Capitalism and Perpetual Adolescence: Essays and Lectures of George S. Becker: Edited by Jonathan D. Lewis Md

By George S. Becker

What is thinking but the courage to work alone developing concepts that are lasting because they grow out of a living relationship to a subject matter. Academic fashions come and go while the thought of the social anthropologist George Becker remains the contemporary of the future. Here assembled by his student and friend, the psychiatrist Jon Lewis, some of the essential papers unpublished in Beckers lifetime. The range is great: from Female Delinquency to Jonestown. The depth is compelling. The critique of other thinkers in the field are incisive. And a final virtue: the style is clear, without the need for scholarly obfuscations.

Walter A Davis, Professor of English Emeritus, Ohio State University. Author of Deaths Dream Kingdom, Deracination and Inwardness and Existence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Jul 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514460665

George S. Becker

Jonathan Lewis has practiced psychiatry in Chicago for 35 years. He worked with George Becker in their clinic for neglected and abused children and adolescents. Subsequently, he spent 25 years in private practice focusing on the treatment of traumatized refugees and asylum seekers from countries that had experienced civil strife . His account of this work is titled 'Towards a Unified Theory of Trauma and its Consequences' published online in The International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 9 (4): 298-317; 18 January 2012

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CONTENTS

Editor’s Introduction

Acknowledgments

PART ONE THE MAJOR WORKS

Chapter 1 Some Observations on Female Delinquency (1978)

Chapter 2 Character Structure in Late Capitalist Society and Its Antithetical Relationship to the Marxian Ideal (1983)

Chapter 3 Culture and Personality (1967)

Chapter 4 Jonestown: A Critical Analysis (1982)

PART TWO LECTURES AND BRIEF ESSAYS

Chapter 5 ‘Jonestown, a Fragment’ – Chapter IIIa, (May 1982)

Chapter 6 On War

Chapter 7 On the Bare Bones of My Philosophy; the Grundrisse

Chapter 8 Psychiatric Reductionism (May 1979)

Chapter 9 Maturity, Ideology, and Cognition I – V (April – August 1980)

Chapter 10 Cognition and the Life Cycle

Chapter 11 Moral Philosophy as an Underpinning of Psychiatric Theory (March 1976)

Chapter 12 Primitive Culture and Mass Society – Lecture (August 1976)

Chapter 13 On the Nature of Mind: Epiphenomena and Psychoanalysis (June 1979)

Chapter 14 Language and Character Disorder (December 1976)

Chapter 15 A Cautionary Allegory (November 1980)

PART THREE THE AMAZON NOTEBOOKS

Appendix

The Naviki (1966)

The Naviki Life Cycle

Naviki Personality Structure

A Note on Naviki Texts

Story 1 – MOON

Cachiri (The Drinking Party, fig.1)

Acculturation

Thoughts on Pareto and the Naviki

Psychoanalytic Approach to ‘Culture Shock’

Macú Acculturation

Snakebite Remedies and Medicines

Some Devils of the Jungle and Other Supernatural Creatures

Dedication

For Patricia J. Becker

and

Thomas Rosenwein, Esq.

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

By talking about these things on the air in wartime one has the feeling that one is keeping a tiny light alive somewhere.

—George Orwell, Letter to Alex Comfort, July 1943

G eorge S. Becker was a private intellectual, and for this reason his name is not known in academic and intellectual circles. Although he taught for a few years at Roosevelt University in Chicago during the late 1960s, h e abjured association with the institutions of society and did not belong to the academy or that community of public intellectuals. In presenting this edited version of his writings, lectures, and informal talks, I am attemp ting to keep a light alive, a light that burned intensely but briefly and for a precious few. It is a light that I believe deserves to survive at a time in which knowledge is increasingly fragmented, a t endency that George Becker abhorred. He firmly believed that fragmentation of knowledge inevitably leads to error. His mind and thought were analytic and synthetic, but his overarching contribution was in the synthetic realm, as he aspired to create a philosophical foundation for the social sciences. He felt that he had accomplished this goal by the time he was 40 and he taught his ideas in a course titled ‘Culture and Personality’, where I first met him in 1967.

