nazi collaborationist Vichy government. His French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems would oversee demographic and eugenics research in Vichy France. Although Carrel himself was never directly implicated in any crimes against humanity, his Vichy association and his espousal in Man The Unknown of eugenics and the use of “poison gas” in dealing with criminals and the criminally insane, would taint him as a proto-Nazi.(6) By 1941 his reputation had already begun to slip. Korzybski, in a footnote in that year’s “Introduction to the Second Edition” of Science and Sanity, made a brief, apparently critical reference to Carrel and his book while discussing “führers” in different fields “fancying that they represent ‘all’ of the human world!”(7)

Carrel would remain a ‘mixed bag’ for Korzybski. In subsequent seminars until the end of his life, while openly stating his qualms about Carrel’s political sympathies and mystical Catholicism, Alfred acknowledged the man’s contributions as a great physician-scientist. He would still refer to some of Carrel’s findings and would use a statement from Man The Unknown—not included in his review—as one of the quotes on self-reflexiveness with which he typically ended his lectures: “To progress again, man must remake himself. And he cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor.”(8)

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

3. Carrel 1935, p. 47. 

4. Carrel 1935, p. 47. qtd. by Korzybski 1937, in Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings, p. 250. 

5. Carrel 1935, p. 285. Qtd. by Korzybski 1937, in Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings, p. 251. Carrel had received a copy of Korzybski’s first Time-Binding paper in 1925, and wrote to Korzybski: “I shall take your reprint on “Time-Binding” with me to France, so that I may have an opportunity of reading it with the care it deserves.” [A. Carrel to AK, 5/25/1925. AKDA 17.135.] Given his discussion in Man The Unknown of the “science of man”, etc., it appears likely that he did just that. 

6. Carrel 1935, pp. 318–319. 7. Korzybski 1994 (1933), “Introduction to the Second Edition” of Science and Sanity, p. xliii–xliv. 8. Carrel 1935, p. 274.

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Chapter 47 - One Weary Man: Part 1 - Introduction

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

The troubles with Mira and with Lynn had not only disturbed Alfred’s personal life. They also seemed to him to have reduced his prospects for establishing his work around Boston—and perhaps elsewhere too. He wondered whether the whole unfortunate business had harmed Campbell’s and Congdon’s opinions of him. Campbell visited him in Boston and reassured him otherwise. In a March 3, 1937 letter to Kendig, Campbell wrote,

I saw Alfred in Boston and was delighted to find him very much better in every way—healthy, hard at work and self-controlled. Lynn [at this time apparently still working at McLean], Congdon and myself are continuing to have unexpectedly good results with G.S., and while we cannot share some of Alfred’s propagandizing and proselytizing tendencies there is no doubt we are more and more enthusiastic. I believe that I shall soon be able to announce some form of permanent subsidy for him, perhaps making it possible for him to locate in Chicago. (1)

Until whatever Campbell was planning came through, Alfred would indeed be hard at work. (Then again, when was he not hard at work?) From February 17 until March 20, he gave a seminar for a group largely composed of Boston-area academics at the Baker Library of Harvard Business School which had become a center of human relations studies under the direction of Professors Elton Mayo and F. J. Roethlisberger. The two men had pioneered the study of motivating factors in workers’ behavior in their famous “Hawthorne Experiments”, at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in Illinois. 

Elton Mayo (left) and Fritz. J. Roethlisberger,
Harvard Business School, ca. 1940

Roethlisberger, who attended the seminar along with Mayo, had previously read Science and Sanity:

[Korzybski’s book] although difficult to read, seemed to me to be saying something important. What I think attracted my interest was the way he put epistemology to work, so to speak. Boiled down, his approach seemed to me to be applied epistemology.  

At this time there was considerable interest in comparing the way a child thinks (Piaget) with the way a primitive thinks (Levy-Bruhl) and with the way a neurotic thinks (Freud). Only a genius or a nut would have tried to compare the way a mathematician thinks (Russell and Whitehead) and the way a neurotic thinks (psychiatry). Korzybski was such a man.  

Because he took such an extreme position, which at that time did not fit well into any discipline, Korzybski never gained any academic post or much recognition. His field was neither strictly philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, semantics, psychiatry, nor mental health. It was a brilliant one-man synthesis of all these things which he called general semantics to differentiate it from ordinary semantics (e.g., Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning). (2)

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

1. D. G. Campbell to M. Kendig, 3/3/1937. IGS Archives. 

2. Roethlisberger 1977, pp. 71–72.

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Chapter 46 - "Shoot All The Mothers!": Part 6 - "Shoot All The Mothers"

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

The following event probably took place around this time. I heard Dr. Campbell relate the story in person many years afterwards at the 1979 Korzybski Centennial celebration:

...I knew one very well-to-do man who was impressed by Korzybski and GS, and suggested that we meet his mother, who was very wealthy, and that she might endow an institute, which was what I hoped would happen. Korzybski was somewhat difficult to manage in those days, to put it mildly. I didn’t know how he would behave at a North Shore reception that was being given in his honor. However, he agreed to go. We went to this event and he behaved superbly with all the charm of his aristocratic background.  

Well, she started questioning him about the increasing problems of juvenile delinquency and what did he think about it and wasn’t it bad and so forth, and what could we do as a group to combat juvenile delinquency in Chicago? He held himself in control quite well, which was a lot for Korzybski, and it was at this point that I was beginning to get a little anxious as to what might come out. 

