Word: psycho
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...LAWRENCE LEFT a legacy deserving a much more intricate and subtle approach than this. In his exhaustive study, A Prince of Our Disorder, Dr. John E. Mack has brought his psycho-historical skills to all that is known about Lawrence in an effort to set the record straight. Not content with simplistic Freudian digs at Lawrence, Mack has gathered every (but every) shred of evidence he could find--friends' recollections, letters, unpublished commentaries to Lawrence's books and, of course, Lawrence's massive opus which almost no one has read, "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom." The project took Mack...
...enabling." Lawrence, through his sharp understanding of the needs of men, managed with grace to prod and guide them into putting their wishes into action. Erik Erikson stressed this same talent for "enabling" in Mahatmha Ghandi, in a work, Ghandi's Truth, that sets the standard for insightful psycho-history. And like Erikson, Mack demonstrates how Lawrence made this talent a continual game that challenged his considerable wits and tested his subtle power to move and manipulate his environment...
...with any psycho-historical interpretation, though, A Prince of Our Disorder leaves one with the uneasy feeling that these neat themes may be too neat. In fact, the awesome load of testimony and historical background Mack has collected seems to almost defy generalizations. Mack has not only amassed what must amount to a warehouse full of notes--his text is followed with not less than 56 pages of footnote--he seems to have felt an obligation to use them all. (He informs us at one point that on a post-war trip through southern Europe, Lawrence stopped over in Albania...
STILL, HISTORICAL PRECISION and a thorough consideration of where the evidence is coming from give Mack's work strength. In his preface, Mack says he undertook the Lawrence project with a prejudice in favor of a much more psycho-analytical explanation of his subject; but the more he discovered the more he became convinced, he writes, that Lawrence's unusual place in history was of central importance. E.M. Forster wrote about Lawrence that in an age of faith he might have become a monk, or at least a holy crusader who continued to believe in his lost cause...
Without such a faith, however, the awful attraction to violence and degradation eventually took its toll on Lawrence. He became acutely conscious of how he was "using" the Arabs to live out personal dreams and to fight his fear of death. Ultimately, Lawrence could not endure the central psycho-social fact that no matter how diligently man serves humanity, he inevitably serves himself in doing so. Lawrence, more than anyone, would feel uneasy about the psycho-historical movement; in his later life, he often prayed and pleaded to be free of his mainly self-analytical insights...