Self and Suffering in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day: A Horneyan Intrepretation

Abstract: This paper—my 1994 thesis for my Master of Liberal Arts at Harvard University—offers a psychoanalytic reading of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day through the lens of psychoanalyst and feminist Karen Horney’s theory of moral masochism and the dissolution of the self. I argue that the protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm, exemplifies Horney’s model of the self in crisis—one caught in a cycle of self-defeat and unconscious submission to suffering as a means of securing validation and a sense of worth. By engaging Horney’s critique of Freud, particularly her rejection of his biologically driven determinism in favor of a socially and relationally constructed subjectivity, I position Wilhelm’s suffering within a broader existential and psychoanalytic framework. Additionally, I explore the novel’s resonance with Freud’s concept of the oceanic feeling—a dissolution of ego boundaries associated with mystical or regressive states—suggesting that Wilhelm’s yearning for transcendence and release mirrors a paradoxical desire for both obliteration and unity. In this way, Bellow’s text becomes a site where the tensions between Horneyan and Freudian models of selfhood and suffering unfold, offering a profound meditation on the fragility of identity and the search for meaning in a world that refuses to provide it.

Self and Suffering in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day: A Horneyan Intrepretation (1994)

Chapter I

Introduction

Previous criticism of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day has either treated superficially or ignored three of this novella’s central issues, a deep understanding of which is crucial for a full appreciation of the text. These issues concern the meanings of the protagonist’s suffering, of the final passage, “… the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need,” and of the ending in general. Because these issues are interrelated, and can only be appreciated fully when brought together in relation to the central figure, it is important to investigate first the protaganist’s world, his relationships, and his character before attempting specifically to interpret his suffering, “ultimate need,’ and the meaning of the ending. While I believe my reading sheds some light on Wilhelm’s suffering and “ultimate need,” I also feel that the ending relies on its ambiguity, thus making multiple readings possible and a solution according to one reading impossible.

The action of Seize the Day takes place over one day and focuses on a character with many names—Wilhelm Adler, Tommy Wilhelm, and Wilky— and his relationships with his father, Dr. Adler, and a charlatan psychologist, “Dr.” Tamkin. It is a “day of reckoning” for Wilhelm, a day on which, “willing or not, he would take a good close look at the truth ” (96). The truth about Wilhelm, however, is elusive since readers learn much about him through his often unreliable thoughts and overdetermined actions. The narrator warns us early in the novella: “Wilhelm respected the truth, but he could lie …” (13). Indeed, Wilhelm often lies to himself, especially concerning his troubles, their causes, and the suffering they produce. Seize the Day opens with the lines, “When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the next fellow. So at least he thought, and there was a certain amount of evidence to back him up” (3). Yet, Wilhelm often goes out of his way to get sympathy for his troubles and thus hardly conceals them. The essence of Wilhelm’s character derives from a relationship to suffering that is complex and mysterious, especially to himself. The meaning of Wilhelm’s troubles and attendant suffering has also remained largely mysterious to critics.

Many critics have agreed with Daniel Weiss’s interpretation that Wilhelm suffers from what Freud described as moral masochism, a nonsexual form of finding pleasure in pain. This interpretation, complicated by the general confusion that surrounds Freud’s concept of masochism , is subverted by the many instances where Wilhelm does not desire to suffer, where his suffering simply results from frustrated attempts to secure the affection, self-respect, or care he desires. I shall argue that, though Bellow’s portayal of Wilhelm is influenced by Freud’s theory of masochism, as Weiss argues, it cannot be reduced to these terms. Wilhelm’s suffering is the result of an intricate aggregation of masochistic drives with other desires. An appreciation of Seize the Day as a whole can only be attained by avoiding the reduction of its highly mimetic protagonist to a single psychological category.

Clues to Wilhelm’s character, and to what role suffering plays in it, are given in his reminiscences. Though Seize the Day steadily marches through Wilhelm’s day of reckoning, there are several detours into his past. From these detours we learn that Wilhelm failed in Hollywood, that his marriage has ended and he misses his sons desperately, and that he has recently lost his job. These disappointments are the result of neither merely bad luck nor simply a masochistic desire to suffer. The narrator informs the reader of Wilhelm’s decision-making process:

…when he was best aware of the risks and knew a hundred reasons against going and had made himself sick with fear, he left home. This was typical of Wilhelm. After much thought and hesitation and debate he invariably took the course he had rejected innumerable times. Ten such decisions made up the history of his life. He had decided that it would be a bad mistake to go to Hollywood, and then he went. He had made up his mind not to marry his wife, but ran off and got married. He had resolved not to invest money with Tamkin, and then had given him a check. (23)

Wilhelm ignores the voices of caution for complex reasons, only one of which is a desire to suffer. For the most part, Wilhelm takes the risks he does because he has many competing, sometimes contrary, desires. He is portrayed as groping for solutions to these conflicting needs. To understand Wilhelm’s suffering, we must first understand his desires and the psychological conflicts they create.

The end of his day of reckoning finds Wilhelm broke, financially and psychologically. His attempts to cope with his environment fail to bring him what he desires, and he has lost all of his money gambling on the futures market. Tamkin, who is responsible for his financial loss and owes him two hundred dollars, is nowhere to be found. For help, Wilhelm approaches his unsympathetic father—the last of several attempts throughout the story—but is rebuked more harshly than before. Having been close to breaking down psychologically after arguing with his father, he then pleads with his wife for mercy when she pressures him to keep his promise of support payments. After she refuses him, in a daze, Wilhelm finds himself swept into a chapel where a funeral is taking place, and then into the line for viewing the body. When he sees the corpse he begins to cry—softly, at first, and then very hard. Some of the mourners are awed by his suffering; they wonder if he is the dead man’s brother, but they decide that he is not. The novel ends with the following lines:

The flowers and lights fused ecstatically in Wilhelm’s blind, wet eyes; the heavy sea-like music came up to his ears. It poured into him where he had hidden himself in the center of a crowd by the great and happy oblivion of tears. He heard it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need. (118).

The last line, and the short paragraph that contains it, acts as a central riddle of the story. What is Wilhelm’s “heart’s ultimate need”? Andrew Gordon points out that this line is an allusion to Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”:

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

Gordon concludes that Wilhelm wants much more than financial or emotional assistance; he wants a spiritual transcendence: “The old man in Yeats’s poem wants his heart to be consumed by fire; Tommy Wilhelm wants his heart to be consumed by water.” I shall return to this allusion when I try to answer the question, what happens in the end?

Though many critics have ignored the question—what is Wilhelm’s “heart’s ultimate need”?—almost every critic has attempted to interpret the ending in general. According to Robert Kiernan, “most critics of the novel read the final scene in salvific terms.” Only a few critics read it in negative terms, often in terms of Wilhelm’s “sinking” into psychosis. A larger group of critics read the ending as ambiguous, susceptible to multiple readings. The water imagery that appears throughout Seize the Day suggests that Wilhelm’s conflicts are not solved but dissolved as he sinks “through torn sobs and cries.” I shall explore two alternative interpretations of the ending that seem plausible; paradoxically, one is positive and the other is negative.

What follows is a reading of Seize the Day that incorporates three important aspects of the novella which critics hitherto have either neglected or not understood in relation to each other: Wilhelm’s suffering, the final passage, and the ending. After providing an explanation of my critical approach in the section, “A Horneyan Aproach to Seize the Day,” I shall explore the world portrayed in Seize the Day and Wilhelm’s relationships in that world in the sections, “Paternal Reality: The Appeal of Mastery” and “Maternal Ideal: The Appeal of Love.” In these two sections, I shall give a general reading of the main characters of Seize the Day, focusing on the conflicts between Wilhelm and others. In “Inner Crowds, Inner Conflicts,” I shall analyze Wilhelm’s character in general, and specifically his psychological conflicts as represented by his many names. In “From Self-Effacement to the Relinquishment of the Self: The Functions of Wilhelm’s Suffering,” I shall explore the nature of his suffering. I hope to show how Wilhelm’s suffering enables him to integrate his self, while at the same time, as Karen Horney would say, to “relinquish his self.” In “Dissolving Inner Conflicts” I shall try to understand the meaning of the equivocal ending. I shall conclude by treating Seize the Day as a whole in light of my interpretations.

Chapter II

A Horneyan Aproach to Seize the Day

Using a psychoanalytic and synchronic approach to Seize the Day, I attempt to be non-reductive, though my reading is primarily influnced by only one theorist: Karen Horney. I have chosen Horneyan theory to analyze Seize the Day for several reasons, the most important being that this theory accounts for the complexity of masochistic behavior, which Horney treats broadly as “neurotic suffering.” In addition, the character typology of her mature theory is especially useful for understanding Wilhelm, and her synchronic approach to psychological analysis is apt for the study of a literary character when there is scant history of their childhood development, as is the case here. Before giving a brief explanation of Horney’s mature theory, I shall explore my reasons for choosing to use Horneyan theory as the theoretical foundation of understanding Seize the Day. In the next subsection, I shall analyze the relationship between psychoanalysis and Seize the Day, with a focus on issues surrounding the concept of masochism. Finally, in the subsection, “‘Reading Otherwise,’” I shall discuss psychoanalytic literary criticism in general, and the way in which I attempt to avoid the common pitfall of mastering literary texts with a psychoanalytic theory, rather than reading them on their own terms.

Psychoanalysis, Masochism, and Seize the Day

The relationship between Seize the Day and psychoanalysis is a profound one, and has often gone unappreciated by critics. The names of the characters are the most obvious evidence that this novella has been influenced by, and is critical of, psychoanalysis in significant ways. Wilhelm, Dr. Adler, Mr. Rappaport, and Mr. Perls all share names with prominent psychoanalysts of the past: Wilhelm Reich, Alfred Adler, David Rapaport, and Fritz Perls. In addition, the character Tamkin can be understood as a parody of Fritz Perls’s here-and-now vulgarization of psychoanalysis and Gestalt Psychology. As if he was chanting one of Perls’ prayers, Tamkin tells Wilhelm, “The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real--the here-and-now. Seize the day” (66). Another allusion to an historical figure is Dr. Adler, whose character I understand as a manifestation of Alfred Alder’s will-to-power libido. A few critics have recognized the strong relationship between Seize the Day and psychoanalysis in their interpretations: Daniel Weiss’s, "Caliban on Prospero: a Psychoanalytic Study on the Novel Seize the Day, by Saul Bellow”; J. Brooks Bousson’s, “The Narcissistic Self-Drama of Wilhelm Adler: A Kohutian Reading of Seize the Day”; and Eusebio Rodrigues's, “Reichianism in Seize the Day.”

Various models of masochism figure into the interpretations of all of these critics. Bousson only alludes to the topic in passing, for she is more concerned with understanding Wilhelm in terms of Kohutian concepts of narcissism. Her essay is full of interesting insights, yet it is unfortunately dependent on a construction of Wilhelm’s childhood, the only part of his life not represented in the novella. In contrast, masochism is the center-piece for Weiss’s interpretation. But Weiss regretfully conflates Freud’s early theory of masochism with his later one. The early theory understands masochism in terms of sadism turned in upon the self, whereas the later theory posits a primary masochism in terms of the death drives. Though he recognizes that there is a distinction between Freud’s earlier and later theories, Weiss goes on to explain Wilhelm’s character in terms of the death instincts after drawing on the earlier theory. Furthermore, Weiss conflates both of these Freudian theories with Berliner’s object relational model of masocism, which neither understands masochism as an inverted sadism in the way Freud orignally argued nor posits a primary masochism.

As my criticism of Bousson’s essay suggests, any use of a diachronic theory—one that relies on some understanding of the individual’s development, especially its origins in infancy—creates another problem: these theories rely on experiences that are not represented in Seize the Day. According to almost every school of psychoanalytic theory, masochism’s source, if not rooted in the the very core of the psyche, is found in the earliest stages of psychological development. It seems that Bellow invokes masochism as a theme because its origins are at the core of the self, as a way of bringing the reader’s focus on what Wilhelm calls “the deeper things of life” (69). A problem arises, however, when readers go searching for evidence of infantile trauma that is not there. To sustain such interpretations, these critics have either projected theories onto the text or made inferences which the text cannot support. For example, Weiss attributes Wilhelm’s masochism to an “old unpaid bill for affection.” Weiss bases his tenuous notion of Wilhelm’s unhappy childhood on two lines: “Maybe, thought Wilhelm, I was sentimental in the past and exaggerated [Dr. Adler’s] kindliness--warm family life. It may have never been there” (26). First of all, Wilhelm’s thoughts are unreliable. He may exaggerate his memories of “warm family life,” but he certainly exaggerates his suffering. In short, there is no solid evidence from which to construct the complex developmental picture required to diagnose Wilhelm as a masochist either in terms of Kohut’s theories or of any conflation of Freud’s theories, such as those presented by Weiss.

