Medicine: Psychiatry for Industry

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The lecturers in the seminar room of the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kans. last week were, naturally, topnotch psychiatrists—Drs. Karl and William Menninger and key members of their staff. The talk was, naturally, about Eros and Thanatos, conscious and preconscious, repression and denial. What was surprising was the student body: 18 men from industry and a woman from a consumers' group. They had two things in common—they were responsible for the personnel policies of their organizations, and they wanted to know how psychology and psychiatry could help them with their problems. Companies represented ranged from giant A. T. & T. through Kraft Foods to the Alma Piston Co. of Alma, Mich.

Explained Dr. Will Menninger: the foundation is deeply interested in industrial psychiatry; there are only three full-time and a handful of part-time psychiatrists in U.S. industry today, though 70% or more of all dismissals are the result of "social incompetence," and only 30% are caused by technical incompetence.

The class plunged promptly, if not deeply, into Freudian theory. Psychiatrist Herbert Modlin ticked off basic personality types, and told how to recognize some of the tricks of the unconscious in employees' behavior. Examples: a compulsive, conservative accountant may be reacting against childhood impulses to be dirty and rebellious; an ambitious man may have developed from a passive child, a philanthropist from the bullyboy who tied tin cans to cats' tails; an employee oversuspicious of everybody else's motives may act that way because his own unconscious motives are basically unworthy. A passive and compliant type who will not even ask for a raise may be covering up intolerable aggressions. Dr. Modlin tried to get his students to look at their employees with a diagnostic eye: "If you see a definite change in a worker's personality traits, the assumption is that he's reacting to severe stress . . . It's up to you to find out what it is and try to help him."

Dr. Karl Menninger, author of Man Against Himself and a leading devotee of the death-instinct theory (TIME, Dec. 12), spoke of the self-destructive urges which, in his view, make men accident-prone, absence-prone, and likely to court trouble with the boss. The practical businessmen around the table found the idea of a death instinct a tough nut. Some of them also boggled over the immense importance attached by the experts to the preschool years in character formation. In general, however, they lapped up most of the theory, and brought up case histories to match against it. Samples:

¶ The perfectionist worker who procrastinates because he cannot make decisions. The prescription was to put him in a set structure with firm deadlines, clearly defined duties and few decisions.

¶ An otherwise excellent supervisor who spoils his performance by a bullying lack of tact with subordinates. Since his behavior is adolescent, the prescription was to treat him as an adolescent, with firmness and support, and allow him to let off steam against his own superior with no fear of counterattack.