Youth: Confused Parents, Confused Kids

Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, 66, who is best known for his innovative studies of children’s emotional development, has turned his protean mind to student radicals. He sees some in his private therapeutic practice, and observes others on the campus of the University of Chicago, where he teaches and directs the Sonia Shankman School for psychotic children. His considered conclusion is that American parents and American society have not given today’s youth the emotional equipment for engaging in rational and constructive protest. In the September issue of the British magazine Encounter, Bettelheim spells out his ideas, which have been raising controversy at academic conferences and press conferences for the past six months. Among them: > “When I see some of these students —’unwashed’ and ‘unkempt’—I cannot help thinking: There goes another youngster who, as an infant, was practically scrubbed out of existence by his parents in the name of good hygiene and loving care.” > “In most of the small group of leaders of the radical left, intellect was developed at much too early an age, and at the expense of their emotional development. Although exceedingly bright, some remained emotionally fixated at the age of the temper tantrum.” > “The political content of student revolt is most of all a desperate wish that the parent should have been strong in the convictions that motivate his actions. This is why so many of our radical students embrace Maoism, why they chant ‘Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh’ in their demonstrations. They chant of strong fathers with strong convictions.” >”We should not overlook the symbolic meaning of the student invasions of the office of the president or dean. Big in size and age, those who sit in feel like little boys with a need to ‘play big’ by sitting in Papa’s big chair.”

Self-Hate. Bettelheim devotes his most careful scrutiny to the activities of the most radical student leaders, and blames their shrillness on parents who raised them with half-baked psychoanalytic theories. “Psychoanalysis has certainly suggested that we should not suppress our inner rages but should face them,” Bettelheim writes. “But we were only expected to face them in thought, and only in the safely structured treatment situation. This has been misapplied by large numbers of the educated middle classes to mean that aggression should always be expressed, and not just in thought. Accordingly, many children today do not learn to repress aggression enough.”

Yet the same overpermissive parents more often than not make irrational demands for high marks in school and insist on superhygienic cleanliness so that their children reflect well on them in public. Such families, says Bettelheim, exploit their children to fulfill their own “narcissistic needs”; they choose to follow Freud where it suits their convenience, and are as demanding of conformity as “the worst Victorian parent” where it does not. For the children, Bettelheim says, the result has been a “senseless” uncertainty about their own identities that turns to self-hate and later to resentment of the world at large.

The claim by radicals that they act out of high motives, Bettelheim believes, and “their occasional on-target attack on real evils have misled many well-meaning people into overlooking their true motif: this is hate, not desire for a better world.”

Bettelheim blames the malaise of the majority of student rebels on another oversimplified idea: the national insistence on putting high school graduates indiscriminately into the isolated academic atmosphere of traditional colleges and universities. Students feel “obsolete,” he says, because “society keeps the next generation too long in a state of dependence, too long in terms of a sense of place that one has personally striven for and won. To be adolescent means that one has reached (and even passed) the age of puberty, but must nevertheless postpone full adulthood till long beyond what any other period in history has ever considered reasonable. Students want, essentially, those group therapeutic experiences that will help them feel they have at long last come of age.” Because providing those experiences is not the chief function of most educational institutions, “colleges must inevitably disappoint the students where their greatest need lies. Campus rebellion seems to offer youth a chance to short-cut the time of empty waiting and prove themselves real adults.”

Bettelheim does not deny the existence of injustices within U.S. life. But he insists that the underlying causes of campus unrest lie as much in the way American children are raised and educated as in the Vietnamese war or widespread poverty. His advice is for universities to act like firm but understanding parents. While gladly adopting worthy suggestions, administrators should stop being so “anxious to look progressive” that they shrink from upholding the reasoned guidelines that students need to cope with their inner conflicts. For adolescents who lack a commitment to study and research, Bettelheim proposes a new educational system that will cater to the emotional needs of growing up. It would offer a variety of educational apprenticeships combining work and study, and would be ideal, Bettelheim feels, for the majority of American teenagers.