Despite my argument above, there is a lesson regarding masochism to be learned from diachronic object relations theory that is applicable to Seize the Day. Object relations theorists argue that humans are essentially object-seeking and social, rather than pleasure-seeking and self-centered, as Freud argued. If humans are primarily object-seeking rather than pleasure-seeking, then masochistic behavior—i.e., finding pleasure in pain—could be understood simply as a mode of object-relations where suffering is used to secure the recognition and love of an indifferent, unloving, or cruel object. As I argue below in chapter IV, this kind of object-seeking applies to Wilhelm.

Though I have maintained above that there are many instances where Wilhelm does not desire suffering as an end in itself, there are a few incidents where certain opportunities to suffer seem to be irresistible for him. When he is faced with the decision of whether or not to invest all of his money with Tamkin, whom he suspects to be an untrustworthy charlatan, he can’t resist, and from “the moment when he tasted the peculiar flavor of fatality in Dr. Tamkin, he could no longer keep back the money” (15). Here, Bellow connects Wilhelm’s desire to suffer with fatality. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud argues the source of masochism is thanatos, the death drives, a complex of innate desires for the destruction of the self. In this project, I am interested in moving away from Freud’s later conception of masochism where the death drives are the source of self-destruction. Though I recognize that Wilhelm desires a kind of “fatality” in those things that bring him suffering, I shall argue that these desires derive from the psychological conflicts from which he suffers. The death that Wilhelm desires is the death of the neurotic or “false” selves fostered by these conflicts. The question I shall be interested in later is whether or not there is a self beyond these conflicts, one that might survive the death of the neurotic selves.

The connection between conflicts of character and self-destructive behavior was made by Karen Horney in her essay, "The Meaning of Neurotic Suffering (The Problem of Masochism)." She argues here that, even after the recognition that psychological conflicts are the source of masochistic desire, a psychological economy of masochism is elusive: "When the [characterological] functions of neurotic suffering are recognized the problem is divested of much of its mystery, but is still not completely solved." After confronting the problem of psychological economy presented by masochism, Freud changed the foundation of his theory by going “beyond the pleasure principle” and positing a primary masochism. Horney rejects a primary masochism, and argues that the excess of suffering can be understood as an attempt to get beyond the psychological conflicts that engender neurotic suffering. For example, Wilhelm invites situations that entail suffering, but the end he seeks is not necessarily the suffering itself. The suffering is what he is willing to pay for what it is he desires beyond suffering, his “ultimate need” perhaps. According to Horney:

Masochistic drives are neither an essentially sexual phenomenon nor the result of biologically determined processes, but originate in personality conflicts. Their aim is not suffering; the neurotic wishes to suffer as little as anyone else wishes it. Neurotic suffering, inasmuch as it serves certain functions, is not what the person wants but what he pays, and the satisfaction he aims at is not suffering itself but a relinquishment of the self.

The neurotic self is a suffering self, and, according to this theory, suffering is employed to get beyond suffering.

As Freud claimed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, self-destructive behavior brings us to the core of the self. The complete solution to the riddle of self-destructive behavior, for Horney, is still mysterious, or even mystical. She argues that her solution potentially connects masochism with Nietzsche's Dionysus, the Upanishad, the tortuous Sun Dances of the Plains Indians, and the Flagellants in the Middle Ages, since all of these concepts, rites and beliefs are based on a loss of self through immersion in pain or pleasure. Those who consistently invite suffering may be attempting to drown their conflicted selves in suffering. This solution, or dissolution, can explain why the “masochist” invites suffering and feels more pain than seems to be warranted. The suffering becomes an opiate for the psychological conflicts that have caused the neurotic character which appears to desire suffering.

Horney’s theory of neurotic suffering abandons the pleasure-pain inversion. Though their theories are dramatically different, both Horney and Freud saw “the problem of masochism” as an economic one. Freud’s solution to the problem, the death instinct, supposes that self-destruction is biologically determined. Horney rejects the death instinct. Her solution is two-fold: first, she recognizes the characterological functions of neurotic suffering; and second, she posits that the excessive suffering acts as an opiate for the pain of a conflicted self. I believe Horney’s solution works best when trying to understand Wilhelm’s character and “ultimate need.” I shall further develop these ideas in Chapter VI, “From Self-Effacement to the Relinquishment of the Self: The Function of Wilhelm’s Suffering.”

“Reading Otherwise”

Putting psychoanalysis above literature seems to be a common trend in psychoanalytic literary theory, one I wish to avoid in this project. The first psychoanalytic literary criticism was Freud’s interpretation of Hamlet in The Interpretations of Dreams. Freud describes Hamlet as a play that had baffled interpreters for centuries. What hinders Hamlet’s action? What makes him unable to “seize the day”? According to Freud, Hamlet is burdened by his œdipal guilt from taking action. From the evidence provided by Hamlet, Freud goes on to suggest that the protaganist’s œdipal guilt stems from Shakespeare’s own guilt, exacerbated by his father’s death just prior to the writing of Hamlet. Freud uses the play to support his claim of the ubiquity of what would be known as, ten years after the writing of The Interpretations of Dreams, the Œdipus complex. Freud ends this passage on Hamlet with the following modifying statement:

But just as all neurotic symptoms, and, for that matter dreams, are capable of being ‘over-interpreted’ and indeed need to be, if they are to be fully understood, so all genuinely creative writings are the product of more than a single motive and more than a single impulse in the poet’s mind, and are open to more than a single interpretation. In what I have written I have only attempted to interpret the deepest layer of impulses in the mind of the creative writer.

Though Freud recognizes the overdetermination of Hamlet’s inability to act, as well as the complexity of Shakespeare’s motives for creating the character, he asserts that his interpretation is the “deepest.” What has perplexed literati of the world for centuries, Freud professes to have mastered in one paragraph in The Interpretations of Dreams.

In his introduction to Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, Geoffrey Hartman expresses hope that “psychoanalytic studies [will] accept their mutual rather than masterful relation to literature.” In her introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis: the Question of Reading: Otherwise, Shoshana Felman echoes Hartman’s concerns:

While literature is a body of language--to be interpreted--psychoanalysis is considered as a body of knowledge, whose competence is called upon to interpret … literature’s function, like that of a slave, is to serve precisely the desire of psychoanalytical theory--its desire for recognition; exercising its authority and power over the literary field, holding a discourse of masterly competence, psychoanalysis, in literature, thus seems to seek above all its own satisfaction. (Felman, pp. 5-6)

Though I am uncomfortable with giving this kind of subjectivity to either psychoanalysis or literature, and I disagree with Felman’s Lacanian mastery of “the question of reading otherwise,” I strongly agree with Felman’s and Hartman’s message that literature has been subordinated to psychoanalysis in psychoanalytic literary criticism.

The kind of mastery Felman and Hartmann warn against, however, is hard to avoid. When does an attempt to understand become a will to master? Like the critics I criticize, I am using a psychoanalytic theorist’s ideas to understand Seize the Day. Horneyan theory is a body of theory, though not necessarily of knowledge. Though I recognize that it is literary in that it uses metaphor and narrative to conceive of and communicate human behavior, and that the signifiers associated with neuroses and conflicts in this theory have unstable relationships with their signifieds and referents, I am not willing to consider it as merely a “body of language” with no connection to the world of referents. Like much literature, it has a truth that I value, though this truth may be provisional and difficult to pin down. Even if this truth has been in flux within me, my relationship to this body of theory has been consistent enough to have shaped my understanding of my environment, and it is with this understanding of human psychology and relationships that I will attempt to understand Seize the Day. Every literary interpretation is a reduction of a text according to the myriad influences that make up the interpreters’ psychology.

The endeavor to understand Seize the Day according to its own terms that informs this interpretation is a strategy to avoid an overly masterful relation to this text. Other critics have tried to support theories dependent on a knowledge of childhood development when Wilhelm’s childhood is significantly absent from Seize the Day. Horney’s later theory is unique in that it does not require a knowledge of the events of one’s early childhood to understand one’s psychodynamics. Though she sees the origins of neurosis primarily in childhood development, Horney understands development as an ongoing evolution of character. Unlike Freudian or object relations theory, where adult behavior is determined to large a extent by the events and fantasies of childhood, Horney’s theory of the evolution of character subverts the determining power of these events, and view the developing human in a high state of flux well even into adulthood. Because of the complexity and overdeterminacy of adult behavior and its evolution, Horney focuses on how the individual’s character functions synchronically, in the “here-and-now” as Tamkin might say.

In his essay “Reichianism in Seize the Day,”Rodrigues asserts that “Bellow does not dramatize … the psychodynamics of Wilhelm’s masochism, but he does provide the reader with some hints.” Contrary to this assertion, I shall argue that Seize the Day, to a large degree,is a dramatization of Wilhelm’s psychodynamics. What is suggested by Rodrigues’ statement is that he could only finds hints that support his project of revealing the pervasive ifluence of Reichian theories on Seize the Day. Rodrigues claims that “Bellow obviously makes use of psychological insights, but he refuses to allow his creative imagination to be imprisoned by any one psychological system, even that of Wilhelm Reich.” While this statement contradicts the essence of Rodrigues’ essay, I believe it rings true, for the novella as a whole resists being reduced to “any one psychological system,” including Horney’s, and especially Freud’s or Reich’s. On the other hand, I also believe that Horney’s theories—among other psychoanalytic theories that have been used for interpreting Seize the Day—are the best suited to understanding this novella that has a profound relationship to psychoanalysis.

Horney’s Mature Theory

Horney argues that neurosis is a defense against “basic anxiety,” a feeling of “profound insecurity and vague apprehensiveness,” experienced when an individual does not develop a sense of belonging. Bernard Paris, the author of many works on Horneyan approaches to literature, points out that Horney’s concept of basic anxiety is “very close to and can be enriched by [R. D.] Laing’s notion of “ontological insecurity.” In Neurosis and Human Growth, Horney divides the defensive strategies against basic anxiety into two broad categories: interpersonal and intrapsychic. The interpersonal defenses include three movements in relation to others: the self-effacing or compliant person moves towards others, the expansive person moves against others, and the detached person moves away from others. A healthy person is able to move in all three directions spontaneously, while the neurotic will move compulsively with respect to others without consideration of the circumstances at hand. Each movement promotes different values: love for those that move toward others, mastery for those that move against others, and freedom for those that move away from them.

Though Wilhelm displays all of these moves at some time in Seize the Day, his dominant interpersonal coping strategy is to move toward others, to be compliant or self-effacing. The most prominent characteristic that Wilhem shares with the self-effacing type is his suffering with all its various sources and functions, especially that of getting the attention of loved ones. According to Horney, the central theme of the self-effacing person is “the appeal of love,” and “his idealized image of himself primarily is a composite of ‘lovable’ qualities, such as unselfishness, goodness, generosity, humility, saintliness, nobility, sympathy.” The self-effacing person moves toward others, “tends to subordinate himself to others, to be dependent on them, to appease them …Far from abhorring [helplessness and suffering], he rather cultivates and unwittingly exaggerates them …What he longs for is help, protection, and surrendering love.” Wilhelm screams for Olive to protect him from “that devil who wants his life” (117), and he yells at his father, “I expect Help!” (54). For the self-effacing person, a “premium is also placed on feelings—feelings of joy or suffering, feelings not only for individual people but for all of humanity…”. While Wilhelm walks in Central Park, he looks at the disfigured faces of people and, “all of a sudden, unsought, a general love for all these imperfect and lurid-looking people burst out in Wilhelm’s breast. He loved them. One and all, he passionately loved them” (84). Horney argues that the “compulsiveness of his expectations [of others] makes it impossible to be discriminating.” Wilhelm befriends Tamkin even though he is obviously untrustworthy, and he continues to return to his father for help when his father’s abuse is all he can expect. Horney writes of the self-effacing person: “Even though by bitter experience he may know that nothing good could possibly come from a particular group or person, he stills persists in expecting it—consciously or unconsciously.” Paralleling the themes of money/love in Seize the Day, Horney argues that

… just as in our civilization many people feel worth as much as the money they are ‘making.’ So the self-effacing type measures his value in the currency of love, using the word here as a comprehensive term for the various forms of acceptance. He is worth as much as he is liked, needed, wanted, or loved.

I shall show that Wilhelm wants to be cared for and loved more than he wants financial help.