He began to talk about the juvenile delinquent being a product of a family situation, with defects in the parenting of the children and particularly the failure of the American mother to do her job properly. He went on and she said, “Yes, but now tell me what would you do to prevent further problems of delinquency?” He said, “I would shoot all the mothers,” [Laughter] So with that --[Laughter]--the party broke up rather quickly and--[Continued Laughter]--and the Institute was not financed by this famous family,...(19) 

No one can know for sure why Korzybski made his ‘little joke’, but I’ll take a stab at an explanation. Korzybski would openly admit that, although he was usually polite, decorum and respectability were not qualities he had much use for. It seems likely to me he said what he said to take the wealthy lady ‘down a notch’. If she and the people at the party couldn’t laugh it off and instead felt offended by his jest, he wouldn’t have wanted their money. Perhaps he had had a little too much to drink as well. In any case, it might have served him better to keep his mouth shut.

Mira found out about what happened, probably from Campbell or from John Lynn, who was in communication with Campbell. She did not take the news lightly. Indeed, combined with the verbal slap Alfred had given her about the material she had sent him (the intent of which she felt he had misunderstood), she became increasingly upset and angry.

Alfred was continuing to write to her, reporting on his work with 46 and others, as if nothing else had happened. By the end of October, Mira had stopped writing regularly to him. She had tired of his scolding and the seemingly endless number of letters about his ‘sick’ students. He had put off returning to Cambridge for months. She was waiting for him to show some concern in something besides his work, i.e., in her and their home life. She also hoped he would recognize that he had some responsibility for problems regarding both his work and their relationship. She was communicating with Campbell, Lynn and others in an attempt to explain her concerns and to give some justification for the earlier material she had sent to them. But her attempts to explain her actions to Alfred’s friends and colleagues simply backfired. Alfred went to Campbell, who made things worse by sharing some of the material Mira had sent—including the July letter to Lynn containing Mira’s worries about Alfred’s drinking. Alfred became furious and angrily wrote to Mira accusing her of broadcasting their private lives and “killing” his work. Mira in turn wrote an angry missive entitled “All Mothers Should Be Shot” excoriating Alfred for his shooting of “silly-slogans that don’t fit and have torn M.E. psycho-logically as successfully as explosive bullets could physically.”(20) As Mira would say, they had gotten themselves into a very vicious circle.

While Congdon seems to have kept himself out of the fray, Campbell had gotten himself into the unenviable position of mediating between Alfred and Mira and in that role had made more of a mess of things. Meanwhile Lynn, still a psychiatric resident and—as Mira had concluded—rather naive, was making the bad situation even worse by hatching serious doubts about both Mira’s and Alfred’s sanity and sharing his suspicions with Campbell and Congdon. Lynn, who earlier had so confidently sent a telegram to Alfred announcing Mira’s ‘cancer’, didn’t seem to question the soundness of these psychiatric ‘diagnoses’ either.

In early December Alfred finally returned to Cambridge. Mira was not at home. She had checked into a hotel (probably boarding the monkey with the veterinarian who had previously taken care of it). Initially, Alfred didn’t know where she had gone. His only contact with her was through Dr. Lynn with whom she was checking in by phone every day. It took some cajoling on Alfred’s part to break the impasse with her, which he finally managed to do. As far as he was concerned, Mira had had a ‘breakdown’, which he attributed to Dr. Lynn’s influence. To Alfred, the psychiatrist seemed to be showing signs of serious disturbance himself. Lynn was apparently presenting his concerns about Korzybski’s sanity to others at McLean Hospital and around Boston. Alfred’s reputation in the Boston area seems to have sustained serious damage.

Within a month, the storm had passed. He and Mira were seeing each other and talking and had managed to patch up their relationship. Clearly, Mira had come to feel peripheral to Alfred’s work—not an inaccurate assessment. But underlying all that, her undying devotion remained. The extremity of her upset seemed partly due to that devotion and her assessment that Alfred was not living up to his own teachings. Although she realized she had made some serious mistakes as well, his stubborn resistance to seeing her point of view bothered her immensely. “Donk”, for Donkey (rhyming with Mira’s “Monk”)—the nickname they both used for him in letters—seemed at times a quite fitting name for Alfred. 

"DONK" 
(small cast-metal desk statue of donkey)
Gift from Mira Edgerly Korzybska to Alfred Korzybski 

By this time, Mira had concluded that her efforts to be helpful had made a mess of things and she didn’t want to have anything more to do with the ‘semantic family’ or to be involved in Alfred’s work. She decided it would do her good to take a long trip to South America to travel and paint and get some distance to sort out their relationship. She brought Kik to the Polakovs who had agreed to keep the dear monkey (Alfred was just too busy to care for the high-maintenance pet by himself). By the end of January, Mira was on a ship on her way to Argentina. She would spend most of 1937 and 1938 there, especially in Buenos Aires, and would travel to Brazil (Rio de Janeiro) and Trinidad as well, before getting back to the United States at the end of 1938.

What happened to Dr. Lynn? Indications from Alfred’s letters to him, and to Campbell and Mira, suggest that by the spring of 1937 he was struggling with some serious adjustment problems of his own. He left McLean Hospital around that time. By the fall, he had apparently improved enough to get married. Korzybski got a wedding invitation in August. He was in contact with Lynn over the next year but in March 1938 still felt uncertain enough about the psychiatrist’s stability to ask him “...not to do further harm to me..., as you did before by propagating sick attitudes toward my work,...”(21) Lynn didn’t seem to take offense at Alfred’s scolding. Letters he wrote to Alfred later that year, show an unreservedly friendly tone. Alfred’s letters also appear congenial. They seem to have dated their problems. By 1940, Lynn was in New York doing research at a neurological institute and training in psychoanalysis. He continued with an occasional friendly letter to Korzybski for at least a couple more years. However, his great involvement with and ambitious plans for GS had gone kaput.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

19. “Douglas Gordon Campbell, MD: An Interview with Helen Hafner, Mary Morain and David Waggoner, MD”. General Semantics Bulletin 47: 65-66. 

