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Clinical psychologist Richard Ryder approaches three iconic celebrities - Horatio Nelson, Adolph Hitler, and Diana Princess of Wales - as though they were his patients and presents a short psycho-biography of each. Beneath their obvious differences he finds striking similarities in their backgrounds and early experience, especially being deprived of their mothers' love. In a short Epilogue the author asks what lessons might be learned for the future from these three famous figures of the past.

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Popular psychology

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	02 juillet 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781845405014
Langue	English

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Title page
Nelson, Hitler and Diana
Studies in Trauma and Celebrity
Richard D. Ryder

Copyright page
Copyright © Richard D. Ryder, 2009
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Originally published in the UK by
Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK
Originally published in the USA by
Imprint Academic, Philosophy Documentation Center
PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA
2013 digital version by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com

Dedication
To
Louis Dudley Ryder

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Jeffrey Simmons, G. F. Newman, Rebecca Hall, Jon Wynne-Tyson, Julian Alexander, Kay Dunbar, Alison Weir, Barbara Gardner, Anthony Freeman, Mavis Cheek, Dr Ian Mortimer, Toby Buchan and Professor A.C. Grayling.
In particular I would like to thank to two psychiatrist friends, Dr Michael Hession and Dr Robert Oxlade, for discussing all three of my subjects in considerable depth and for their professional insight. Together with Alison Taylor and Mary Hession we enjoyed a full case conference on Adolf Hitler, while sipping gin beside the calm waters of Poole Harbour. Later I spent similarly pleasant evenings with Professor Nicholas Rodger and the late Dr Colin White discussing the life of Horatio Nelson.
When it came to German translation I relied upon my old friend Hugh Denman. Henry Ryder has also helped me and Dr Emily Ryder has given encouragement, as did Heathcote Williams, while Penny Merrett, as usual, did the real work.
Sir William Beechey’s (1755-1839) Portrait of Sir William Hamilton (1730-1803), on page 14, is in the Jay and Jean Kislak Collection and is reproduced courtesy of Sotheby’s Picture Library.