According to Horneyan theory, the intrapsychic conflicts begin when the individual attempts to achieve an identity that is based on a “search for glory” rather than one based on the “real self,” which Horney defines as “the ‘original’ force toward individual growth and fulfillment, with which we may again achieve full identification when freed of the crippling shackles of neurosis.” This movement away from the real self towards an idealized self is what Horney called self-alienation. Out of any self-alienating search for glory develops a pride system consisting of neurotic claims made upon others, tyrannical “shoulds,” which are demands made upon the self, neurotic pride, and self-hate. As the energy that could be devoted to the achievement of self-realization is diverted into actualizing the idealized self of a search for glory, the “real self” becomes weakened and alienated from the actual self. Whereas the real self represents a possible self, the idealized self is an impossible self. With the establishment of an idealized self comes its corollary: the despised self, that which represents anything falling short of the ideal self. Seen from the heights of a value system based on the search for glory, the actual or empirical self of the neurotic becomes the object of intense scrutiny, revealing and magnifying all discrepancies between the actual self and the ideal self. The self-hate that this scrutiny engenders causes the neurotic to bolster his pride and then become more determined to achieve the ideal self. This intensifies the scrutiny of the actual self in terms of the idealized self until the gaps between the actual self and the despised self disappear as the actual self sinks farther away from the heights of the ideal self. This is a vicious circle or downward spiral. In the section “Inner Crowds, Inner Conflicts,” I show how Wilhelm’s psyche is populated by many different idealized selves and the corresponding despised selves. Wilhelm’s many names represent his search for and confusion that plagues his identity.

Chapter III

Paternal Reality: The Appeal of Mastery

Wilhelm’s primary relationships in Seize the Day are with Dr. Adler and Tamkin. Both men are metonymies of Seize the Day’s world, where mastery is considered valuable and worthy of reward, while suffering is disgraceful and deserving of stigmatization, and love falls out of the frame. In harmony with the expansive solution, Horney describes, both men, especially Dr. Adler, abhor “the idea of … being compliant, appeasing, or dependent” and consider Wilhelm’s suffering a sign of weakness. Whereas Tamkin preys on this weakness, Dr. Adler is ashamed of it. Though Wilhelm’s essentially self-effacing character seems to be at odds with his attraction to these expansive types, I shall try to show how his character and his attraction to these men are actually congruous with each other. Horney argues that the self-effacing solution “represents a move in a direction which is in all essentials opposite to that of expansive solution.” This is especially true with respect to the issue of pride. The expansive person’s pride is conspicuous, and he will challenge anyone who contests its legitimacy. The self-effacing type, however, must keep his pride under wraps because, according to Horney, “his very image of saintliness and lovableness prohibits any conscious feeling of pride.” Wilhelm has to suppress his pride if he is going to achieve his self-effacing, idealized self. Referring to the self-effacing type, Horney writes:

To love a proud person, to merge with him, to live vicariously through him would allow him to participate in the mastery of life without having to own it himself. If in the course of the relationship he discovers that the god has feet of clay, he may sometimes lose interest because he can no longer transfer his pride.

Wilhelm’s attachment to Dr. Adler and Tamkin, whose characters oppose his own, constitutes an attempt to live out his expansive desires vicariously in order to escape the self-contempt that the self-effacing aspects of his character would feel if he owned up to his latent expansive drives.

This chapter is devoted to understanding in detail Wilhelm’s relationship to these men, his primary father figures. Since a full appreciation of Wilhelm’s psychology can only be achieved within the context of these relationships, I begin this chapter with a section called, “Wilhelm and the World of Seize the Day,” which is devoted to explaining this context in general. Following are sections on Wilhelm’s relationship with his father and Tamkin. Wilhelm’s relationship with Tamkin, I believe, is the most telling with respect to the protagonist’s character; therefore, I have devoted the greatest attention to the section, “Wilhelm and Tamkin.”

Wilhelm and the World of Seize the Day

The post-World War II world of Seize the Day, which is primarily seen through the distorted lenses of Wilhelm’s eyes, appears to be a capitalist wasteland. Because Wilhelm associates this world with his father and Tamkin, I consider it the “paternal reality” of the text. Wilhelm wonders if it is “a kind of hell” (71) or a “Tower of Babel” since “it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood, not to know the crazy from the sane, the wise from the fools, the young from the old or the sick from the well” (83-4). The categories of crazy and sane are blurred by his vaguely articulated suspicion that the context these categories rely on might be insane itself, thus creating what Erich Fromm called a “pathology of normalcy.” The animal imagery throughout Seize the Day—wolves, hippos, chickens, birds—suggests a loss of humanity. Additionally, it is also a world where scientists and businessmen are valued. Dr. Adler, a “fine old scientist” (12) in the eyes of those who knew him—really, a detatched man and a cold father—was “idolized by everyone” (11). The only praise of Wilhelm Dr. Adler offers is when he brags to an old man about his son the “sales executive” with his salary “ up in the five figures somewhere” (13), a lie which Wilhelm overhears.

In this world, money is equated with life-giving blood and even love. Wilhelm thinks, “The money! When I had it, I flowed money. They bled it away from me. I hemorrhaged money” (40). Wilhelm tells his father the truth when he tells him, “you hate me. And if I had money you wouldn’t” (55). While Wilhelm is in a rage about his wife’s unceasing demands for money, she tells him that she has “great confidence in [his] earning ability” (112) instead of showing him the pity he desires. Money is the currency of all value in this world.

They adore money! Holy money! Beautiful money! It was getting so that people were feeble-minded about everything except money. While if you didn’t have it you had to excuse yourself from the face of the earth. Chicken! that’s what it was. The world’s business. If only he could find a way out of it. (36)

Though Wilhelm has tried to succeed in this world as an actor, a business executive, and a Wall Street marketeer, he now wants a “way out” because this world does not satisfy his desires.

Wilhelm biases his presentation of the world of Seize the Day. While many readers may be sympathetic to Wilhelm’s stressing of the importance of truth and love, they may also be skeptical of his reasons for emphasizing these values, since he himself is often untruthful, and since the love he expresses and desires results more from a kind of childish or neurotic dependency than maturity. It is likely that many American readers would be sympathetic to other values found in the world of Seize the Day as well. In Neurosis and Human Growth, Horney lists some values that she believes are healthy, although Wilhelm might take exception:

…having autonomous convictions and acting upon them, having the self-reliance that stems from tapping our own resources, assuming responsibility for ourselves, taking a realistic appraisal of our assets, liabilities, and limitations, having strength and directness of feelings, and having the capacity for establishing and cultivating good human relations.

Wilhelm lacks all of these attributes. Though his actions and words suggest that he would be sympathetic to the last value with its suggestion of love, it is a value he has failed miserably to embody. It may be from these positive qualities of autonomy and industry, often fetishized and distorted in our culture, that Wilhelm wants to escape, rather than from the world’s lack of love and truth. As money becomes a symbol for these attributes for Wilhelm, greed becomes an easy target for him while playing the role of the moralist. Just as these values concerning autonomy and self-reliance neurotically manifest themselves in Dr. Adler and Tamkin as expansive solutions, Wilhelm’s values of love and truth may be part of a neurotic, self-effacing way of coping with his environment.

According to Horney, whether values are healthy or neurotic depends on their source. If they emanate from the real self, they are healthy; if they emanate from some form of idealized self, they are neurotic and unhealthy. The question I am interested in here is why Wilhelm wants to “find a way out” of the world. Is it because of its vanity and greed, its lack of love and truth? Or is it because Wilhelm is not strong enough to stand on his own and seize the day? Are Wilhelm’s values of truth and love genuine, or are they part of a search for glory? I will return to these questions below, but they are helpful to keep in mind during the discussion of Wilhelm’s relationships that follows. Understanding his relationships with the other figures in Seize the Day helps to appreciate the nature of this character’s motivations.

Wilhelm and Dr. Adler

Dr. Adler “lived in an entirely different world from his son’s” (10). In Dr. Adler’s world money and appearances count, yet love, the highest achievement in Wilhelm’s ideal world, is absent. Dr. Adler is a retired internist. An internist must look beyond the body’s surface to see the disease inside. Ironically, Dr. Adler is indifferent to the cause of pain within his son. And judging from some of his diagnoses of its source—for example, “bed-trouble” and homosexuality (51)—he is accordingly ignorant of the sources of Wilhelm’s pain. Dr. Adler also seems to overvalue appearances, another irony for someone trained to see beyond them. Wilhelm reflects that for Dr. Adler, “style was the main consideration” (35). Contrary to his pride in the fiction of the “sales executive,” Dr. Adler is embarrassed about the real Wilhelm and wishes his son could “sweeten his appearance” (42).

Wilhelm muses, “he had always been a vain man” (12). But Wilhelm is more troubled by Dr. Adler’s coldness towards him than by his vanity. When Wilhelm begs for compassion from Dr. Adler, Dr. Adler is unmoved: “you might have told him that Seattle was next to Puget Sound …He behaved toward his son as he had formerly done toward his patients, and it was a great grief to Wilhelm” (11). Wilhelm wonders if his father has “lost his family sense” (11) and eventually concludes that he is “not a kind man” (110).

Wilhelm desperately wants some sign from his father that he cares. He seems to desire validation in the world of Seize the Day from a champion of that world. Yet his father does not care about him beyond society’s expectations of Dr. Adler as a father; and it is a society where, according to Wilhelm, the “fathers were no fathers and the sons no sons” (84). Dr. Adler only cares about his son insofar as Wilhelm is a reflection of himself as a father, but his caring does not go beyond what is required to maintain the appearance of being a good, pragmatic, principled father.

The pragmatic father of this world can justify denying his son financial help in order to teach his son a lesson about autonomy, industry, and the world’s business, even though he is a wealthy octogenarian with little to do with his money except hoard it. As Wilhelm sees it, the lesson his father tries to instill—that “everyone is supposed to have money” (30), especially a man in his forties—is unjust. In Wilhelm’s opinion, he is a “slave” to alimony and corporations that know that “a guy has to have his salary, and takes full advantage of him” (49). The lesson, according to Dr. Adler, is that “people who will just wait for help—must wait for help. They have got to stop waiting” (109).

Wilhelm expects special consideration for Dr. Adler because he is his son. Horney argues that neurotic claims “often are justified on cultural grounds. Because I am a woman—because I am a man—because I am your mother”—or, because I am your son. If Wilhelm is making neurotic claims, Dr. Adler may not be the unkind man Wilhelm believes him to be: he may be merely a father who feels harrassed by a son who can’t stand on his own feet. On the other hand, Dr. Adler may have lost “his family sense,” if he ever had it, since he is abusive when he denies Wilhelm help: “I can’t give you any money. There would be no end of it if I started … I want nobody on my back. Get off!” (55). This passage suggests that Dr. Adler is not only an expansive character, who brags about his son’s earning ability, but also a detatched character, who does not want to be burdened with other people’s troubles. Wilhelm’s relentless neediness is the very thing to make this type retreat. Here is an example of incompatibility between interpersonal movements: while Wilhelm’s dominant movement is towards others, one of Dr. Adler’s is away from others. This incompatibility creates resentment on both sides. Wilhelm cannot show resentment, since it would clash with his self-effacing values. This is not the case for Dr. Adler, however, whose last words in the novella are screamed at Wilhelm: “It’s torture for me to look at you, you Slob!” (110).

Though Dr. Adler understands Wilhelm’s request as one for financial support, Wilhelm does not necessarily want money from his father. Wilhelm writes a note to his father, “Dear Dad, Please carry me this month, Yours, W.” (74). To be “carried” connotes being cared for, like a child in a parent’s arms.

It isn’t a question of money—there are other things a father can give to a son …one word from you, just a word, would go a long way. I’ve never asked you for very much. But you are not a kind man, Father. You don’t give the little bit I beg you for. (109-10).

Wilhelm wants a sign of parental care from his father, a caring gesture, and recognition of him as an adult in his father’s world. He wants Dr. Adler simultaneously to treat him like a child—giving him special consideration as his son, caring for him—and like an adult. Yet his father is incapable of treating him as either a child or an adult—perhaps, because Wilhelm is neither completely. Demonizing Dr. Adler in a reading of this novella is problematic since the claims Wilhelm imposes on him seem to stem from values based on his self-effacing idealized self. Excusing Dr. Adler from responsibility for Wilhelm’s suffering, however, is also difficult, since Wilhelm’s request for his father’s concern, if nothing else, seems to be legitimate.

