Making Sense of Jonathan Bowden’s Life & Mind from Projection in His Literature
His Mental State

1,087 words

Charisma and creativity tend to be associated with mental instability. A detailed examination of the lives of highly eminent men by the psychiatrist Felix Post entitled “Creativity and Psychopathology” found that this was very frequently the case, especially among artists and writers. Jonathan Bowden was most famous for his scintillating public speaking and, as I argued in his biography Shaman of the Radical Right: The Life and Mind of Jonathan Bowden, it seems probable that this ability emerged from Bowden having serious mental health problems. In order to cope with these, he created a kind of narcissistic false self which oozed confidence and inspired people. Indeed, it in inspired people to the extent that, for some of his followers, all ability to reason is lost when it comes to Bowden and any dispassionate analysis of Bowden means that you must be jealous of him or that you are an enemy of their cause.

As I explored in the last article on Bowden, projection is very common way of dealing with aspects of ourselves that we find too painful to admit. We project them onto other people, in whom we notice them, and satisfy ourselves that at least we are not as bad as them. From a therapeutic perspective, we can explore, and attempt to deal with, these difficult aspects of ourselves by exploring them in other people. So, when a writer does examine particular themes in other people it may give us some insight into his own psychology.

Bowden’s twenties are nebulous. There are a number of years where we simply don’t know what he was doing with himself. We do know that he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia towards the end of his life and we know that he told a number of friends that this was not the first time he had been hospitalised due to severe mental health problems. A number of friends suspected that he was extremely traumatised by his mother, who was possibly a paranoid schizophrenic herself or had some personality disorder that can manifest in similar symptoms such as Borderline Personality Disorder. Bowden variously told people that he’d been in every situation you could imagine with his mother except sexual, he never knew what she’d be like when he arrived home from school and that she once set fire to the curtains. She died when he was fifteen and this appears to have further traumatized him. After I published the book, a supposed friend of Bowden’s, who was livid that I had dared to write this book (I suspect I know who it is) told me that Bowden had confided in him that he was a manic depressive.

In this regard, Bowden’s analysis of a female relative of his, in his book Fury, is potentially extremely telling with regard to what Bowden went through himself. As I explored in the last article, Bowden gives his subjects false names, which often barely disguised who they were. His father, for example, is “the Archdeacon” – a relatively senior cleric; his father having been a bank manager. This relative of Bowden’s, who he calls “Gabriella,” “. . . suffered from a form of clinical depression which had been diagnosed as such and that doctors were attempting to cure with a mixture of therapy and drugs. Gabriella has always exhibited—to my mind—a certain moroseness; a tendency towards depression of a particular sort—coupled with a type of wildness and excitability—which was just the other side of depression and withdrawal.” This sounds very much like Bowden, according to the friends of his to whom I spoke. Bowden was excitable and jolly but would then go through periods of being withdrawn, during which they would hardly see him at all.

Bowden continues, with regard to Gabriella:

According to a hypnotherapist, who had a lot to do with her during this time, the death of her father when she was five years of age had a considerable effect on her, an appreciably greater effect than most people realized at the time. Perhaps it was at this time—when she was still a very young child—that a certain schism occurred; a type of rupture in her personality—the beginning of a lost, waif-like, and tormented existence.

Once more, his fascination with Gabriella’s condition is likely partly stimulated by the fact that it so clearly mirrors his own. Bowden’s mother died when he was fifteen and it seems that he never really got over it.

One of the points which has come to light about Bowden is that he never worked; he lived off a small allowance from his father, though Bowden told people who was a millionaire property investor. In this regard, his comment on his relative really does sound like some kind of self-awareness via another person; a person similar to him; projection:

Ultimately though, my father and Sybil will have to face the fact that they may have a somewhat wounded daughter—a misanthrope in reverse—for many years to come. As a result, Gabriella may remain in the family home for many years, and she may be restricted, at least for the foreseeable future, to a sedentary and somewhat retarded existence. It is also questionable whether Gabriella could ever marry, at least in her present state…

This sounds remarkably like the bachelor Bowden who used to pretend he was married with children.

“Although it must be said that Gabriella is suffering from a type of nervous depression—a neurotic position—which is cyclical and ever-present,” writes Bowden. This, of course, is the essence of manic depression.

It is as if Gabriella is taken over by some outside force, some force outside herself which is strong, sinuous and ugly, and incapable of being removed easily. All of a sudden, she will be convulsed by one particular anxiety—usually a relatively unimportant matter—which takes on a significance out of all proportion to its actual size. Such an anxiety is felt to be all-important and unforgiving, and it will not allow an individual like Gabriella to relax for a moment. This recurrent anxiety, such as it is, leads to repeated panic attacks—states of aloneness and isolation—which cannot be dealt with in any way except through psychiatric treatment.

I suggest that the mystery of Bowden’s “missing years” is now firmly solved, though the explanation was likely before. He was suffering from bouts of depression which left incapable of either working or studying. Following Felix Post’s analysis of highly creative people, we really shouldn’t be surprised by this.