THE PSYCHIATRIST

Webster defines psychology as “The science of the human soul; specifically, the systematic and scientific knowledge of the powers and functions of the human soul, in so far as they are known to consciousness; a treatise on the human soul.”

Modified by the phrase, “in so far as they are known to consciousness,” that definition will do, albeit we have arrived at but little “knowledge” of the “powers and functions of the human soul,” and at less of prescience that accounts for the by-choice criminal. Then, too, distinction must be made as between the finite limitations of the brain of flesh, and the infinite reach of the “soul” of man.

In any case, let us not cough over a too nice fitting of technical terms; but envisage, in the broad, the matter of mental research and healing.

The more material powers of the mind of the criminal frequently elude the examiner and tools which can be too “systematic.” This, because the examiner faces cards which the examined instinctively employ every means at their command to euchre. Also, if his limited scope of criminological vision causes him to over-emphasize present emphasis, and to bolt the way-backward trail of his subject, the examiner will remain as half blind to the basic reasons for a given criminal.

Cardinal causes for the criminal commonly hark back to remote ancestors. And so, for example, one unacquainted with the early history of the Sicilian people, the events of which changed so many of that people from trustful, mutually helpful sons of the soil, into dagger-thrusting brigands, lunging for the hearts of their blood brothers, has no call to classify the alien Sicilian-Italian who makes America his base of operations. That is essentially so, because the period from bib to puberty is the most impressionable after-birth period, during which a lad will tend to take on much that will aggravate congenital predisposition; predisposition the more fateful for the reason that it lurks in the unconscious, and there constantly presses upon its victim for expression.

Hence, psycho-physical research that does not cover the whole field of motive and motion, is comparatively valueless. By the same token, the investigator who is casehardened with technical lore, will be very likely to miscall the turn, especially on the alien and near-alien criminal.

Above all else, the psychiatrist must measure the criminal with an absolutely open mind, attuned alike to individual and racial determination; attuned, also, to his own definitions, such as that psychic contagion is “transfer of nervous disease by imitation”; and attuned to the fact that the mode of operating employed with Awasco, the sunny-hearted, comparatively ingenuous “Wop,” anxious to help, won’t do at all with Hungarian Zynthner the sullen, who is evasive, suspicious, and resentful alike of authority and the personal touch, because he still bristles over hurts visited upon him and his by thick-lipped Hapsburgs.

Mental searching of the latter class of criminals usually yields next to nothing that is specifically of capital importance. For want of the master-key to the situation, the operator leaves the tested laughing up their sleeves over having fundamentally over-reached the tester. Needless to add, the master-key is mostly shaped of the metal of foreign soil, and unlocks the far-removed circumstance.

First off, the really expert examiner will seek to win the undivided attention, full confidence, and voluntary coÖperation of his man, who is to be led only by judicious degrees to the conviction that the questioner is not a mere cog of a “scientific” machine, the purpose of which is to bare the subject’s soul, regardless of his feelings in the matter.

Call mental research by what name you will: state it in esoteric terms laden with syllables, or so plainly that a recent past master at making mud pies can understand, and it must still be led, as well as leading, else miss the mark.

Stamps of stigma are essentially subversive of the end sought. Designate a lad by a disgraceful name, and you create the strongest of initial motive for him to earn the name. Moreover, such procedure is usually as senseless as harmful, since it is not within human gift to declare the morrow of the disease-free, pre-adolescent mind. The writer is moved to stress this paragraph, because he has observed so many cases whereof full-blown puberty has marked mental metamorphosis; marked it both as to the positive and negative, the which will usually depend on the sum of the subject’s bringing-up, inclusive, of course, of the sum of his environment; and partly on his intrinsic moral fibre, born at his birth. And recollect that juvenile predilections usually mark the confirmed criminal to be.