20. “All Mothers Should Be Shot”. IGS Archives. 

21. AK to John G. Lynn, 3/3/1938. IGS Archives.

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Chapter 46 - "Shoot All The Mothers!": Part 5 - A Beautiful Home

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

While he’d been unloading the burdens of his work in his letters to her, Mira was writing to him about her manifold doings in Cambridge. Given her level of upset when he left, her letters showed a surprising cheeriness. She’d unpacked their things, bought some needed furniture (cutting costs where she could as she respected his concern for saving pennies), and rearranged the place in a way she hoped would provide a welcoming sense of home to Alfred when he returned. Doing this, she felt in herself a level of domesticity that surprised her. The growing discord with Alfred in Brooklyn had left her feeling anything but homey, but she realized part of the problem there may have been the cramped studio space without enough room for two such independent people to get out of each other’s way. This was not going to be a problem on Story Street. When she unpacked during the summer, with much of the contents of their suitcases and trunks laid out in the open, there seemed to be almost as much space to move about as before. Both she and Alfred would have rooms of their own to work in. By the fall, having almost fully unpacked, furnished, and cleaned the place, she hoped the physical order she’d made might bring a new order of relationship between her and Alfred. 

Kik the monkey had something to do as well with keeping up Mira’s spirit. Mira tried to keep the little monkey on a leash when uncaged but from her reports to Alfred, she seemed to give the monkey a fair amount of freedom to roam around the house. Mira had always loved monkeys (her nickname was “Monk” for a reason) and enjoyed observing the animal as it explored. It was a smart, playful monkey. It liked to drink from the bathroom and kitchen faucets and had started to learn how to turn the spigots on and off. A few times a day it would run up to Mira when she sat or lay on the couch and would hug her around the neck, nibble on her ear, and playfully dance on her belly. It also liked to play “hide and seek” getting chased or chasing Mira around the room in fun. With all this, the monkey seemed relatively well behaved. Mira had trained it to respond to a few voice commands such as “no” when it was getting into some of Alfred’s things or “cage” to go into its cage. Mira confusedly referred to it with both feminine and masculine pronouns. But whether boy or girl, Kik was apparently a lot cleaner than naughty Kiki—or had somehow learned better hygiene—since there’s no indication from Mira’s letters that she ever had to clean any walls the monkey decorated.

That summer and fall, she planned to do some painting and had made a few forays to Nantucket and north of Boston to explore possibilities for commissions. But having only a short walk to the Harvard campus, a major objective of hers—besides getting the house in shape—lay in another direction: to make use of the educational opportunities of Cambridge. Her regret at not being able to attend college, and the exigencies of making a living had fed a lifelong ambition to make up for her lack of formal education. It was one of the things that had attracted her to Alfred. She had made her ‘sloppy thinker’ more meticulous and gotten it better furnished under his tough, sometimes merciless tutelage. She now seemed more eager than ever for further study on her own.

The celebration of Harvard’s Tercentenary (300th anniversary) then in progress gave her a great opportunity. She made it her business to attend many of the special public lectures and presentations provided during the summer session. During the two-week Tercentenary Conference of Arts and Sciences in early September she reveled in the scholarly feast, which included lectures by Whitehead, Eddington, and Einstein, among others. Friends of Alfred attending the Conference, such as G. Y. Rainich, and Hugh and Lillian Lieber, seemed genuinely glad to see her and to enjoy her company and conversation. During her short time in Cambridge, she was managing to get quite a boost to her intellectual self-worth after having come to feel so low about herself. During the summer session, sitting in a lecture hall while waiting for a speaker, she had written to Alfred “If I do say it, I am gaining an increased respect for my own thinker – that is after the hard, endless work you have put on it.”(15)

She had already met a number of Harvard people who seemed to respect her as a person with some intellectual ability. Chief among these were mathematician E.V. Huntington and his wife who had befriended the lonely Mira and invited her for dinner in their home. At the end of July they asked her to come with them on a trip to their summer cottage in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. She brought Kik with her on the trip (the Huntingtons loved the monkey) and ended up staying two weeks. During that time she became quite friendly with both husband and wife, reveling in the good relations they seemed to have with one another. Huntington had been writing a paper on symbolic logic. He invited Mira to read it, tutoring her on the subject, which she found both flattering and helpful since she was deeply interested in the relation of different kinds of notation to people’s formulating processes.

By the middle of September, feeling stimulated by all this input she decided to put some of her thoughts into writing. Her main purpose was to clear up for herself some GS-related topics she’d been wondering about. She ended up with a number of longhand pages. To make them more readable she got them typed (at this point she couldn’t type well enough to do it herself). The typed notes amounted to around 18 pages. For a little additional charge, the not-very-busy typist mimeographed a few extra copies for Mira, who decided she wanted Alfred, the Huntingtons, and a few other people to look at them. As she wrote to the Huntingtons on October 9, she didn’t want anyone to take what she wrote too seriously. It was a “purging” so to speak of some things she was trying to get out of her system and she only wanted to know if it might contain any inkling of a usable idea.(16) 

Up until then she had not written much, other than letters. One could find a lot to criticize if one wanted. Experimenting with hyphens and underlining, she overdid them. She misspelled words. She wrote incomplete sentences and long ones with confusing or absent punctuation. But despite these flaws, her 1936 writings sometimes also showed originality and raw vigor with a quality like free verse. (Remember, she had spent some time with Gertrude Stein.) And having studied and worked to get GS into her gut, she did have some significant things to say about learning and applying it. Here are some snippets from a page she wrote, addressed to a supposed student of general semantics—truly reminder notes to herself:

When one is enmeshed in an Aristotelian civilization,...I grant you combined with the habits of one’s own education and language – one has to be constantly vigilant – just as one has to be in transforming the energy used in an un-useful physically pleasant habit – say – from childhood of biting one’s nails – to the higher transformed useful pleasure in the energy of cultivating beautiful nails.  