Preface
This book is about the power of a mother’s love and what happens when a mother is lost. Such loss can have extraordinary consequences not only upon the child but upon the world at large. All three of my subjects were driven to become great celebrities and all lived lives that still considerably affect our own today - being those of the archetypal hero, the utter villain and the beautiful princess. They are among the most influential icons of our age. All of them have already been studied in depth by professional historians but none, previously, has been retrospectively analysed psychologically as I have attempted to do. In this trilogy I am seeking to make psychodynamic and diagnostic sense of the facts presented. Applying my working habits as a psychologist I focus, therefore, on the early lives of my subjects and on their relationships within their families, exploring their own words and those of witnesses. It is a matter of looking for psychological clues, bringing them together and testing them against other evidence. Above all, why did they really do what they did? There are truthful answers to be found to this question but they require detective work. I regard my subjects rather as I would clients or patients seeking treatment.
Psychiatrists and psychotherapists tend to function and think in a world that is slightly apart. We rarely use, for example, the stock-in-trade explanations for human behaviour much beloved by novelists; we often do not believe in them. Not only do we speak a different language but we also accept that there may be subtler and deeper reasons beneath the level of conscious rationalisation that have to be considered. For any behaviour there may be a score of possible determinants but only a handful that will be genuinely causal in each case. These are the truths that the good psychodynamicist tries to isolate and validate. And consensus is often to be found. At hundreds of ‘case conferences’ over the years I have known a dozen or so professionals reach agreement on what makes a patient do what they do. Such widely agreed explanations are usually in terms of the fears, traumas and loves of childhood that produce attitudes, fantasies and defences which are then applied or misapplied to situations in later life. Yet, to a large extent, day to day behaviour can be explained in terms of rational decisions taken for obvious reasons and this is true, too, of our three subjects. But underlying such routine behaviour is the hidden swell of psychodynamics that can determine the overall pattern of a life and the symbolic decisions taken at moments of crisis.
Readers may wonder why I have selected such an apparently disparate trio of subjects. Well, they have all been described in excellent biographies in recent years, and they certainly provide interesting contrasts. Strangely, they also share several remarkable features in common: all courted publicity, all were charismatic, all believed that they had been chosen by destiny, all w ere t ouched by psychopathology and all met violent and dramatic ends that sealed their legendary status - at Trafalgar, in the Berlin bunker or in the crash in Paris. Above all, the single most powerful formative event in all their lives, that caused all three of them to become the great historic figures that they are, was almost precisely the same: when young each lost their mother. Their reactions to this loss were different but, in every case, this trauma would haunt and shape the whole of their careers.
In this book I propose original psychological explanations that shed light upon Diana’s death, the frustration of Napoleon’s intention to invade Britain, and the reasons for the Second World War itself. These ideas are, as far as I am aware, quite new. All three of my famous subjects were superstars because all three wanted it to be that way. All were virtuosi in the arts of celebrity, finding their own routes to fame through glory, power or beauty. Nelson was in many ways a pioneer of the modern celebrity cult, while Hitler used revolutionary new methods of propaganda and Diana dealt skilfully with the unprecedented power that the visual media attained in the late twentieth century.
By treating Adolf Hitler as a human being it is not my intention in any way to belittle his wickedness. On the contrary, I hope that my approach will act as a particular warning for the future. As a psychologist, I do not approach human behaviour censoriously, seeking to condemn nor, indeed, to praise. Vices and virtues are all, for me, interesting phenomena that need to be explained. So I do not blame Diana for her caprices, nor praise Nelson for his courage, nor laboriously condemn Hitler for his utter infamy. I simply try to understand them.
So this trilogy is not a search for new data; it is an attempt to find new psychological insights the ample information already made available by some outstanding biographies. Psychobiography is a developing field that sometimes worries historians, some of whom may wish to dismiss such efforts as mere ‘psychobabble’. But how can we really understand history without understanding the motives and behaviour of key historic figures? What really made them tick? With my background in experimental, forensic, social and clinical psychology, and with my knowledge of history, I try to find some answers.
Finally, and narcissistically perhaps, I confess that my three subjects are all rather special for me: I met Diana at Buckingham Palace; I am four times great nephew of Horatio Nelson; and Adolf Hitler’s Messerschmidts once machine-gunned me in my pram (they missed!).
Richard D. Ryder
Exeter, 2009

1: Horatio Nelson 1758-1805

Photo copyright © Westminster Abbey
Admiral Lord Nelson
A wax image made in his lifetime by Catherine Andras
‘The thought of former days brings all my mother into my heart ...’
Horatio Nelson, May 1804.
Horatio Nelson is one of Britain’s greatest heroes. In four famous battles, and in numerous smaller engagements, Admiral Nelson triumphed over the naval forces of the man who had conquered the rest of Western Europe - Napoleon Bonaparte - thus preventing the invasion of Britain. Despite losing an eye and an arm, Nelson remained courageous to the end, dying at the hour of his greatest glory and final victory, at Trafalgar.
Horatio Nelson was a kindly man who inspired the affectionate devotion of his sailors. His own reckless bravery and love of glory enthused his men, and his practice of explaining his battle tactics in advance to his officers, and giving them powers of initiative, produced supreme results from them. Yet he had other, less attractive, qualities that make his personality complex and difficult to understand. He was vain, obsequious towards royalty and unforgiving in his attitude to disloyalty.
Early life
Horatio was born on 29 September 1758, the fourth surviving child of the Reverend Edmund Nelson, Rector of Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk and his wife Catherine (née Suckling), a great niece of Sir Robert Walpole, England’s first Prime Minister. Four more siblings followed him. Horatio was thus right in the middle of a large family all of whom, so we can surmise, had to compete for their parents’ attention. A middle child in such circumstances is often at a disadvantage, the eldest most often feeling valued by being given ‘adult’ responsibilities by the parents, and the youngest commanding the greatest cosseting. Nevertheless, Horatio found a means of securing his mother’s attention. According to family folklore he became recklessly adventurous, or ‘game’ as they then said, raiding a neighbour’s garden for fruit at night, for example, undertaking a dangerous journey through heavy snow, and climbing trees for birds’ eggs. Horatio had found a way to stand out from his brothers, all of whom were rather unexciting. Horatio was, accordi