In any case, the negative conclusion should wait upon indubitable evidence; and the positive, general statement be mostly guardedly made, since the scales will likely tip to the weight of influence, and that may be in the lap of change entirely beyond the ken of “little man.” God, alone, disposes, alike as to mind and matter. Furthermore, pre-criminal motivations are never singular; hence the single-seeing reformer, or investigator, cuts no swath in complex, crowding crime. And furthermore, his conclusions may be absolutely correct, and his mode of applying remedial measures be diametrically at variance with the crying exactions of his subject.

Then again, crime is not a disease in the sense that it is so lightly proclaimed. Crime may eventuate mainly because of congenital flaw, physical, mental, or both; or it may crop out by acquirement in spite of a sound heredity; but it always issues to relative mental disease in the sense that habitually oblique reasoning becomes master of the subject, either tentatively, or for good and all; tentatively, if the constant weight of influence is preponderantly in his favor, and permanently under the reverse circumstance.

More than that, the serviceable investigator will understand how the weight of influence can be turned, one way or the other, by seeming straws of effort or circumstance. For instance, the mood of the moment must be understood not only, but as well, why it is the mood of the moment. Here, pre-natal influence may carry in nothing more tangible than a lowering sky. There, the marked face of the man betrays the erotic-neurotic in the throes of the immediate aftermath of his self-indulged spree, in which state of low vitality he naturally looks out upon an ugly, drab world. Another nurses a fetich: a ridiculous fetich, to be sure, but one of which you shall not purge his mind with a club of words; indeed, in no way else than through patiently building to his better understanding. Per contra, looms up the capsheaf of them all: the parent-spoiled ego-centric mouther, who is certain sure he could plan a better world than ever Almighty God could think of. Very good, encourage him to build it; then pick it to pieces, preferably with terse, pregnant parables that leave him not a stone to stand on. Do it often, do it advisedly, and do it thoroughly. You will not thereby win him at once to rational thought, but you have better than a fighting chance to switch him for it, if you are kindly tactful, and do not attempt to stuff your opposed views down his throat.

We are not concerned here with those doomed mentally in state of embryo, save that it is well to have in mind Dr. A. Jacobi’s “Report to the Prison Congress of 1892,” to the effect that “No congenital chronic thickening of the brain membranes, no fixed changes in the brain substance, unless it be syphilitic perhaps, have ever been cured.” So much is indisputable fact, qualified by the word “cured.”

With Dr. Jacobi’s further assertion, many will, without presumption, disagree: “It is not necessary to resort to material impressions (in the embryonic state) as the cause of physical, intellectual and moral anomalies in the offspring: that theory may safely be left to nurses and poets.”

Passing the poet—who usually culls and adorns, yet has been known to probe and create—while objecting strongly for the grateful nurse who often guides to health where the physician, single-handed, would have failed, is Dr. Jacobi’s second sweeping conclusion unassailable?

What is the last power of the protoplasmic germ, and what is the last influence from which it derives that power? Can any man answer unqualifiedly, and if he cannot, just why exclude the psychic from the possibilities? If morbidly by “psychic contagion” is admitted, why refuse pre-natal impressions of psychic origin?

We know that hereditary transmission is persistent as to physical attributes. It may appear to drop stitches here and there, though we shall note more or less of reversion to type if we follow through far enough; but let opinion be as it may, how is one to check up variations of mood, temperament and disposition with physical figures? As to the last three, Jimmy the first and Johnny the second of the same family are antithetic. Why, if the physical is final?

How, by purely physical analysis, are we to account for the fact that the original Clay family of horses were notoriously high-strung and hard to school to rein: whereas the Morgan family were supremely easy to break and groove? Why, where the blood line was kept pure, did the family temperament persist, with few deviations, and even then breed on again back to original family “manners”? Why, with mixture of those breeds, mixture of manners?

What made the intrinsic difference in mental bent and physical outlook as between Webster and Hayne? Why was the one a stickler for centralized governmental power, and the other champion of the rights of individual States, and why was each cock-sure of his ground of contention under the Constitution? In the final analysis, did anything out of physiology decide the question, and how did, what did decide, take up its abode in the national consciousness?