He was supremely qualified for this task as he was formally trained in anthropology and psychology and well read in these disciplines as well as in sociology, psychoanalysis, classical economic theory, evolutionary biology, medicine, and anatomy; in addition, he was well versed in art, philosophy, and both classical and modern history and literature. It is difficult to categorize George Becker; perhaps it would be most accurate to describe him as a critical theorist, as he often spoke of his intellectual indebtedness to the Frankfort School, especially Theodore Adorno, Marcuse, and to Karl Mannheim. But it was his breadth of learning, talents, and accomplishments that most characterized him: he was a social psychologist, an anthropologist, a philosopher, an analytic therapist, a physician, and an addictionologist, all these and more. Although a thoroughgoing Freudian, he was analyzed by Rudolf Dreikurs, a Viennese analyst who founded the Adler Institute in Chicago. Perhaps he chose Dreikurs because Dreikurs’ work focused on the application of analytic ideas to the education of the child, a goal that corresponded to Becker’s lifelong interest in psychological development as it was influenced by social and cultural institutions. This topic and many more are reflected in the essays presented here. George Becker’s writings are critiques of the social institutions of post-industrial capitalist society as they affect the development of personality and mind. Yet he was not simply an academician and theorist; he was a practitioner who lived his philosophy as a practicing therapist and anthropologist, an adventurer and thoroughgoing student of man. He lived his life by the ethical/epistemic axis that he developed in his theories.

A summary of his ideas and philosophy for the social sciences, as taught in his course, constitutes chapter 3 of this book. I have tried to remain faithful to the style in which the lectures were presented; but at this remove, and with much condensation, the result is a pale reflection of the living presentations. George Becker spoke without notes, one idea lighting up dozens of associations, yet all led back to the theme of the philosophical unification of the social sciences.

The necessity for this book lies in the fact, as I stated at the outset, that George S. Becker was a ‘private’ intellectual, publishing only a single article during his lifetime (‘Integrated Drug and Psychotherapy in the Treatment of Alcoholism’, George S. Becker and Patrick Israel, MD, Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 610–633, December 1961). While the medications referred to in this work have long been out of use, the psychotherapeutic techniques discussed are still valid more than a half century after the article’s publication, and George Becker’s inimitable style is immediately recognizable. Other than this publication, his work was exclusively in the form of lectures at university, presentations at conferences and informal talks and lectures in staff meetings at the research and treatment clinic he established for character-disordered adolescents in the 1970s.

The first section of the book contains his more substantive work consisting of two conference presentations, the aforementioned chapter devoted to his lectures on ‘Culture and Personality’, and a long essay taken from what had been intended to be a book about Jim Jones and Jonestown on which he was working at the time of his death. The second section of the book presents shorter lectures and informal talks at clinical staff meetings. The final section reproduces portions of his field notes and drawings from his studies of the Naviki, a tribal people of the Northwest Amazon. Although his life was brief in years, he died in 1986, shortly before his 58th birthday, George Becker managed to live fully, creating a world of thought in that short time.

I have said that George Becker was an adventurer as well as an academic. Born in 1928, he was frustrated, being too young to fight the fascists he loathed, but joined the military immediately following high school and was a member of the Army of Occupation in Japan after the war ended. His writing talents were recognized and he became a staff writer for Stars and Stripes. As such he was able to live off base among the native population. He learned Japanese and ‘went bamboo’, adopting Japanese dress and manners so completely that he was often mistaken for Japanese by Westerners. He traveled to China in the late 1940s to witness the revolution there firsthand. A decade later, he visited Cuba during the revolution in that country. He grew up learning German from relatives on his mother’s side. After returning from the military, he did his undergraduate studies at Roosevelt University in Chicago and studied anthropology at Northwestern University, where, even as a graduate student, Melville Herskovitz described him as a ‘high-level theorist’. He learned the Sioux language doing fieldwork with this group of Native Americans. He was also fluent in Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese, traveling extensively in Europe and South America. He studied medicine and psychology while in graduate school, but did not complete his dissertation for a doctorate in anthropology. Theoretical differences with the department chair at Northwestern led him to abandon his studies before finishing his thesis. He then worked as chief psychologist at the Portal House Clinic for alcoholics, and for St. Leonard’s House in Chicago, a treatment center for addicts, and was also the psychologist for the Men’s Clinic of the Salvation Army, where he treated hundreds of homeless alcoholics.

