Psychiatry at Work

Spare the Freud and save the child, says Dr. Douglas McGlashan Kelley, professor of criminology at the University of California, who was chief psychiatrist at the Nuernberg trials. Misunderstanding and misapplication of Freudian theory, Dr. Kelley told a summer session at Fresno State College last week, have made parents neurotically fearful of turning their children into neurotics. As a result, he said, the U.S. today may be producing a smaller proportion of neurotics, but it is harvesting a bumper crop of psychopaths, which is worse.

It is the nature of every infant, said Dr. Kelley, to believe that the world revolves around him and especially his digestive tract; as a growing child, he cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality, he lacks emotional control, and, being inexperienced in the world's ways, he cannot make sound critical judgments.

With reasonable parental instruction and discipline, nearly everybody outgrows or learns to control these traits. But if children carry them over uncontrolled into adult life, the result is a character defect or disorder.* An active, severe defect, said Dr. Kelley, may lead directly to crime--a simple example of "sees what he wants and takes it."

Besides love and security, says Dr. Kelley, a youngster needs simple corporal punishment. This should change after age seven or so to adult types of punishment --fines and loss of privileges, always with reasoned explanations. If the child is not secure, Dr. Kelley conceded, the controls may make him neurotic. But that fear, first sown by Freud, has run wild through U.S. education and childrearing. The result: "A generation of children who have not been taught the discipline required for getting along with the world."

"At present," said Dr. Kelley, "our general approach is opposed to the totalitarian pattern and emphasizes freedom of speech, lack of obsessive rituals and minimal demands on behavior. We have been overenthusiastic in our refusal to teach control lest we traumatize ... I should like to suggest that the foundations of democracy can be achieved even while total freedom of behavior may be curtailed. The ideal solution would be neither too much nor too little training suppression. Since nobody knows how much is too much, if we err, let it be on the side of potential neuroses. [Perhaps thus we can] make our world a better place in which to live ... If we do not choose some risk of creating neuroses, we ... increase our delinquency and criminal rates."

*Serious character defects mark what used to be called the "constitutional psychopathic inferior," more recently known simply as the psychopath (and some experts want to change it again to "sociopath") Commonest feature: utter selfishness, in which the victim knows the difference between right and wrong but does not care.

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