The Abnormal

While the courts and headlines are filled with "sex crimes," usually committed by "perverts," psychologists worry why such things happen, and what can be done to prevent them. Last week two Washington psychiatrists offered their findings and some suggestions in a bulky (702 pp.) book entitled Sexual Deviations (Linacre Press; $10).

The whole problem can be traced, say Drs. Louis S. London and Frank S. Caprio, to the fact that civilization has developed in man a feeling of shame about sex. The impulse, they say, is as natural and fundamental as hunger: "Everyone is allowed to admit without shame that he feels hungry, but not . . . that he has a craving for sex. Thus nature has planted in the human being an impulse which is continually producing tension . . ."

It is no easy matter to decide just what is normal, and hence, what is a perversion (the authors prefer the word deviation). Virtually every sexual practice which is condemned as abnormal in modern Western civilization is, or has been, considered normal somewhere, at some time.

Dr. London and Dr. Caprio have found that the deviations from what modern society considers normal are legion. Almost any common object or experience, they believe, can be tinged with sexual excitement for some individual. Prosecutors have long known that firebugs are often unbalanced and get sexual satisfaction from watching either the fire itself or the extinguishers. Even shoplifters, according to the Washington psychiatrists, are often sexually abnormal, and pilfer objects with some obscure sexual significance (e.g., women who steal fountain pens, men who take gloves.)

Many psychologists will be irritated by the authors' Freudian patter. But their main conclusions make considerable sense:

1/2 "No one is born sexually deviated . . . Sexual inversion as a symptomatic disorder in both sexes is curable . . . Sexually aberrated individuals can be treated [by] psychoanalytic psychotherapy."

1/2 "Alcohol plays animportant role in the problem of sexual deviations. It releases the inhibitions and tends to bring to the surface -sexual cravings that have been repressed. Many sex offenses are committed under the influence of alcohol."

1/2 "Rape is the product of an illness of the sexual instinct. Incarceration or capital punishment will not adequately solve the problem. Rapists should be segregated from society, analyzed and treated."

1/2 "Sex offenses must be looked upon by the courts as symptoms of neuroses requiring long-term psychotherapy."

Society's long-range aim, Drs. London and Caprio believe, must be to prevent sex deviations and crimes by treating sex rationally from childhood. Thus, neuroses would be given no chance to develop. The authors foresee "institutes of sexual science," where people with sexual disorders could go (or be sent) for treatment, and where married couples and those about to marry could get guidance.

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