BOOKS:
Taylor, Carlo A Weber, Dennis Hale, Mark
BOOKS A Home tor the Heart BRUNO BETTELHEIM Knopf, $12.50 CARLO A. WEBER Almost anyone who has devoted full thirty years of his life caring for the mentally ill in one consuming program, has...
...His desire may be simply to assert as fully as possible the tradition to which he belongs, but there is an overabundance of citations from other writers, often where no authority is really needed for a particular point, and the arguments of one or two essays appear largely determined by the amount of erudition that had to be worked in...
...202) 269-2276...
...During his trial his assistants (who actively supported his accusers) moved up to take his place, and Jensen was barred from his old chapel...
...22—Ed.] In fact, Ms...
...Rather than focusing on a false base it is necessary to see that these dichotomies of feminine and masculine in the social realm are undergoing rigorous scrutiny, are not bearing up well under it, and are approaching dissolution...
...BOOKS A Home tor the Heart BRUNO BETTELHEIM Knopf, $12.50 CARLO A. WEBER Almost anyone who has devoted full thirty years of his life caring for the mentally ill in one consuming program, has also survived the publication of half a dozen books on the subject, to say nothing of their critics, is entitled to write a Summa...
...McCauley's review of James W. Jones' book, Fitted with New Wine [Nov...
...Then, at Cecil Field, in Jacksonville, Florida, things began to fall apart...
...the book is written essentially as a long apologia for doubting colleagues, it could just as easily have been written for school administrators, mothers, architects, or anyone responsible for providing an aesthetically pleasing environment in which people can live productively...
...Such a patient can only respond to a world in which there is perfect synchrony between physical (outer) and psychic (inner) messages...
...However much is written today, and whatever laws are passed in the states to empty out the state hospitals, there is little evidence to this point that that process works in practice, and that the patients so displaced from institutions back into the community have been aided by that move...
...Jensen was a stubborn man, and refused to resign or to plead guilty...
...Most therapeutic ventures fail, not because the psychotherapy itself is off target, but rather because it is set in a physical environment which tends to deny it...
...There is, of course, a delicate line separating the dependency-creating social support of many psychiatric processes, and the no-demand environment of many state mental hospitals, from the autonomy-generating social support system, which allows the patient the time and space to regroup his ego forces and develop out of them his individual living style...
...Subscribe to THE REVIEW OF BOOKS AND RELIGION...
...The technical offenses he was charged with —"conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman" and "conduct prejudicial to the service"—have since been ruled unconstitutionally vague by the U.S...
...And all of this happened at a Navy base where sexual promiscuity, mate-swapping, and casual affairs were widespread and open secrets...
...They are ready with any number of reasons why community care has not worked—community resistance, inadequate funding, untrained staffing, emphasis of community mental health centers on crisis-care rather than after-care, etc...
...Each new perfidy committed by the Navy disillusioned them further, until even the attorneys were convinced that the Navy was no longer the institution they had served and loved for most of their adult lives...
...Four semester, M.A...
...The Trial of Chaplain Jensen CHAPLAIN ANDREW JENSEN with MARTIN ABRAMSON Arbor House, $7.95 DENNIS HALE Andrew Jensen once belonged to that legion of decent, middle-class Americans who believe only the best about their country because they have no personal experience with its ugly side...
...He was married (the "one romance of my life") and had two children...
...99 for 2 years...
...As a literary and psychiatric project, it fulfills the criterion for true erudition, "leading out of darkness...
...Growing up in the grape country of California during the Depression, he saw how the traditional values of religion and family life kept people going against difficult odds, and he vowed to serve those values...
...But then, how can it be otherwise...
...His long-standing reputation as an upright man of God caused concern among his less righteous colleagues, and he began getting strong bints that everyone would feel a lot safer if "Square Andy" would join the fun...
...Panichas seems to have read everything ever written, and on occasion he seems too eager to prove that he has done so...
...Outdated SymbmlUm Ventura, Calif...
...Apparently, that portion of the citizenry who originally wanted to have their emotionally disturbed brothers and sisters "out of sight and out of mind," now resist their re-entry into the community with equal vigor...
...Much better to have them safely barricaded behind the walls of rural asylums, where they can neither disturb us or serve as our psychic mirrors...