He would spend the early morning hours before work reading books and professional journals. During the early 1960s, George Becker read of an Amazonian tribe whose culture and very existence was being endangered as the result of multiple social influences. He took leave from his positions to do fieldwork with this group in order to preserve a record of their way of life. Having trained in medicine (though not being degreed in this field), he petitioned the Colombian authorities to examine him in medicine in order to become certified to provide medical and dental services to the indigenous peoples he intended to study. He was successful in his quest and received a titulo of Doctor en Medicina limited to practice with the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Upon returning to the United States, he retained the title of’ ‘Doctor’ as an honorific, and though he was a skilled physician, he was, of course, not licensed to practice in this country. Becker’s achievement in convincing the Columbian authorities to examine his skills and authorize him to engage in the practice of medicine among the tribal people might be considered a worthy alternative to the definition of chutzpah rendered by Leo Rosten in his well-known The Joys of Yiddish.

Among his other talents, George Becker was a gifted metal-smith. He designed and fabricated his own universal elevator, a tool for performing dental extractions, and often did several dozen extractions a day in his jungle medical and dental clinics. His only written account of his work in the Northwest Amazon appears in chapter 1, a presentation comparing the society of this ‘primitive’ group of people to the adolescents he treated in his clinic some years later. As indicated above, the third section of the book consists of excerpts, drawings, and photos from his South American fieldwork journals.

While a serious thinker, he was also a wit with a marvelous sense of humor who could quote as readily from the Marx Brothers as he could from Karl Marx. He loved the work of Karl Manheim, Kant, Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, Habermas, Russell, Freud (both Sigmund and Anna), Franz Boas and Boas’s students at Columbia, Linton, Kluckhohn, Kroeber, Herskovitz, and Mead. His conversations were peppered with references to these and dozens of other writers. I trust that reading these essays will provide a taste of the fertility and nimbleness of a mind that had comprehended and could recall everything from the 20,000 books he had read, for he exhibited that mysterious and ineffable quality of mind often referred to as a photographic memory.

If the reader has gotten this far, he may have become incredulous, doubting that such a person as I have described could have existed and is but a fiction or fabrication, but I can assure you that my characterization of George Becker is an accurate portrayal of my experiences with him. Alternatively, if the reader believes that I have idealized my subject, I plead guilty; but in response, I reply that without idealizations and ideals to strive towards, we are relegated to live as passive victims of the present, as Becker points out in these essays. Our association lasted from that first course in 1967 until his death in 1986. He was first and foremost my teacher, a mentor, and when I completed medical education and a residency in psychiatry, I became the medical director and psychiatrist for the clinic he had established for adolescents. Here, I continued to benefit from his talks on diverse subjects, his clinical supervision, and his wisdom.

My wish is that this book will provide a taste of his style of thought and convey a sense of his ideas for a philosophy of the social sciences. As these writings are by now several decades old, his ideas and work will likely have been supplanted by developments since his death, nonetheless, I believe it important to document his ideas, some of which remain quite current and more pertinent today than they were when written. I finally wish to note that the writings that follow were in fact not written at all. Following two heart attacks, George Becker suffered a massive stroke at age 48, which left him unable to write or type. Fortunately, while unable to form new memories after this event, his pre-stroke memory remained intact. Hence he would dictate his thoughts for a presentation or lecture to an assistant, who would record and transcribe them. He would read the transcripts and make minor changes, but the chapters contained herein fundamentally represent George Becker’s thoughts as he spoke them.

Jonathan D. Lewis MD, Chicago, 2014

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The essays in this book could not have been assembled without the labors of Wendy S. Williams, who served as George Becker’s Boswell; taping, referencing and assiduously transcribing these presentations, lectures, and informal talks so that they might be preserved. Ms. Williams also was a therapeutic teacher and administrative assistant at the clinic of The Institute for Applied Behavioral and Psychiatric Research, the non-profit research organization and clinic established by George Becker. Other members of the institute clinic included Dr. Theodore I. Friedman, psychologist; Dr. Dennis McCaughan, research associate; Sally Phelps, therapeutic teacher; Gerard Littman, social worker; Karen A. McCullough, psychologist; and Jacqueline Lescovec, counselor. Dr. Patrick Israel served on the board of directors and was a loyal friend to George Becker. Thomas Rosenwein provided invaluable service as the chairman of the board; and Patricia J. Becker made sure that the staff, if not handsomely remunerated, was at least well fed.

