Stop, Look & Love

A man inherits the color of his eyes, say scientists, through the little heredity-carriers called genes. Leopold Szondi, a lively 65-year-old Hungarian psychiatrist, goes much farther than that. He believes that the genes also control the kind of subconscious mind a person has, and what is in it.

The all-important genes, Szondi says, determine people's lives & loves. In the field of romance, like attracts like--to disaster. Lovers with bad mental and emotional characteristics, caused by "sick" genes, should avoid marrying people with the same type of bad genes. An apparently healthy man with a schizophrenic grandmother, Szondi claims, is likely to fall in love with a girl whose ancestors suffered from the same kind of insanity. Their children, of course, would inherit a double dose of gene-damnation.

For Lovers. Psychiatrist Szondi knows no way of curing sick genes. But he believes that he can act as a sort of Dorothy Dix of dementia. With a test he has devised, he hopes to spot latent mental illnesses and warn gene-crossed lovers against compounding their illnesses by marriage. The test is made with photographs: a scientifically selected rogues' gallery of insanity.

After ten years of experiment, Szondi picked out from the archives of prisons and insane asylums some "typical" photographs of criminals, psychotics and other odd mental types. He has 48 photographs in all, divided into six sets. Each set of photographs (see cut) contains the face of 1) an epileptic; 2) a manic depressive in a depressed state; 3) a manic depressive in a manic state; 4) a sadist; 5) a catatonic (completely withdrawn) schizophrenic; 6) a paranoid (active, with delusions of persecution) schizophrenic; 7) a homosexual; 8) a hysteric.

In the test, the patient studies each set of eight photographs, and picks out the two faces that seem "most attractive" and the two that seem "most repellent." The test-taker is asked to run through the strange, leering faces again & again, perhaps as often as ten times. His choices, blocked in on a complicated scorecard like a crossword puzzle blank, are revealing to the psychiatrist. The filled-in squares on the scorecard can be translated into signs of "conflict" in the four fundamental fields of sexuality, emotional control, "ego structure" (estimate and control of self) and "object relationship" (adjustment to reality).

For Murderers. In crime detection, the test would not necessarily reveal the murderer among a group of suspects; but Szondi believes that he could eliminate people whose unconscious would never allow them to commit murder. The test, he thinks, would also reveal those whose unconscious makes them capable of murder. In ordinary use, Szondi says, the test will furnish "an X-ray picture of the psychic structure" of the patient, reveal "the hereditary content of the unconscious." It can also act as a warning to an engaged couple that their choices of pictures reveal latent sick genes so similar that marriage would be dangerous.

Szondi's tests have already been introduced into the U.S. In Manhattan, Mrs. Suzan Koroszy-Deri, his onetime clinical assistant at the University of Budapest (Szondi was driven out by the Nazis in 1944), gives a weekly seminar on the subject in City College.The Menninger Clinic at Topeka, Kans. also uses the tests. Szondi recently published a clinical handbook, Experiments in Impulse Diagnosis (Hans Huber Verlag; Bern). Last week in Switzerland, he was waiting in his Zurich apartment for reactions from U.S. and European psychiatrists.

First reactions: Szondi's theories about inheritance of the subconscious are of doubtful value, but his tests may prove useful in the hands of well-trained technicians. The tests may even become as important as the Rorschach tests, in which the patient is asked to say what he "sees" in ink blots.

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