Medicine: Rebels or Psychopaths?

Every succeeding era is puzzled or even frightened by the behavior of “the younger generation.” But the U.S. today is more than usually concerned with the state of its youth. Juvenile delinquents appear (from often confusing statistics) to be increasing in numbers; certainly their crimes have increased in violence and often drip horror.

Few psychologists are better equipped to diagnose the complaint than Baltimore’s Robert Lindner. He has studied young people as a practicing analyst, as consulting psychologist to Maryland’s state prisons as well as to the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pa. Dr. Lindner has reached the startling conclusion that the youth of today is suffering from a severe, collective mental illness. While many parents—and some of Dr. Lindner’s own colleagues—will not go along with him all the way, his diagnosis is provocative.

“Until quite recently,” Lindner told a Los Angeles audience, “the rebellion of youth could be viewed with the detachment usually accorded anything so common and natural. The brute fact of today is that our youth is no longer in rebellion, but in a condition of downright active and hostile mutiny. Within the memory of every living adult, a profound and terrifying change has overtaken adolescence.”

Action & the Herd. Lindner sees two main symptoms of this change:

Today’s youth has a tendency “to act out, to display, his inner turmoil, in direct contrast to the suffering-out of the same internal agitation by adolescents of yesteryear.” Among Lindner’s examples: four Brooklyn youths arrested last August, among other things, for beating an old man to death in a park—as Lindner puts it, “a devil’s rosary of crimes ranging from rape to murder, and all stamped with an unbelievable degree of sadism.” Another of his examples: the New Zealand girl. Pauline Parker, 16, who savagely murdered her mother, assisted by a girl friend, Juliet Hulme, 15. Both, says Lindner, quoting from news reports, “exulted over their crime” and “showed no reasonable emotional appreciation of their situation.”

Though juvenile crime is more fully reported nowadays than ever before, Dr. Lindner still feels that there is a real contrast between the woes of today’s youth and “those classical descriptions of the storms of adolescence detailed by Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Twain, Dickens, Joyce, Mann and the rest.” These, he says, were all inward storms. “Lust was in their creations, also vast and devouring if nameless hungers, as well as cosmic yearnings, strange thirsts, occult sensations, murderous rages, vengeful fantasies and imaginings that catalogue all of sin and crime. But, unlike the sorry six from Brooklyn and New Zealand, in them these impulses were contained within the skin’s envelope, merely felt and suffered in the private agony of a tormenting preadulthood.”

The second major symptom about today’s youth, according to Lindner, lies in “the abandonment of that solitude which was at once the trademark of adolescence and the source of its deepest despairs as of its dubious ecstasies. And frequently this solitude was creative. From it some times came the dreams, the hopes and the soaring aims that charged life henceforward with meaning and contributed to giving us our poets, artists, scientists . . . But youth today has abandoned solitude in favor of pack-running, of predatory assembly, of great collectivities that bury, if they do not destroy, individuality. Into these mindless associations the young flock like cattle. The fee they pay for initiation is abandonment of self and im mersion in the herd . . . This innovation can yield no social gain. For it is in solitude that the works of hand, heart and mind are always conceived. In the crowd, herd or gang, it is a mass mind that operates—a mind without subtlety, without compassion, uncivilized.”

Violence Without Conscience. An anxious and concerned public, Lindner says, has received from the “experts” only absurd theories and warmed-over nostrums:

“Throw away the comic books,” “Close down the TV stations,” “Return to breastfeeding,” and “Get tough with them.” But, he adds, “really to understand what is happening to youth requires psychological knowledge. Both the basic tendencies of modern youth—to ‘act out’ and to drift into herds—are symptoms of a psychiatric condition, worldwide in scope, related di rectly to the social and political temper of our times. There is only one mental aberration in which these two symptoms coexist: in the psychopathic personality, essentially antisocial, conscienceless, inclined to violence in behavior, and liable to loss of identity in the group, gang, mob or herd. The psychopath is a rebel without a cause—hence, in a chronic state of mutiny. He strives solely for the satisfaction of his moment-to-moment desires. Raw need is all that drives him . . .

“The youth of the world today is touched with madness, literally sick with an aberrant condition of mind formerly confined to a few distressed souls but now epidemic over the earth.”

How did youth get that way? “It is not youth alone that has succumbed to psychopathy, but nations, populations—indeed, the whole of mankind. The world, in short, has run amuck.” And how did the world get that way? Dr. Lindner answers that one of the major factors producing psychopathy is damage to the ego. He sees a loss of individuality and consequent damage to the ego in the 20th century’s mass political movements, social and industrial giants, wars and economic upheavals. “From loss of identity has come insecurity, and this has bred the soul-destroying plague we know as mass psychopathy. Mass man is the psychopath par excellence.”

The “Lie of Adjustment.” “In this perspective,” says Lindner, “we can no longer regard the mutiny of youth as the product of ‘bad’ influences, a transient perversity that time will cure or that a few applications of social-service soporifics and mental-hygiene maxims will fix. Mutinous adolescents and their violent deeds now appear as specimens of the shape of things to come, as models of an emergent type of humanity.” Furthermore, Lindner believes that society, in trying to combat the epidemic, only compounds the conditions that generate the psychopathic virus—by “the myth of conformity, the big lie of adjustment.”

If man is forced from without to conform and from within to rebel, Lindner holds, man makes a compromise: “He rebels within the confines of conformity, he discharges his protest within the limits set by the social order that he has permitted to be erected around him.” In a special sense, this is what the honored, respectably liberal Goethe did when he committed his rebelliousness to paper. But man in the mass, who does not have such comfortable literary outlets, can “become transformed into storm trooper, Blackshirt, NKVD inquisitor, guard on the long march from Corregidor, or burner of the fiery cross.”

In modern society Dr. Lindner sees “nothing which does not require the young to conform, to adjust, to submit.” Along with religion and education he lumps social work, which aims to smooth rough-edged personalities so that they will not rub too harshly on their fellows; also philosophy, recreation and pediatrics: “Each is infused with the rot-producing idea that the salvation of the individual, and so of society, depends upon conformity and adjustment.” Thus, in harsher terms, rebellious Psychologist Lindner reaches much the same diagnosis as Social Scientist David Riesman (TIME, Sept. 27), who calls the pattern of the times “other-directedness.”

Concludes Lindner: “This is the very soil in which mass manhood and psychopathy take root and grow. Our adolescents are but one step forward from us upon the road to mass manhood. Into them we have bred our fears and insecurities; upon them we have foisted our mistakes and misconceptions. They are imprisoned by the blunders and delusions of us, their predecessors, and like all prisoners they are mutineers in their hearts.”