...What are we really saying, for example, to the "patient" (i.e...
...But to the book, which is divided into four inter-related parts: A discussion of the physical setting for an institution, and its effect upon the resident, an account of total milieu therapy, and rather detailed descriptions of how the staff is selected and expected to function, and how training of both staff and residents is carried out...
...That dispute is not over...
...nor does the book resolve it...
...It requires but a single news report of a homicidal ex-mental patient to set off a wave of charges that those "crazies" out picking apples from imaginary trees, or sitting staring into space, are all potential murderers...
...He seems to proceed from a negative bias that is hope-less: we illusion-free realists really know that nothing new can happen, that we must accept man and God as they are...
...Plus booknotes and interviews...
...And Bruno Bettel-heim is not "almost anyone...
...It is this milieu that promotes and sustains the social solidarity which the patient must experience in order to journey out of himself, out of stereotypical retrenchments and into personal autonomy...
...it is an anomaly in the world of the normal...
...mysterious, threatening phone calls were made in the middle of the night...
...Differences such as competitiveness and aggression are not of the essence of masculinity but rather are foisted on all males by society and pose somewhat of a heavy burden on those males who are not these things and on women who are...
...The trial was an education for Jensen, as well as for his two Naval attorneys, Charles Pope and Jack Blackmon...
...He liked his work...
...The private lives of Jensen, his wife, and the two accusers were laid bare, held up to public scrutiny, and mercilessly picked apart by both the prosecution and the defense...
...Supreme Court...
...are often as important as what goes on inside them, as our shell is important to the psyche within...
...This body-psyche synchronism, applied to every physical and spiritual detail, is the capstone of Bettelheim's work...
...Beneath it all lies Bettelheim's resolute, dare I say ruthless, promulgation of the essential principle that mentally ill persons are ". . . very much individuals, with their own life histories and personalities, but who are also in many respects very much like the rest of us, the author and the reader...
...Even after his exoneration, the authorities at Cecil Field saw fit to have him removed...
...The thrust is for human characteristics as manifested in the diversity of individuals...
...Still, Jensen believes that the only reason justice was secured is that the officers serving on the jury were high enough in the command structure to be immune from influence by local officers...
...Jensen's is a simple story, and he tells it in a simple, even plodding manner...
...That we shall know in time...
...he does not say so, but I suspect that he no longer supports Richard M. Nixon (to whom he appealed in vain during his trial), and perhaps he even doubts the wisdom of his earlier attitudes toward the war...
...Second, the women's liberation movement submits that aside from basic biologic differences men and women have human differences which cannot be assigned to one sex exclusively...
...Who is really ready to acknowledge that the shadow within myself is embodied out there in the bizarre, often grotesque, skin and bones of the "crazy" man who lives next door...
...Your reviewer may therefore be reassured: "liberal Suenens" has not been "conned" in this matter...
...evidence of perjury was withheld by the prosecution...
...You know what that strange-looking fellow with his hand in his back pocket is getting ready to do, don't you...
...University of Tennessee Press, $16.95...
...The psychotic young person is torn by a dis-harmony between intra-psychic events and extra-psychic ones...
...The key psychotherapeutic issue, as I read it, is as follows...
...POSITIONS OPEN: Tell us what you can teach...
...Wrappings, be those paint on the exterior of the building, the decor within, the space, the placement and selection of furnishings, etc...
...1. As a close theological collaborator to Cardinal Suenens, I can testify that his "endorsement" of the charismatic renewal is by no means naive and unqualified (see his latest book, soon available in English: A New Pentecost...
...like Christianity, it hasn't really been tried...
...See "Letters," Nov...
...The court-martial was a brutal affair...
...Specifically, two women, the wives of Naval officers and members of Jensen's congregation, accused the Chaplain of having committed adultery with them nearly one hundred times in motels, apartments and in the chapel itself during 1970 and 1971...
...Will pay well for qualified persons...
...CANT KEEP UP with the new books...
...At Cecil Field, Chaplain Jensen got a look at the ugly side...
...30-40 reviews per issue, 10x yearly...
...In a sense all of his essays— whether they be investigations of the thought of overtly religious writers like Simone Weil or covertly religious ones like D. H. Lawrence, assessments of the work of teachers and critics like F. R. Leavis, G. Wilson Knight, and Vivian de Sola Pinto, or reflections on the writer and society or the literature of Edwardian England—constitute an effort to separate what matters and what will endure from the mass of ephemera surrounding it...
