How depression, guilt governed the psyche of J. Robert Oppenheimer, ‘destroyer of worlds’

Once, 14-year-old J. Robert Oppenheimer, a frail boy with shaggy, long hair went to a summer camp that should have been a mountain paradise of fun and delight, ended tragically for him when other boys stripped him naked, painted his buttocks and genitals fluorescent green and left him locked in an ice-house overnight to freeze. Oppenheimer, often an easy pick for bullies owing to his agreeable traits, refused to fight back.

He neither complained and nor did he leave the camp. Instead, he wrote to his parents later that the other boys were teaching him the “facts of life”. Many decades later, when the prodigious scientist saw the death and destruction the atomic bomb wreaked at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he saw himself straddling across an impassable gulf of triumph and guilt, a dilemma that was not just situational, but the seeds of which were rather sowed deeply in his childhood.

Oppenheimer grew up in a protective environment, his father was a wealthy textile importer and mother a conspicuous painter. He and his brother Frank grew up in an elite household at 155 Riverside Drive apartment. The opulent household had two maids, chauffeur-driven vehicles, and the original exhibits of Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso embellished their living room. The cushioned environment at Robert’s household created for him a lack of numerous socio-emotional experiences that one is subjected to in the absence of material privilege.

Signs of mental distress

But Robert’s privileged upbringing allowed him to battle his loneliness in a cocoon he wove by his intellectual propensities and a quest for answers. “I needed physics more than friends,” he confessed later in his life. Robert was shy, and always engrossed in books and his classmates name-called him “Cutie”. “I was an unctuous, repulsively good little boy. My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things,” his biographers Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin quote him saying in American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005). Robert’s protective cocoon at home gave him “no normal, healthy way to be a bastard”.

Robert’s parents were anxious and wanted to send him out amongst the other boys of his age. However, their anxieties did Robert no good. During his time at Camp Koenig, where the young Robert endured merciless bullying, his only friend later recounted he was uncannily engrossed in the writings of George Eliot that summer. Children who do not have a lot of companionable peer exchanges often tend to cater to their social needs by creating a world of their own. So did Robert. He developed an array of interests in mineralogy, philosophy and eastern theosophy. He used intellectualisation as an ego defence to cope, which Sigmund Freud defines as riveting oneself deep into factual and reasonable expanse while grossly brushing aside the emotional facets.

For Robert, throughout his life, mental health was a perpetual struggle. He started experiencing initial bouts of depression at the age of 14, and suffered depressive ruminations and anxiety throughout his teen years. The signs of mental distress stayed with him throughout and witnessed a major culmination when he was at Cambridge.

A case of acute dissociation

Robert shared a history of friction and confrontations with one of his professors Patrick Blackett, a British experimental physicist, whose work on cloud chambers, cosmic rays, and paleomagnetism, fetched him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1948. The tiff stretched to an extent when he once allegedly injected Potassium Cyanide into an apple that was lying on Blackett’s desk. Robert was charged with an attempt to murder. However, once again his father’s influence and riches saved him from being convicted.

Through the Freudian lens, this anecdote can lead us to an understanding of Robert’s Thanatos — death instinct — dominating his psyche. Robert might as well have subliminally projected his wish to die onto his professor. And, surprisingly, such incidents were not rare in Robert’s life.

At Cambridge, one of his friends, Francis Fergusson, once noticed that Robert was feeling morose. In a bid to alleviate his mood, Fergusson jokingly told Robert that he would marry his girlfriend. On the spur of the moment, Robert pounced on him and tried to choke his throat. The incident reinforced Fergusson’s concerns that Robert was battling with severe mental health problems.

Robert’s woes were not just limited to symptoms of anxiety and depression. There is an account that once when he had taken a girl out on a date and their car ran out of gas, Robert urged her to stay back and gave her his blazer to stay warm, and went to procure gas. He was gone for more than an hour, making his girlfriend worried enough to inform the police, only to learn that he had gone home and, surprisingly, gone to bed. Robert, who was fast asleep, had totally forgotten about her. This is an episode of acute dissociation, a protective mechanism of one’s mind against immense distress. One can experience fits of amnesia by unconsciously getting rid of some chunks from the memory.

