License to Reflect: A Conversation with Dr. Antony Bond

The following is an edited interview with Dr. Antony Bond, licensed clinical psychologist in the Commonwealth of Virginia, Assistant Professor and Assistant Director of Clinical Training in the Psy.D. program at Divine Mercy University. Dr. Bond has published on seminary formation, psychologist-formator collaboration, and clinical identity. He previously worked in production for the BBC and wrote for The Literary Review, The New Statesman, and The Catholic Herald. He is, he confirms, the younger brother of James Bond.

You don't use the family name professionally very often. Is that deliberate?

Practical, mostly. My brother has rather cornered the market on it. When someone schedules an appointment with "Dr. Bond," the first thing they say at the door is, "You're not what I expected." Which, therapeutically, is actually quite a useful opening. People drop their prepared scripts immediately. So I've kept it.

James always found that amusing, actually. He said it was one of the few advantages of notoriety he hadn't anticipated.

What was he like as a brother? Reports suggest a certain emotional unavailability.

That's a kind formulation. The clinical term, were I inclined to use it of a family member, would be closer to what Aquinas describes when the passions operate without the governance of right reason — not wickedness, exactly, but a kind of appetitive autonomy. James always knew what he wanted and moved toward it without much friction from conscience or consequence. Charming, yes. Present, intermittently.

Growing up, he was the one mother worried about and father admired. I was the one who read books and asked questions at the wrong moments. Father was Scottish, as you probably know — Andrew Bond, from Glencoe — and Mother was Swiss, Monique Delacroix. That combination produces either a watchmaker or a spy. James became the spy. I became the psychologist, which is arguably the same thing with more paperwork and less Walther PPK.

The CCMMP framework you use in your research speaks of the person as created, fallen, and redeemed. Where does your brother fit in that arc?

Firmly in the middle section, I'd say, with occasional aspirations toward the third.

More seriously: the framework Vitz, Nordling, and Titus articulate is concerned with what happens when the original unity of a person — body, soul, reason, appetite — fractures under the weight of concupiscence and disordered desire. James is a rather pure case study. He is a man whose appetites are at full throttle and whose vocation is, paradoxically, to deploy those appetites in the service of the common good. The martini, the women, the violence — none of it is incidental. It is constitutive. The question that is rarely asked is whether a person can be used as a blunt instrument without something essential being blunted.

That is, in fact, the pastoral question underneath most of my work with seminary formation. The priest, like the agent, is asked to give himself entirely to a mission. What sustains him? What erodes him? James never found a satisfactory answer. He kept changing his Aston Martin.

You've trained at the Washington Baltimore Psychoanalytic Center and worked with clergy at St. John Vianney Seminary in Denver. Did any of that training help you understand your brother?

The psychoanalytic work helped me understand why I kept trying to explain him. That's the more useful insight.

But yes — the seminary formation work in particular. One of the things you learn quickly working with men preparing for ordination is that the question of identity is never settled by the collar. A man can receive a title, wear the vestments, master the liturgical forms, and still be operating almost entirely out of a constructed persona rather than a genuine self. James had this problem acutely. The tuxedo was impeccable. The self underneath was another matter entirely.

Kohlberg's model of moral development, which Vitz subjected to considerable critique, assumes that moral reasoning advances through stages by accumulating cognitive sophistication.[^1] What it misses is that moral character requires more than knowing the right answer to a trolley problem. It requires the integration of appetites, habits, and perception — what Aquinas calls the unity of the moral virtues, where practical wisdom governs the whole.[^2] James could reason about ethics perfectly well. He simply didn't let the reasoning slow him down.

He was, by all accounts, effective at his job.

Extraordinarily. And this is the uncomfortable part. The Christian account of the person does not suggest that a disordered life is an ineffective one, at least not in the short term and not by worldly measures. James saved the world — or portions of it — with remarkable regularity. He also left a trail of people who were worse off for having known him, including several who are dead.

Paul Vitz's work on psychology as religion gets at something relevant here. The therapeutic culture that emerged in the twentieth century tended to treat the self as the ultimate reference point. Desire, if sufficiently authentic, becomes its own justification. James is in many ways the apotheosis of that sensibility: a man who lives entirely by instinct, whose instincts are reliably correct, and who is never asked to account for what his freedom costs other people.

The problem, theologically and psychologically, is that freedom exercised without ordered love is not flourishing. It is, as the Carmelite tradition would recognize, a particularly sophisticated form of attachment.

John of the Cross would have had thoughts about your brother.

John of the Cross would have had James on his knees within a week, and James would have found some reason to be recalled to London.

But yes — the passive purifications John describes are precisely the mechanism by which the soul is freed from its attachment to its own competence, its own efficacy, its own reputation for cool. James was constitutionally allergic to that process. The dark night requires surrendering the very qualities that have made you who you are. For a man whose entire identity rests on being the most capable person in the room, that is not an abstract theological invitation. It is an existential threat.

I say this with considerable fraternal warmth.

You worked at the BBC before becoming a psychologist. Did that affect how you think about the way James is perceived?

Production experience teaches you that everything in a story is a choice. What to show, what to cut away from, what to score with silence and what to leave in shadow. The accounts of James's operations that reach the public have very little interest in what happens to the minor characters, the operatives who don't make it out, the people two cases later. Those stories are not told.

The Catholic Christian tradition, by contrast, has a deep investment in what happens to secondary characters. The common good, as Maritain understood it, is not the aggregate of successful missions. It is the network of dignities that makes human community possible. Every person touched by James's work is, from that vantage, a full person — not a plot device, not a casualty footnote, not what the service might call "expendable."

I wrote about this for The Catholic Herald once. The editors thought I was being earnest. I was.

Is there a version of James Bond that makes it through the redeemed third of the arc?

I've thought about this more than a younger brother probably should.

The psychological condition for it would require what ACT theorists after Hayes call defusion — the capacity to hold one's own self-narrative lightly enough to revise it. "I am 007" is, in therapeutic terms, a highly fused identity. The number is the person. Defuse the number and you have to ask who James Bond actually is without the license, the authority, the mission.

The theological condition would be something simpler and harder: the willingness to be loved rather than merely useful. James received a great deal of admiration. Admiration is pleasant but it does not touch the part of a person that needs to be known. Teresa of Avila, in the Interior Castle, describes the soul's journey inward as a movement away from the performance of virtue toward its reality. James performed virtue — patriotism, courage, loyalty to the Crown — with extraordinary polish. Whether he ever got anywhere near the interior castle is something I genuinely don't know.

He doesn't return my calls reliably. Classified, he says.

Final question: martini, shaken or stirred?

I am a psychologist in the Catholic Christian tradition, so I am accustomed to questions that appear simple and are not.

Shaken, obviously. A stirred martini is what you order when you have time to be thoughtful. My brother never had time to be thoughtful. That was always the problem, and also, I suspect, the point.

References

[^1]: Vitz critiques Kohlberg's model for reducing moral development to cognitive stage-progression, neglecting the integration of appetite, habit, and character formation that Thomistic virtue ethics requires.

[^2]: McWhorter's analysis of Aquinas on the moral virtues of the Christian person identifies the unity of the virtues under practical wisdom as central to Aquinas's account — moral knowledge alone does not constitute moral character.