While George Becker was the most influential of many for my intellectual development, he was preceded by David Orlinski and Bruno Bettelheim, who introduced me to psychoanalysis at the University of Chicago. George Stocking further prepared me for George Becker’s teaching in his graduate seminar on the intellectual history of cultural anthropology at UC Berkeley. Subsequent to meeting George Becker, I learned psychiatry and psychoanalysis from a host of generous teachers, among them Gene Borowitz, Louis Shapiro, Peter Giovachinni, Alfred Flarsheim, Merton Gill, John Hofstra, Robert Levine, Jerome Beigler, Hyman Muslin, and Leo Sadow. Jeffrey Roth greatly contributed to my personal and intellectual development in the application of psychoanalytic concepts to group dynamics. Finally, I was fortunate in later life to meet Walter A. Davis, professor emeritus at Ohio State University, whose breadth and depth of learning and whose critical thinking were congruent with that of George Becker and the ideals he espoused, thus providing me with the hope that such an ideal survives in an age of fragmentation of knowledge. My patients, who came from many countries and cultures, and who of necessity remain anonymous, taught me a great deal about what it means to retain one’s humanity in the face of humanly inflicted trauma.

I am grateful to my wife, Betty DeVísé, for graciously tolerating for many years the clutter that resulted from my obsessive attentions to this book, and who critiqued my editing, always improving on it. I apologize to the many who have contributed to my personal and intellectual development who have inadvertently been neglected here. They are legion. All the ideas and creativity represented here belong to George S. Becker; I am solely responsible for any errors in the text.

PART ONE

The Major Works

CHAPTER 1

Some Observations on Female Delinquency (1978)

E ditor’s Introduction: The title of chapter 1 is somewhat misleading in that it provides no hint of the richness and originality of its contents, wherein is contained the only report George Becker made of his fieldwork with an Amazonian tribe during the mid-1960s. His description of the socialization and enculturation process of the girls of the tribe is utilized to set in relief the plight of the delinquent adolescent girls he treated in the clinic he established following his return from Amazonia. The paper was written for a conference on delinquency, organized by Dr. Richard C. Marohn, a child and adolescent analyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. The papers from the conference were published in volume 7 (1979) of ‘Adolescent Psychiatry’, a series edited by Sherman C. F einstein and Peter L. Giovacchini. Richard Marohn was guest editor for a section of that volume titled ‘Legal and Psychiatric Perspectives on Delinquency and Acting Out’. However, due to a postal mishap, Becker’s paper did not arrive at the publisher in a timely fashion and was not included in the collection. It is published here for the first time.

Currently, there is a prevalent notion that female delinquency is increasing. While unsupported by ‘hard’ research, many in the fields of child psychiatry and child welfare share this idea impressionistically. On purely deductive grounds, it is possible to support such a contention by producing abundant sociological evidence that the period of adolescence is being extended; and from this the a priori conclusion can be drawn that, because delinquency is age-specific, female delinquency, also, must be increasing. However, from a psychiatric position, the question would have to be phrased: Is the kind of personality that leads to behavior designated as delinquent on the increase? Intensive study of twenty girls, ages 14 to 18, all of low-normal or below-normal intelligence, who could be diagnosed as character disordered (Michaels, 1959), seems to provide an affirmative answer. It is suggested here that cultural changes appear to be taking place, and are typified by the female adolescents in the sample; these transformations follow certain directions, in terms of both symptomatology and basic mental processes.

Character disorder is highly dependent upon the individual cognitive makeup of the patient, and cognition seems to be even more determinative during adolescence than do those aspects of personality which may be termed emotional. Certain cognitive patterns, notably those involving moral judgments, are developed in and through the process of socialization, and solidified by cultural or sub-cultural prescription (Kohlberg, 1959; Kohlberg & Gilligan, 1971). These disturbed adolescents all show deficiencies in this area, which leaves them on the verge of womanhood, with little clear notion of what is expected of them as adults. Because of this, such girls, if left untreated, will flounder. They seem to be headed for lives that will be, at worst, personally disastrous, and at best, merely lives of banality and impoverishment. Only adolescence is being discussed here, and it is taken as given that earlier dynamic processes have formed the very cognitive processes, upon which attention is concentrated.

