Fat & Unhappy

The week's headline-catching medical pronouncement came from a woman doctor: fatness, said Dr. Hilde Bruch of Columbia University's departments of psychiatry and pediatrics, is caused by overeating.

The fashionable theory that glandular disturbances cause fatness, Dr. Bruch told the New York Academy of Medicine, is mostly tommyrot. In a recent study of heavyweights, it was found that fewer than one in 200 had a glandular ailment.

What makes people overeat? Insecurity and immaturity, as a rule, says Dr. Bruch: "Quite often it is the youngest or an only child who becomes obese. . . . Fathers usually play a subordinate role in the emotional life of the obese family. The mothers are dominant in their influence. . . ." Coddled, overfed and overprotected by a doting mother, the chubby child grows up with a "fundamentally low self-esteem and with the conviction of his helplessness in a world which has been represented to him as a dangerous place. . . ."

Fat people, to Dr. Bruch (5 ft. 8 in., 145 lbs.), are not the placid and jolly folks they are generally reputed. Their good humor, she thinks, is a pose--a thin veneer over a greedy, irritable personality that will not brook any denial of its wants.

"Many fat girls," says Dr. Bruch, "though outwardly very concerned about not getting married, nevertheless persist in remaining fat because it is a protection against men and sex and the responsibilities of womanhood, which they dread even more than the disgrace of being fat." Even so, admits Dr. Bruch, these defenses in depth don't always work: in every crowd there is at least one man who prefers fat girls.

The only really effective cure for fatness, Dr. Bruch believes, is not in exercise or diets (although the "pure mechanical reducing," now popular in the reducing academies, is sometimes surprisingly successful, but only when the students have enough emotional control of themselves to go through with the course). Fatness, she says, is a psychosomatic condition; the blubbery patient belongs not in the gym, but in a psychiatrist's office. She implies that, with modern insight and sympathetic doctors, such well-known fatties as St. Thomas Aquinas, William Howard Taft, Hermann Goring or Charles the Fat might have been skinnies.

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