Tag Archives: Adelaide Procter. Adelaide Anne Procter

“the four things that no human being can endure” (a question the answer to which was torturing me)

Leave a reply

 

Roger W. Smith email to Sherwood Waldron, MD, February 20, 2017:

Dear Dr. Waldron,

I am a writer living in Queens, NYC.

I hope this query is not a nuisance.

I am trying to find the answer to a question that has been torturing me.

I was seeing a therapist, Dr. Ralph Colp, Jr., in Manhattan over a long period of time. Dr. Colp passed away in 2008.

I tend to remember practically everything Dr. Colp said, word for word. That was the value his words and observations had for me.

But, I can’t quite remember one thing he told me. We were talking about my experience of loneliness, and how I had managed to overcome it.

Dr. Colp said to me, quoting some well known psychoanalyst or writer (I think it was a psychoanalyst), that there were four (?) things that no one — no human being — can stand or endure: loneliness, anxiety (?), and _________.

I can’t recall the source of the quote. I doubt it was Freud, because I would have remembered it if this were the case. It was probably someone more recent whose works Dr. Colp was acquainted with.

I have Googled the quote to no avail. I thought it might have been Alfred Adler, Erich Fromm, or Harry Stack Sullivan.

It could have been Abraham Maslow, but I don’t recall that Dr. Colp mentioned him. It seems I would have remembered, since I knew of Maslow, who taught at Brandeis University when I was a student there. Maslow said similar things.

It could have been Erik Erikson. But, again, it seems that I would have remembered.

Others who come to mind:

Bruno Bettelheim

Rollo May

Schopenhauer

Karl Menninger

It could have been the psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom, who wrote about “ultimate existential concerns,” namely death freedom isolation, and meaninglessness.

Would you have any idea where the quote might have come from, or how I might go about researching or inquiring about it?

 

*****************************************************

Sherwood Waldron MD email to Roger W. Smith, February 20, 2017

Sorry, I don’t recognize the quote.

 

*****************************************************

Roger W. Smith email to Sherwood Waldron MD,  January 31, 2020

Dear Dr. Waldron,

I do not expect you to reply to this email unless you wish to.

However, since you were kind enough to reply to me (almost three years ago), I now know (through my persistence) where the passage Dr. Colp was referring to came from.

It is in the works of Irvin D. Yalom, reprinted in The Yalom Reader (Basic Books, 1998), pp. 172-173. What I recalled was that there were four ultimate concerns that Dr. Colp spoke of: they are (Yalom’s four concerns) existential conditions faced by all persons that if not faced inspire dread. One of the four existential concerns is isolation (which I recalled as aloneness, which is the same thing. but I wasted a lot of time Googling using the wrong words).

I am certain that Dr. Colp was familiar with Dr. Yalom’s works — given that he often purchased books from this publisher and that he and Dr. Yalom published, at least once, articles in the same issue of the same journal, Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics.

Sincerely,

Roger W. Smith

 

*****************************************************

THE ULTIMATE CONCERNS OF HUMAN LIFE

Existential therapy is a dynamic approach to therapy which focuses on concerns that are rooted in the individual’s existence.

 

[T]he primary concerns are deeply buried, encrusted with layer upon layer of repression, denial, displacements, and symbolization.”

The existential position emphasizes a conflict that flows from the individual’s confrontation with the givens of existence.

 

This book deals with four ultimate concerns: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. The individual’s confrontation with each of these facts of life constitutes the content of the existential dynamic conflict.

Death The most obvious, the most easily apprehended ultimate concern is death. We exist now, but one day we shall cease to be. Death will come, and there is no escape from it. It is a terrible truth, and we respond to it with mortal terror. “Everything,” in Spinoza’s words, “endeavors to persist in its own being”;’ and a core existential conflict is the tension between the awareness of the inevitability of death and the wish to continue to be.

Freedom Another ultimate concern, a far less accessible one, is freedom. Ordinarily we think of freedom as an unequivocally positive concept. Throughout recorded history has not the human being yearned and striven for freedom? Yet freedom viewed from the perspective of ultimate ground is riveted to dread. In its existential sense “freedom” refers to the absence of external structure. Contrary to everyday experience, the human being does not enter (and leave) a well-structured universe that has an inherent design. Rather, the individual is entirely responsible for–that is, is the author of–his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions. “Freedom,” in this sense, has a terrifying implication: it means that beneath us there is no ground-nothing, a void, an abyss. A key existential dynamic, then, is the clash between our confrontation with groundlessness and our wish for ground and structure.