Do hopples employed in effecting change in the original, instinctive gait of a mare from trot to pace, alone account for change of gait? If so, why, when her instinct of motion is changed mechanically from the trot to the pace, does she transmit the latter-acquired instinct to her progeny, to the near exclusion of the gait she was born to? Why, when the hopples are removed, does she not revert to the trot?

Way back of Civil War days, a gentleman-horseman of Rhode Island changed the gait of the saddle horse of the lady of his choice to the pace, agreeably with the fastidious taste of the lady. Then, it was, the “pacer” made his bow to the horse world. To-day, he speeds better than fifty-fifty with trotters through the “Grand Circuit,” and almost surely transmits the instinct to pace. Hopples now are employed mainly to prevent “breaking”; in fact, pacing champions have been leg-free of them.

What’s the answer, if not transmitted instinct, and who is to draw the boundary line thereof? If the instinct to play a base horn, why not the instinct to play a base part? If the instinct to play a base part, why not the instinct to brood and abnormally berate oneself, or flippantly break laws, or froth over fol-de-rol, or “fake” the whole human scheme?

At any rate, the instinctive intent of the habitual criminal is summed up in the last phrase of the preceding paragraph. Therefore, we needs must sharpen our tools of amendment and repair accordingly.

Sharpening, we shall learn on the one hand that bloviation brands the surface-sign, self-seeking examiner; and on the other hand, that be his lip-service never so fulsome in favor of this or that man, method, or rÉgime of reform, the examined is dealing from the bottom of the deck if he does not hearken unto “The stern daughter of the voice of God.”

The subject is hearkening if he has the grit to pass up “gutter guff” always circulating in the criminal crowd, while he puts forth earnest efforts for fundamental averages. Contrariwise, if he juggles those averages with his mind clamped to the sporting schedule of the place, he is “faking”; he is faking, even though he cunningly steers clear of the house disciplinarian. Hence, the rational rÉgime of reform will require him to do the one, while making it practically impossible for him to do the other, and make an early parole—as he now does.Save for congenital deviates the like of those named by Dr. Jacobi, determination of his reactions is but the first step in the social rehabilitation of the recidivistic felon; in truth, the determination so far is in appreciable measure self-evident. By the very fact that he elects to be and remain a lawbreaker, he is somewhat of a mental dud, and more of a moral pervert. Moreover, whether he was slated mainly by nature to play the part, or it was pressed upon him by the cumulative weight of spiteful circumstance, he plays the part.

The part is the part of the predal parasite, the which he likes fully well and will not cast aside lightly at call to carry his rightly weighted share of the social load, be that never so light.

Opinions differ as to the capacity of the criminal to adjust to social exactions, but there can be no two judgments as to the duty of the State to require of him that he shall make earnest bid for the best social expression of which he is capable. Thereof his number in the average is not so close to zero as it is commonly marked. Added to his positive mental response, a certain cleavage in favor of his brain and betterment must nearly always be allowed, since he usually plays possum in prison for “easy pickin’” in line with his anti-social predilections.

Furthermore, mental search made in a strange and stressed atmosphere, with tools utterly foreign to the subject’s attention, will get on his nerves to a degree, and may prove baldly misleading; misleading not only as to his latent mental content, but as well upon him, if negative procedure following the search causes him to throw up his hands in deep-seated disgust.

Under restrictive conditions, for which a bungling operator may be primarily responsible, a hyperesthetic might suffer close to acute sensory aphasia; and he who bears the burdens of hebetude would probably fare no better if the clicking of his mind were clocked to an arbitrary time allowance.

In any case, the final test should revert to material practices, and processes of intellection whereof the subject had worked from motive to excel, shall the motive have been good, bad, or indifferent.

Particularly, the examiner should beware a habit of mind that sends him fetich stalking: as for instance, to establish the ultimate, unconscious, sexual base of neurasthenia; or a given percentage of morons, applicable in general to felonious offenders against the public law, or even as constant for different prison populations. The danger that lies in determination to prove what one is predisposed to prove, is not easily overestimated; indeed, the test should, in such case, pass from tested to tester.

