Nobody rose so high in scientific achievement as Oppenheimer and fell like Icarus. He was the most important person in the development of the atomic bomb. He was falsely accused of spying for the Russians. He was described as an ambitious, insecure genius with naivety, determination as well as being stoical, (Bird& Sherwin, 2009).
He was close to his mother, and he said, ‘she loved me too much’. He was devastated when she died of leukemia. He had a pathologically negative relationship with his father. As a child, he was fascinated with ‘blocks’, and ‘rock specimens’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). He was a lonely ‘unhappy’ child who ‘didn’t fit in’ and was often ‘incommunicado emotionally’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). He was very eccentric.
He was an extreme intellectual and liked to work on his own on math problems. He was rigid, controlling and very dominating. He knew he was different from others. He was often tactless and unemphatic. Children particularly found it difficult to relate to him. He was an abstract thinker. He wrote about himself in the third person, which is typical of persons with autism. Unlike most people with autism, he had wide interests in poetry, language and literature. He loved walking, which is very common in persons with autism. Later he said, ‘he had very little sensitiveness to human beings, and very little humility before the realities of the world’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). Lilienthal described the ‘contradictions between opposites, a brilliant mind and his awkward personality… he did not know how to deal with people, his children especially’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). His daughter, Toni was a linguist but also shy like Robert. Toni hanged herself in 1977. His son, Peter, kept a low profile after Robert’s death and worked as a ‘contractor and carpenter’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009).
He used ‘florid language’ and often exaggerated. ‘His physics papers were unusually brief to the point of being cursory’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). This is a feature of autism. In lectures, he used to mumble in a soft, almost inaudible voice and would ‘stutter his oddly lilting hum that sounded like ‘nim-nim-nim’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). He could terrorize ‘his students with sarcasm and be very cruel in his remarks’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). He was charismatic and could mesmerize people with the power of his rhetoric. When Lilienthal, not a scientist, first met him he noted ‘huge’ sounds between sentences or phrases as he paced the room, looking at the floor – a mannerism quite strange’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009).
He suffered many depressive episodes. In a fit of jealousy, he left a poisoned apple on a friend’s desk. Nothing happened to the friend. Nevertheless, he was sent to a psychiatrist and later to a psychoanalyst who diagnosed him with schizophrenia. He never did have schizophrenia. He also felt like ‘bumping’ himself off, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). Once he tried to choke a friend. He was hyperkinetic and his pace was ‘frantic’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). He interrupted a lot in groups, that is academic seminars which many people found intolerable.
He said, ‘I need physics more than friends’ and a colleague also said that ‘the longer I was acquainted with him, the less I knew him’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). This is often said about people with autism. A post-graduate student Harold Cherniss stated, ‘he didn’t quite know how to make friends’, (Bird & Sherwin,2009). He was often seen as mysterious, which is not uncommon in persons with high IQ and high functioning autism. In personal relationships, it was up to other people to take the initiative. Oppenheimer said, ‘I’m not an attached kind of person’. When his daughter was born he said, ‘I can’t love her’, and asked a friend if they would adopt her, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). In terms of relationships with women, he began mixing with a woman called Jean Tatlock. This broke up. She later completed suicide. He had a relationship with Kitty Harrison who became his wife. From his point of view, this was a rather masochistic relationship, and she was alcoholic. He had one very dangerous relationship with Haakon Chevalier, who asked him to spy for the Russians. He said this was treason. Nevertheless, when he told his boss about this later, he covered up for a friend and told a lie which got him into major trouble later on. He was a fellow traveler with communists but never joined the party and it was because he became concerned with poverty in America. He himself had never suffered poverty and came from an affluent background. Oppenheimer could be ‘caustic’, and ‘brusque’, and a colleague, Neddermeyer, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009) stated that Oppenheimer could ‘cut you cold and humiliate you right down to the ground’. He antagonized people a great deal and was often ‘impatient and candid to the point of rudeness’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). He didn’t realize the full danger of Hoover from the FBI going after him. He was framed in a ‘Kangaroo Court’, who withdrew his security clearance. He could have simply resigned and saved himself all the trouble.
He used to make stereotyped movements with his hands. He walked with ‘a peculiar walk with his feet turned out at a severe angle’ and was ‘clumsy’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). He was ‘impractical’ and ‘walked about with scuffled shoes and a funny hat’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009).