Wilhelm and Tamkin

Wilhelm turns to Tamkin for the sympathy, care, and validation he does not receive from his father. Earlier in Seize the Day, Wilhelm thinks, “His own son, his one and only son, could not speak his mind or ease his heart to him. I wouldn’t turn to Tamkin …if I could turn to him. At least Tamkin sympathizes with me and tries to give me a hand, whereas Dad doesn’t want to be disturbed” (10-1). Though Tamkin is a father-figure for Wilhelm, Tamkin’s sympathy is suspect, and his validation is only as good as his own legitimacy in the world, which never ceases to be in doubt for Wilhelm. Wilhelm imagines that he is being “carried” by Tamkin financially, through their investment in futures, and psychologically, through their pseudo-philosophical discussions about the nature of Wilhelm’s problems and the importance of the here and now. He conveniently disavows Tamkin’s obvious lies when he needs to believe Tamkin is speaking the truth. The self-effacing person, Horney explains, “cannot as a rule distinguish between genuine friendliness and its many counterfeits …[and] his fear of antagonism and possible fights make him overlook, discard, minimize, or explain away such traits as lying, crookedness, exploiting, cruelty, treachery.” Despite obvious evidence that Tamkin is a con man, Wilhelm is constantly debating with himself whether or not Tamkin is trustworthy: “Was [Tamkin] a liar? That was a delicate question. Even a liar might be trustworthy in some ways” (57). It is a delicate question for Wilhelm because he has deceived himself about Tamkin’s trustworthiness in order to imagine that he is gaining the sympathy and support he desperately needs. Wilhelm realizes that he is “a sucker for people who talk about the deeper things in life, even the way [Tamkin] does” (69).

Tamkin is part of the world Wilhelm wants to escape. Tamkin is portrayed as being at home in the wasteland: a vulture, a machine, and a devil. Tamkin has “bulging eyes” that were “sharp” (78), a “gull’s nose” (62), a “bald head” (9, 78), and “his shoulders rose in two pagodalike points” (62): “What a rare, peculiar bird he was, with those pointed shoulders, that bare head, his loose nails, almost claws, and those brown, soft, deadly, heavy eyes” (82). Tamkin is a scavenger hovering above Wilhelm on his “day of reckoning.” In another incarnation, he is a bird of prey, preying on Wilhelm’s conflicting desires. He is also described as a machine, with jaws that creak at the hinges; yet he ironically points to his chest with a knife and tells Wilhelm about the manifold human soul (70). To complete the myriad roles Tamkin plays, he “smiles like a benevolent magician” (81) and has “deceiver’s brown eyes” (62) that “wizardlike” (56) see inside Wilhelm. These protean identities share the characteristics of inhumanity that must repel one seeking love and human connection.

When it comes time to invest, Tamkin claims to be able to put up only three hundred dollars, though they are equal partners and they seem to have agreed to invest one thousand dollars. It does not occur to Wilhelm to invest only six hundred dollars instead of loaning Tamkin two hundred dollars for his share of the thousand. When the transaction is completed, Wilhelm has invested seven hundred dollars to Tamkin’s three hundred, and Tamkin has secured the investment leverage of one thousand dollars with relatively little risk. After this unbalanced arrangement is settled, Wilhelm agrees to surrender power of attorney to Tamkin, the rationale being that Tamkin is showing Wilhelm “how to work it.” With power of attorney over Wilhelm’s money, Tamkin can reinvest the thousand dollars however he wants. Thus Tamkin’s con becomes a Wall Street shell game, and indeed he moves the investment around any way he chooses. Tamkin casually informs Wilhelm at the exchange, “Oh, did I forget to mention what I did before closing yesterday? You see, I closed out one of the lard contracts and bought a hedge of December rye” (81). Wilhelm has resigned himself to his fate at this point; he doesn’t bother to question Tamkin’s decision. If he had not surrendered himself to his woes, he might have asked if the hedge was the same price as the lard contract. Moreover, it is doubtful Tamkin would have said a thing about the switch if rye had gone down.

Though his swidling may seem sophisticated, Tamkin is often a bumbling con man, and hardly a master of the larger world of Seize the Day. Dr. Adler and Mr. Perls—veterans of the world of Seize the Day—easily see through him. He needs a gullible character like Wilhelm, one who has obvious needs, especially the need to be duped, that can be manipulated in order to carry out his con and to feel masterful. Tamkin clumsily responds to Wilhelm’s desire to sell the investment—“I’m losing my taste for the gamble” (88)—by trying to manipulate his fears and needs: “If you wish I should sell I can give the sell order. But this is the difference between healthiness and pathology” (88). Wilhelm becomes angry. Wilhelm is sensitive to the subject of his sanity, especially after his father prescribed hydrotherapy for him at breakfast and he recognized “that the water cure is for lunatics” (44). When Tamkin sees that this tactic is a mistake, he tries another tactic that works: “I meant …that as a salesman you are basically an artist type. The seller is in the visionary sphere of the business function. And then you’re an actor, too” (88). Tamkin manipulates Wilhelm’s needs for self-esteem. Wilhelm desperately needs to have his positive self-images validated. Wilhelm characterizes himself as a “visionary sort of animal” (39), the descirption is ironic since he is often blind to the obvious. He frequently deludes himself that he was an actor in Hollywood, when he was really only an extra. Wilhelm’s self-esteem is very fragile. Tamkin regains the con by piling on Wilhelm more of what he wants to hear in order to keep him distracted while the shell game continues. Tamkin needs a dupe like Wilhelm for his shell-game con to succeed.

Tamkin eventually is able to get rid of Wilhelm by getting him to take Mr. Rappaport to buy his cigars, thus bringing the con to a close. Tamkin knows “dozen of people” in the exchange and was “continually engaging in discussions” (82). Wilhelm wonders about these discussions: “Was he giving advice, gathering information, or giving it, or practicing—whatever mysterious profession he practiced?” (82). Tamkin seems to have planned to get rid of Wilhelm with Mr. Rappaport to allow him free reign over the money and an opportunity to escape if the money is lost. First Tamkin manages to delay Wilhelm’s pulling out by talking about “the deeper things,” and then he arranges for Wilhelm to be kept busy while he works his “mysterious profession” and then escapes. When Wilhelm returns with Mr. Rappaport in tow, he has lost all of his money and Tamkin is gone.

Tamkin’s last words to Wilhelm are ironic. Speaking of Mr. Rappaport’s desire for Wilhelm to take him to buy cigars, Tamkin says, “He wants you …This is another instance of the ‘here-and-now.’ You have to live in this very minute, and you don’t want to. A man asks for your help. Don’t think of the market. It won’t run away” (100). It won’t, but Tamkin will. Ironically, Wilhelm has asked for Tamkin’s help, and all of Tamkin’s energies are directed toward making a killing at the market, a type of murder about which Tamkin warns Wilhelm. Though Tamkin spoke of “deeper things,” and Wilhelm was “profoundly moved” by his “revelations” (99), Wilhelm suspected “that Tamkin hadn’t made them his own” (82). Tamkin sees Wilhelm’s desire for care, his need to trust him, and his fears, and he smiles at them (64). Tamkin is glad because Wilhelm’s neurotic needs ultimately correlate to Tamkin’s desire to use Wilhelm’s money to increase his leverage on the market. Though, in a sense, Wilhelm surrenders his “self” to Tamkin, thus displaying a self-effacing attribute, Wilhelm’s desire to win on the market is a representation of an expansive solution. Ultimately, Wilhelm’s desire to master the world of money is played out in a self-effacing mode, where “his salvation lies in others” and “he craves to surrender himself body and soul.”

A comparison of Wilhelm’s relationship to his father and Tamkin reveals meaningful similarities and differences. Wilhelm hopes that both men will carry him, suggesting that Wilhelm desires to be in a subordinate, submissive or child-like role with both men—i.e., a self-effacing role. Wilhelm hopes to get money from both of them, but, more importantly, needs them to care for, love, and appreciate him. An important difference between Dr. Adler and Tamkin concerns their ability to understand Wilhelm, to imagine Wilhelm’s ideal world, and to appreciate his problems with the world of Seize the Day. Dr. Adler is completely a part of the world of Seize the Day; he is so unsympathetic to what he calls Wilhelm’s idealism (40) that he wonders if homosexuality is the problem (51). Tamkin, however, has a foot in both Wilhelm’s ideal world and the world that champions Dr. Adlers, though his footing in both is unsure.

A primary reason Wilhelm desperately desires to submit to Tamkin is that sympathetic aspects of Tamkin’s philosophy deeply move Wilhelm and help him to articulate his plight. This positive, almost wise Tamkin centers his philosophy on a concept of a multi-souled self, the two primary souls being the “real soul and a pretender soul” (70). In his first lecture to Wilhelm, Tamkin explains that the real soul concerns itself with love and truth, while the pretender is interested in “the social life” and “vanity” (70). Dr. Adler, who “had always been a vain man” (12), and for whom “style was the main consideration” (35), is the epitome of one kind of manifestation of a pretender soul. Despite its moments of eloquence, Tamkin’s lecture deteriorates as it progresses:

The true soul is the one that pays the price. It suffers and gets sick, and it realizes that the pretender can’t be loved. Because the pretender is a lie. The true soul loves the truth. And when the true soul feels like this, it wants to kill the pretender. The love has turned into hate. Then you become dangerous. A killer. You have to kill the deceiver … Who is the enemy? Him. And his lover? Also. Therefore, all suicide is murder, and all murder is suicide. It’s the one and identical phenomenon …This is the human tragedy-comedy. (71).

The primary purpose of this incoherent passage is not to enlighten Wilhelm, but to prevent Wilhelm’s doubts from ruining his con. As the “you” becomes ambiguous, the passage becomes muddled and represents the swishing of the shells in Tamkin’s con, though giving Tamkin credit for intentionality regarding the disconnected passages may be unwarranted. Indeed, Tamkin may be muddled in his thoughts, a little stupid. Another reason Tamkin’s philosophy is inchoate may be because he himself is another manifestation of the pretender, a victim of psychological conflicts and compromises. With his “deceiver’s brown eyes” (62), Tamkin is the deceiver that must be “killed,” and to whom people unhindered by pretender souls become dangerous. Like the pretender, Tamkin is a lie, and his eloquence is contaminated with his biases.

Regardless of Tamkin’s psychology and the reasons the passage is muddled, Wilhelm reacts in Tamkin’s favor: dazzled by the sound of the swishing shells in the form of passages on truth and love. He vaguely recognizes that Tamkin’s lecture is faulty, but he is still moved: “It was the description of the two souls that awed him” (71). Wilhelm suspects that his real soul suffers at the hands of his pretender soul and is awed by the themes of truth and love that Tamkin, skillfully reading Wilhelm, weaves throughout his philosophy.

Tamkin’s last lecture to Wilhelm, given over lunch, has the same strengths, weaknesses, and motives as his other lectures. The theme this time is Wilhelm’s suffering. Tamkin claims that he wants Wilhelm “to see how some people free themselves from morbid guilt feelings and follow their instincts” (97). This conscience-free doctrine is Tamkin’s rationalization for his guiltless, con-man modus operandi, and an essential part of the credo of the world of Seize the Day. In this lecture we also find the wise Tamkin who awes Wilhelm with his imperative: “don’t marry suffering.” Those who do, “sleep and eat” with suffering, “just like as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it’s adultery” (98). Wilhelm reflects that for these people, “suffering is the only kind of life they are sure they can have, and if they quit suffering they’re afraid they’ll have nothing” (98). Though only obscurely recognizing himself in this statment, he is taken in by its truth. There seems to be a part of Wilhelm that recognizes that if his self-effacing solution is taken away there will be no “real soul” or real self left remaining.

After Tamkin gets Wilhelm to pay the bill for lunch—Wilhelm later remembers that he paid the bill last time—Tamkin gives his last oration:

“I’m optimistic in your case …You don’t really want to destroy yourself …[there are] only two classes of people …Some want to live, but the great majority don’t.” This fantastic Tamkin began to surpass himself. “They don’t. Or else, why all these wars? …The love of the dying amounts to one thing; they want you to die with them. It’s because they love you. Make no mistake.”

Wilhelm is “profoundly moved.” One reason for this may be that Wilhelm has been thinking about his father’s future death while yearning for his love. His father had told him, “It doesn’t enter your mind that when I die—a year, two years from now—you’ll still be here” (54). This statement gives Wilhelm the impression that his father thinks it is unfair that the better man should die first, which unearths many buried and conflicting emotions of hate and sadness that make it almost impossible for Wilhelm to cope. Wilhelm has told Tamkin bitterly,

My father’s death blots out all other considerations from his mind. He forces me to think about it, too. Then he hates me when he succeeds. When I get desperate—of course I think about money. But I don’t want anything to happen to him. I certainly don’t want him to die. (92).

Using Tamkin’s logic, however, Wilhelm can also think of his father’s death wish—i.e., I, Dr. Adler, should live and you, Wilhelm, should die—in terms of “the love of the dying,” thus transforming his father’s selfish and hateful statement into a sign of his love. Furthermore, with Tamkin’s love-of-the-dying formulation, Wilhelm can distort his own death wish directed at his father in terms of the love of a devoted son. This powerful, conflicted, and deluded solution moves Wilhelm.

