Swaddled minds
Soviet babies and Cold War theories of the 'Great Russian' mind
I’ve been doing some research on a cluster of social scientific research projects based at institutions in the US that sought to understand the ‘Soviet mind’ in the very early years of the Cold War. Unable to conduct research in the Soviet Union, the social scientists working on these projects instead relied on interviews with recent emigres to the West and on analyses of published sources such as newspapers, literature and political speeches. This post is about one of the more eccentric and controversial publications that emerged as a result. And it’s all about babies.
*
The People of Great Russia by Geoffrey Gorer and John Rickman was published in 1949, based on research undertaken by Gorer as part of his work for the Columbia University Project, Research in Contemporary Cultures, led by anthropologist Ruth Benedict from 1947 and funded by the Office of Naval Research. Benedict died in 1948 and Gorer was then involved with anthropologist Margaret Mead’s Studies in Soviet Culture based at the Natural History Museum in New York.
John Rickman (1891-1951) was a British psychoanalyst who lived in London. He was from a Quaker family and he trained with Freud in Vienna in the early 1920s. As a psychoanalyst influenced by Melanie Klein and working in the British object-relations tradition, Rickman saw early infancy as a formative period in the life of the individual but aside from a short essay included in the book’s Appendix, his sections of the book were not psychoanalytically informed. His contribution instead consisted of a series of vignettes about Russian peasant life written while he was stationed as a doctor with the Friends’ War Victims Relief Unit in 1916-1918, prior to his psychoanalytic training. A pacifist and conscientious objector who had avoided conscription, Rickman was based near Samara on the Volga and his work involved distributing felt boots to refugees, as well as offering medical services. Gorer persuaded Rickman to include his writings in the book because they had not been published elsewhere and seemed consistent with Gorer’s insistence on fundamental continuities in Russian culture over time (though he left very soon after the 1917 October Revolution so his contributions could not be read as analyses of Soviet culture).
It was the second section of the book written by Gorer, advancing the so-called ‘swaddling hypothesis’, that attracted most attention and controversy. Born in London in 1905, Geoffrey Gorer was something of a polymath, even a bit of a dilettante. His first book, published in 1935, was about the Marquis de Sade. He had no disciplinary training in anthropology but stumbled into the field after publishing a book entitled Africa Dances in 1935, following a spontaneous three month trip around West Africa on a tour with the Sengalese dancer Féral Benga. In the later thirties he published books on South East Asia and the Indian Himalayas. Himalayan Village (1938) was his only publication based on fieldwork. He spent the Second World War in the US where he studied behaviourism at Yale. He was involved in the Committee for National Morale, set up to advise Roosevelt in 1940, for which he wrote about the American ‘national character’. In the wake of Pearl Harbour he turned to work on Japan and after the Second World War he turned to work on Russia. He returned to Britain in 1950 and his later career was occupied with studies of the English national character, alongside prolific journalistic writings. His various studies on ‘national character’ in the 1940s should be seen in the context of the history of US social science, part of a broader effort to ‘put anthropology at the service of the war effort’ and then the Cold War effort.
In his Appendix, ‘А Note on the Swaddling Hypothesis’, Rickman admits that he did not notice swaddling during the time he spent in Russia and seems wary to make general pronouncements on national character but supports the notion that experiences of constriction in early infancy could - theoretically - influence individual development. Minutes from the meetings of the Columbia University Research Project on Contemporary Cultures reveal that Gorer proposed his ‘swaddling hypothesis’ to the group in November 1947, asking those of his research associates in New York who were Russian emigres, whether they had been swaddled in infancy. During the discussion Margaret Mead interjected: ‘This is the first culture I’ve seen where it’s so hard to find the babies!’ One of the researchers responded that she had indeed be swaddled as a baby:
The baby was unwrapped to take fresh air or a bath, or to kick around. A baby has to be wrapped stiffly for convenience’s sake. Otherwise he is hard to carry around.