Existential Isolation A third ultimate concern is isolation-not in­terpersonal isolation with its attendant loneliness, or intrapersonal isolation (isolation from parts of oneself), but a fundamental isolation–an isolation both from creatures and from world–which cuts beneath other isolation. No matter how close each of us becomes to another, there remains a final, unbridgeable gap; each of us enters existence alone and must depart from it alone. The existential conflict is thus the tension between our awareness of our absolute isolation and our wish for contact, for protection, our wish to be part of a larger whole.

Meaninglessness A fourth ultimate concern, or given, of existence is meaninglessness. If we must die, if we constitute our own world, if each is ultimately alone in an indifferent universe, then what meaning does life have? Why do we live? How shall we live? If there is no preor­dained design for us, then each of us must construct our own meanings in life. Yet can a meaning of one’s own creation be sturdy enough to bear one’s life? This existential dynamic conflict stems from the dilemma of a meaning-seeking creature who is thrown into a universe that has no meaning.

— from Irving D. Yalom, “The Four Ultimate Concerns,” Essential Therapy; The Introduction; reprinted in The Yalom Reader (Basic Books, 1998), pp. 169-173

 

*****************************************************

Persistence, doggedness pay off in research.

I never give up.

My wife often says, “You can find ANYTHING.”

My former therapist, Dr. Colp, an independent scholar, used to ask me to do research for him pro bono. I used to wonder, was it his way of sort of exacting payment in kind to make up for his very low fees? Sometimes the research was very tedious. But, I told him that I was flattered to be asked.

The questions he asked me to research were never easy ones. They were minuscule things which he couldn’t find the answer to. Such as who wrote a certain poem that Charles Darwin knew of because he liked a song  composed by Sir Arthur Sullivan in which the lyrics of the poem had been set to music? It was some Victorian poet. I found the answer to that one (Adelaide Procter).

And, who was the author of a bestselling women’s novel that Darwin liked? I never did find the answer. The novel (entitled The Fair Carew) was published anonymously, and it appears that even to this day the author’s identity has never been discovered. (Dr. Colp read the novel in a library in London during a visit there.)

 

— posted by Roger W Smith

   March 2020

serendipity (or, should I say, the paranormal?)

3 Replies

 

It usually is the case that if two people don’t get along, they can’t have a successful working relationship.

This applies to an instructor and a student.

If the thing being taught is something technical, you would think that if the instructor has the knowledge and expertise, personality wouldn’t matter.

It does for me. I have had experiences taking lessons (briefly) in swimming, tennis, and piano, all of which didn’t work out mostly because I could not establish rapport with the instructor.

 

*****************************************************

This was true of George Cohen of Newton, Massachusetts, a well known and very successful piano teacher.

My father, who became a professional pianist and himself a piano teacher, was a student of Mr. Cohen in his youth. My younger brother took lessons with Mr. Cohen for years and was one of his best students.

I myself decided that I wanted to try taking piano lessons for a second time when I was a junior in college. I had taken them briefly at age eleven with a very nice, attractive, and vivacious Japanese woman, Marsha Fukui, in Cambridge, Mass. We hit it off, but I lost interest in piano after a few months and stopped taking lessons.

I tried again in my late teens, when I was in college, with Mr. Cohen. I thought the fact that I was my father’s son and that my father must have been one of his best students would have meant something, also the fact that my younger brother was his student for a long time. This didn’t seem to matter to Mr. Cohen. Personal relationships were not of interest to him. One could say, why should they matter? You were there to learn how to play the piano. But in my case — from my perspective — such things are very important. I have to feel connected to the other person, have to be able to make conversation. If I don’t, I can’t get anywhere with them.

 

*****************************************************

But that’s not the key point of this post. I wish to share a couple of amazing, serendipitous things that happened to me. One involved my lessons with Mr. Cohen.

