Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [181]
But he and his friends were so bowled over by Atlas Shrugged that he forgot or set aside his reservations.
A week before Atlas went on sale, Rothbard sent Rand a four-page, single-spaced letter of stunned praise. “I will start by saying that all of us in the ‘Circle Bastiat’ are convinced … that Atlas Shrugged is the greatest novel ever written,” he began. “For the first time [in history], you have [depicted] persons and their actions in perfect accordance with principles and their consequences.” Admitting that he had kept his distance from her for the last three years (“the fault is mine … a defect in my own psyche”), he explained that he suffered from depression and had experienced a bout after every long discussion with her. He was convinced that this was due either to the exhausting effort of keeping up with “a mind that I unhesitatingly say is the most brilliant of the twentieth century” or to a subconscious fear that his independence and personality would be swallowed up “by the tremendous power of your own.” Rand accepted his apology and asked to see him, and for a few weeks in early 1958, she, Nathaniel Branden, and the “anarcho-libertarian” Rothbard got along together well.
By the early 1960s, Branden would have created a well-oiled assembly line that delivered thousands of young men and women to Objectivism every year. But in the late 1950s he was on the lookout for high-value converts such as Efron and Ramrus. Rothbard, age thirty-one, had a Ph.D. in economics and came with his own circle of five or six Bastiat associates, including George Reisman and a bright Queens College undergraduate named Robert Hessen, who later became a business and economic historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Rand and Branden welcomed Rothbard and his friends. But intimations of trouble followed.
Rothbard’s brief connection with Rand and her circle is a cautionary tale of cult initiation gone awry. Like most New York Rand enthusiasts, he signed up for the NBI lectures. He also entered into a course of psychotherapy with Branden, hoping that Rand’s theory of the mind, as interpreted and practiced by her closest advisor, would guide him in overcoming his recurring depression as well as a severe travel phobia that prevented him from taking trains and planes. When he mentioned this, he later noted in a letter, Branden gave him a “ninety-five percent guarantee” that he would be cured of his phobia along with his depression. On the basis of such assurances, he accepted an invitation to speak at an Emory University—sponsored academic symposium scheduled to take place nine months later, in Sea Island, Georgia.
The novelist’s protégé was still only twenty-seven years old in late 1957, but, as Rand’s followers knew, she considered him to be an established genius in a field she often said she hated to deal with; most psychology was “a sewer” of the irrational, she said, while applauding Branden’s skill in bringing her principles to bear on it. By this she meant that, since emotions stem from ideas, a neurotic person is necessarily a repository of wrong, evasive, or contradictory ideas, which didn’t interest her. If the person wasn’t immoral, however (meaning consciously evading the facts of reality as she saw them), she was confident that Branden could fix what ailed him. When young friends came to her to discuss their problems, she habitually referred them to Branden for either long- or short-term treatment, depending on the nature of their troubles and complaints. Because her suggestions had the force of law, at one time or another “Nathan was everybody’s therapist,” at least within the Collective, his wife later said. Some worked it off, others paid five dollars an hour, Branden’s modest fee.
Impartial observers, however, might not have been so sure that the NBI chief was qualified to treat emotional disturbances at that time. Although he now had an M.A. in psychology from the education department at NYU,