Another Russian person at the meeting described how babies would often be given black bread wrapped in cloth to suck, ‘a variation of a nipple’. In this discussion various members of the group informed Gorer that the baby would be unswaddled to feed. The experience of moving between being swaddled and unswaddled would become central to Gorer’s ‘swaddling hypothesis’, which he claimed only applied to ‘Great Russians’ (defined as people who inhabited the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and who spoke Russian as their mother tongue, elsewhere he specified that the category did not include Jewish people and sometimes he confined it to people who grew up West of the Urals – so it was a fairly inconsistent category and one that excluded much of the territory of the Soviet Union).
Unable to conduct field work in Soviet Russia, Gorer relied primarily on interviews conducted in English, French or German with Russian emigres in New York. The Columbia research team discussed visiting choirs and neighbourhood associations in the city in search of people with whom to speak. Gorer mostly spoke with relatively elderly people some of whom had emigrated as teenagers after 1917, some whom emigrated during the 1930s. Almost none of them came from peasant backgrounds (significantly, given his claim that his observations on swaddling applied solely to peasants). He feared that at least one ‘informant’ was a member of an underground anti-Bolshevik group, while another had suspected NKVD connections. In addition to the interviews, the group analysed a range of what he called ‘symbolic material’ from a variety of published sources from technical manuals to novels, newspapers to radio scripts. The research team also gathered many thousands of photographs as evidence of childcare practices from newspapers and advice pamphlets. Additionally, some of Gorer’s observations are based less on empirical observations than on what he calls ‘free associations’. He muses, for example, that the fact Russians refer to swaddling fabric as ‘bandages’ implies they see the baby like they would a corpse, which demonstrates how negatively the experience of swaddling is viewed.
Though swaddling occurred in many other cultures, ‘Great Russian’ swaddling was unique according to Gorer because it tended to last for a relatively long period (around nine months), because the arms as well as the body of the baby were wrapped up, and because the baby was regularly released from its bandages in order to breast feed. Periods of lonely constriction were punctuated by moments of warm intimacy. He argued that an experience of ‘unbearable restraint’ that produced rage in the infant was interspersed with unswaddled nursing. Gorer presented the experience of constantly shifting from the constriction of movement within the swaddling bandages to the care and warmth associated with breast-feeding as the key that could unlock the Great Russian psyche. It was not just the experience of being swaddled but of being tied and untied, constrained then freed, isolated then cuddled, that was distinctive about Great Russian early infantile experience.
He proposed that the infant’s relation to swaddling was analogous to the adult’s relationship to authority. According to Gorer, the prototype for authority and the source of fear and guilt in adulthood among Great Russians was not a figure in the family, but the impersonal swaddling bandages themselves. The tendency to oscillate between two extremes – ‘from violence to gentleness, from excessive activity to passivity, from orgiastic indulgence to ascetic abstemiousness’ – was also, he argued, characteristic of the adult Russian.
Gorer’s work was mocked and attacked upon its publication, though it was widely reviewed in both specialist journals and mainstream newspapers in both Britain and the United States. Mead’s comments on the draft manuscript anticipated many of the criticisms: she warned Gorer against making overly generalising statements, advised him to remove words such as ‘always’ and ‘never’ and fretted about his lack of data, especially in instances where the practices being described as distinctly Russian could be observed elsewhere.
Rocky Mountain News dismissed Gorer’s thesis as ‘scientific hogwash’. Writing in the anti-communist New Leader, David Dallin the former Menshevik leader who had emigrated to the US in 1939 from France attacked Gorer for suggesting that an oppressive state could be understood by analysing supposedly unchanging cultural practices, habits and customs. Another article in the same journal ridiculed Gorer’s ‘historyless method’, which the author claimed was particularly unjustified given the dramatic social convulsions that had transformed everyday life in the period since the October Revolution. Gorer’s claim that confessions to crimes among the innocent during the Stalinist purges could be compared to Orthodox practices of confession, with both phenomena arising from early infantile experience, struck The New Leader reviewer as especially ludicrous: ‘Might the confessions be due to cruel, totalitarian methods, rather than to the timeless, swaddling syndrome of a pattern that preceded totalitarianism?’ The political implications of Gorer’s hypotheses struck these readers as extremely bleak, as they seemed to assume some form of authoritarianism was culturally inevitable in Russia, essential rather than historical or political.