When a man gets that way as to any human question, he is relatively in the same state of mind as the fetichist who fondles milady’s shoe, to the exclusion of the body and soul of her, provided: the shoe is high-heeled and buttons. Such an one should turn awhile from the criminal crowd, to care-free thinking in the wide open. Before resuming his duties, he should further check up with one of his craft who planes his blocks to square with well-battened conclusions.

While it is true that no structural change to man’s hand is possible in the brain built in embryo, it is also true that the pernicious custom is to overdetermination of the damage done in that state. For example, the fact that a given subject may never hope to master calculus, doesn’t mean that he may not be stretched to the size of a serviceable breadwinner. In line with that truth, take one, of many, extreme cases that have come under the writer’s observation and treatment:

R., age sixteen, lowest-grade imbecile and borderline idiot, so dense that it took the writer three weeks to establish in his mind the difference between right and left. When so much of mental awakening came, came with it a pitifully wistful smile of blowing pride. Another three weeks, and he could execute on command with few slips through the “School of the Soldier.” At the end of three months, he worked regularly and reliably with his company in battalion drill through intricate “Successive Formations”; and within the year, he could take his company to and from any formation with which he had been taught to form. More than that, he picked up nicely at common school, and made relatively good progress at “Sloyd.”

Surely, all of that does not come under the heading of “reflex action”; and if it does, what of it? If a megacephalic, splay-footed, slab-sided, lumbering imbecile like R., so close to the idiot as to give off the latter’s proverbial scent, can be carried even to the stage of mental and physical development R. was carried “within the year,” what cannot be done for the mounting millions of mentally and physically backward girls and boys of America classed as “Morons”? How are we to get the down-to-the-ground work of the land done without the aid of such?

In any event, it is at once informing and encouraging to note that the school authorities of New York City have called check on the near mania of the period to attach negatively overdrawn advalorem tags to such children; and then, when so tagged, practically to dump them into the social discard, there to hate themselves, each other, and everybody.

For one, cardinal thing, the named school authorities rightly hold that the humane burden is upon New York City’s teaching staff to dig out and decide upon ways and means better than those which make social pariahs of unfolding lads and lassies.

The same authorities further hold rightly that the benefits accruing to such children through mixing with the better-equipped mass is, in itself, a consideration not to be lightly brushed aside. And once more, that mental backwardness is in appreciable measure chargeable to false methods of educative approach and attack.

Gentlemen who lie awake o’nights devising bizarre means by which alleged criminal “morons” can best be cheated of that which the school authorities of the City of New York insist New York’s mentally backward children shall have, will do well to follow the effects of the edict of those authorities. Certainly that edict won’t visit arresting embargo upon the normal mass of children, and must prove a boon to approximately ten thousand children who don’t just measure to arbitrarily-spaced mental tape; tape which is not, and can not be, out of the hand of the Almighty, and tape which can not measure to fully unfolded years.

As applies to either prison or public school instruction, the crucial points are: (1) Technical marks of stigmata are much too frequently and much too loosely attached to budding youth, the inevitable effect of which is to depress and discourage them, particularly out of the gibes of unthinking comrades. (2) More often than not, the marks initiate in the fallible brains of those tricked into overdetermination, through predisposition amounting to near obsession to make the technical case. (3) The marks, as arrived at under present conception of rational “follow-up” processes, do not carry to comprehensive measures. (4) The scholastic or reform curriculum that is not pregnant with influences fundamentally germane to the mental, moral and physical uplift of the last unit of the mass, is either falsely prescribed or prosecuted.

Because of his reasoning faculty, the child, more quickly than any other youngling of the animal kingdom, unfolds by imitation to good suggestion and good example. Hence, if solely because segregated-group treatment practically cold-blankets those two, capital influences, as exerted by the mass upon the individual, it should be relegated to the domain where veiled minds are wedded either to fantasies, or to the useless function.

Wheresoever mental dullards are schooled, the atmosphere should be surcharged with hope. There, the word “can’t” should be held taboo, and “you can if you will” issue commonly with the force of an unquestionable slogan. No matter how apparently hopeless the case, no suggestion of character whatsoever, to that effect, should be carried to the subject.