...It is all the more scary for its simplicity, and because it happened to one so willing to believe in the goodness of his government and his military superiors...
...To the Editors: First, Michael Novak is mistaken when he says that women, in seeking the priesthood, "are not . . . asking for liberation" [Nov...
...It contains however two statements which need rectification...
...are accepting applications for 1975-76...
...IN BRIEF The Reverent Discipline: Essays in Literary Criticism and Culture by George A. Panichas...
...he believes in the dependence of civilization on the preservation of its cultural monuments, absolute standards of excellence, and a continuity of critical discrimination...
...For unfortunately, Ortho is not truly replicable—the world of mental health professionals is not peopled with Bettelheims, and the ongoing patient population of about forty at any given time at Ortho is so minis-cule as to send public administrators who must deal with thousands of patients scurrying for their data sheets and census tracts, to show how precious the Orthogenic experiment really is...
...efforts were made to frighten Mrs...
...Jensen into refusing to testify...
...Naval Hospital in Philadelphia, where he is once again performing the duties of chaplain...
...Contact: Sister Mary Louise Norpel, S.N.D., Director of Pastoral Ministry Program, Trinity College, Washington, D.C...
...Is such an arrangement really for the customer's convenience, or are red eyes and a drawn countenance the signal of embarrassment, lack of control, and therefore to be hidden from view...
...The body, as the wall separating the two, reflects that conflict...
...It was Greene's endorsement on your promotion flier that got me to subscribe last summer...
...they believed in its traditions and were confident in the integrity of its officers...
...mark taylor CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 347) Simon and Schuster, 1973, p. 251...
...There, we used to say, but for the grace of God go I. If one had ever had any doubts about that social response, the recent quite hysterical reactions to the closing of state mental hospitals across the country, and the alleged "dumping" of patients into Board and Care homes in urban neighborhoods should have erased them...
...As a last act of spite, the local command refused to allow a group from Jensen's congregation to use the base for a fund-raising effort in his behalf...
...the "sufferer") with the grey, antiseptic, endless hospital corridors, and the shabbily and tastelessly decorated waiting rooms of public clinics, often designed to accommodate long waiting lines more than to satisfy even the most fleeting aesthetic need...
...The therapist and the milieu are working at cross-purposes, the one laboring to counteract messages delivered to the patient from the environment...
...That is not to say that community care cannot work (patently Bettelheim thinks out...
...In short: look to what the symbolism rests on...
...When it did go to trial, and when the evidence began to mount that a frame-up was in the works, they were shocked...
...Lauder has noted that he contrasts Greene and Percy not because their visions are contradictory but because their emphases are different...
...What a room, or a given space is to the person, so the body wall is to the psyche...
...They believed the Navy would never allow the case to go to trial...
...What followed can only be described as a modern version of the Salem witch trials, this one led by "swingers" instead of Puritans...
...This means that rather than worrying over a civilization, for example, as being pitched toward the symbols of masculinity defined as the all-mastering, competitive, and aggressive spirit, it becomes necessary to not accept this definition out of hand but to look to the premises underlying the definition...
...and he deplores, from an unmistakable perspective of Christian-humanism, the loss of the spiritual dimension in modem life...
...2. The Cardinal has never announced "he will only accept speaking engagements that permit him to hold forth on Pentecos-talism...
...If present-day women's libera-tionists would rather have seen her assert her feminine identity as well as her confessional bias in this scholarly volume, we can at least lament with her the reality factors that entered into the decision to emulate other talented women who have found it expedient to publish under masculine names...
...If gentleness, patience, humility, and kindness of the early Christians were clearly perceived as affronts to the (then) current image of masculine perfection, let's give a belated cheer for Jesus, acknowledging that the revolution he started (the new law) is ready to be implemented in 1975 A.D...
...Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that their lot has been rather significantly worsened...
...A Home for the Heart, a book title which could at the same time be the name for the Orthogenic School in Chicago which it describes in loving detail, is Bettelheim's Summa...
...Not even the Vietnam War could shake his confidence...