To transform personal “emotional” wastes of energy in connection with living out un-congenial conditions – one has only to call into activity, onto the job, one’s unique human faculty or function – because of our cortex -– that is – of being the observer and the observed, in one organism; the sculptor and the clay, in one organism; the organism and the organizer, in one organism:– of being humanely impersonal about the most personal goings-on inside one.  

It makes of life a “grand adventure” if one can have as an intimate companion, one who is also so oriented, but, with those who are not, it makes for tolerance, poise, patience, and master of a situation, by making it clear to the other fellow in extensionalizing the situation, what characteristics the other fellow has left out of consideration, as it helps one to discover what one’s self has left out, and when that is done, fight for dominance is stopped and co-operation is begun. Widely different biological and sociological inheritances, and life-habits can be adjusted and just the differences, united enlarge each the other’s life, constructively. (17) 

She surely had inklings of some good ideas here and in the other pages she sent special delivery to Alfred on October 9. She had written a bit about a GS evaluational compass and among other things had worked out some novel ways of relating some of the main GS formulations to each other in diagram form. 

Mira's Suggestion for an Evaluational Compass 

Alfred wrote back the following day:

Dearest One:
Received your special delivery with enclosures of the article of Norris and your own. Please do not add to my burdens by spending money on typing, mimeography, etc., perfectly worthless verbal masturbation the distribution of which does definite harm to my whole work...Please do not get discouraged, STUDY SERIOUSLY S+S without adding your fancies to it, try to understand PLAIN ENGLISH following your “beloved” Oxford, with which you only play. Dearest I have enough professional troubles, for pity sake do not add family troubles to it. Write long hand all you want to, but do not waste money on typing mostly worthless or harmful material. I am terribly tired dealing with “mental aberrations”, PLEASE do not add to my burdens. All my love (18)

‘All my love’ indeed! On his side, he did have some justifiable grounds for concern. What Mira—as his wife—said or wrote might gain more attention and be judged more critically as a representation of him and his work than something said by almost anyone else. It seemed reasonable to ask her to be careful. But his blatantly patronizing attitude and nearly total dismissiveness towards her written efforts surely seem excessive. He did love her, but unfortunately he had also developed a fixed set of disapproving attitudes toward her that would stay fixed for a number of years and that would lead to much pain for both of them. And Mira had reached a point in her life, much to her chagrin, where she wasn’t going to accept the resulting treatment.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

15. MEK to A.K, 7/20/1936. MEK Archives, Box 17. 

16. MEK to Huntingtons, Oct. 9, 1936. MEK Archives, Box 17. 

17. MEK, n.d. MEK Archives, Box 17. 

18. AK to MEK, 10/10/1936. MEK Archives, Box 17.

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Chapter 46 - "Shoot All The Mothers!": Part 4 - Case #46

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

He was away for much longer than either of them expected. Although the seminar finished in mid-August, Alfred remained in the Midwest until the end of November. At the end of September he had visited Topeka, Kansas where he lectured at the Menninger Clinic; otherwise he had been shuttling between Chicago and Kansas City to work and consult with Campbell, Congdon, and Kendig. But mainly his work with Kendig had kept him from returning home.

Kendig was having significant problems, not only with the culture of the Barstow School, which seemed resistant to the changes she was trying to bring about. She also had more personal issues. Soon after she encountered his work, Kendig had become one of Korzybski’s most stalwart students. Like Mira, who had started much earlier, she was discovering that earnestly applying extensional methods to herself involved a certain amount of suffering. Since the previous year she had been doing extensive ‘laboratory work’ with Korzybski via personal interviews and letters. As far as I know, there is no remaining record of this work; the exact and detailed nature of the inner conflicts she was dealing with at the time remain unknown. But from Alfred’s letters to Mira, a general picture emerges: she seemed to have dredged up and to be struggling with some serious unresolved problems going back to her childhood (perhaps related to sexual abuse). Clearly, by the summer of 1936 she seemed to be undergoing a major serious internal reorganization. And Alfred, as he wrote to Mira, was seriously concerned for her sanity. In fact, he worried that Kendig was going to have a complete psychological collapse.

Even before he had completed the Northwestern seminar, he had been traveling to Kansas City to work with her and she, apparently, was coming up to Chicago as well. Mira had for a long time been the only person who knew that Kendig was the one he had referred to in letters and discussions with others as case number 46. Without going much into specifics, he inundated Mira with news about 46’s problems, his worries about her impending breakdown, etc. This constituted a major part of his letters while he was away. Mira did not like to hear about the nitty-gritty details of the evaluational housecleaning of Kendig’s (or any of his other student’s) psyche. She also worried about Alfred getting in over his head since he had no official psychotherapy training or credentials. (Although Mira didn’t mention it, Korzybski had certainly stepped onto dangerous ground, in this early phase of his teaching career, by referring in his letters to 46 and other of his students as “patients”.) According to Mira, it wouldn’t look good for Alfred if Kendig—a well-known student and advocate of his work for education and mental hygiene—had to be hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. By late July, Mira was already warning him to be careful, to consult with his psychiatrist students, and perhaps to stop pushing Kendig so hard. (The possibility cannot be eliminated that Korzybski may have inadvertently helped precipitate the ‘crisis’ Kendig was going through.)