Tamkin’s philosophizing has a profound effect on Wilhelm throughout the novella. In the beginning of Seize the Day, Wilhelm is aware that “his routine was about to break up and he sensed that huge trouble long presaged but till now formless was due” (4). Tamkin’s philosophy paradoxically delays and hastens the feared forming of the “huge trouble.” It delays it by providing rationalizations that sustain Wilhelm’s idealized selves, yet hastens it by keeping him focused on “deeper things.” Tamkin works to keep the trouble unformed long enough to steal Wilhelm’s money, but brings the trouble on when he needs to make Wilhelm feel weak and needy. Tamkin’s philosophy, when he’s not rash, touches on critical themes for Wilhelm, which works both to “construct and destruct”—borrowing from Tamkin’s interpretation of his poetry—Wilhelm’s modus operandi. This philosophy is ultimately motivated, however, by his need to continue and complete his con. His ideas and “treatment,” convoluted and deceit-motivated as they may be, ultimately fuel the break-up of Wilhelm’s routine, and help to form the huge trouble. Ironically, Tamkin tells the truth when he tells Wilhelm that he is treating him. (73). Tamkin’s treatment seems to be straightforward: he deprives Wilhelm’s marketeering persona and his expansive drives of the money they need to survive. The pretender soul is “the society mechanism” in a society fueled by money; and, the “huge trouble long presaged” happens after Wilhelm has lost all of his money. The question remains whether or not Tamkin’s treatment of killing the pretender will leave any soul.

Wilhelm’s response to Tamkin’s admission that he has been treating him recapitulates the conflict between the self-effacing and expansive sides of Wilhelm’s character. Wilhelm is in the position of patient with both Dr. Adler and Tamkin, and the patient is an apt representation of the self-effacing type. The expansive part of Wilhelm, however, resents being dominated by both doctors, especially his father who showed his patients indifference. Wilhelm claims that he is “of two minds” (73) regarding Tamkin’s treatment. In my view, one mind is expansive and the other is self-effacing. He is “somewhat indignant” (73) that Tamkin assumes he wants to be treated, especially by someone who is so untrustworthy. On the other hand, that “the doctor cared about him pleased him. This was what he craved, that someone should care about him, wish him well. Kindness, mercy, he wanted” (73). Wilhelm’s self-effacing desires are frustrated by his father’s indifference and gratified by Tamkin’s care; his expansive desires are frustrated by the indignity of being presumed to need treatment.

The conflict between expansive and self-effacing drives is represented by the relationships between the predominantly self-effacing and compliant Wilhelm, and the predominantly expansive and aggressive Dr. Adler, Tamkin, and the world of Seize the Day. In Dr. Adler we find a representation of success in this world of money and style, and, in Wilhelm, resistance to this version of success. Wilhelm is conflicted because his expansive self drives him to want success in this world—this part of Wilhelm wants to win on the market with Tamkin, wants to live up to his father’s boast of a “sales executive,” and wanted to make it big in Hollywood. The self-effacing part of Wilhelm, however, finds success in this world unacceptable because it finds the world and what it represents repugnant to its values.

Chapter IV

Maternal Ideal: The Appeal of Love

The world of Seize the Day is a very masculine world, and Wilhelm feels less than a man due to his inability to succeed in it. Because the masculine, as I have shown, is associated with emotional sterility in Seize the Day, I feel that there is a correlation between the absence of the feminine in the novella and the general absence of love in its world. Exploring this absence helps us to understand whether Wilhelm’s values of love and truth are sincere or neurotic coping solutions. Though never present in body, Wilhelm’s mother, Margaret, and Olive play a significant role as the women in Seize the Day. Whereas his mother has been dead for around twenty years, Margaret hovers just off stage on the other end of a phone line, and Olive represents a kind of mythical last hope for Wilhelm. Part of Wilhelm’s last soliloquy is “…And Olive? My dear! Why, why, why, why—-you must protect me against that devil who wants my life …” (117). Earlier Wilhelm thinks, “I’ll start again with Olive. In fact, I must. Olive loves me. Olive—” (115). Why Olive can occupy the position of last hope requires an understanding of Wilhelm’s relationship with the other women in his life, primarily with his mother. I shall first explore Wilhelm’s relation to his mother and then to the various mother-figures, including Dr. Adler, unlikely as this may seem. I shall then try better to understand his self-effacing solution in terms of his need for maternal care.

Before meeting Dr. Adler for breakfast, Wilhelm remembers how his father had said to him, using his childhood nickname, “Well, Wilky, here we are under the same roof again, after all these years” (27). Though glad about his father’s affable manner toward him, Wilhelm understands his father’s statement as a question, “Why are you here … You have brought me all your confusions. What do you expect me to do with them?” (27). Wilhelm’s response, however, puts his father on the defensive, “…how many years has it been? …Wasn’t it the year Mother died? What year was that?” Wilhelm asks this though he knows “the year, the month, the day, the very hour of his mother’s death” (27). Dr. Adler answers, but he is three years off. Wilhelm begins to shiver and display some of his usual array of nervous tics, which include unintended movements, slurred speech, and chest congestion, among others. Dr. Adler half-heartedly asks his son for clemency for this crime of memory on account of his age. But since he is preoccupied with his son nervous jitters—Wilhelm is “a regular mountain of tics” (28)—he does not seem genuinely concerned with receiving Wilhelm’s pardon. Part of Wilhelm grants his father clemency, but another thinks, “If you were to ask him what part of the year he had interned, he’d tell you correctly” (27). The exchange ends cryptically with Wilhelm proclaiming, “Yes, that was the beginning of the end, wasn’t it, Father?”

Wilhelm’s relationship to his mother must have been profound considering his many references to her throughout Seize the Day. Remembering his decision to leave college for Hollywood, he thinks, “Mama was the one that tried to stop me, and we carried on and yelled and pleaded …Poor Mother! How I disappointed her” (15). This passage suggests that not disappointing her would mean making it in the world, and that Wilhelm feels accountable to her. The narrator tells us that, “she was afraid he was going to destroy himself” (16), which implies that she had been concerned about his self-destructive tendencies. We are also told that “he had gotten sensitive feelings, a soft heart, a brooding nature, a tendency to be confused under pressure” (25) from his mother. When Tamkin tells Wilhelm that he can expect a long life because of his father’s long life, Wilhelm responds, “I think I inherit more from my mother’s side, and she died in her fifties” (62). Wilhelm suppresses his anger when he thinks of the vandals who have broken the bench near her grave, and mourns her death throughout. These details suggest that Wilhelm feels a consonance with his mother’s character that he does not feel with his father’s.

“The end” Wilhelm speaks of to his father can be understood as a world without maternal love, a kind of love that is not based on conditions of success. What Wilhelm seems to wants from his father is unconditional love. Yet the world that admires Dr. Adler is a paternal world of conditions. Wilhelm’s ideal might be called a maternal ideal of love based on the qualities of compassion Wilhelm probably experienced with his mother—the “family sense” that Dr. Adler has lost. Dr. Adler brags about a fantasy version of his son as the sales executive, but is repulsed by the real being. Wilhelm desperately hopes that his father will “carry” him through his difficulties, setting aside his rules, simply because of the fillial relationship. When Tamkin asks if he loves his father, Wilhelm responds, “Of course, of course I love him. My father. My mother —” (92). Wilhelm’s goal of returning to his father’s care seems to be an attempt to substitute his father for his dead mother.

The absence of women in the world of Seize the Day represents a general absence or devaluation of the themes that traditionally have been associated with femininity by our patriarchal culture, such as vulnerability, submissiveness, nurturing and love. Wilhelm seems unconsciously nostalgic for a time when these things defined his life, when he could cry out his suffering and his mother would come, and when the only condition for parental care was suffering. Dr. Adler is an unlikely substitution for this mode of object relations since he abhors Wilhelm’s suffering as a sign of weakness and effeminacy. When he diagnoses Wilhelm as a homosexual, he attributes these “feminine” themes to Wilhelm in pathological terms. Dr. Adler seems to conclude that what he interprets as Wilhelm’s effeminacy, as well as Wilhelm’s attraction to himself and other father figures, are signs of homosexuality. Since homosexuality seems to be a perversion in his traditional mind, Dr. Adler’s diagnosis suggests that he considers fillial intimacy to be perverse. In other words, Dr. Adler can only think of Wilhelm’s “maternal ideal” as a perversion.

The roles played by the other women of Seize the Day support my “maternal ideal” reading of Wilhelm’s desired world. Olive acts as potential mother substitute; Margaret was a prior substitute. When he suffered from chest weakness after blowing the bagpipes as an extra in a movie, “Margaret nursed him” (89) and read to him “somewhat unwillingly” (90) Keats’ Endymion, a poem about a young man kept eternally youthful through sleep. Wilhelm remembers some lines from this poem : “Sweetest sorrow! / like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast!” (89). Margaret is reluctant to nurse him and play to his fancies of eternal youth because she wants him to grow up: she tells Wilhelm, “You’ve got to stop thinking like a youngster” (112). The many allusions to nursing, to being carried, and to Wilhelm as a child suggest that Wilhelm is stuck in an infantile mode. He imagines Olive as his last hope of clinging to this mode.

Wilhelm is portrayed as an infant or child throughout Seize the Day. Though in his forties, Wilhelm still seems to be caught in the negotiations of the infantile or early childhood stages of development, where the Ericksonian theme is “basic trust,” and where “basic confidence” in self and others is fostered according to Horney’s theory. Aspects of Wilhelm’s suffering are consistant with this reading. His suffering often can be understood as an adult transformation of the universal first communication of the need for attention expressed by crying infants. To secure the love of the primary care-giver—his mother, Margaret, Dr. Adler—Wilhelm suffers and cries out.

Wilhelm’s expectations of marriage are another example of infantile behavior. When his father asks what went wrong between Wilhelm and Margaret, he responds, “She was one way and I was another. She wouldn’t be like me, so I tried to be like her, and I couldn’t do it” (51). His desire for mirroring others is reminiscent of the time before recognition of the division between self and other. As Bousson points out in her essay, “The Narcissistic Self-Drama of Wilhelm Adler: A Kohutian Reading of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day,” Bellow anticipates recent psychoanalytic theory based on narcissism in the character of Wilhelm.

There are other allusions to Wilhelm’s arrested development or childishness. We are told that “he looked much younger than his years” (6), that “he had been slow to mature” (7). He chides himself, “it’s time I stopped feeling like a kid toward [father], a small son” (11). Resigning himself to his seemingly unwanted adulthood, Wilhelm says to himself, “Good-by, youth! Oh, good-by those marvelous, foolish wasted days” (29).

By gambling, Wilhelm combines the maternal and paternal modes of seeking recognition, his self-effacing and expansive drives. If he wins with his investment—like all neurotic investments, it is an investment in futures—he can win his father’s recognition through money, and he can buy his father’s reified love. If he loses, he suffers and he can hope—all the while deluding himself—for his father to transform into a mother-figure. The dominance of the infantile mode and self-effacing solution is revealed when he makes sure that he loses by becoming partners with Tamkin, and then giving him power of attorney. A short time after he loses his money, he finds himself in a chapel, (116) an environment where his values of truth and love might be transformed into Truth and Love, and his suffering might be appreciated.

Wilhelm’s ideal world is one where the values of the self-effacing solution are prized. Wilhelm’s desire for parental care drives him to attempt expansive solutions in order to win his father’s favor. All of these attempts are ultimately undermined by Wilhelm’s more powerful self-effacing trends, which appear to dominate his character. Wilhelm’s expansive drives stem from his desire to receive validation as an adult and a man from his father. His self-effacing drives stem from his memory of “marvelous days” (28) as a child under his mother’s care. The competition of solutions for dominance produces many psychological conflicts. The conflict between Wilhelm’s self-effacing desires and a cultural environment that rewards only expansive values is an introjection of the conflict between himself and his environment. These conflicts engender Wilhelm’s self-hate, and it is “his heart’s ultimate need” to transcend these conflicts in order to gain self-respect, and even achieve glory.

Chapter V

Inner Crowds, Inner Conflicts

In this section I shall give more details of Wilhelm’s intrapsychic conflicts, and of the competition between his self-effacing and expansive solutions. Wilhelm’s various combinations of self-effacing and expansive drives are represented by the careers he pursues. A close investigation of these careers reveals expansive drives that are blended with, and then subverted by, self-effacing drives. Wilhelm’s psychology is fragmented by the conflict between these two genres of drives. His many names represent the fragmentation of his psychology. These names correspond to the four selves in Horney’s theory: the real, the idealized, the actual, and the despised selves. His many career personas and the selves that coincide with each name comprise Wilhelm’s inner crowd. In the final paragraph, “sea-like music” pours into Wilhelm, “where he had hidden himself in the center of a crowd” (118). Because this crowd consists of diverse characters, there are bound to be inner conflicts. What follows is an attempt to understand this crowd and its conflicts.

