By Jerald and Sandra Tanner
In our last newsletter, we included a statement by Dr. Lawrence Foster criticizing our work. Foster claimed that we were deliberately trying to avoid an interview with him. Nothing could be further from the truth. We were actually looking forward to meeting with him. Unfortunately, in his response to us in the last newsletter, Foster continued to state that we were afraid to meet with him. He went so far as to claim that H. Michael Marquardt told him that “you were uneasy about meeting with me and had not yet decided whether or not you would agree to an interview.”
When we asked Mr. Marquardt about this matter, he replied that this assertion was not true and authorized us to print the following: “I never told Foster that the Tanners were uneasy about meeting with him.”
In the May 1996 issue of the Messenger, we spoke of Foster’s hypothesis that Joseph Smith may have been mentally ill. While we certainly have no strong objections to Foster’s idea, we know that it is very offensive to Mormons. Unfortunately, it now appears that Foster wants to sugarcoat his statements about Joseph Smith’s mental state. In his rebuttal to us, he states: “Similarly my analysis of the complex sources of Joseph Smith’s genius (Dialogue, Winter 1993) never refers to him as ‘mentally ill’ but instead stresses the complex psychological dynamics that may have contributed to his exceptional creativity.” This statement gives the impression that we misrepresented Foster’s position. While it may be true that Foster did not use the specific words “mentally ill” in his article, he very strongly implied that Joseph Smith had a serious mental problem. Foster’s hypothesis is that Smith suffered from manic-depression, which is certainly a form of mental illness. In his article in Dialogue Foster wrote:
In no area were Joseph Smith’s manic qualities more evident than in his efforts to introduce and practice polygamy during the last three years of his life. The point at which Joseph Smith began systematically to introduce polygamy to his closest associates has strong suggestions of mania. . . . his subsequent surge of actitivity [sic] with the sixteen or more women with whom he appears to have sustained sexual relations as plural wives . . . is even more suggestive of the hypersexuality that often accompanies manic periods. (Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Winter, 1993, pages 4, 7, 9-13)
Foster’s statement that, “In no area were Joseph Smith’s manic qualities more evident than in his efforts to introduce and practice polygamy” does not fit well with his watered-down statement in his rebuttal to us.