Although he did end up following Mira’s advice by consulting in a limited way with Congdon and Campbell (apparently with Kendig’s permission), he seemed to bristle at the fact that Mira had dared to give him advice:

Many thanks for your advises about 46, I have spent a great deal of concentration on this subject, from every angle. It’s a most tragic situation all together and I have taken into consideration every single angle imaginable. Please dearest UNDERSTAND that as far as insanity is concerned, you have a complete misunderstanding. I am using my best judgement I ever had, because the issues at hand are the most serious any MD ever faced. 46 KNOWS the whole problem. Her situation is difficult everyway, my situation is also extremely difficult, but I am sane, she is not, and you do not understand INSANITY at all. (14) 

I find it hard to read this and not to conclude that Korzybski was overreaching. I doubt that he had taken every imaginable consideration into account. Mira, from the evidence of her advice to him, did not seem nearly as benighted about human behavior as he implied. Unquestionably Kendig was going through difficult times in the summer and fall of 1936. And it seems likely that Alfred did greatly help her to deal with some significant-for-her life issues. It seems clear she later felt indebted to him. She would devote her life to promoting and developing his work. But Korzybski’s estimation of Kendig’s general sanity seems questionable. Before she met Korzybski, Kendig had already shown herself capable and successful in the worlds of business and education. She had friends, a social life, and had married—although this had ended in divorce. (Of course, none of these preclude a person from having a serious psychiatric condition.) Even while this apparent crisis was going on she was running a school, apparently successfully despite problems. Later in life (even a short while later) she would function as a highly competent administrator, editor, and teacher at the Institute of General Semantics. People who knew her over extended periods considered her an exceptionally well-balanced individual. She was known as a wise and warm person to her friends, and a loving wife to her second husband. Since Korzybski’s judgment about people was hardly perfect, she may have not been in as serious a condition as he seemed to think at the time.

Kendig (circa 1936)

In any event, by the end of October 1936, Kendig seemed to have passed some kind of crisis point and to be on the way to restoration of her personal balance. Perhaps Korzybski helped her to do that—and sooner than would have happened otherwise. (But perhaps she would have eventually done so on her own without the extensive intervention on his part.) At any rate, Alfred began to consider returning home.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

14. AK to MEK, 8/14/1936. MEK Archives, Box 17.

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Chapter 46 - "Shoot All The Mothers!": Part 3 - A Worried Letter

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

The move to Cambridge seemed full of sunshine and promise. Alfred had a budding seminar career, a coterie of close professional students in psychiatry and education, and increasing possibilities for getting serious financial support. Yet in his personal life as well as his work, fog and darkness had rolled in. He had sailed into dangerous waters. 

To produce the work of his two books, he’d labored for years with a dogged determination bordering on obsessiveness. Since then, he had worked with an equally ferocious intensity to show the potential of his work and to promote and teach it. But his tendency to make heroic effort habitual had led to habitual personal strain. His persistence in pursuing his vision at times crossed the line into blind rigidity. While holding up a mirror to Mira and to some of his students, he had failed to sufficiently hold up a mirror to himself. He was heading into potentially serious troubles for his health, his work, and his marriage. Alcohol may have played a part. 

For most of his life, even during prohibition when he brewed his own ale, Alfred ‘had not been a non-drinker’, as he sometimes phrased it. And Mira was not a teetotaler and did not disapprove of moderate drinking. But according to her (and I give her statements some credence), Alfred’s alcohol use started to become a problem for him—and her—around 1931 as he felt increasing pressure to complete Science and Sanity. At this time he started drinking to relax and to help him sleep. Apparently he sometimes drank alone. Mira would observe the results. More than once she had come home to find him intoxicated or difficult to arouse from an afternoon nap. Sometimes, intoxicated, he would break into tears before her from the burdens he felt he was carrying. Sometimes, thus disposed, he would harangue her about her faults. Although he would apologize afterwards, this kind of behavior recurred. She had hoped things would change after the book came out, but they didn’t. During the period from the publication of Science and Sanity until the move to Cambridge in 1936, it’s not clear how much or how frequently he drank or how often he became seriously intoxicated. (In letters he wrote to Mira later that year, Alfred briefly acknowledged “drinking troubles” which he assured her were over.) But even when he didn’t drink or at least was not visibly drunk, she found him more and more tense, impatient and critical. Life with the man she so loved and idolized had become increasingly thorny. 

Although his alcohol use apparently made the problems between Alfred and Mira worse, it seems likely they would have arisen whether or not he drank. For Alfred had come to focus primarily on what he perceived as Mira’s negative qualities while ignoring or downplaying her virtues. He consistently told her he had done what he did for her, and continued to work so hard primarily for her benefit. He also never hesitated to say he would not have written his two main works without her support and encouragement. But he seemed to have forgotten the extent to which her active help—not only financial and moral support—had contributed to them as well. Mira had served for years as the main sounding board for Alfred’s formulating. Her innocent, intuitive questions, reflections, and advice nigh undoubtedly helped him to develop his work from the beginning. But at this point, Mira—progressively more conscious of the quality of her own intelligence (quite different in style from Alfred’s)—had gotten into a seemingly un-winnable position with him.

She had always regretted missing out on a college education and considered that she had a sloppy ‘thinker’. To put this right, she had aspired to learn as much as she could from her husband. Thus, she considered herself his student as well as his wife—as did he. By 1936, this probably was not the best way for either of them to look at their relationship, since Alfred seemed to have difficulty pulling himself out of the role of the teacher whose job it was to find her faults and correct them.

