Medicine: Rebels or Psychopaths?

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The "Lie of Adjustment." "In this perspective," says Lindner, "we can no longer regard the mutiny of youth as the product of 'bad' influences, a transient perversity that time will cure or that a few applications of social-service soporifics and mental-hygiene maxims will fix. Mutinous adolescents and their violent deeds now appear as specimens of the shape of things to come, as models of an emergent type of humanity." Furthermore, Lindner believes that society, in trying to combat the epidemic, only compounds the conditions that generate the psychopathic virus—by "the myth of conformity, the big lie of adjustment."

If man is forced from without to conform and from within to rebel, Lindner holds, man makes a compromise: "He rebels within the confines of conformity, he discharges his protest within the limits set by the social order that he has permitted to be erected around him." In a special sense, this is what the honored, respectably liberal Goethe did when he committed his rebelliousness to paper. But man in the mass, who does not have such comfortable literary outlets, can "become transformed into storm trooper, Blackshirt, NKVD inquisitor, guard on the long march from Corregidor, or burner of the fiery cross."

In modern society Dr. Lindner sees "nothing which does not require the young to conform, to adjust, to submit." Along with religion and education he lumps social work, which aims to smooth rough-edged personalities so that they will not rub too harshly on their fellows; also philosophy, recreation and pediatrics: "Each is infused with the rot-producing idea that the salvation of the individual, and so of society, depends upon conformity and adjustment." Thus, in harsher terms, rebellious Psychologist Lindner reaches much the same diagnosis as Social Scientist David Riesman (TIME, Sept. 27), who calls the pattern of the times "other-directedness."

Concludes Lindner: "This is the very soil in which mass manhood and psychopathy take root and grow. Our adolescents are but one step forward from us upon the road to mass manhood. Into them we have bred our fears and insecurities; upon them we have foisted our mistakes and misconceptions. They are imprisoned by the blunders and delusions of us, their predecessors, and like all prisoners they are mutineers in their hearts."