Document Type
Article
Department
Religion (CGU)
Publication Date
2006
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | Other Religion | Religion
Abstract
On more than one occasion in the 1970s, Leonard Arrington, the founder of this organization, told me I should write a psychological sketch of Joseph Smith. Leonard was probably thinking of Fawn Brodie's brief analysis of Joseph in the second edition of No Man Knows My History. Brodie thought Joseph might conform to a psychological type, "the impostor," described by psychoanalyst Phyllis Greenacre. A few years earlier, I had spent two years studying psychoanalysis, and Leonard probably thought I was as well prepared as anyone to write about Joseph Smith's psychodynamics. Arrington could not have foreseen the assortment of psychologies studies that would begin appearing afater 1976 by T.L. Brink, Jess Groesbeck, William D. Morain, Robert D. Anderson, and Lawrence Foster, most of them describing the Prophet as suffering from one psychological disease or another. After all this work, none of it particularly satisfying to Mormons, Leonard has earned the right to a hearty "I told you so."
Rights Information
© 2006 Mormon History Association
Recommended Citation
Bushman, Richard. “The Inner Joseph Smith,” Journal of Mormon History 32, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 65-81.