Alfred agreed with Mira about her sloppy ‘thinker’. She had once confused Buffalo with Albany and he grabbed onto this verbal slip. ‘Buffalo-Albany’ became a term he used to refer to what to him seemed her habitual tendency to confuse map-territory relations, her disregard (as far as he was concerned) for hard facts. For years he brought up ‘Buffalo-Albany’ to her when they had a disagreement. Among his ongoing and repeated criticisms (in letters and conversations with her)—besides her non-extensional ‘Buffalo-Albany’ ways—were the inexact manner with which she talked about his work to others, and her tendency for dramatic self-presentation in public (what he referred to as her ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ style) which he considered damaging to his scientific reputation. He had trouble considering the possibility that he might at times overgeneralize about these, making mountains out of molehills.

Certainly, given her lack of formal education, particularly in science and mathematics, she was not going to be a scientific expositer of Alfred’s work. But having already become familiar with his assessments of her, I felt surprised by the extent of the mismatch I found between his evaluations of her and what I gathered about her as I read their personal correspondence, as well as some of Mira’s other writings. I was struck with her talent for astute observation, her gift for apt metaphor for sizing up a situation or person, and her general playfulness with language and life. I was also repeatedly struck with the depth of her personal application of the extensional methods she had learned from Alfred, her concerted efforts to understand herself and her relationships, her openness to criticism, her hunger for knowledge, her original elaborations of Alfred’s formulations, and her often wise advice to him. Even more striking was Korzybski’s apparent blindness to much of this. He loved her dearly. He may have been right about a great deal in regard to her faults (she agreed with him about these to a remarkable extent). But he seriously underestimated her for years. After the move to Cambridge the problems in their relationship began to come to a head. 

From New York World-Telegram article of May 5, 1936, 
just before Alfred & Mira's move to Cambridge (13 a)

In the last week of June, with boxes still unpacked, he left for the seminar he was giving at Northwestern University from July 1 to August 15. After Mira saw him off at the train station, she was feeling especially miserable, alone, and cut off. The period around the move had been tense. She felt disturbed by whatever he said before he left. Despite her confused feelings, she missed him. She began to write to him almost immediately. Not having heard much from him (he may have sent one letter a few days after he left) she began to feel more concerned. In a way she considered general semantics as much her child as it was his. She worried he was going to drive himself too hard, drink too much, lose control, and as a result compromise the success of his seminars and the possibilities for getting financial support. Still not hearing from him, she wrote a letter to John Lynn on July 8, detailing the history of their troubles, including Alfred’s use of alcohol, and pleading with Lynn (and Campbell and Congdon) to be on the alert. It was the first time she had revealed these problems to anyone. Lynn forwarded the letter to his colleagues in Chicago.(13)

Within a day of this, Mira got a letter from Alfred, who had been extremely busy. Everything was going fine in Chicago. She seemed relieved. Perhaps she had worried needlessly. Indeed, in his lectures—the transcriptions of which I have seen—he seemed well-organized and in tip-top form. The seminar had many interested participants and he was asked to come back the following year. But perhaps Mira’s letter did have some effect. The seminar organizers, Campbell and Congdon, having been forewarned by her letter (which Alfred didn’t know about) may have kept an extra-vigilant watch on him to try to keep him in line. At any rate, from this point forward, Mira and Alfred settled down to a somewhat regular and congenial exchange of letters.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

13. MEK to John G. Lynn, 7/8/1936. MEK Archives, Box 17.

13a. 

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Chapter 46 - "Shoot All The Mothers!": Part 2 - Cambridge

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

Whatever other interests Alfred had with the Chicago and Boston-area psychiatrists, he was after financial support. It did not appear that book sales and seminar income alone were going to allow him to continue his work in the way he wanted. He had become increasingly convinced he would require extra funding, either private (foundation or otherwise) or government-based. Since the mental hygiene benefits of his work seemed more and more obvious, getting the support of psychiatrists could help him to attract such funding.

Among psychiatrists, he had detected a growing conscious need for what he felt he could provide with his work. He had read with great interest a 1933 booklet published by the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, Psychiatry in Medical Education, which emphasized the need for psychiatric instruction in basic medical education. This confirmed his own view that, as he wrote in the paper he delivered to the AAAS Psychology Section, “...medicine which neglects psychiatry represents nothing more than glorified veterinary science.” He had gone a step further in that paper with a challenge to psychiatrists:

All human psycho-logical reactions ultimately represent problems of evaluation, and all psychopathological mechanisms, problems of misevaluation. How can psychiatry and psychotherapy become scientific and so more efficient if psychiatrists neglect General Semantics which discloses the mechanisms of “normal function” and the general factors of evaluation which made science what it is. (4) 

Some psychiatrists had taken up his challenge—at least to the extent of paying attention. Despite the fact that the American Journal of Psychiatry had not reviewed Science and Sanity, Korzybski’s St. Louis paper grabbed the notice of the journal’s editor, Clarence B. Farrar, M.D. with whom he was corresponding. Farrar would publish the paper in the July 1936 issue. This, the first of a number of appearances by Korzybski in that journal, seems especially remarkable given Alfred’s lack of psychiatric, medical, or higher academic credentials.

Older and esteemed psychiatrists like White, Paton, Meyers, and Jeliffe had already endorsed his work. (Jeliffe’s complimentary review of Science and Sanity was published in the September 1935 issue of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.) Now at the start of 1936, with Campbell and Congdon in Chicago and Lynn in the Boston area, he had three close and enthusiastic students (other than Graven) among the younger generation of psychiatrists.