Though Wilhelm Adler changed his name to Tommy Wilhelm when he went to Hollywood, his father still refers to him by his childhood name, Wilky. Early in Seize the Day, Wilhelm reflects on these names:

Wilhelm had always had a great longing to be Tommy. He had never, however, succeeded in feeling like Tommy, and in his soul had always remained Wilky. When he was drunk he reproached himself horribly as Wilky. “You fool, you clunk, you Wilky!” he called himself. He thought that it was a good thing perhaps that he had not become a success as Tommy since that would not have been a genuine success. Wilhelm would have feared that not he but Tommy had brought it off, cheating Wilky of his birthright …He had cast off his father’s name, and with it his father’s opinion of him. It was, he knew it was, his bid for liberty, Adler being in his mind the title of the species, Tommy the freedom of the person. But Wilky was his inescapable self. (24-5)

In Tommy, Wilhelm seeks freedom from the name “Adler,” which as a “species” is associated with the animal imagery in Seize the Day, symbolizing the loss of humanity in Dr. Adler’s world. The move toward Tommy, ironically, is a retreat from freedom; it is a move toward the rigidity of alienation of the self that begins with a search for glory. Tommy represents an idealized self; it is, however, not the only idealized self. Tommy represents Wilhelm’s attempt to actualize the ideal self of his actor phase. Each phase has a unique idealized self.

Achieving what “Tommy” represented for Wilhelm would have produced a parallel success in his maternal and paternal worlds. He never achieves them because of his personal limitations, and because they have mutually exclusive components. Despite his failure to achieve his ideal selves, they still represent the standard by which he judges himself, as evidenced by the sharp rebukes he gives himself throughout Seize the Day: “Ass! Idiot! Wild boar! Dumb mule! Slave! Lousy, wallowing hippopotamus!” (55). His actual self, what I call Wilhelm, is clumsy, child-like, and has slurred speech: basically one of “the average” (22) population he is so frantic to escape. Looking from the lofty heights of actor or sales executive, Wilhelm the actual self becomes Wilky the despised self. The perceived gap between this ideal self and the despised self is a neurotic’s source of self-hate.

The self he cannot name is the real self. He muses that it might be the name his grandfather had given him, Velvel, but then recants because “the name of the soul …must be only that—soul” (72). The naming of the soul seems to represent to Wilhelm the naming of something holy and transcendent. In this respect Wilhelm is in harmony with the foundation of Judaism. In his book, You Shall Be As Gods, Erich Fromm writes,

[The] God who manifests himself in history cannot be represented by any kind of image, neither by an image of sound—that is, a name—nor by an image of stone or wood … This command is one of the most fundamental principles of Jewish “theology.”

Not naming his “true soul” indicates Wilhelm’s desire to have within himself a connection with transcendence.

The many idealized selves Wilhelm tries to actualize, including Tommy, provide more evidence of Wilhelm’s fragmented psyche. Horney’s theory of intrapsychic dynamics is based on a search for glory where the neurotic defends himself against feelings of worthlessness and isolation with an imperative “to lift himself above others.” This is the beginning of the process Horney calls, “alienation from the self,” where the idealized self saps the energy otherwise devoted to the real self. Horney symbolizes this beginning, in terms opposed to Wilhelm’s desire for something godly within himself, as a pact made with the devil:

The devil …tempts a person who is perplexed by spiritual or material trouble with the offer of unlimited powers. But he can obtain these powers only on the condition of selling his soul or going to hell. The temptation can come to anybody, rich or poor in spirit, because it speaks to two powerful desires: the longing for the infinite and the wish for an easy way out …the easy way to infinite glory is inevitably also the way to an inner hell of self-contempt and self-torment. By taking this road, the individual is in fact losing his soul—his real self.

Wilhelm’s last thoughts are, “Why, why, why—-you [Olive] must protect me against that devil who wants my life. If you [devil] want it, then kill me. Take, take it, take it from me” (117). That Wilhelm seems to have always been strongly “perplexed by spiritual and material trouble,” explains why he seems familiar with “that” devil who wants his life. In other words, he made this pact well before his day of reckoning, the day when one is called upon to pay one’s debts. Wilhelm’s day of reckoning is the moment of a battle between various desires within himself—desires that combine, separate, recombine in an evolution of different solutions for coping with life. For Wilhelm, these solutions are actor, sales executive, Wall Street marketeer, and martyr. At the core of each solution is a different pact with the devil.

Early in Seize the Day, Wilhelm looks back on his life and thinks that he would have been better off doing hard labor all his life, “hard honest labor that tires you out and makes you sleep” (7). Though he seems to desire the “happy oblivion” (118) of sleep more than the simplicity and honesty of the labor, he remembers regretfully how he decided to distinguish himself by leaving college for Hollywood. Becoming an actor would have satisfied Wilhelm’s desire for validation of his uniqueness. It also offered fame, style, and money, which entails expansive values his father would respect.

Acting also appeals to Wilhelm’s self-effacing desires. Maurice Venice, the talent scout who discovered Wilhelm’s picture in a college yearbook, had decided not to recommend him after he took the screen test. Before the screen test, however, Venice tries to convince Wilhelm that acting is his calling by appealing to Wilhelm’s various desires, including his desire for fame, for ease of life, and for the validation of his uniqueness, his lovableness, and his saintly martyrdom achieved through suffering: “This way, in one jump, the world knows who you are … you become a lover to the whole world. The world wants it, needs it … One fellow cries, [a] billion sob with him” (22). “Let yourself go,” advises Venice, “Don’t be afraid to make faces and be emotional …when you start to act you’re no more an ordinary person …you don’t behave the same way as the average” (22). As an actor, Wilhelm pictures himself as that unique person “the world had named to shine before it,” the one chosen to suffer for billions.

After the screen test, Wilhelm had to force Venice to affirm that he “might make it out there” (14). He found out later that a recommendation from Venice was the kiss of death in Hollywood. A few years after this attempt at glory failed, Wilhelm worked as an orderly in a Los Angeles hospital. (24). Working at a hospital, especially in such a subordinate position, represents Wilhelm’s humbling return to Dr. Adler’s world.

Eventually Wilhelm develops a new concept of glory, one that his father can respect: the sales executive. When Wilhelm catches his father bragging about his son the “sales executive” (13), Wilhelm is amused and thinks, “Why, that boasting old hypocrite. He knew the sales executive was no more” (13). And Wilhelm, who had been a sales representative—i.e., a salesman—knew that he had never been an executive at all. Wilhelm quit his job at Rojax when they made someone’s son-in-law an executive instead of him. As with his own father, the father-figure of the Rojax corporation did not recognize Wilhelm as the honored son. The self-effacing desires that had been satisfied via his dependency on the corporate father were frustrated to the point that Wilhelm could not return. Later Wilhelm reflects, “Feeling got me in dutch at Rojax. I had the feeling I belonged to the firm, and my feelings were hurt when they put Greber in over me” (56). Though Wilhelm’s search for glory as a sales executive had maintained Wilhelm for many of the twenty or so years between leaving school and losing his job, this expansive solution came toppling down when his self-effacing “feelings” were hurt.

The sales-executive strategy is replaced by the marketeer strategy. Though expansive drive to make money is still a part of this strategy, the opportunity to return to self-effacing themes that involve surrender and suffering plays a larger part. Wilhelm names what he imagines to be his “inescapable self,” (25) Wilky, the name his father has called him since he was a child. To a large degree, this self that is stuck in the infantile mode of suffering for love and care. It has been satisfied during the sales-executive phase through Wilhelm’s dependent and childish attachment to the company that makes children’s furniture. By gambling as a marketeer, where losing is more likely than winning and almost a certainty when one relies on someone like Tamkin, Wilhelm makes a full return to this inescapable self. Moreover, receiving money from the market is like receiving love from the paternal reality: this solution would result in the paternal world loving Wilhelm almost unconditionally. Through Tamkin, Wilhelm surrenders himself to the larger body of Wall Street. The “huge trouble long presaged” (4) to which Wilhelm refers results from Wilhelm’s attempt to combine the desires of his ideal world with the real world, which in turn force him to forge a solution with drastically conflicting themes. In the marketeer phase, there is no way to reconcile his conflicting desires for success and failure, and his opposing expansive and self-effacing drives; hence, the marketeer idealized self is short-lived. This phase also represents a return to the primacy of self-effacing solutions, and the desperation of his expansive desires. The “fatality” Wilhelm senses in Tamkin appears to be the death of his expansive pride system.

As the expansive desires painfully die, and the desires for success in the paternal world die with them, Wilhelm attempts to recombine his surviving desires into a coherent role for a new drama of glory. Many of those that make up the crowd in Wilhelm’s psyche are a combination of self-effacing and expansive solutions. The actor self combined fame and wealth with suffering for the viewers; the corporate executive combined submission to a corporate family and the prestige of a high salary and the coveted position as Vice President; the markateer combined submission to Tamkin, the hopes of receiving validation from a world of money-love, and the prospects of enough wealth to make Dr. Adler proud, or at least not ashamed. All of these ideal selves fail when the expansive aspects of them fail.

Unlike previous casting—where Wilhelm’s self-effacing desires might have cast him in a secondary role within a generally expansive solution, such as with Rojax or Tamkin—Wilhelm’s desire for uniqueness resurfaces, and he imagines himself in a leading role in the last phase of his idealized selves. The role in this last phase, which I have called the martyr phase, finds Wilhelm moving toward an ideal self that is Christ-like. As in his acting phase, he imagines himself as the one chosen to suffer for billions. Wilhelm thinks, “You had to forgive. First, to forgive yourself, and then, general forgiveness. Didn’t he suffer from his mistakes far more than his father could?” (26). Wilhelm also defends the common people against Tamkin’s reduction of the world to those who want to live and die: “there are also kind, ordinary, helpful people” (72). Tamkin places Wilhelm in the role of “sick humanity” in his poem. Wilhelm feels most sure that Tamkin is a fraud when Tamkin bumbles his con by trying to usurp Wilhelm’s chosen role for himself: “…my real calling is to be a healer. I get wounded, I suffer from it …I am only on loan to myself. I belong to humanity.” The following passage is the strongest evidence that the archetype of Wilhelm’s final search for glory is Christ:

And in the dark tunnel, in the haste, heat, and darkness which disfigure and make freaks and fragments of nose and eyes and teeth, all of a sudden, unsought, a general love of all these imperfect and lurid-looking people burst out in Wilhelm’s breast. He loved them. One and all, he passionately loved them. They were his brothers and his sisters. He was imperfect and disfigured himself, but what difference did that make if he was united with them by this blaze of love? As he walked he began to say, “Oh my brothers—my brothers and my sisters,” blessing them all as well as himself. (85).

The archetype is suggested again in the end when Wilhelm cries forcefully for a stranger. The role of Christ also combines expansive and self-effacing drives: mastery of the world through love and suffering.

Christ is also the ultimate model for the self-effacing solution and the desire for access to the infinite through suffering. Wilhelm’s desire for truth has become a desire for a truth that transcends his environment. According to Horney, “If a man’s thinking and feeling are primarily focused upon the infinite and the vision of possibilities, he loses his sense for the concrete, for the here and now.” (Was Tamkin’s treatment on track?) As Gordon suggests in his essay that connects the last passage of Seize the Day with lines from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” Wilhelm wants his heart consumed in an “artifice of eternity.” We are told that Wilhelm is someone “who has to believe that he can know why he exists. Though he has never seriously tried to find out why” (39). Ironically, Wilhelm makes a pact with the Devil to become Christ-like, or at least “visionary” or saintly.

Wilhelm’s many names—Wilky, Wilhelm Adler, Tommy Wilhelm, Velvel—and the various roles in which he casts himself—actor, sales executive, marketeer, martyr, Christ—comprise the crowd that surrounds his real self. The many conflicts between these demanding individuals in the crowd cause Wilhelm to suffer and sap the energy he might use to realize his “true soul.” Seize the Day explores the rise and fall of many of these characters in the crowd. Towards the end of Wilhelm’s day of reckoning, the expansive solutions represented by many of these characters have failed, and the self-effacing drives, though present, seem to have diminished. Wilhelm’s crisis finds him without an artificial mode of coping with the conflicts between his desires and his environment, or between the many selves that populate his inner crowd.

Chapter VI

From Self-Effacement to the Relinquishment of the Self:

The Functions of Wilhelm’s Suffering

When Tamkin’s treatment is finished, Wilhelm’s hopes for validation from the paternal world disappear with his money. He is left with pent up emotions— especially hostility towards those who have hurt him, and injured pride—that conflict with the values of love, humility, and forgiveness that charactreize his fundamentally self-effacing character. Wilhelm’s infantile mode of suffering remains as well. It is not only a remnant of his “inescapable self”; it also functions within his self-effacing psychology as a way of coping with his hostility and pride. Wilhelm’s suffering also functions to “relinquish the self.” In this section, by exploring the functions of his suffering, I shall try to understand how Wilhelm copes with the conflicts between his pride, hositlity, and the values his Christ-like idealized self.

