Behind the Lens, Inside the Mind. The Life of Frederick Eberstadt.
Part 3: The abyss
In 2020, the World Health Organization estimated that about a quarter billion people around the world suffer from depression.
Theories about the roots of the illness are vast, but the most accepted ones consider it a brain disorder caused by the interrelation of genetic, neurochemical, environmental, and psychological factors. How all those factors interact to produce the illness, however, appears to be an eternal work in progress.
People suffering from depression not only altogether lose interest in anything they once found joyful; the condition can also be completely disabling, preventing them from functioning normally and, in its extreme manifestation, it generates such an overpowering sense of worthlessness, it can lead to suicidal thoughts, some tragically materializing into actual attempts.
It was in his late 50s that the demon launched its devastating attack on Eberstadt.
Although it was not the first time he had fallen into its clutches — he had dealt with depression since his teenage years — now it was different. “This time, I simply collapsed,” he declares. “I felt like a total failure, absolutely hopeless.”
“There was a vacuum in his life,” reflects Fernanda Eberstadt, 60, his daughter. “His career as a photographer was coming to a standstill. He wasn’t as involved in it. He didn’t know what to do next. He wrote a novel. The novel got rejected. He wanted to put together photographic essays. That got turned down. He didn’t really know what to do with himself. He didn’t know where to go.”
For over two years, crushed by a feeling of absolute self-loathing, he did little else than bounce from one psychiatrist to another, finding mixed degrees of help from them. In some cases, starting with the first one who treated him, it was downright lacerating. “I don’t think he had any insight into what it is like to be depressed,” Eberstadt recalls with disappointment. “I think on one level he felt like saying ‘Pull up your socks and get to work, you jerk!’ That was his attitude.”
The effects of depression propagate beyond those it preys on. Family and friends, seemingly unable to aid their loved one to feel better, are engulfed in a sense of helplessness. But in contrast with illnesses like cancer or Alzheimer’s — which are no less mortifying for next of kin and close acquaintances — what adds to their distress is being unable to fathom how somebody’s will to live can suddenly all but vanish, when there seems to be absolutely nothing wrong with him or her.
Sadly, such an agonizing situation wasn’t new to the Eberstadt household. Isabel, Eberstadt’s wife, had suffered from the illness for a very long time. Fernanda recalls growing up attuned to the image of her mother spending long periods in bed, constantly fearing to let her out of her sight. “I was scared she was going to commit suicide,” she recalls.
But her father’s falling into the same pit was a completely new dynamic. “She was the depressed one, and suddenly he was too. Also lying in bed, taking naps all the time,” she recalls. “I think it was difficult for both to be locked in this situation. They were very, very close and they had a lot of fun together, but I think they also didn’t help each other that way.”
A matter of perception
By the time Aaron T. Beck graduated from the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute, in 1958, Freudian theory was the dominant school of thought in psychology. Beck himself practiced it during the early years of his career. Until he began having second thoughts about it.
“I started to examine everything about psychoanalysis, and I realized that I had accepted everything on faith, because it was taught by people whom I respected,” Beck once declared. “But once I started looking for empirical evidence, there was none.”
That is how cognitive behavioral therapy, more commonly known as cognitive therapy, came to exist. As its name implies, it is all about cognition, about perception. Beck’s breakthrough was realizing that people’s depressed thoughts are the consequence of self-demeaning beliefs about themselves. His approach to treating depression — and several other psychological ailments, like anxiety, addictions, panic attacks, eating disorders — would shift its focus away from the patient’s childhood experiences, the Freudian core, and concentrate on these self-defeating thoughts.
Classic psychoanalysis strategy consists in digging into patients’ minds, in search for buried childhood traumas. Beck questioned the need to go that deep. He thought clues to the causes of patients’ problems could be found laying bare atop of their minds, freely expressed by them: their thoughts. More precisely, their thoughts about themselves. Instead of using a metaphorical shovel to dig out traumas, he chose a torch instead, to shed light on those clues lying on the mind’s surface.
People who suffer depression have something in common — as well as a crucial difference — with scientists. Depressed people, just like scientists, formulate hypotheses that become the basis of their conduct. The hypothesis that depressed people work on is a simple one: “I am worthless.”
Scientists, however, are rigorously trained to be aware that their theories are that and only that: theories, suppositions, postulations. They must constantly remind themselves that that their hypotheses must pass rigorous, reality-testing experimentation if they are to be awarded the ultimate status they can aspire to: “Truth” — and maybe a Nobel prize. There is hell to pay in their profession if they pronounce veracity for their theories without first going through this testing phase.
But that is precisely the phase that people who suffer depression omit, without even knowing it. Disavowing any kind of examination, depressed people rashly interpret their self-devaluating theories as absolute, irrevocable facts. Beck’s goal was bold: For all practical purposes, he wanted to make scientists out of his patients. The subject of their science project? Themselves. Or rather, their thoughts about themselves.
A session with Beck probably felt more like a workshop than a consultation. During each meeting, patients learned and polished the skills needed to test the veracity of their distorted beliefs — theories — about themselves. The goal? To teach patients how to help themselves. Through logical reasoning and even physical activities, they would gently be led into awareness of their flawed chain of logic. Their self-deprecating convictions become increasingly hard to defend. (And defend them they try to, vigorously.) The fortress of self-loathing they erected on seemingly solid foundations slowly reveals itself to be the house of cards it always was. Patients begins to admit — to feel — there is only one logical conclusion that can be reached: That they are, and always have been, somebody with value.