...And for that matter, though WANTED: Brothers, Sisters, Priests to teach in a growing Catholic High School in outer suburban area of Chicago, Illinois, in McHenry County...
...So the Catholic symbolism—and all symbolism—based on "masculine and feminine" needs to be looked at anew in the light of current awareness...
...p. lebeau, s.j...
...Bettelheim begins with this very social response as a 'given': "We wish to believe that the insane person is dangerous but the primitive and uncanny feeling we experience when confronted by insanity shows all too clearly that we are endangered not so much by him as by the idea that we might be, or become, like him...
...In fact, both women admitted in their depositions to having told the Chaplain about their affairs during counseling sessions, and one woman would have another affair exposed during the trial...
...Injustice happens only to people who are "different...
...APPLY TO: Thomas J. Parsley, Principal, Marian Central Catholic High School, Woodstock, Illinois 60098...
...With one important difference, the one tragically that we generally overlook in practice: The "patient," precisely because of his or her anxiety and fear about "what the therapist and all those other folk are up to, is inclined to view with a raw sensitivity every detail of behavior and setting with far keener attention than would others...
...By his own admission, Andrew Jensen is a "square...
...It's too early to say this can't happen with the charismatic movement...
...Jensen denied the charges, but the local commanders believed his accusers...
...in Pastoral Ministry and two semester, non-degree programs oiler practical and theoretical preparation of ministry in health care, the aging, the parish, correctional institutions, community action and education...
...A five-week Summer Institute in Pastoral Ministry, independent of the other two programs, is also offered, starting June 30...
...community care for the chronically mentally ill...
...382-89...
...Is this not an implicit despair, an unconscious denial of the Resurrection and openness to the God who comes, and continually...
...I would suggest that a close analysis of Greene's latest novel will reveal a shift in this writer's emphasis that is significant enough to merit consideration in contemporary discussion of Catholic fiction...
...Judging from the success of the graduates of Orthogenic, and that constitutes 85 percent, that balance is indeed maintained at the school...
...New Wine, Old Biases Ottawa, Ontario To the Editors: I am dismayed by Michael McCauley's harsh attitude towards the charismatic movement (Review, James W. Jones, Fitted With New Wine, Nov...
...It dictates the "total milieu which includes the physical surroundings, and the awareness by every staff member, from Chief Psychiatrist to janitor, of the process both they and the residents are involved in...
...One is tempted to speculate about the fate of the school once this gigantic spirit is departed...
...He refused, even to the extent of suggesting psychiatric counseling for unfaithful marriage partners...
...MARY BOLAND...
...20017...
...Now, none of this about the effect of the social, physical, and behavioral environments upon the patient is at all new, nor indeed dramatic...
...At any rate, Jensen's PASTORAL MINISTRY PROGRAMS at Trinity College, Washington, D.C...
...Only 95 per year...
...During the hearings and trials which followed, the entire apparatus of the local command was used against Jensen: goons from the Naval Intelligence Service were sent around to harass and intimidate witnesses for the defense...
...What is unique is that at the Orthogenic School, it appears to be done...
...It will allow males and females to be human...
...Jensen's troubles began when he discovered that the major form of recreation at the base was musical beds...
...Jensen and his lawyers were dedicated to the Navy...
...What lugubrious message is communicated to the patient in even posh private psychiatric offices where outgoing clients are segregated from the incoming, via entrance and egress through a different door...
...papers were stolen from his office...
...experience is yet another reminder, if we needed any more, of what awesome power resides in the United States Government, and of how many of its current employees are willing to use that power for the foulest ends...
...Every page of this large volume demonstrates its author's passionate prejudices: Mr...
...As a strict Baptist (no drinking, no smoking, no "fooling around") Jensen disapproved of this development, and said so...
...Every detail of the environment carries a message that is far more explicit to the patient than anything a therapist may subsequently say in face-to-face contact...
...pointed out recently (Worship, Aug.-Sept., 1974, pp...
...Box 86, White River Junction, Vermont 05001...
...Personal autonomy experienced as a function of social solidarity is therefore the therapeutic objective...
...After cooling his heels for several months, Jensen was posted to the U.S...
...But on the other hand, the institutions, with rare exceptions such as Orthogenic, have not worked overly well either, and their proponents are ready with just as many rationalizations...