The self-effacing type must repress his pride because, according to Horney, “his very image of saintliness and lovableness prohibits any conscious feeling of pride.” Since overt pride is contradictory to the saintly martyr’s role, pride is pushed underground. The prohibition of conscious pride gives self-contempt free reign. When this type of neurotic fall short of their ideal of saintliness, self-contempt is engendered and they try harder to actualize the ideal self. A vicious circle is created when the neurotic tries to counterbalance his self-contempt by setting a more unrealistic ideal. An expansive person might counterbalance his self-contempt with pride. The self-contempt of the self-effacing solution, however, is unchecked by pride since, according to their value system, pride itself is something of which to be ashamed. Without pride to compbat self-contempt, self-effacing types can suffer from an unchecked downward spiral of self-respect.

Another problematic issue for self-effacing types is hostility toward others. Since their self-respect is dependent on others, failed relations often produce self-contempt. This is the case with Wilhelm’s relationships with his father, Tamkin, and Margaret. When a relationship is responsible for the downward spiral of self-respect from which self-effacing types suffer, hostility is produced. Since hostility, like pride, is contradictory to the general themes of the self-effacing solution, it must be repressed if the neurotic solution is to be sustained.

Prohibiting conscious pride and hostility forces the real self of this type of neurotic more underground, thus making him become more determined by neurotic “solutions.” A combined function of suffering for the neurotic—one that can slow up this downward spiral—is to punish them by making them feel guilty, while excusing himself from the responsibility of his failures. The suffering of the self-effacing type, according to Horney, “accuses others and excuses himself!” The accusing of others allows the self-effacing type to vent his hostility; excusing himself allows him to compensate for his lack of self-respect without feeling proud.

Wilhelm uses suffering to accomplish both of these ends. Throughout Seize the Day, he displays his suffering to accuse his father and wife of treating him with a lack of “family sense.” The novella begins with an ambivalent statment by the narrator regarding Wilhelm’s ability to conceal his troubles. Though Wilhelm believes in his delusion of begin an actor that he is able to hide his suffering from the outside world, the reality is that he cannot because he uses it to vent his hostility and avoid responsiblity for his failures.

Wilhelm also uses his suffering to avoid his responsibilities. He parades his tattered state to his father as an excuse for not having looked for another job. He tells his father after being out of work for weeks without looking for a job, “I could stand a rest after going so hard. You know that’s true, Father” (39). Wilhelm pleads with Margaret to let him off the hook for his support payments: “You must realize you’re killing me” (112). After she refuses, she tells him that she has, “confidence in his earning ability” (112). Wilhelm response is “Margaret, you don’t grasp the situation. You’ll have to get a job” (112-3). When she refuses again, he begs her:

“Margaret, go easy on me. You ought to. I’m at the end of my rope and I feel that I’m suffocating. You don’t want to be responsible for a person’s destruction …And it’s something I can never understand about you. How you can treat someone like this whom you lived with so long. Who gave you the best of himself. Who tried. Who loved you.” (113-4).

According to Wilhelm, he should be excused from his responsibility to support her because he once loved her and he is now suffering, and his suffering is her fault. Most significanly, Wilhelm’s uses his suffering as excuse for not performing his duties as father. During the breakdown of all his solutions, one of his last appeals is to his children: “What’ll I do about the kids—Tommy, Paul? My children” (117).

Though Wilhelm’s suffering might alleviate some of his pent up hostility, it cannot satisfy his grandiose pride merely by excusing him from the responsiblity for his failure. A second function of suffering, with respect to coping with pride, is what Horney calls “relinquishment of self” in her earlier work on neurotic suffering. She argues that, though suffering has “strategic value” for the neurotic, such as accusing others and excusing oneself, the neurotic “often suffers more than is warranted by the strategic goal, tends to exaggerate his misery, to submerge himself in feelings of helplessness, unhappiness and unworthiness.” This excess of suffering, according to Horney, serves the purpose of relinquishing the self, a more extreme form of self-effacement than the “strategic” self-effacing solution. In other words, Horney’s general theory of suffering, from her earlier essay to her mature theory, centers on the effacement of the self. The earlier form, what she later called “self-extinction,” is an explanation of the excess of suffering the neurotic displays and feels; the later form, the self-effacing solution, is what she had earlier described as “strategic.”

Wallowing in suffering allows the neurotic to transcend the oppressive demands he has put upon himself to achieve glory:

…when he dwindles to nothing in his own estimation, the categories of success and failure, superiority and inferiority cease to exist; by exaggerating his pain, by losing himself in a general feeling of misery or unworthiness, the aggravating experience loses some of its reality, the sting of the special pain is lulled, narcotized …it means that though suffering is painful, abandoning one’s self to excessive suffering may serve as an opiate against pain.

The pain referred to here is the pain engendered from unchecked self-contempt; the crucial idea being that the need for self-respect is dissolved as “the categories of success and failure” dissolve in a “sea of tears.” Horney writes in Neurosis and Human Growth that the self-effacing type “craves to surrender himself body and soul, but can do so only if his pride is broken.” In the earlier essay, she associates this phenomenon of “abandoning one’s self to excessive suffering” with the Dionysian cults of ancient Greece, the Sun Dances of the Plains Indians, and the Flagellants of the Middle Ages. Among these groups it was believed that suffering could be used to get beyond the self in order to access a spiritual or primal substratum which the self blocks off to consciousness. Horney argues that the “obtaining of satisfaction by submersion in misery is an expression of the general principal of finding satisfaction by losing the self in something greater, by dissolving the individuality, by getting rid of the self with its doubts, conflicts, pains, limitations and isolation.”

In this chapter I have tried to show the functions of suffering in relation to the self-effacing types repressed hostility and pride. Hostility is vented by making others feel guilty for one’s suffering. This strategy doesn’t work with Dr. Adler or Margaret, who are fed up with Wilhelm’s woes. With respect to pride, the suffering of the neurotic has two functions: to relieve him of the burden of responsibilty for his failures, and, more radically, to relinquish the self with its conflicts and pride by drowning it in suffering. I read the complex ending of Seize the Day with respect to this complex relationship between pride and neurotic suffering.

Chapter VII

Dissolving Conflicts: The Meaning of the Ending

In this section I will explore two interpretations of the ending that attempt to bring together the various themes I have discussed earlier. These readings emphasize different interpretations of Wilhelm’s suffering, and of the last words regarding his “ultimate need.” They also use the water imagery that pervades Seize the Day differently, and each incorporates Horney’s theory of the “relinquishment of self” in a distinct way. In what I call the “toward psychosis” reading, Wilhelm’s psychotic break from reality allows him to transcend the conflicts created by a world that is hostile to his mode of suffering for love. The second reading, “toward salvation,” argues that Wilhelm’s encounter with the corpse allows him to experience what Horney calls “true suffering,” which leads to a kind of rebirth or baptism of his real self. I believe that the ambiguity of the ending creates a text where both readings can be tenable and convincing.

Both readings precede from the injury done to Wilhelm’s neurotic pride when he encounters the corpse. For those who aspire to immortality, confronting mortality can be traumatic. Wilhelm’s encounter with the corpse in the final scene is an overdetermined representation of this kind of trauma. It seems that the corpse represents much for Wilhelm: humanity, his father, himself, and the futility of his pride. When he sees himself, he sees his mortality. When he sees his father, he sees that even this wasteland “god has feet of clay,” thus revealing his previous desire to surrender to Dr. Adler as futile. Most significantly, Wilhelm’s recognition of his mortality damages his already fractured sense of uniqueness, and painfully reveals the impossibility of his grandiose ideals, including the lingering martyr solution .

The image of the corpse can be read as a symbol of the death, or near death, of Wilhelm’s neurotic solutions, of all his pride systems, and his self-effacing solutions. But what is remaining? After a life-time full of idealized selves sapping the real self of the energy it needs to be actualized, or even to maintain its existence, is there enough of a real self left for Wilhelm to begin again? Is there any real self or real pride remaining that might allow him to carry on? In my “toward salvation” reading, I argue that there is, and that this is what carries the burden of the “true suffering” that follows. In my “toward psychosis” reading I argue that there is not. That, as Wilhelm recognized, there was nothing beyond his very basic mode of suffering.

Toward Psychosis

Wilhelm cannot imagine, and often avoids, having a life without troubles. After Dr. Adler tells Wilhelm that he keeps his sympathies for “real ailments” (42), Wilhelm becomes indignant. He warns himself not to respond, “Lay off, pal. It’ll be an aggravation” (43). To avoid responding, however, would be to avoid his troubles: “From a deeper source …came other promptings. If he didn’t keep his troubles in front of him he risked losing them altogether, and he knew by experience that this was worse” (43). When Tamkin warns him not to “marry suffering,” his response is to admit to himself that there was “a great deal in Tamkin’s words.” Regarding those that are married to suffering, Wilhelm thinks, “suffering is the only kind of life they are sure they can have, and if they quit suffering they’re afraid they’ll have nothing” (98). On one level, he knows this, as he admitted before, “by experience” (43); but, on another level, he refuses to acknowledge how perfectly this insight applies to himself. The suffering he refers to in these passages is not experienced; it is kept “in front of him.” This alienated suffering is neurotic.

What is unalienated suffering? Suffering can either solve the self-effacing person’s pride-engendered problems by enabling him to evade responsibility for failures, and also by dissolving them in a sea of tears. Or, once the self’s pride is diminished, suffering can become real or “true” according to Horney:

Only when the pride system is considerably undermined does [the neurotic] begin to feel true suffering. Only then can he feel sympathy for this suffering self of his, a sympathy that can move him to do something constructive for himself. The self pity he felt before was a rather maudlin writhing of the proud self for feeling abused. He who has not experienced the difference may shrug his shoulders and think that it is irrelevant—that suffering is suffering. But it is true suffering alone that has the power to broaden and deepen our range of feelings and to open our hearts for the suffering of others.

True suffering requires the absence of idealized selves and the presence of a real self to experience it, and bear its burden.

Wilhelm’s suffering changes in the last passages of Seize the Day. The quality of that change is dependent on whether or not a real self has survived Wilhelm’s long duration of self-alienation. After Wilhelm encounters the corpse, he experiences the death spasms of his neurotic solutions:

What’ll I do? I’m stripped and kicked out …Oh, Father, what do I ask of you? What’ll I do about the kids—-Tommy, Paul? My children. And Olive? My dear! Why, why, why, why—-you must protect me against that devil who wants my life. If you want it, then kill me. Take, take it, take it from me.”

This jumbled paroxysm of desperation signifies the death of many of those that make up Wilhelm’s psychological crowd. His desperate call to Olive represents his last hope for a dependent relationship where he might be able to suffer and be loved. His most fundamental self—his inescapable self or infantile mode—has been torn from him. According to this reading, there is nothing left of his real self after Wilhelm’s fundamental self is “taken” by “that devil”; and, therefore, there is no real self to support “true suffering.”

The change in Wilhelm’s suffering, as it becomes deeper and more intense after the above passage, indicates a change in the function of his suffering, from “strategic” suffering to suffering that indicates a yearning for the “relinquishment of the self.” The following passages create the image of Wilhelm shriveling as his self of suffering is painfully drained of its essential tears:

The source of all tears had suddenly sprung open within him, black, deep, and hot, and they were pouring out and convulsed his body, bending his stubborn head, bowing his shoulders, twisting his face, crippling the very hands with which he held the handkerchief. His efforts to collect himself were useless. (117-8).

The emptying of tears represents the emptying of a self of suffering. Wilhelm’s bodily contortions are somatic representations of a relinquishment of the self.

Wilhelm’s “submersion in misery” has allowed him to get “rid of the self with its doubts, conflicts, pains, limitations and isolation.” The novel ends with the following lines:

The flowers and lights fused ecstatically in Wilhelm’s blind, wet eyes; the heavy sea-like music came up to his ears. It poured into him where he had hidden himself in the center of a crowd by the great and happy oblivion of tears. He heard it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need. (118).

Wilhelm’s real self sinks past the “torn sobs and cries” of his infantile mode, the foundation of his self. He experiences a radical regression past infancy, returning to a womb-like existence where there is no separation between inside and outside, self and other, and, therefore, no conflict—where there is no self.

His “heart’s ultimate need” is satisfied in this psychosis because the conflicts that cause him to lose self-respect no longer exist in his Yeatsian “artifice of eternity.” When his self-effacing solutions are torn away, so are his values for truth and love. Wilhelm’s “way out” (36) of Dr. Adler’s world is to sever his connection with the reality—no more need for truth—that is full of the people that are so difficult to love and be loved by—no more need for object love. Whatever is left of his values of truth and love becomes completely egocentric, radically subjective. The religious setting, where suffering is admired, may help Wilhelm to rationalize that his psychological break with reality is actually the spiritual transcendence for which he has longed. Severed from a world hostile to his fantasy of a holy and “true” soul, which he would not name in fear of idolatry, he can begin to bring it into this new “reality” where there is nothing to threaten its livelihood.

