Word: alger
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...intent to confirm the guilt or establish the innocence of Hiss," writes San Francisco psychoanalysist Meyer Zeligs in the preface to his "analysis" of the Hiss-Chambers case. The disavowal is necessary. Friendship and Fratricide only further complicates the already hopelessly complicated questions surrounding Alger Hiss's alleged crime. But Zeligs is less than consistent in his avowed aims: he denies at the outset any desire to prove Hiss's innocence, because he is treading on unsure ground; later the distinction between pschoanalysis and detective-work is ignored and finally abandoned when Zeligs finds certain propositions incompatible with the possibility...
...essence of Chambers' character, says Zeligs, is an overriding guilt dating back to the suicide of his brother Richard. Chambers imagined some sort of death pact with his younger, stronger and more personable brother, and since then has sought out brother-figures to befriend and betray. Alger Hiss was one such figure; son, according to Zeligs, were at least half a dozen of Chambers' fellow students, workers and party members...
...individual dates -- some critical, some petty -- seems particularly force. "In the second Hiss trial," writes Zeligs, "Chambers . . . testified that Richard [his brother] had died on September 19, 1926. Whether Chambers knew it or not (and it is likely that he did), September 19, 1926 was the birth date of Alger Hiss's stepson. Timothy Hobson (an easy slip away from September 9, 1926, the actual date of Richard's death)." Zeligs attempts to tie this error into a chain of meaningful mistakes on Chambers' part...
FRIENDSHIP AND FRATRICIDE: AN ANALYSIS OF WHITTAKER CHAMBERS & ALGER HISS by Meyer A. Zeligs, M.D. 476 pages. Viking...
...wild, leching lad who committed suicide at 22. Chambers' whole life, to hear Zeligs tell it, became a search for a mystical brother whom he could force to re-enact a ritual death pact. The consummation of that search was the symbolic destruction of his "mystical brother," Alger Hiss...