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unsatisfactory sexual ventures, convinced Francis that his friend was
seriously troubled."
Subsequently, there were other melodramatic episodes, periodic
visits to a Cambridge psychiatrist, and evidence of continued depres–
sion. That spring, Robert told his friend John Edsall that "he had
dementia praecox
and that his psychiatrist had dismissed him because
in a case like this further analysis would do more harm than good." To
another friend he said at the time he was leaving his psychiatrist
because the fellow was too stupid to follow him, and that he knew
more about his own troubles than the doctor did.
A word needs to be said about the use in those days of the phrase
dementia praecox.
The same symptoms might now be called borderline
schizophrenia, a term that lacks the stigma of deterioration, debility,
and irreversibility. Through the work of Erik Erikson and others on
the identity formation of young persons, we are now more ready to deal
with such episodes. For cases in which, in the past young people were
judged to suffer from a "chronic malignant disturbance," we now
suspect, in Eriksonian terms, a somewhat delayed developmental crisis.
The young person is engaged in two tasks. One is the working through
of a "negative identity"-the sum of the fragments which the individ–
ual has to submerge in himself as undesirable or irreconcilable; and the
other is the development of a positive identity to preserve the promise
of a traditionally assured wholeness. Erikson speaks specifically about
the rage that can be aroused by threatened identity loss and can explode
in arbitrary destructiveness, as well as the more traditional explanation
of dangerous or radical alternation between loving and hateful tenden–
cies during transference.
Some day there may exist enough material and skill to attempt a
psychobiographical study of Oppenheimer. But it is clear already from
these letters that, once he had made the decision not to go back into a
laboratory but to throw himself into the grand theoretical problems
then attracting some of the best European physicists, Oppenheimer
had essentially embarked on a course of self-therapy. Those of us who,
as teachers and mentors of young would-be scientists, watch them over
a period of a few crucial years, see not infrequently some version of this
process of self-identification taking place before our very eyes. For
Oppenheimer, joining in the great intellectual drama of transforming
physics-"coming into physics"-helped resolve his dilemmas, once
he achieved some success. Some psychological damage remained,
however, not least a vulnerability that ran through his personality like
a geological fault, to be revealed at the next earthquake. Thus, when