Related tests for physical reactions may be taken at very close to their face value, since the responses thereto are mostly involuntary, and, in any instance, the subject can’t just figure it out how to beat them. However, acquired ability, plus somewhat of natural gift of the psycho-analyst to trace signs to their source and intertwining, must be beyond question.

The phrase “plus somewhat of natural gift” is inserted, because the burden is at once upon the examiner to pick apart the mosaic of motive, and to uncover the counter motives of the examined. That he will not do reliably short of an intuitive faculty naturally keen, backed by a heap of horse sense, and a broad culture; a culture so broad that he can vibrate alike with such as the cheap paddock tout, the crass, ego-centric, oversexed hyperesthenic with a chip on his shoulder, the plain plumb bum and crowded-out derelict, the congenital victim of hebetude with ox-like mind and the sensibilities of the mullet, and the bald criminal cheat, out all of the time to bring the crime-tainted-bacon home over the subterranean route.

Actually to grade human souls and sound human hearts, is a heaping order that calls for catholic understanding of comparative sociology, retroactive as to transmitted traits of character for at least one-hundred-and-eighty years. Back of that, man has not yet probed to impulse for human action of the present; but he can not be sure that reasons in part for present given courses of human conduct, may not strike backward centuries farther than nine-score years.

Not so long ago, as world time goes, natural selection was the vogue. Under Lycurgus, a little later on, Spartan youth who were not expert foragers from the common hoard, were subject to the heaviest hand of the State. Another short bridge of years, and Germans who grilled the legions of Varus boasted that they “didn’t go to war but to annihilation.” Shortly thereafter the doom of the Roman Empire was adumbrated partly by the “lounge-lizard” given over to various forms of indefensible conquest, not the least of which led to vitiating sexual excess; and partly by establishing barbarous letting of human blood in the national consciousness as a form of amusement.

From then on, most of social upheavals carried the germs of future social chaos in thousands of killings, the bulk of which were born of hectic, heartless bestiality, and very few, if any, of which wrought for whole-seeing man.

Through all, war over religious creeds is chargeable, more than any other one influence, with retardation of human progress. Therefore, to trace the backward trail of the purblind bigot, is ofttimes the primary chore of the psycho-analyst.

Instinctive, habitual thievery lashed into lads, even unto death, 323 B. C. would necessarily carry with tremendous pertinacity; probably not unto this year of our Lord, but possibly so. It is given to no man to declare unequivocally that an intrinsic Greek thief of to-day is not, as to natural tendency to thieve, more or less the product of certain lads whom the authorities of ancient Sparta sped on their thieving ways.

We know comparatively so little about hereditary transmission, that to allege of the fixed “law,” or laws thereof, is to part company with the possibilities.

Degree by degree, the finite mind of man edges closer to that which but ten decades ago was by common consent relegated to the domain of the infinite; as for examples, telegraphy, telephony, and the wireless. The wireless, mark you, the metallic language of which depends primarily upon synchronous vibrations produced by sound waves.

That’s striking so close to telepathy as to make rational conception of pre-natal influence relatively simple reasoning. Also, it causes one to wonder if it be not a part of the Great Scheme of the all-knowing Father to unfold the finite mind of man measurably to conception of the infinite?

Be all as it may, present social conditions in America offer many visible signs of far-removed atavistic pressure upon polyglot Americans in the making; signs directly applicable to thousands of alien predal felons in our midst, whom, with such signs, the psycho-analyst must read. Of those signs are the singular predilection of the Sicilian-Italian criminal for criminousness by group expression, initiating with the “Mafiauso,” headquarters at Palermo, Sicily; and the instinctive predisposition of his blood brothers of the “Camorra,” across the Strait of Messena, headquarters at Naples, to combine against the established social order and tear things.

Hence, largely it is, that human life in America is at the moment held at a price less than the primitive savage placed upon it. Spurious leaders of athletics of old Rome got behind that bad business with the bone-breaking gladiator; and spurious leaders of athletics are to-day pressing in America for reversion to the murderous sporting type of Nero’s time, through establishing the blood-spilling pug-ugly, and heroizing the low-down parasital “sport.”