He was often tactless, and he was ´incapable of tolerating banalities´, and Professor Percy Bridgeman notes that he was a, ´quick on the trigger intellectual´, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). He had a sense of humour, as persons with autism often have, (Lyons & Fitzgerald, 2004). He could also make callous and deeply wounding comments to people. He was a fussy eater. According to his brother, Frank, he divided the world into people who were worth, ´his time, and those who were not´, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). He was a linguist. He also had identity diffusion and an immature personality. He often showed effortless superiority. He was novelty-seeking and a sensation-seeker. He was impatient with mathematical calculations. He was always trying to understand himself and his identity diffusion. His students began to copy his ´quirks and eccentricities´, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). The same happened with Ludwig Wittgenstein (Fitzgerald, 2000).
He had an interest in mysticism. At a party a fellow guest, John Washburns said of him, ‘never since the Greek tragedies has there been heard the unrelieved pomposity of Robert Oppenheimer’, (Bird & Sherwin,2009). He was described as, ´argumentative, sharp, pedantic’ and showed ‘political naivete’, (Bird &Sherwin, 2009). He was regarded by colleagues as being, ‘sort of nuts’ and eccentric as well as being an ‘awkward, scientific prodigy’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). He had ‘a lack of interest in mundane affairs’, (Bird& Sherwin, 2009). According to John Manly, after Los Alamos he was noted to be more, ´arrogant´, and a ‘smart aleck’, who did not suffer fools gladly’, and still he was ‘very naive’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). He loved the adulation after Los Alamos. A colleague, Freeman Dyson noted that, ´restlessness drove him to this supreme achievement, the fulfillment of the mission of Los Alamos without pause for rest or reflection’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). A colleague stated that he had a ´difficult temperament and poor judgement’, (Bird& Sherwin, 2009). He became more megalomaniacal after the war and felt it was his duty to prevent the world from nuclear destruction. President Truman called him after the war, a ´cry-baby scientist´, when he said to Truman wringing his hands, ‘I feel I have blood on my hands’ (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). This was an extraordinarily naive and immature way to talk to the President of the United States. He had an autistic superego, and this was seen, particularly post-Los Alamos. A colleague said, ´he thinks he is God´, and had a ‘priestly style’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). Nevertheless, there was a perverse element to Oppenheimer, and he loved, ‘to have people at the institute, (where he worked), quarrel with each other’, (Bird & Sherwin,2009). He showed pathological control. He often showed ‘fierce arrogance’ and made ‘biting comments’, while he was ’emotionally detached’, and an extraordinarily ‘private person’ who was ‘not given to showing his feelings’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). He had identity diffusion which goes with autism and didn’t know quite who he was. According to Isidor Rabi, who knew him well he was often condescending, humiliating and had narcissistic contempt for Lewis Strauss in public, which led to Strauss destroying him. A colleague, Marvin Goldberger, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009), said he was an ‘extraordinarily arrogant, difficult person to be with. He was caustic and patronizing’. In terms of narcissistic personality disorder, (APA, 2013), he did achieve a massive amount, an almost unlimited success at Los Alamos, unlimited power and brilliance and was unique. This was all true, but he also showed pathological narcissism in ordinary interactions outside of Los Alamos. His wife felt that he had ‘no sense of fun and play’ and was ‘maddingly aloof and detached’ and lived life as an introvert, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). Nevertheless, he did mature somewhat in later life, and he knew that ‘some of his most depressing mistakes were due to his vanity’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). He finally had insight, but it was too late. He was narcissistically destroyed by the investigation. During all of his life however, he had been somebody who ‘loved controversy’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). Because of his narcissistic problems, he had a ‘talent for self-dramatization’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009).
He became head of the atomic programme to make the bomb. He did it brilliantly and probably no other man could have done it in the short time available. The reason General Groves chose him was because of his’overwinning ambition’, (Bird & Sherwin, 2009). Only such a man could develop the bomb in the time available. He was wrong to go against the H bomb which Russia later developed as well. This was Edward Teller’s pet project, and it was Teller who finally destroyed Oppenheimer by saying that he would prefer if the nuclear programme was in someone else’s hands, to Oppenheimer. Strauss (Bird & Sherwin, 2009) noted his ‘omniscience’. He had piercing eyes, often seen in persons with autism.
Oppenheimer was probably the most influential scientist of the twentieth century with the development of the atomic bomb. He was naive, had poor social skills, a penetrating gaze, some stereotyped movements and narcissism. All of this fitted with autism.
- Michael Fitzgerald, Former Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