The mental, as opposed to emotional, makeup of the child has been determined by familial and socio-cultural forces to produce a characterologically flawed personality. Research material supports the psychoanalytic position that adolescence, as a stage of development, constitutes a recapitulation and reformulation of the individual’s pre-oedipal steps (BIos, 1962). Our data have led to the conclusion that processes of cognition provide the individual with a framework within which she will develop her thinking about herself and the world. The child’s weltanschauung is composed, in great measure, of ‘intellectualized’ projections, rationalizations, denials, introjections, and the like. Mentation patterns, unlike the inner life of private fantasy, tend to be more socially determined. For the girls under study, this fact becomes salient, since the adolescent is particularly prone, by the nature of that developmental phase, to the influences of her age mates and those around her. Consequently, the girl’s intellectual view of herself and of the world becomes the prime determinant of the directions she takes in action, and probably lays the foundations for the rest of her adult life. Unlike their counterparts from higher socio-economic levels in society, these youngsters do not devote much energy or attention to freeing themselves from parental restrictions and obligations; there is notably lacking in them the rebellion of ideas so common to children from wealthier families. Nor was there, in most of the girls studied, much conflict that centered on the breaking of psycho-sexual ties with the parents, although it could be argued that the absence of parent figures could well be responsible for this. However, case material suggests something more than the lack of a father or a rejecting mother, even though both conditions were present in a majority of cases. While the children studied were basically alone, they did not seek for a kind of relationship that would provide an encompassing solution to all of their intrapsychic difficulties that is embodied in the romantic search for a mate. Rather, they felt that somehow society at large or some abstract force would provide this for them. The girls felt that somehow, magically, upon reaching age 18 or 21, all of the world’s benefits would be bestowed upon them. It would be a mistake to view this merely as being unrealistic or magical thinking, since many of these youngsters had had experiences in which their every material need was provided by some hospital, private or state agency, or other instrumentality of the society. This and other phenomena are interpreted in this paper as reflecting a very basic change that has occurred in recent years.

The singular phenomenon of post-industrial society that proves pivotal is the weakening of the adult role and postponement of the assumption of that role in all social groups. Difficulty arises because no existing synthesis accounts satisfactorily for historical changes reciprocating with the complex interactions of personal and social factors involved in the phenomenon. Prolongation and glorification of adolescence is unprecedented in simpler societies and would have been unthinkable during the first hundred years that followed the industrial revolution. In every well-functioning society, one age role becomes the model and the goal towards which all younger people strive. This stage is adulthood. Apart from such exceptions as the Arunta of Australia and perhaps feudal Japan, middle adulthood is universally accepted as the period that confers maximum status. By contrast, the generalized American culture deprecates adulthood in favor of adolescence. Implicit in this is denial of the values of wisdom and experience. Cross-culturally, adulthood is marked by full participation in the economic system, which is integrally bound up with marriage and childbearing. Prolonged adolescence is very rare, and with the exceptions of isolated instances, such as that of rural Ireland where marriage was postponed, this lengthened period prior to adulthood is unique to our time. It is probably difficult for most Westerners who have no contact with simpler societies to conceive of the relative brevity of adolescent rites of passage as they have been practiced by the human race for thousands of years.