Physics, his refuge

Robert’s crises in life were not relegated merely to his inner strife. During the 1930s, when Adolf Hitler was at the precipice of power, he successfully directed the hatred towards Jews by fuelling the anti-Semitic sentiments through his intricate propagandistic machinery. Jews were the first casualty of Hitler’s glorious ambition of conquering Europe. Robert’s Jewish roots and privileges urged and allowed him to give away three percent of his income, in a bid to save an array of Jewish scientists and academics who were stuck in Germany facing Hitler’s wrath. This can be simply seen as an act of mere charity, but in Robert’s case, there was more than meets the eye. He was habitual of dealing with his persistent existential conflicts with an altruistic defense, an act of giving, that is driven unconsciously, to cope with his existential woes.

Throughout Robert’s life, the emotion of guilt was predominantly central. Besides his ambition and love for science, his Jewish background and the ensuing guilt of privilege — that he would be able to save Jews from Nazis — acted as a major catalyst that would propel him to grab the reins of Manhattan Project. During the infamous 1954 hearing, which would later end with him losing his elite security clearance, he said that he had “a continuing, smouldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany,” and that he had relatives there, whom he helped in bringing to the US. “I saw,” Robert said in the testimony, “what the depression was doing to my students… and through them, l began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men’s lives.”

The pre-emptive guilt of not being able to play his part in the Jewish struggle was one of the subliminal reasons for him to spearhead the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos laboratory, where the Americans were secretly building the atomic bomb. Freud understood guilt as a manifestation of Superego’s regulation — Superego is the moral governor of the psyche. Robert consciously dealt with the conflict by taking a cognizance of altruism. He thought that the development of a weapon of mass destruction would put an end to the Third Reich.

Besides, the Los Alamos days presented Robert with an opportunity to exhibit his sheer brilliance and would facilitate his rise to a pedestal of unprecedented power and popularity from where, he would assume, nobody could bring him down. In a way, he was simultaneously on a quest to seek validation from the world, and parallelly, on an unconscious journey to heal the little Robert, a child who was never accepted by the boys around him. Physics, once again, came to the fore as Robert’s “only important friend”. Robert was so engrossed in the project at Los Alamos that at one instance, he had forgotten to eat for days. He ended up losing several pounds.

The demons in his head

After the bomb was tested successfully, Robert was to find himself caught unawares in a dilemma of triumph and guilt. His colleague Isidor Isaac Rabi later remarked upon Oppenheimer’s body language after the test: “I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car… His walk was like High Noon… this kind of strut. He had done it.”

The Manhattan Project, no doubt, was a perfect opportunity for Robert to achieve, and resolve an amalgam of internal and external conflicts. He proved his calibre, and also fed his altruistic self, even though it was too late as Germany had succumbed to immense war fatigue, and already surrendered. Nevertheless, the crescendo of his career and the scale of devastation that Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered, shoved him into a morass of altruistic guilt — a guilt that arises from a harm caused through one’s deeds or one’s exclusions.

The responsibility of his actions was very threatening to his ego — the facet of the psyche that one considers as “self” or “I”. Ego determines one’s perceptions and position in the external world. Robert, yet again, channelised his altruism as the defence to save his ‘Ego’ from disintegration, using his recently-earned influence and popularity to advocate for regulations on the policies concerning the creation and use of nuclear weapons.

Whether or not Robert’s guilt was epicentered in his morals, a major chunk of his actions and choices in his life was indeed governed by the demons in his head he could never tame. We may face a barrage of questions, but amongst all the most important one is: If Robert’s childhood were not as isolated, would that alter the choices he would unconsciously make in his later life? As long as we are not justifying his actions, the answer, surprisingly, is: ‘Maybe, yes’!