Just as with the once-novel methods from Freud and others before him, Beck had — and has — his critics. And just as with its predecessors, cognitive therapy is not an infallible system that works for everybody.
It has, however, worked for a lot of people, to the point that today roughly three generations of Beck’s disciples have learned and spread his system. Some of those disciples have even enriched it.
One of them, Dr. Jeffrey Young, began noticing patterns among his patients’ self-devaluating beliefs and realized some of them were more intricate than others, making their treatment more elaborate. One type of self-diminishing beliefs was particularly challenging: Those rooted in early childhood memories — the kind that Freud favored and Beck disregarded.
Young’s insights would lead him beyond spreading cognitive therapy, to establish his own school of thought: schema therapy, named after the term he used to refer to those childhood-rooted beliefs.
Schema therapy proposes that most people who suffer from depression experienced one or more of those childhood schemas, and that treating them purely with rational unpacking — the cognitive way — may not be enough. The causes of their self-diminishing thoughts needed to be acknowledged and treated directly, in parallel with the task of logically proving their lack of basis.
Young considers one of his former patients a clear-cut representative example of his theory: Eberstadt. “Fred’s case was purely schema-based,” he explains. It did not take long after Eberstadt arrived at his door for Young to zero in on the roots of his problem.
The son of a legend
Born in 1890, Ferdinand Eberstadt, Frederick’s father, was a Wall Street legend who built a fortune during the roaring 1920s, lost it during the Great Depression and rebuilt it with the help of a 50,000 dollar loan — roughly one million of today’s dollars — from Harrison Williams, one of the world’s wealthiest individuals at the time. According to Frederick, that loan between Williams and his father was based on nothing but a handshake between the two men.
The business world would prove to be too small for Ferdinand. He went on to play vital roles during World War II, coordinating the efforts of the private industry and the United States armed forces for the production and allocation of critical materials for the conflict. During the post-war period, he was involved in the formulation of economic and security policies, which included the creation of the CIA and the Pentagon.
Father and son could hardly have been born with more contrasting personalities, and their bond would be marked by an emotional abyss until Eberstadt senior’s death in 1969. “I learned early on I was a disappointment,” recalls Frederick.
Through the years, Frederick’s daughter, Fernanda, heard from him the stories about her grandfather. “I was aware that he was a brilliant banker, an incredibly accomplished man,” she says. “But my sense of him is that he was cruel and capricious. He liked to humiliate people and play games with them, to have them fighting for his favor. He died when I was eight, so I knew him a bit, and that corresponds to what I saw when I was a child.”
Such power plays were the norm ever since Frederick was a child. He can remember several occasions when he faced public humiliation at the hands of his father, who would use him as a burlesque subject to entertain dinner guests.
“My father was not what he was looking for,” Fernanda reflects about her grandfather. “But I also don’t think in fact my grandfather would have stood for competition. I don’t think he would have valued a brilliant banker son. At all. Any son he had, he would have tried to crush, make him feel worthless.”
Ferdinand may not have been an emotionally supportive parent or husband — according to Frederick, his father’s relationships with his own wife and his other children were no less lacerating — but he wasn’t a man devoid of feelings or of a sense of family loyalty.
For one thing, he adored his grandchildren. “He was infatuated with little Fernanda,” recalls Eberstadt. Nicholas, Frederick’s first-born, shared Ferdinand’s mathematical and business talents. Grandfather and grandson enjoyed building hypothetical stock portfolios together and following their performance over time. Even towards his wife, Ferdinand’s attitude was complex. “My father used to bully my mother terribly sometimes. And then he’d switch back and say how wonderful she was,” says Eberstadt.
Not only was Ferdinand capable of emotional attachment, but in terms of his legacy, his actions clearly indicated where his priorities were, leaving all his copious estate to his wife and children. Frederick acknowledges he was never concerned about being disowned for choosing the type of life he led, regardless of how much his father disapproved of it. Ferdinand’s genuine love for his grandchildren left him no doubt about that.
Unfortunately, Ferdinand didn’t leave his matters in the tidiest of conditions. “He would wake up in the middle of the night and think of a clause he wanted to add to his will, call his lawyer and tell them to put them in effect,” Eberstadt recalls. Not daring to displease the legend, the next day the clauses would be on his desk, ready for his signature. As a result, after his passing, “his will on one point contradicted itself in three different ways,” says Eberstadt. It was the perfect brewing setup for a huge and long legal fight with anybody who ever worked for his father and felt entitled to part of, if not all, his abundant estate.
With his financial legacy at stake, Eberstadt set his career on pause, spending the next two years immersed in a legal battle to preserve the patrimony his father left them. “It knocked a big hole in my life as a photographer, but from a financial point of view it was so much more important,” he says.
Since he had worked for him as an intern decades earlier, this would be the second time Eberstadt would be immersed in his father’s business world. It paid off: He managed to retain the family’s financial heritage. His mother let him know something that suggests how proud and, at the same time, regretful she must have felt. “I wish your father had known how competent you are,” she told her son.
“Cases like Fred’s are the extreme ones,” Young explains. He knew first hand that patients that had at least one punitive parent, like Eberstadt, and that also suffer from dysthymic depression — mild, yet persistent for long periods, also like Eberstadt — have a considerable risk of eventually plummeting into a major depressive disorder. “He saw himself as his father saw him and was convinced he deserved his criticism, that it was his fault.”
