The Juvenile Delinquent and the Mythic Hero
Slochower, Harry
In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Ernst Cassirer argues that the distinguishing characteristic of man is his symbolizing activity. While the animal responds to signs and finds satisfaction in...
...Erikson offers the term "negative identity" to connote behavior which is disapproved by authority...
...One of the motivations for delinquent behavior is a desire to assume a heroic role, in order to compensate for the feeling of so many young people that they don't belong, that they aren't important enough...
...By opening up avenues of symbolic action in art, literature and social criticism, these energies can be redirected towards useful activity...
...It was Melvin who hit the Negro...
...It involves a gang leader, Jack Koslow, and his victim Willard Menter...
...Moderation of these pressures could give the Koslows a chance to act, not in the manner of the social satyr, but of the culture hero...
...Why then did they kill...
...Because the Don retains his vision, he gains the support of the villagers, converts Sancho and even the Bachelor...
...And Frank Santana: War pictures, gangsters, crime...
...Mittman may be regarded as the bodily, "female" aspect of Koslow, as Sancho is Quixote's...
...III Despite the dislocations in the contemporary scene which condition juvenile delinquency, we need to recognize that delinquency has a positive function for the adolescent and that it contains an oblique social value...
...In his personality and behavior the criminal may often reveal, though in a distorted and sometimes brutal form, those same impulses of rebellion which move the artist and which the artist embodies in his hero...
...in Cervantes' novel, Sancho cries easily...
...All I'm interested in is violence—destruction—death...
...In the last stage, the rebellious hero can accept his society, which has been humanized by his rebellion: Aeschylus' Agamemnon and Clytemnestra are replaced by Apollo and Athena, Sophocles' Laios by Theseus, Virgil's Troy by Rome, Faust's Gothic heritage by utopian socialism...
...While the animal responds to signs and finds satisfaction in the manipulation and incorporation of physical objects, man also needs, and has the capacity to find, substitute gratifications in symbolic communication— through the sciences, philosophy, religion, and above all, the arts...
...There, Mittman, Koslow's buddy, hit Menter and when the Negro ducked Koslow's follow-up punch, he fell into the water where he was left to drown...
...He rescues his society from mummified tradition and, in the end, he is sanctified...
...Here, he can be "a man," while avoiding personal responsibility since the crime is ordered by the leader...
...In Koslow's and Santana's case, however, we find no similar motive...
...At the same time, the hero's challenge quickens and transforms the original static or rotten society...
...only a very fine line divides genius and pathology...
...Now, such dissidence is a recurrent characteristic of mythopoeic heroes and of prophet-artists, from Dionysus to Thomas Mann's Joseph, from Aeschylus to Nietzsche, Shaw and perhaps the Beatniks...
...Hamlet, not Horatio, emerges as "a noble heart...
...As Freud suggested, there is a connection between symbol and symptom...
...Because the victory of the mythic hero is the victory of consciousness, it makes possible his rehabilitation in the group...
...In this sense, he becomes the instrument of social salvation, his sacrifice making manifest the changes necessary for the welfare of the group...
...Here, he can be "moral," for the gang has its own strict code of ethics, demanding absolute loyalty, and severely punishing stool-pigeons...
...Society needs the dissidents and ought to support, if not subsidize them...
...Among mythopoeic heroes, Melville's Captain Ahab and Cervantes' Don Quixote stand out through their apparently meaningless quests...
...We are reminded of Freud's tenet that criminality comes from a sense of guilt and is an unconscious desire to be apprehended...
...Oedipus, without surrendering his violent feelings, becomes the Savior-figure, not the just and kindly Theseus...
...The following analysis of the two drawings owes credit to a clinical psychologist, Karen Machover: Orality is suggested by Koslow's choice of a baker and by the large breasts of the dancer...
...Masochism is, indeed, indicated in the case of Koslow...
...Wertham that the creeps "made the person who die rise up again and kill the guy who killed...
...It is as if he were paralyzed in panic over his attraction for sensuousness and stands ready to demolish or to exorcize it...
...And if he is to be victimized, he wants to feel—in the mode of the suicide and the existentialist—that he himself is choosing the manner in which this is to happen...
...Although he owns only a barber's basin and a humble steed, and is accompanied by an ordinary peasant, he would like to be regarded as a famous knight who rebels against an "iron age...
...II We now come to the conscious or unconscious identification by the gang leader with some mythic hero and its relation to his form of rebellion...
...The hands and feet of the dancer are fingerless and held away from the body...
...When Koslow was asked to characterize his activity, he said: Just hit or miss...
...The pre-Renaissance mythic hero had found favorable conditions for integrating his quest with the needs of the community...
...A Jewish boy, he cried "Heil Hitler" and said he loved the Nazis...
...He confined his attacks to older men, especially Negroes, that is, parent figures with sensuous components...
...Again, like the delinquent, the Don is not concerned with practical gains, but only with the exhibition of his courage...
...At the same time, the juvenile delinquent attempts to retaliate against the injustice done him, replacing the helpless victim with himself, as a child...
...Koslow identified his figures as Grecian and Egyptian...
...The mythic hero, necessarily moving into conflict with his authoritative code, becomes "the dangerous child": he steals and commits incest and patricide...
...This particular Negro meant nothing to him, nor was he an adversary against whom a "victory" could bring glory...
...The baker holds what Koslow called a baker's trowel and the female appears in a stiff dancing position...
...Walking aimlessly, they came across Willard Menter, a Negro, sleeping on a park bench...
...his own activity brings on retaliation...
...The powerlessness which he exhibits and the punishment which he invites at once appease the super-ego, "prove" that the parentfigure is evil and provide masochistic pleasure...
