Shunning

Heard in a Manhattan elevator, one dental technician talking about a difficult patient, “you know when you put a cross that someone doesn’t exist?” This may be easier said than done. There are all kinds of societies in which shunning is the punishment of choice for those who have broken social codes. Today with the ubiquitous beheadings by ISIS in Syria and elsewhere ostracizing seems a relatively mild form of vengeance--even when we consider what happened to Hester Prynne in The Scarlett Letter. But if Dante was to create circles just related to vengeance then things like banishment and ostracizing might occupy the first circle of this hell. To take someone’s life, particularly in a painful manner such as beheading or live burial or stoning would obviously fall into the 9th circle category. But what about eradicating an individual's existence without necessarily terminating their life. This would probably fall under the category of what the psychoanalyst Leonard Shengold terms Soul Murder. There’s something particularly invidious about this method of torture. It’s not waterboarding or sleep deprivation, but it attacks the deepest level of humanity, to the extent that it denies one's being and identity. The victim of such reprisal suddenly finds him or herself forcibly estranged from some person or persons he once knew. He or she no longer sees him or herself reflected in their eyes and a little bit of him dies. Maybe you don’t care if the person cleaning your teeth refuses to acknowledge your existence, but these things can become viral and you soon may find yourself faced with such a degree of assumed indifference to your presence that you begin to wonder if you really do exist.

Lana Peters

The final line of Douglas Martin’s Times obituary of Stalin’s daughter, Lana Peters (“Lana Peters,Stalin’s Daughter, Dies at 85,” NYT, 11/28/11), is a quote from an interview she gave to the Wisconsin State Journal in 2010. “I will always be a political prisoner of my father’s name,” she said.  Usually fiction can take more liberties than non-fiction. But even Dickens with his vast sense of fate and destiny could unlikely have produced the dramatic story that the Times obit tells. History is not just a player in this tale. It is the stage on which it’s set and the turns of fortune are extreme. Born Svetlana Stalina, Americans might remember Stalin’s daughter from two books she published about her life in l969 (Only One Year) and l984 (Faraway Music) under the name of Svetlana Alliluyeva (Alliluyeva was her mother’s last name). In a sense she embodied the paradoxes of Soviet Communism, a dictatorship of the proletariat that produced  its own aristocracy. As Stalin’s purges raged on, proving that power is conservative, self-perpetuating and hardly geared toward the betterment of mankind, Stalin’s daughter, who changed her name to Lana Peters after marrying an American, lived the life of the poor little rich girl. Ironically what happened to her mirrored the fate of the banished  Romanovs who went from enjoying the extravagance of hereditary nobility to that of being dispossessed of all power and slaughtered. The psychoanalyst Leonard Shengold’s book Soul Murder, describes the effect of traumatic childhood experience on a number of great writers including Chekhov. According to Martin’s Times obit there had been  a plan by the KGB to assassinate the once in a future defector, but while Svetllana Alliluyeva aka Lana Peters was never murdered, it’s apparent that her soul was. “He broke my life,”  Martin quotes Peters as telling the same newspaper from the state where she’d died “after decades of obscurity, wandering and poverty.” “ I want to explain to you. He broke my life.”