...In the end, the evidence was found to be so inconsistent (witnesses continually placed Jensen somewhere else when the women claimed to have been in a motel with him, and dozens of character witnesses appeared to testify to Jensen's rectitude) that the Chaplain was found not guilty...
...Many people are still mired in an archaic and often quite primitive (read, "pre-rational") response to insanity...
...Paniches defends, with Matthew Arnold, the need "to learn and propagate the best that is known...
...It seems not to rest on a biologic base but on a social one...
...that the liturgical movement originally came from outside the hierarchy, but became a renewal integrated within the whole church...
...as a part-time marriage counselor, he found himself directly involved in its consequences...
...Kendig and Iris Cully, editors...
...Life seemed secure...
...They do their duty and mind their own business, ignoring, if they can, whatever disturbing news reaches their ears...
...All of this makes the Orthogenic School the quintessence of the total institution, which, as Goffman has described it, can either completely build or completely destroy, depending apparently on how it's used...
...REV...
...Kept away from farming by allergies and a frail constitution, Jensen decided to become a Baptist minister, and his sense of patriotism led him into the Navy, where he became a Chaplain...
...It is not that they are indifferent to suffering, but only that they are able, because of their class, or their color, or their income, to keep it at a distance...
...And that could lead to a long digression about institutional vs...
...Bettelheim translates the therapeutic milieu from the abstract to the concrete so thoroughly that at one point, when describing the physical building of a hospital as it appears to the eye of the patient, he could as well be describing the doctor, as he appears to the eye of the patient, a comparison Bettelheim would surely acknowledge, and probably elaborate in great detail...
...Those who disagree with Bettelheim cite a few experiments, usually beginning with the Belgian village of Geel, to support their claim...
...A final note: Although for reasons of her own Jean Kellogg spelled her name "Gene" on the title page of The Vital Tradition: The Catholic Novel in a Period of Convergence, which Lauder so rightly terms an "excellent study," it should be pointed out, for the record, that she is a woman...
...We are looking for the religious influence...
...This minor objection does not apply, however, to the best essays here—on Weil, Lawrence, and Dostoev-sky—which are as exciting for their critical perspicacity as for their moral intensity...
...Nor was he given the promotion denied him during the trial, and of course no effort was made to pay him back the thousands of dollars in legal fees incurred during the year's ordeal...
...BARRY MCORORY Brussels To the Editors: I have read with genuine interest Mr...
...Jensen was ordered off the base, removed from his post as Chaplain, denied permission to conduct services, encouraged to resign ("for the good of the Navy"), and told that the Navy could do nothing about the fact that the husband of one of the women was looking for him with a gun...
...The Sexual Revolution and Right-wing Republicanism were locked in a passionate, if furtive, embrace...
...Some of them were sincere, no doubt, and some simply took advantage of an opportunity to rid themselves of an irritant...
...serving aboard the carrier Ticonderoga from 1967 to 1969 was the "high point" of his career...
...Any disharmony ratifies that which is already felt...
...But, in the clear and forceful style of the book, one thing is clear—the Home for the Heart is Bettelheim himself, standing astride the school and the people in it, the force of his personality driving them, daring them, in a sense, to fail him...
...Kellogg is the only woman presently teaching at the University of Chicago Divinity School...
...Perhaps it is not a question of the locus—institution or community—at all, but the modality, the care, the attention to detail, the live-in therapists, the selectivity of staff and residents, that works...
...The essence of women's liberation is the possibility of making a choice...
...Jensen and his Naval attorney were both denied what would have been routine promotions...
...S. ANNE E. PATRICK, SNJM P.S...
...Others might have, (rev...
...Hard work and sincere devotion to the welfare of his men earned him promotions to the rank of captain...
...For with all our professional sophistication and preoccupation with mental illness, we honestly know very little about it, and less about what to do about it...
...And with its success, one feels a suspicion that the many graduates are not so much autonomous and functional people, with a style all of their own, but mini-Bettelheims, made to the mold, and driven by a small spark of that fire that ignites its founder...
...As a result, he was court-martialed, the first Navy Chaplain to be court-martialed for adultery, and the only Navy officer ever court-martialed on that charge alone...
...Brother Steindl-Rast, O.S.B...
...Jensen is no longer so willing to believe...
Vol. 101 • January 1975 • No. 13