Campbell and Congdon, already established in psychiatry as teachers and clinicians, and Lynn, still in his residency, all felt excited about the results they were getting with the ‘semantic method’, as Congdon referred to it. By early 1936, the three psychiatrists were in contact with each other. Korzybski’s work gave them a theoretical framework and set of techniques for a more directive approach to therapy. As psychiatrists they were becoming educators, teaching their patients how to examine, challenge, and change their attitudes, beliefs, language, etc. The three men represented a pioneering korzybskian tributary feeding a larger stream just emerging at that time in psychotherapy—it would not have a name until the final decades of the 20th Century—the cognitive-behavioral approach.

Over the next few years Campbell, who had already published a number of articles in psychiatric journals, would produce additional articles on general semantics. Congdon never wrote anything for publication that I have been able to find, although he remained an accomplished speaker active in the field of general semantics throughout the 1940s. And Lynn—as it turned out—would soon move onto other things.

But at the start of 1936, Lynn was bursting with enthusiasm for Korzybski and his work. He had given a number of presentations on general semantics to the medical staff of McLean Hospital and by late May had also designed a very ambitious and intensive Korzybski-inspired, post-graduate study program for himself. He wanted to study “human symbolic functions...in the language of primitives, children, mathematics, dreams, etc.” and “the pathological, neuro-physiological processes mediating these language functions.”(5)

The program, which he planned to start later that year at Harvard, included not only neurology and anthropology coursework, but also logic and scientific method as well as tutorials in mathematics starting with trigonometry and analytical geometry, calculus, and probability. The psychiatric resident certainly seemed to have been bitten hard by a korzybskian bug. He was friendly with both Mira and Alfred and was writing to both. He had helped Mira with her medical issues. Both Korzybskis had visited him and he had visited them in Brooklyn.

Alfred had also gone a number of times to McLean where he lectured and sat in at staff meetings. The distinct differences from psychiatric staff meetings he had attended elsewhere impressed him. For one thing, at his first meeting, a doctor gave a patient’s history, then came a pause, and everyone stood up. Alfred did too. What was up? The patient being discussed was entering the room and this was the normal show of respect MacLean doctors gave to patients. The language used at the hospital impressed him even more:

...The doctors never used ‘feeling’, never used ‘thinking’, ‘emotion’—never; the only word they used at all occasions was the word ‘evaluation’. Evaluation. And this was apparently a tradition at McLean. They didn’t get it from me. But I was learning among others—oh, my work was already done; so I didn’t get the benefit out of it—but I got the benefit by watching the tremendous application of the word ‘evaluation’; how it covers practically every field of human endeavor. And you can speak in terms of evaluation at any level...what entirely new atmosphere a hospital has using the word ‘evaluation’, instead of the old ‘psychological’ lingo. (6) 

Both Lynn and his colleagues in Chicago wanted to find a way to support Korzybski in his work. Lynn wrote to him in March 1936:

It is essential that we organize a group. Call it the Semantic School of Psychiatry if you will—but no advertisement as of yet—not until we have the facts [i.e., more research]. Several individuals working together talking the same [s]emantic language stimulating each other are bound to produce much more than having them scattered about working alone.  

Furthermore, if we could start such a group here or in Chicago we could then be in a position to have you with us as adviser-leader. This would give you much needed security [and] also recognition limited at first but bound to spread as our work progresses and becomes known...it would be a tremendous help to both of us if you could come [and] live in Cambridge. I could help with the transportation expenses. However, I believe it is essential that we get together somewhere here or in Chicago – Campbell feels the same. (7)

On April 1, Alfred informed Dr. Lynn that he and Mira had indeed decided to move to Cambridge. The Korzybskis had already spent a great deal of time in Boston that year and had even rented a place to stay. Alfred had met with Dr. Kenneth Tillotson, the Psychiatrist-In-Chief at McLean Hospital and, through Lynn and Tillotson, had gotten in contact with Dr. Gregg, a psychiatrist associated with the Rockefeller Foundation. So there seemed some promise that Lynn’s boosting and research at McLean might give Alfred a lever for connecting with more psychiatrists and perhaps getting foundation support. Korzybski’s numerous connections at Harvard also had some influence on the decision. He still had hopes of “saving the skin of Bridgman as a personal friend” and of “giving hell to the mathematicians and physicists” there. He also wanted to “try to interest [Rudolph] Carnap” the logician and philosopher of science then at Harvard. Perhaps he could manage to give some seminars there as well. (8) 

Since they were going to be moving, Alfred didn’t have much time for lecturing or giving seminars, although on April 9 he did give a two-hour lecture at Marlboro State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Marlboro, New Jersey. His audience, a mixed group of about fifty people, included staff doctors, administrative personnel, patients, and some of their friends and relatives. Dr. Graves, the chief psychiatrist at the hospital had started a GS class for patients the previous July. As a result, GS had an enthusiastic following there. The hospital newsletter reported on Korzybski’s lecture:

To many present it was a memorable occasion. The speaker had a dashing and colorful personality. His energy was unbounded. Within the two hour period he gave clearly and forcefully a succinct account of his system...As pointed out by the Count, our difficulties, both personal and public, are caused by false knowledge...Following dinner at the home of Dr. Graves the Count returned in the evening to his residence in New York City. (9)

The Korzybskis had a lot of packing to do. Vagabonds both, Alfred and Mira had spent a good part of their lives in transit. Nonetheless, as a couple, they had lived in their Brooklyn studio apartment longer than anywhere else. The studio had seemed less than ideal—too hot in summer, too cold in winter, and by now not large enough to keep Alfred and Mira from feeling they were encroaching on each others’ space. Still they had become somewhat rooted there. Now they were pulling up their roots once more. Alfred related how he and Mira got all of the trunks they had kept at the Manhattan Storage Company. Many of the trunks and the items inside—books, papers, clothing, etc.—had gotten ruined during the years of storage and had to be thrown out. Alfred was given a release to sign: “I have no claim against Manhattan Storage from the beginning to the end of the world.” He wrote a polite letter to the director of the company objecting to “the beginning to the end of the world” stuff: “I cannot sign that paper...How do I know that my ape ancestors didn’t store some coconuts with your ape ancestors?”(10) In reply, he got a very polite business letter stating that the release simply contained the standard legal language in use throughout the United States. He wasn’t planning to make a claim against the company but, as he reported later, he refused to sign the form.

