Psychiatry: The Kennedy Round

In Los Angeles last week, no less than in Geneva, it was “the Kennedy round.” When the curtain went up on the annual convention of the American Psychiatric Association, a huge portrait of the late President was the backdrop. The opening session was programmed in mourning type: “In Memoriam John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

Speaker after speaker reminded the 5,000 psychiatrists that no President ever did as much to aid the fight against mental illness as John Kennedy. His mental-health message to Congress last year represented the sort of official recognition for which the Psychiatric Association had been waiting for a century. Said the association’s new president, Dr. Daniel Blain of Philadelphia: “Because of his understanding and because of his own family situation, he chose to become a champion of the cause.”

Kill the Father. An offbeat splinter group, the Academy of Psychodrama and Group Therapy, got into the act by staging a curtain raiser for the main meetings in the form of a Kafka-style reconstruction of the personalities and possible motives of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. Said Manhattan’s Dr. Jacob L. Moreno, who invented psychodrama as a medium for acting out emotional disturbances and thereby treating them: “We are all suffering from a tremendous amount of unresolved guilt and confusion over what happened to President Kennedy. After all, if you can ‘kill the father,’ anything goes. We are all involved and we must all be cured together. We need a mass psychotherapy—a mass catharsis ”

Dr. Moreno had asked Dallas Judge Joe B. Brown to let Ruby out to play himself on the psychodrama stage. Predictably, Judge Brown refused. Moreno also had asked former Defense Counsel Melvin Belli to re-enact his own part. Belli accepted, then failed to show. But every role had volunteers, and though members of the audience who sat as a mock jury took no vote, their consensus was plain: if the Dallas jury box had been packed with psychiatrists, Ruby would have been found “insane.”

Most orthodox psychiatrists are skeptical of psychodrama, but at play’s end, the entire audience of 400 seemed to feel better—as if the doctors of the mind had needed to get something off their minds. Next day, they turned to the main business of the A.P.A.

Road to Immortality. Political assassination, said Dr. G. Wilse Robinson of Kansas City, Mo., did not change from the time of Cain to that of the Medici, but in the modern era there has been a change in the character of the assassin. Today’s hired killer wants no part of any attempt on the life of a prominent political figure. Such work is too dangerous. That leaves two types of assassinations: the conspiracy, as in the death of Lincoln, and the person-to-person attack. But the conspiracy against Lincoln was conceived and directed by John Wilkes Booth, Dr. Robinson argued, so even Booth really fits the more modern pattern: “A single man with a desire that results from long brooding to destroy a leader who is antagonistic to some belief that is very important to the assassin. The political figure has become a personal enemy of the assassin and must be destroyed.”

Booth, said Dr. Robinson, had told his friends: “What a glorious opportunity for a man to immortalize himself by killing Lincoln!” This concept may motivate more assassins than is now realized. “It may have been a major motivation to Lee Oswald. We know Oswald was unhappy in school, in the Marine Corps, in the Soviet Union, and in his own country. He probably would have tried to become an anarchist if he had lived around 1900.

“Perhaps we can say that in Booth, in Leon Czolgosz who shot McKinley, and in Oswald we have three men who were very much alike in basic personality defects. We must assume that they did not expect to change the basic political philosophy of the country. There must have been other motives. Two interlocking concepts seem possible: 1) that they were seeking immortality, and 2) that they were destroying the symbol of the highest authority. Their victim was a symbol of their general basic anger against the social order.”