Mr. Cohen kept telling me that I needed to strengthen my fingers as an older piano student. He said that stiffness in the fingers (they are, apparently, much more limber in a grade schooler) was a problem that had to be overcome if I was ever going to make progress. He told me to take a book and put it over my hand when playing, as a finger muscle strengthening exercise. So, I took a book at random off the bookshelf in the living room of my home and used it when practicing. A while later, I happened to look at the book. The title was The Physiology of Piano Playing.

A totally coincidental occurrence. What were the odds that that would be the book I would use?

 

*****************************************************

The other anecdote involved, indirectly, my former therapist, Dr. Ralph Colp, Jr.

From time to time during the course of our therapy sessions, Dr. Colp, who was a prolific writer and well known scholar, would ask me to do unpaid research for him. I remember once when he was writing an article updating some aspect of the psychiatric literature and he asked me to make an inventory of new publications in the field.

Dr. Colp’s fees were every low, well below professional norms. He made it clear to me personally and also in comments he made to interviewers that he was not in medicine for the money.

Perhaps he regarded “hiring” me to do research as a form of barter, with the research amounting to partial payment. But he only asked me to do it when he was stumped by something and absolutely could not find anything.

I told him that I was flattered to be asked. Yet, sometimes I was thinking, what will he ask me to find now? He always gave me the hardest things to look up.

Often, the research concerned, usually indirectly, Charles Darwin, Dr. Colp’s major research interest, about whom he wrote two books and many articles.

Dr. Colp was interested in learning everything he could about Darwin’s personal (as well as his scientific) life, including how he spent his leisure time and what his tastes in books (e.g., novels) and music were. He had found out that Darwin liked a popular song of the Victorian era, “Will He Come?,” composed by Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame).

Could I find out where the lyrics came from?

It was known that the lyrics to the song were by Adelaide Procter. Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864) was a very popular poet of her day; she was the favorite poet of Queen Victoria. She burst on the literary scene as a teenager. She died of tuberculosis at age thirty-nine.

So, what poem of Procter’s were the lyrics to the song taken from? Dr. Colp, like me, was a stickler for details. He wanted to be exact.

I couldn’t find out what poem of Procter’s the lyrics came from. She published three books of poetry in her lifetime. There is no poem with the title “Will He Come?”

It seems that it would have made sense for me to consult her books, but they weren’t available to me. I cannot remember why I didn’t. This was pre-internet days. Somehow, I found out that Procter had known Charles Dickens, who admired her work, and that some of her earliest poems had been published in Household Words, a weekly magazine edited by Dickens. (I doubt that nowadays many people know that Dickens was an editor.)

I went to the New York Public Library and put in a call slip for several issues of Household Words from the 1850’s. A big fat volume with a faded green cover was handed over to me. It was comprised of several issues of the magazine that had been bound together into a single volume. The pages were old and showed their age.

I placed the big, weighty book on a table in front of me and opened it carefully, not wanting to damage it. I opened it at random to a page somewhere in the middle.

On that very page was THE poem. Miss Procter’s poem. Published under the title “Hush!”

The exact same words, verbatim, as the lyrics in the Arthur Sullivan song.

How had it happened that I had requested the right volume of the magazine, and then, amazingly, opened to the very page on which there was not only a poem by Procter, but the very poem I was looking for?

 

— Roger W. Smith

   October 2017

 

*****************************************************

 

Hush!

“I CAN scarcely hear,” she murmured,
“For my heart beats loud and fast,
But surely, in the far, far distance,
I can hear a sound at last.”
“It is only the reapers singing,
As they carry home their sheaves,
And the evening breeze has risen,
And rustles the dying leaves.”

“Listen! there are voices talking.”
Calmly still she strove to speak,
Yet her voice grew faint and trembling,
And the red flushed in her cheek.
“It is only the children playing
Below, now their work is done,
And they laugh that their eyes are dazzled
By the rays of the setting sun.”

Fainter grew her voice, and weaker
As with anxious eyes she cried,
“Down the avenue of chestnuts,
I can hear a horseman ride.”
“It was only the deer that were feeding
In a herd on the clover grass,
They were startled, and fled to the thicket,
As they saw the reapers pass.”

Now the night arose in silence,
Birds lay in their leafy nest,
And the deer couched in the forest,
And the children were at rest:
There was only a sound of weeping
From watchers around a bed,
But Rest to the weary spirit,
Peace to the quiet Dead!

— Adelaide Procter