By June 1, they had finished packing and were in the process of moving themselves and their stuff, along with their remaining pet monkey whom Mira had come to call “Kik”, to their new address.(11) A small item appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript of Friday, June 12, 1936 under the title “Summer Notes”:

Count Alfred Korzybski and Countess Korzybsk[a] have taken a house at 11 Story Street in Cambridge. From the first of July until the middle of August, the Count will conduct seminars on general semantics at Northwestern University. Countess Korzybski will spend part of the summer on the North Shore, fulfilling commissions for portraits. (12) 

As it turned out, Cambridge would not provide the place of opportunity they had hoped. To start with, it didn’t seem that Alfred was going to be able to do much more with P. W. Bridgman. Alfred had written a long letter to him responding to Bridgman’s new book, The Nature of Physical Theory, which seemed in large part a critical response to Korzybski’s work (without mentioning it by name). Bridgman wrote back just before Alfred and Mira’s move, declaring his unwillingness to spend any more time considering Korzybski’s ideas. That was that. Alfred wasn’t going to “save the skin of Bridgman as a friend” because Bridgman had little interest in engaging with him anymore. Still, he knew other people at Harvard who seemed more open to his work. And the interest of John Lynn and the psychiatric community in the Boston area showed tremendous potential. But this didn’t work out either.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

4. Korzybski 1936, “Neuro-Semantic And Neuro-Linguistic Mechanisms Of Extensionalization: General Semantics As A Natural Experimental Science”. American Journal of Psychiatry 93 (1), July 1936: pp. 31–32. Reprinted in Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings, pp. 229–230. 

5. “Note for Dr. Tillotson on Educational and Research Program of Dr. John G. Lynn”, 5/28/1936. IGS Archives. 

6. Korzybski 1949, Intensive Seminar transcript, pp. 54-55. 

7. John G. Lynn, IV to AK, 3/25/1936. IGS Archives. 

8. AK to Oliver Reiser, 5/27/1936. Ralph Hamilton Papers. 

9. Marlborogram Newsletter, April 1936. AKDA 2.826. 

10. Korzybski 1949, Intensive Seminar transcript, p. 155. 

11. AK to Philip Graven, 6/1/1936. AKDA 30.8. 

12. “Summer Notes”. Boston Evening Transcript, 6/12/1936. AKDA 2.833.

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Chapter 46 - "Shoot All The Mothers!": Part 1 - Introduction

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

One day—probably in late May or early June 1935, while Alfred was away doing his first seminars in Chicago—Kiki Netouche had begun to drag herself along the floor of the Korzybskis’ Brooklyn studio apartment. Something wasn’t right. Mira bundled her up at once and rushed with her to Philadelphia to get help from their friend, zoologist Roderick Macdonald, who as noted before had taken over as head of the Philadelphia Zoo. Macdonald and the veterinarians there couldn’t do anything to save the poor monkey who had somehow fractured a rib and punctured a lung. Kiki died at the zoo that night. Mira felt heartbroken. Barbara Polakov wrote to her: “Dear Bereaved One, Walter and I read with great regret of your Kiki’s departure to a better (at least we hope so) world.”(1) Still, Mira had the other monkey. And Alfred would be back soon.

But not for long. After briefly returning home in July, he had gone off again for his seminars in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Kansas City, which finished at the end of November. From there he went to Chicago. At the end of the year, he went to St. Louis to deliver his extensionalization papers at the AAAS meeting. He then returned to Chicago where he had more business with Campbell and Congden. And there, in mid-January 1936, he got disturbing news from John Lynn about Mira, whom he hadn’t seen for months.

Mira had felt terribly unhappy with Alfred away so long. She not only missed him but worried he was driving himself too hard—working too much, not sleeping or eating enough, and drinking too much. To some extent she may have been right about these things but the worrying certainly didn’t do her any good. In such a state, she had not been taking care of herself either, had not been eating enough, and was losing weight, looking ‘thin’, and not feeling well at all. Lynn, the young psychiatrist at McLean Hospital who had become an enthusiastic student of general semantics, had arranged medical tests and examinations for her at a Boston hospital. On January 16, Lynn sent Alfred the following telegram: “Imperative To See You In New York January Eighteenth And Nineteenth Stop Two Weeks Ago Discovered Countess Has Cancer Of Intestines As Yet She Does Not Know Stop.” The same day Alfred got a telegram from Mira, then back in Brooklyn; her only urgency seemed to be about Alfred’s business with the Chicago and Boston-area psychiatrists, not about herself. (2)

Alfred got back to Brooklyn as soon as he could. With Alfred home again, Mira seemed better. She started to eat more and even showed a fondness for sweets, not typical for her. But she and Alfred agreed she should go to Boston for more tests. By the end of February, having received a thorough examination at Massachusetts General Hospital, she was given a clean bill of health.(3) So much for the ‘intestinal cancer’. The alarming diagnosis that Lynn had shot off in his telegram to Alfred turned out to be completely wrong.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

1. Barbara Polakov to MEK, 6/6/35. IGS Archives. 

2. Telegram John Lynn to AK, 1/16/1936; Telegram MEK to AK, 1/16/1936. IGS Archives. 

3. AK to Graven 2/26/1936. AKDA 30.26.

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