In most primitive societies, the celebration of the boys’ and girls’ transition from childhood into adulthood lasts no longer than a few days or weeks, several months at most. Many societies lack formal initiation ceremonies and puberty rites for females. This is not to say that such ceremonies are uncommon, but simply to contrast the pervasive presence of ceremonies initiating the boy into adulthood with the much less common rituals involving girls for whom, nevertheless, some observance is widespread. This might seem even more surprising when it is considered that menarche is an occurrence that could hardly escape notice and is universal. Our society does not recognize menarche as marking adulthood. There is no clear demarcation between the time at which an individual is considered a child and the time when she is recognized as having adult status. For all social classes, two conditions obtain: first is the prolongation of adolescence; second is the lack of clarity in the specification of the female adult role. But conditions appear to be intensified at the present time. These are two critical preconditions for delinquency. The adolescent, at the lowest level of the economic scale, can have very little direct and productive involvement in the economic system. Allied to this have been trends that often make marriage economically less feasible than an unmarried life. In essence, social forces continue and amplify those situations and conditions which make the assumption of adult womanhood difficult often to the point of impossibility. If, then, childhood is fostered, in contrast to adulthood, character disorder must result. A great deal of the confusion in dealing with delinquency arises from the following paradigm: (1) character disorder is normative for the adolescent, and (2) character disorder is normative for the lower lower class. Because these two facts coincide, and both are largely true, and since it is impossible, at the present stage of theoretical sophistication, even to cope with the second preposition, one or the other of these propositions is disregarded in the ultimate theoretical formulation. In some cases, the premises are shifted in order to make adolescence the cause of delinquency when this is convenient. In other cases, the premises are altered to fit circumstances, and social class is held to be the cause of individual pathology. In actuality, such a unilinear cause/effect relationship violates the laws of logic. There are no conceptual bridges permitting sociological explanations for individual behavior, nor can a life stage account directly for a given diagnostic rubric. Diagnostically, we are faced with further problems, because there is no discreet, nor even remotely clear, scheme of boundaries between such pathologies as paranoid schizophrenia, psychopathy (i.e., character disorder), or acting-out neurosis; nor can such boundaries be established within the diagnostic criteria of temporality and symptomatology. Thus, to define female delinquency presupposes, from the psychiatrist’s point of view, reduction of the term ‘delinquent’ to a medically acceptable term, which label, according to current popular usage, would best be supplied by ‘character disorder’ or ‘borderline personality’. However when we reduce a legal-sociological term to a psychiatric one, we are not much further along in our analysis, simply because we are not dealing solely with an individual personality. We are discussing a socio-culturally formed personality, and that very self-system is composed of emotional, cognitive, and ‘cultural’ elements. Therefore, when we ask what went wrong, in the course of total personality development of the patient who, in adolescence, has earned the label of ‘character disorder’, we are really asking: where were these deficiencies in the course of this individual’s having become almost an adult? If she were to have experienced such difficulties and privations in early infancy and childhood as to make a sound mature adult psyche impossible, we should designate this person as schizophrenic. When a more developed stage of growth is achieved, she becomes a character disorder. We have to consider personality development not simply in the emotional terms of psychoanalytic theory, but also with regard to cognitive maturation, psycholinguistic growth, and the development of the socialization process within the individual, as well as the enculturation process. Behavioral science today lacks a theory of sufficient generality and inclusiveness to study and explain this growth process. Resultantly, if we are to present a true-to-life picture of the individual, it is necessary to resort to Piagetian formulations regarding the stages of cognitive development; psychoanalytic concepts to describe emotional development; social science constructs, such as socialization and enculturation, to explain the content of mind; and even these entail a disregard of psycholinguistic and pertinent physiologic information.

As has been indicated, when we discuss delinquency, it is necessary to rely upon two main bodies of literature. The first and most voluminous is the sociological. The psychiatric-cum-psychoanalytic writings provide us with a different viewpoint. Often when we attempt to reconcile the conclusions of these two disciplinary traditions, we are faced with logical incompatibilities, because it is impossible to compare and evaluate disparate concepts arising from profoundly differing philosophical grounds, to say nothing of the fact that different ontological categories are involved. The sociological literature, whether growing out of the original descriptive and symbolic interactionist positions of the Chicago School or out of the more recent tradition of a ‘deviance’ approach to social problems, in the end, has little to offer over the early Summer-Kellerist statement of the issue as a social problem.