Get that, to its ramifications, such as that on the one hand the average annual salary of ministers of the Methodist faith has just been raised approximately from 800 to 1100 dollars; and on the other hand, that a won’t-work, fistic brute demands and commands $300,000, “win or lose,” for a few minutes at cutting, slugging and punching recognition out of the countenance of another parasital “pug.” This, while public school teachers have to press, and press for a living wage, given grudgingly.

Get just that much of anti-social play and pressure, then wonder not that the sporting-grooved predal felon spurns actual work, and that college authorities have to put hopples on thousands of sport-soaked, bucking young bronchos, in order to align them for a smattering of cheap culture.

As if all that were not enough, would-be bellwethers of reform can not rest until they have well-nigh ruined rÉgimes of reform through supercharging them with so-called “sporting features.”

Right here is the chance for the wholly honest, wholly earnest psycho-analyst to score. Better than he, none should know that legitimate sport outraged is commonly one of the cardinal causes for the confirmed criminal; and that to further inoculate with the sporting “bug” a lad already ridden by the vicious by-products of sport, is directly to furnish him with formula for further perversion of a fundamentally good instinct. He also knows that perversion of the sporting instinct frequently ends with the Wassermann test, and the polluted victim who is a menace to the public health.

Prisoner or freeman, rational exercise in the free air he should have; but why, after nearly two-thousand years of kneeling at Christian altars, should man hold up such as the “two-fisted,” cruel, degenerate, human battering ram, as a criterion for his upcoming kiddies to ape? And if he will have it so, why babble about “disarmament” and “waves” of crime?

Naught but logical sequence of action piled on logical sequence of action explains the predal felon who now comes a’shooting at high noon in America. About that, the much-touted aftermath of the World War has had little to do, and imbuing lads with the instincts of the bull, a very great deal.Stripped of cheap verbiage and cheaper buncombe, the brutal fact is that America has bid, put up, put down, and put through, both in and out of prison, as if she were motivated to establish the predal felon. That she has done primarily through framing the loosest and most asinine of immigration laws, easily beatable; and secondarily, and again in and out of prison, through extracting near to the last sting of consequence from the commission of crime.

If caught and corralled—against which the chances are about ten to one—the broad-day murderous footpad goes to prison with a contemptuous sneer in his heart for repression that doesn’t repress. Also, he nurses a smug chuckle over the fact that criminal law, the fundamental office of which is to prevent crime, doesn’t prevent.

To the “sneer,” he has been actively helped by dream-drugged dilettantes of lay extraction, who base their reformative foibles on the utterly fallacious idea that reformative rÉgimes should be ordered to square with the natural reactions of habitual criminal rounders.

For the “smug chuckle,” he is appreciably indebted to legal agents of the criminal division of the law who, either through false sentence, false suspension of sentence, or false probatory extensions, have rendered spineless the least elastic predicates of penal codes.

In free life the gambler’s chance jumps by the square in favor of the criminal in accordance with the gravity of his crime.

The promise of the early nineties for prison management earnestly and honestly dedicated to actual reformative processes, with inclusive trades teaching featured, is become a huge joke to those in the know: a culmination due very largely to grossly overdrawn compromise with the average criminal’s instinctive desire for the low-down sporting limelight.

Therefore the psychology of the average intrinsic criminal, in so far as his reactions to intrinsic reformative processes are concerned, has been made to his mind. And therefore the psychoanalyst can do his best work not by demonstrating arrest of the social sense, and associate reactions of the criminal, since so much the very fact of his being a criminal presupposes; but by suggesting practical ways and means by which the criminal can be weaned from the breast of crime.

Palpably, a mere technicist won’t subtract much from the bulging prison bill. He must be a very respectable criminologist as well, alike from the practical and theoretical standpoints.

Much left undone for the criminal that must be done, must be done from the ground up, rather than from the clouds down. When so much shall have been done, will be time enough to go airplaning with esoteric gas.

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