A psychologist of the U.S. Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa., 30-year-old Robert Mitchell Lindner, this week gives the public one of the few play-by-play accounts of a psychoanalytic treatment ever published. His book, Rebel Without a Cause (Grune & Stratton; $4) is a complete stenographic transcript of the analysis of a young criminal. Harvard Criminologists Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck call Lindner’s work a milestone in criminology. It is also a pioneering study in hypnoanalysis.
The late Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, began his professional life as a hypnotist. Failing to cure neurotics by hypnotic suggestion, he gave it up to develop his analytic technique. Some Freudians have recently begun to swing back to certain possibilities of hypnosis —among other things — as a shortcut to cure.
“Brief psychotherapy” (as against analyses sometimes taking several years), is best known through the Army’s technique of using drugs to get battle-shocked soldiers to spit out their troubles (TIME, Feb. 7). Many psychiatrists fear that apparently speedy cures may really have little effect, leave permanent psychic damage. The same objection has been raised to hypnoanalysis (Lindner’s example was finished in 46 hourly sessions). But hypnoanalysis also has respectable support: it has been used by the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kan., by famed Psychiatrist Milton H. Erickson, of Michigan’s Eloise Hospital.
Light in Darkness. Lindner’s subject is Harold, 21, serving a long term for a serious, unnamed crime. Harold, the son of a bull-tempered Polish laborer who speaks no English, has been in trouble with the police, mostly for pilfering, since the age of twelve. His most conspicuous psychopathic symptom was a constant blinking of his eyes.
Lindner began in orthodox analytic fashion by having the boy lie on a couch and encouraging him to talk freely. (Lindner got his transcript via a microphone concealed in the couch. Told about this at the end of the analysis, Harold himself urged the analyst to publish the record.) Without much hesitation, Harold gave the details of a hair-raising career of gun-toting, stealing, vandalism, fornication. Like all psychopaths, Harold was “a rebel without a cause, a revolutionary without a program,” a grownup infant with no self-restraint and a craving for instant satisfactions.
By the thirty-second session, the analyst had gathered that: 1) Harold’s eye trouble began before the age of two ; 2 ) his difficulties seemed to have their roots in relations between his mother (whom he loved) and his father (whom he hated). Then Lindner ran into a stone wall of resistance; there were hints of a terrible experience which the boy could not remember.
Lindner thereupon placed Harold in a deep hypnotic trance, suggested his baby hood : “You are getting smaller and younger. … You are very small now, a very small baby … in the cradle. . . . Why did you first start to blink your eyes?” Harold then related, in sharp detail, two frightening experiences apparently at the age of about six or eight months: 1) sitting in his mother’s lap at the movies, he was terrified by a picture of a “wolf” (probably Rin-Tin-Tin, says Lindner); 2) next morning, waking early in his cradle, he saw that his father, looking wolfish, seemed to be hurting his mother.
Light on Lights. Before taking Harold out of his trance, Lindner told him to forget what he had said. Primed with leading questions, Lindner had little difficulty getting the same story from Harold at a later, conscious session. Eventually analyst and patient concluded that Harold’s psychosis was rooted in Oedipean jealousy of his father, that his blinking sprang from his association of the theater’s bright lights with the whole shocking experience. Lindner reports that the hypnoanalysis cured Harold’s blinking.
Most analysts find it difficult to believe in Harold’s powers of recollection from the cradle. They believe that two to three is the earliest age at which a child understands what it sees well enough to describe the incident later.
Orthodox Freudians take issue with Lindner’s basic method. Famed Dr. Franz Alexander, director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, states that while he has no specific knowledge of Lindner’s work, he does not think that “in chronic cases . . . the revival of hypnosis has great advantages over the modern handling of psychotherapy.” Says Manhattan’s Dr. A. A. Brill: “People can become addicts of hypnosis, as of drugs.”
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