As suggested, Wilhelm makes a pact with the devil to become Christ. According to this reading, Wilhelm has made so many pacts with the devil that, when the day of reckoning comes, there is little left to pay off the debt. His break with reality may seem like a heaven where his ultimate needs are consummated, but it actually constitutes the hell of psychosis. If Wilhelm becomes psychotic after his move toward psychosis in the end, it is because “that devil” neurosis has gotten his payment in full by alienating the real self until it died. He will “Take, take it, take it from” (117) Wilhelm, “it” being the real self.

The word “sank” is critical for the “toward psychosis” interpretation where Wilhelm’s real self drowns in order to fulfill his “ultimate need” of transcending conflicts. Seize the Day is filled with imagery of water. The “sea-like” music comes up to his ears and pours into him. His conflicts are dissolved in a sea of tears. “Sank” carries a note of finality, as if he is certain to drown. When Wilhelm finds out that he has lost all of his money, he holds back the tears, but “his unshed tears [rise and rise and he looks] like a man about to drown” (104). Earlier Wilhelm predicts that the “waters of the earth are going to roll over” him. (77) In the beginning, he compares himself to a hippo, a beast that is more at home in the water than on the ground, and usually more submerged than not. For Wilhelm, water is equated with the sorrow of his suffering and with drowning. According to this reading, Wilhelm has drowned his conflicts, and his self that exists in the world, in a sea tears.

Toward Salvation

But the theme of drowning may lead as well to resurrection. Wilhelm is profoundly moved when he remembers a line from Milton’s Lycidas, “Sunk though he be beneath the wat’ry floor …” (13). This allusion to a poem with themes of drowning and resurrection, is helpful in understanding Wilhelm’s fear and desire concerning drowning. His fear of drowning may be understood as a profound, unconscious fear that his real self is being drowned by his neurotic selves, and the suffering they create. His hope, influenced by his desire for infinity, is that drowning leads to a kind of spiritual resurrection.

After Wilhelm’s neurotic pride has been subverted by the symbol of mortality he confronts at the funeral, his suffering changes. Again, we are told, “He cried at first softly and from sentiment, but soon from deeper feeling” (117). According to this reading, his sentimental crying is over the death of his neurotic solutions, his last bit of “rather maudlin writhing of the proud self for feeling abused.” His deep crying is the first sign of Horneyan “true suffering.”

The “other things and different things” that are torn from him are the elements of his inescapable self: his neurotic pride and self-effacing solution. Wilhelm’s panic—“What’ll I do? I’m stripped and kicked out …Oh, Father, what do I ask of you? What’ll I do about the kids—-Tommy, Paul? My children. And Olive? My dear!”—represents a spasm of his infantile mode of suffering for love. After this, when “the source of all tears” springs open, his head is bent, his shoulders are bowed, his hands are crippled, and “his efforts to collect himself [are] useless” (117-8). His convulsive crying is fueled by the uncovering of an abused and abandoned “real self.” That this real self is alive is suggested by the comparison made by bystanders at the funeral between the dead man and Wilhelm. As they wonder what Wilhelm’s relation is to the dead man, one suggests that they are brothers, while another rejects this: “They’re not alike at all. Night and Day” (118).

Though Wilhelm is very much alive, this symbol of his own mortality reveals the futility of his previous searches for glory. The ideal selves and pride systems that stem from these various searches for glory have been torn away from him, one by one, since he failed in Hollywood. As he cries, he can no longer “collect” these old selves together. The last neurotic self to remain is the martyr, bent on suffering and his own uniqueness, and in harmony with his inescapable self. His neurotic suffering and his sense of uniqueness both fail in the end, bringing down the martyr, transcending the “inescapable” self, and subverting neurotic pride. The change in Wilhelm’s suffering, when “the source of all tears” springs open, is from an alienated mode to one that has it’s source in the real self: Wilhelm experiences “true suffering.”

What happens to Wilhelm’s pride? What remained of his neurotic pride after his encounter with the corpse is dissolved by his “sea of tears” in a bacchanal of suffering where the “categories of success and failure” are transcended via immersion in suffering. Here the “relinquishment of the self” is the relinquishment of neurotic selves. In this reading “the waters of the earth” are regenerative, as they would be in a wasteland. Wilhelm’s neurotic attempts to be in harmony with his wasteland produced neurotic selves that sapped the real self of its life force. Though Wilhelm’s desire to “find a way out” of this wasteland was at least partially based on rationalizations of love and truth, these rationalizations were accompanied by his real self’s real desire for love and truth. Dr. Adler suggestion that Wilhelm try hydrotherapy is an allusion to water’s curative qualities. The waters of the final scenes—tears, sea-like music—suggest a kind of baptism. Though the word “sank” suggests a final drowning, the allusion to Lycidas suggests that resurrection may be possible after drowning. The water in this reading symbolizes a baptism of the real self born anew.

One might argue, however, that the line from Lycidas drifts into the narrative through Wilhelm’s memory, which makes the possibility of salvation being wishful thinking great. If this is so, moreover, such a wish for redemption stems from his desire for to merge with the infinite, a desire that is at the core of his search for glory, and, therefore, at the core of his neurosis. Regardless, it seems to me that the evidence is balanced, and the allusions are vague, so that making any rigid choice between these readings would be suspect of wishful reading. If a choice were made, it would be one between sanity and insanity. These categories are not just subverted by Wilhelm’s many references to their ambiguity, they are also made problematic by the beauty of some of the themes of his neurotic “maternal ideal,” and some of the odious values of the “sane” “Paternal reality.” Horney reveals how “the appeal of love” can be neurotic, but can we be certain that this is the case with Wilhelm’s love? Since there is less evidence of any kind of self beyond neurosis in Wilhelm, than I would choose the “toward psychosis” reading if pressed. That the possibility of health in the end remains plausible, however, makes the text rich. Ultimately, there is no way of telling if Wilhelm had enough “real soul” left to be resurrected, if that resurrection was only in his mind, or if it did not happen at all. One of the three mysteries of Seize the Day, the ending, must remain a mystery.

Chapter VIII

Conclusion

My goal has been to shed some light on Seize the Day by investigating three important and neglected issues: the functions of Wilhelm’s suffering, “his heart’s ultimate need,” and the meaning of the ending. I found these issues were either superficially treated or not appreciated in relation to each other in the criticism I encountered. Wilhelm’s suffering is complex. It is a mode of object relations that seems to stem from infancy, modeled on a baby crying for his mother. It is part of a search for glory as a martyr or even a Christ-figure. It serves to accuse others by making them feel guilty, and excusing himself because he is so pitiful. And in the end, it serves to drown his pride and conflicted self in a sea of tears. Wilhelm’s conflicted self engenders “his heart’s ultimate need” to transcend conflict and actualize a self of which he can be proud. One conflict is between his self-effacing and expansive desires; another is between his frail humanity and an environment that sees suffering as a sign of weakness and will not recognize any of his grandiose notions about himself as a “visionary,” an actor, a sales executive, or the one chosen to suffer for billions. The ultimately ambiguous ending, whether read as psychotic or not, is certainly salvific, though probably in an imaginary sense only. Hopefully, I have shown how these mysteries work together, and how the common element to understanding all of them is Wilhelm’s character.

The strength of Seize the Day is that the ambiguity of the ending keeps the reader asking questions because answers can only be inferred from a cornucopia of allusions. Seize the Day proves to be a “writerly” text just as Sarrasine ironically proved to be in Barthes’ brilliant work, S/Z. The weakness of Seize the Day, however, is its absence of health without drowning. Those who do seize the day in the novella tend to do it in destructive and deceitful ways. Bellow’s allusion to Lycidas suggests that the only salvation is beyond this world full of neurotics with their searches for glory and pride, an ideal world on the other side of drowning. Through Wilhelm and his other neurotic characters, Bellow shows the reader how not to act out the imperative of the title. This, however, is far from a lesson in how to seize the day, how to live in the here and now. But Bellow probably would have become a rabbi if he were interested in such a prescriptive mode rather than the more descriptive mode of a novelist.

But is Seize the Day descriptive? After Tamkin describes human existence as a “tragedy-comedy,” Wilhelm replies, “Well, there are also kind, ordinary, helpful people. They’re—out in the country. All over. What kind of morbid stuff do you read, anyway?” (72). Besides Freud and “Korzybski,” (73) Tamkin probably read some literature like Bellow’s too. Though I am self-conscious about aligning myself with Wilhelm, it seems that Bellow, like Freud, has difficulty imagining ordinary health, the kind that people do sometimes experience without drowning their ordinary pride in a sea of tears.

Endnotes

Bibliography

Alhadeff, Barbara. “The Divided Self: A Laingian Interpretation of Seize the Day.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 3 (Spring, 1977): 16-20.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970.

Bellow, Saul. Seize the Day. New York: Penguin Books, 1956.

Bouson, J. B. “The Narcissistic Self-Drama of Wilhelm Adler: A Kohutian Reading of Seize the Day.” Saul Bellow Journal 5 (Spring-Summer, 1986): 3-14.

Cooper, Arnold M. “The Narcissistic-Masochistic Character.” Essential Papers on Character Neurosis and Treatment. Ed. R. F. Lax. New York: New York University Press, 1989. 288-309.

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey et al. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press and the Institutes of Psychoanalysis, 1953-74.

Fromm, Erich. The Sane Society. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1955.

- - - . You Shall Be As Gods. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1966.

Fuchs, Daniel. “Bellow and Freud,” Studies in Literary Imagination 17.2 (Fall, 1984): 59-82.

- - - . “Sieze the Day.” Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision. Durham: Duke University Press, 1984. 79-97.

Gordon, Andrew. “The Hero as Sucker in Saul Bellow’s Early Fiction.” Saul Bellow Journal 6 (Winter, 1987): 47-63.

- - - . “Shakepeare’s The Tempest and Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ in Seize the Day.” Saul Bellow Journal 4 (Fall-Winter, 1985): 45-51.

Horney, Karen. “The Meaning of Neurotic Suffering (The Problem of Masochism).” The Neurotic Personality of Our Time. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1937. 221-39.

Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and abridged by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus. New York: Basic Books, 1961.

Kiernan, Robert. F. “Seize the Day (1956).” Saul Bellow. New York: Continuum, 1989. 57-75.

Kulshrestha, C. Saul Bellow: the Problem of Affirmation. New Delhi: Arnold- Heinemann, 1978.

Pifer, Ellen. “The Heart and the Head: Sieze the Day and Mosby's Memoirs.” Saul Bellow Against the Grain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. 79-95.

Porter, M. Gilbert. “Seize the Day: A Drowning Man.” Whence the Power? The Artistry and Humanity of Saul Bellow. St. Louis: University of Missouri Press, 1974. 103-126.

- - - . “The Scene as Image: A Reading of Seize the Day.” Saul Bellow: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. E. Rovit. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975. 52-71.

Rodrigues, Eusebio. “Reichianism in Seize the Day.” Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. S. Trachtenberg. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1979.

- - - . “Sieze the Day.” Quest for the Human: An Exploration of Saul Bellow's Fiction. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1981. 81-107.

Shechner, Mark. “Down in the Mouth with Saul Bellow.” After the Revolution: Studies in Contemporary Jewish American Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. 29-35.

Stout, Janis P. “Suffering as Meaning in Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day.” Renascence 39 (Winter, 1987): 365-73.

Weiss, Daniel. “Caliban on Prospero: A Psychoanalytic Study on the Novel Seize the Day, by Saul Bellow.” Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed. I. Malin. New York: New York University Press, 1967. 114-41.

Wilson, Jonathan. “Seize the Day.” On Bellow's Planet. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985. 97-111.

Yeats, William Butler. “Sailing to Byzantium.” Selected Poems and Three Plays of W. B. Yeats. Ed. M. L. Rosenthal. New York: Mcmillan, 1962.

Self and Suffering in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day: A Horneyan Intrepretation

Related Blog Posts on ***Seize the Day*, Psychoanalysis, and Relationality**

1. Feminist Critique of ***Seize the Day*: Psychoanalysis, Relationality, and Embodied Care**

2. ***Seize the Day*: The Post-Holocaust Everyman and the Crisis of Relationality**

3. ***Seize the Day: Relational Disintegration and Moral Masochism—Toward a Mitsein* Ontology**

4. Revisiting ***Seize the Day*: Feminist Critiques, Embodied Care, and the Gendered Foundations of Relationality**

5. Book Proposal: Losing Our Grip: Rereading Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day in Trump’s America