Because no essential progress has been made in theory, except to undergird that theory with what C. Wright Mills, over thirty years ago, called a ‘paste-pot eclecticism’ of psychological theories, we find ourselves today faced with a dearth of explanatory concepts. As for the second stream, the psychiatric, it shows itself upon critical analysis to be very little other than elaboration, with some dramatic deviations, from the essential explanations given by Freud and by August Aichhom in Wayward Youth a half century ago. One of the difficulties encountered when we try to explain so complex a phenomenon as the apparent increase in female delinquency as we go into the last half of the twentieth century is that we have not achieved a sufficiently high level of explanation in the behavioral sciences to permit us proper formulations regarding the more basic questions under which female delinquency is necessarily subsumed. Our theory was perfectly consistent with the large accumulating mass of social-psychological data pointing to correspondence between social class and psychopathology. Conclusions drawn from this population and which appear to be substantiated by other studies are that the model personality of the lower-class youngster tends to be one of characterological disorder. It may be speculated that character disorder may well be normative for the lower classes in modern post-industrial society. When we discuss lower class, we refer to the subculture of the ‘lower lower class’ as defined by Warner and Hollingshead’s class V, or Oscar Lewis’s ‘culture of poverty’.¹ Our population is drawn primarily from this class. We refer only to shared values, attitudes, and belief systems when we attempt to describe this socio-economic group. If parenting and family structure are sound enough, obviously the effects of subcultural and peer influences can be overcome, especially if the individual is well-endowed intellectually and is psychically strong. We are affirming that characterological disturbance arises from psychic weakness and intellectual deficit; it is enhanced, subsequently, by the world view entertained by the lower lower class and by the reference group to which the adolescent adheres. When we have encountered this in the middle class, most often the delinquent girls seem to be acting out neurotics, and although they partake of some of the characteristics of the character-disordered adolescent, the substrate is neurosis. Undoubtedly, characterological disturbance has become more common in the middle class and may even become a more frequently occurring pathology in the future. But for now, it appears that character disorder is more common to the lower class.

It may be helpful to explain the approach that has been employed in diagnosis. Melanie Klein was aware of this problem when she wrote, ‘One of the bases of psycho-analysis is Freud’s discovery that we find in the adult all the stages of his early childhood development. We find them in the unconscious which contains all repressed phantasies and tendencies. As we know, the mechanism of repression is mostly directed by the judging, criticizing faculties-the super-ego. It is evident that the deepest repressions are those which are directed against the most unsocial tendencies. As the individual repeats biologically the development of mankind, so also does he do it psychically. We find, repressed and unconscious, the stages which we still observe in primitive people: cannibalism and murderous tendencies of the greatest variety. This primitive part of personality entirely contradicts the cultured part of the personality, which is the one that actually engenders the repression’ (1927, p. 170).

As was stated earlier, we employ a psychoanalytic framework within which to view personality development. Thence, we established a hierarchy of psychopathology. At the bottom of this scale is schizophrenia, the second level is character disorder, while the third and highest level is neurosis. Certainly, if we view a ‘typical’ delinquent, we find her personality to be a mixture of these three, but the predominant emphasis is upon the characterological disturbance.

No segment of society can produce a preponderant number of schizophrenics and continue to exist. But it is certainly not accidental that the lower lower class produces numbers of schizophrenics far beyond the expectation for the general population. We make no pretense that our very limited, although intensively studied, sample of female delinquents is in any way representative. However, because we see them in great numbers, both diagnostically and in treatment, we wish to offer a picture of female delinquency that impressionistically we present as a rather commonplace type of personality which is found with enough frequency in lower-class girls to be deemed worthy of attention. A hypothetical girl who represents an extrapolation of commonly occurring characteristics could be described in the following way. Oral dependency marks her personality more than anything else. She is regressive, naive, and primitive both affectively and cognitively. Her intelligence is within the lowest range of normal or the highest range of the deficient. She is impulsive, and her controls are tenuous. Her most commonly employed ego defense mechanism is denial, with projection running a close second. As may be surmised from all this, her social skills will be poor, her knowledge of herself, the world, and reality is most rudimentary. Guilt is minimal. We have found that the source of her reactions, whether to intrapsychic phenomena, societal phenomena, or environmental exigencies, can best be described in relation to her cognitive sets. Thus, she is unable to place herself in relation to her family, her community, the world, and concomitantly, any interpersonal situation in which she finds herself with any degree of accuracy. She misperceives the world, because she does not understand the world. A sociologist might stress differential association as causative in her delinquent behavior. The orthodox psychoanalyst would undoubtedly dwell upon her regressiveness and subsequent lack of ego strengths as making her unfit to face the challenges of her life. The more political social scientist would harangue against the enormities of the social evils besetting this young girl. We have departed somewhat from these common views of our female delinquent in that we see her as assaulted by a series of overwhelming stimuli daily. She is uncomprehending, and because she does not understand what is happening, she reacts with anger and rage. It is unfortunate that in the quest of esoteric statistical formulations regarding delinquency, researchers often have lost sight of an essential