America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation Read Free

by repeating harsh parental maxims. Eliza Dewey’s favorite was “Praise to the face is an open disgrace.” In grade school, Heinz and Dewey were already working overtime to please their “Tiger Mothers.” While little Henry was feverishly helping Anna grow fruits and vegetables to sell to neighbors, little Melvil was busy classifying and arranging the contents of Eliza’s pantry. And thus were born the vocations of two future American icons.
    The case studies of Heinz and Dewey illustrate a point often obscured in the recent national debate about child-rearing unleashed by Amy Chua’s controversial memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011)—like the Chinese, Americans also have a long history of “extreme parenting” designed to instill success. Anna Heinz and Eliza Dewey were both mid-nineteenth-century versions of Grace Welch, the hard-charging mother of former General Electric CEO Jack Welch. In his bestselling autobiography, Jack: Straight from the Gut (2001), Welch talks about an incident in high school when he flung his hockey stick across the rink after his team suffered a bitter defeat. Startling his teammates and everyone else in sight, his fiery Irish mother rushed into the locker room and grabbed him by the collar, yelling, “You punk! If you don’t know how to lose, you’ll never know how to win.” Like Heinz, who also idealized his mother, Welch calls his “the most influential person in my life…who taught me the value of competition.”
    While Tiger Mothers can produce exceptional leaders, the same humiliations that teach lifelong lessons also have the potential to create long-term emotional problems. “Neutron Jack,” the man who constantly trimmed his staff at GE, has often been described as a narcissist incapable of empathy. “His egocentrism is everywhere,” observes Joseph Nocera in his review of Jack for the New York Times Book Review . A likely reason why Heinz and Dewey developed into two-for-ones rather than pure narcissists is that unlike Jack Welch, they both also experienced maternal neglect. Eliza Dewey was forty-two when she had Melvil and, as he later recalled, “had no time to fuss with babies.” Whatever early bonding the future decimal man experienced came at the hands of his elder sister, Mate, to whom his mother entrusted his care.
    While obsessive innovators all have obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), they do not necessarily suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). These two psychiatric conditions, while often considered synonymous, are actually cousins. Broadly speaking, obsessions are things that one can’t stop thinking about, and compulsions are things that one can’t stop doing. While the content of these thoughts and actions can be similar in the two disorders, the person’s internal experience is very different. Whereas in OCD, the obsessions—say, fears of dirt—are unwelcome, in OCPD the opposite is true. In psychiatryspeak, this is the distinction between egodystonic and egosyntonic. Compare the elderly Howard Hughes, who would spend all day sitting naked in the middle of hotel rooms—the germ-free zone—with the thirty-something Steve Jobs, who would do his quick dust checks on the factory floor. In contrast to Hughes, who was paralyzed by his OCD, Jobs basked in his OCPD; he was proud of his company’s cleanliness. Likewise, Melvil Dewey celebrated his childhood fixation with the number 10, turning it into his signature achievement, the decimal classification system that bears his name. And in contrast to those with OCD, who often seek psychiatric treatment, those with OCPD rarely acknowledge that anything is wrong. That’s because the personality disorder typically improves rather than impairs normal functioning. “OCPD is a method of avoiding suffering. Those with the disorder come for help only if someone else—say, a spouse—demands it,” explained Lorrin Moran, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at Stanford