Medicine: Rebels or Psychopaths?

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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."