An article in the British Journal of Psychology similarly dismissed Gorer’s assumption that Russia hadn’t really changed since the late nineteenth century, while an audience member at one of his talks expressed incredulity at Gorer’s apparent ignorance of basic facts about Russia and the Soviet Union, such as seeming not to know that Stalin was Georgian rather than Russian. Meanwhile, on February 19th 1952 the Soviet newspaper Izvestnia published a scathing article on Gorer and Mead entitled ‘Slanderers and Swaddling Clothes’, which they presented as peddling old cultural stereotypes via pseudoscience.
Gorer’s work upset those in the Russian émigré community especially because it was seen as being anti-Russian rather than anti-Communist, anti-Stalinist or anti-Soviet. As Peter Mandler discusses, it also disappointed the project’s funders. The US Navy didn’t seem to care as much but RAND ‘wanted verifiable, preferably quantitative results with clear-cut policy implications’ and they demanded insights into distinctively Soviet characteristics, not into the supposedly eternal attributes of the Russian soul. Mead was consistently forced to defend Gorer against criticisms. In 1954 she published a defense of the ‘swaddling hypothesis’ in American Anthropology claiming ‘it does not, as has frequently been claimed “ignore history”. It merely, for the purpose of a particular inquiry about a designated group of living individuals, holds history constant’ (which sounds quite a lot like ignoring history to me). Rather than asking how changes in Soviet everyday life impacted child rearing practices, she poses the question the other way around: ‘when we deal with cultural change the character structure of the individuals of which the society is composed at the period when the change takes place will be one factor in the nature of the change.’ She does not ask how transformations ushered in following the revolution impacted people psychologically but instead asks whether the pre-existing psychological dispositions of ‘Great Russian’ people made historical events unfold in the way they did. It’s not that consciousness reflects society - as many contemporaneous Soviet psychologists would have argued, invoking the Leninist concept of reflection - but that societies reflect the minds of the people in it. The argument is logically contradictory and would preclude the possibility of dramatic historical change from ever occurring.
*
On January 9 1948 Gorer delivered a talk on the swaddling hypothesis at the Russian Research Centre at Harvard University. Notes on the discussion following the talk reveal skepticism among members of the audience about his approach and conclusions. One of the major issues, again, was Gorer’s insistence on continuity over long periods. A member of the audience asked ‘What is changing in Russian culture?’ and Gorer responded there had been ‘Very little change’ and also claimed that American attitudes to Russia remained the same. ‘Little differences between patterns of someone six years old in 1866 and someone six now’.
In the People of Great Russia, the Cold War context in which the research was conducted is often made clear: ‘Russia and its government are a potential danger to our values and our security,’ Gorer declares in the book’s introduction but like Mead he thought that the contemporary conjuncture had deep cultural roots stretching far back in time. By contrast, Gorer’s interview transcripts reveal that his informants, far from echoing his conclusions, often emphasised changes over continuities. Some of them talked at length about Soviet policies and the transformations they brought about.
Informant 15 who was interviewed on the 12th March 1947 was a Jewish woman in her mid-50s who lived in Russia until 1939 with two children. She had been involved in parent-teacher organisations in nurseries and schools and described the transformations in childcare as ‘the real Revolution.’ She spoke to Gorer about the hygiene campaigns conducted to educate peasant women. The pre-revolutionary practice of giving children a piece of black bread wrapped in a rag was rejected as unhealthy. Women were shown images of microbes, taught about the dangers of contagion and encouraged to wash or boil swaddling clothes: ‘You’ve no idea how quickly people learn. Women who didn’t know a thing about hygiene and sanitation would pick it all up in a few years.’ Rather than being delivered at home, babies were more likely to be delivered in hospitals. Official state guidance said that babies should not be swaddled and teachers would repeat this to mothers. She says this was also reflected in Mother and Child exhibitions. She also discusses how new forms of collective living changed how children were brought up and cared for. These kinds of concrete historical transformations did not seem to interest Gorer whose method was indeed strangely ‘historyless’, but that method itself has a history.
This is excellently detailed. The Slave Soul of Russia by Rancour-Laferriere follows some of the same leads and was equally controversial in Slavic Studies.