Medicine: Watch Your Head

For years, wiseacres have been warning people to distrust their hearts and use their heads. Last week in Illinois, 50 topflight psychiatrists, psychologists, anthropologists and physiologists hedged considerably. Said they: if you don’t listen to your emotions, too, your intellect may get you into trouble.

The convening scientists* were particularly interested in man’s “adjustive struggle.” Said Chicago Psychologist Samuel J. Beck: “The presumably all-intellectual, nonemotional, strictly realistic attitude—that attitude traditionally so hallowed in science—is not useful equipment in the adjustive struggle.”

Those pioneers and leaders of the “Age of Enlightenment,”—Galileo, Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Leibnitz, Locke—put too much emphasis on reason, said Dr. Beck. The intellect, he added stoutly, is not enough. “We know from the history of our own times that the intellect has been a disappointment. It has not given men the central direction for which they searched.”

There’s a little old Calvinist in the woodpile, too. One reason why modern man has troubles with his emotions, said University of Illinois Psychiatrist Richard L. Jenkins, stems from the Protestant Reformation, “which increased the number and severity of the moral taboos and denied the certainty of forgiveness through the confessional and penance.” A man whose “halo is too tight,” said Dr. Jenkins, suffers from too many inhibitions, and may wind up in a doctor’s office with an obscure headache.

Said Manhattan Psychologist Anne Roe: doctors have spent too much time trying to find out why people get emotionally sick, and not enough time trying to find out why they stay emotionally well. Tests may show that a “patient” has a severe neurosis, but he may be prosperous and socially successful. Studying “normal” people, Dr. Roe admitted, has bored too many researchers.

*At the Second International Symposium on Feelings and Emotions, sponsored by the Mooseheart (111.) Laboratory for Child Research of the Loyal Order of Moose and the University of Chicago.