...Among the insignia the gangs adopt are Supermen, Panthers, Dragons, Tarzans, Enchanters, Devils, Rebels...
...The Don assaults people indiscriminately and without any provocation, attacks consequences without examining causes...
...Despite these relatively favorable circumstances, Jack became a drifter, went from job to job, finding fault with everybody...
...This is the reason why the mythopoeic rebel is dignified in tragedy which presents his revolt and fall as a sacrifice for the reinvigoration of the community...
...The contemporary delinquent—living in an era of social cacophony, what Robert Merton (following Durkheim) calls a state of Anomie or the contradiction and breakdown of norms— has difficulty in finding an ego-ideal...
...Here, Koslow and Santana sense that their behavior is, in part, the internalization of the very ruling symbols against which it is directed...
...The rehabilitation of the hero in mythopoesis is contingent on his maintaining the very qualities which enter into his "crime": Job, who questions the ways of the Lord, is uplifted, not the Friends who urge submission...
...Now, errant or delinquent behavior is also a form of symbolic communication...
...Yet, it was Jack's "airy" blow which was finally effective...
...From June 1954 on, he was unemployed and lived as "a bum...
...People are killed in all the pictures...
...He points out that the adolescent needs to go through the stage of negative identification, that to establish a strong ego, he must emancipate himself from infantile identification...
...What made a deep impression on me when I read Marya Mannes's account in The Reporter (January 27, 1955), as well as Dr...
...He was in a class of "gifted children" and made high school in 3 years...
...He attempts to break down the prison which separates him from others, and to establish communication...
...Our delinquent has no poem, such as Dulcinea, no realistic folk-guide, such as Sancho, and no similar village support...
...It is, indeed, the necessary condition of the critical spirit without which corporate bodies tend to be ossified into totalitarian conformity...
...Its leaders harbor the productive possibilities found in the classical or brigand heroes they attempt to imitate...
...Frank Santana expressed this idea when he told Dr...
...These impulses represent the productive and usable elements of deviant conduct...
...In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Ernst Cassirer argues that the distinguishing characteristic of man is his symbolizing activity...
...In the premodern mythopoeic works from Job to Dante, we know that the wanderer will come home at the end...
...He said of the murder: "I had to do it to preserve my individuality"—a formulation strikingly similar to Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov who killed to prove himself, "to have the daring...
...In his quest and through his self-sacrifice, the hero acts for the non-heroic...
...He did not suffer economic privation and came from a fairly stable home, although he hated his father for beating him...
...By the time of Cervantes, however, the ordered world offering divine or secular guidance had given way to a diffusion of national interests and a confusion of authority...
...Such blessedness is awarded Job and Prometheus, Oedipus and Virgil, Don Quixote (in La Mancha) and Hamlet (in Horatio's prayer) , Mann's Joseph and Judah...
...But here the analogy ends...
...Personal and social pressures led Jack Koslow to imitate the vampires of Greek mythology...
...It incites me to hit him...
...Jack was a highly gifted boy with an IQ of 135 when he was 9 years old...
...Thus, the delinquent's hero stratic tendency, his unconscious shifting of blame from the parental to the social image has some legitimacy...
...Just as in therapy we address ourselves to the intact ego of the patient, so in regard to juvenile delinquency and adult crime, we must seek out these elements, and assist in their redirection...
...On her fingerless right hand rests a dove with sharply pointed wings...
...Ahab persists in an apparently senseless pursuit of a whale and acts in such a way as to bring on punishment...
...Jack only swung in his direction...
...The Don can no longer find trusted guides and tries to chart his own way and prove himself by his own deeds...
...In contrast, Don Quixote could still draw on the memory of "a Golden Age" for his passion and action...
...Whereas the Koslows go through their acts in a listless apathetic way, Job, Prometheus, Aeneas, Don Quixote, Faust and others do what they feel they must do, believing in their mission...
...The two nudes are drawn in severe economic lines, precisely proportioned, with complete absence of sensuous effect...
...That is, the hero in mythopoesis learns from his crime and his suffering, learns to "know himself" and to re-channel his infantile self-assertion or his submission, thereby widening and strengthening his ego...
...Jack is described as having delicately ugly features, tall and thin with a narrow head and a long thin nose...
...The delinquent identifies himself with the very au 4,4 thority against which he rebels, fears his own drives and seeks punishment...
...Wasn't his war against bums a war against his own hated identity as a bum...
...The two drawings seem polar opposites: Whereas the dancer has no pupils, appears static, passive, dead, the baker is angry and fierce...
...Wasn't Koslow's disgust with being looked at "out of one eye" disgust with an aspect of himself...
...Writers, such as Thomas Mann, have viewed the artist as a borderline case and shown his inner relationship to the criminal...
...Koslow was not after Menter's money...
...It also emerges from Koslow's craftsmanship...
...On the night of August 19, 1954, Koslow and three other Brooklyn boys met and talked vaguely of what to do...
...As a dramatic illustration of this point, I want to recall an incident which occurred in New York about six years ago...
...Violence...
...Again, in the Egyptian dancer, he combines death-like rigidity with sensuous breasts...
...so has Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas in Native Son who feels humiliated by his social status among the whites...
...in the courtroom, Mittman wept throughout the trial...
...And here we can see the first striking contrast between the hero in mythopoesis and the juvenile delinquent—a contrast in the manner of their quest...
...FredricWertham's book about Frank Santana (The Circle of Guilt) was that the acts of these boys were carried out in a mechanical, passionless manner which brought them no relief or catharsis...
...He looks at you out of one eye...
...With the loss of communal identification in the Renaissance, however, and with the more unqualified attempt of the individual to be "free," homecoming becomes more tenuous, as with Hamlet, Ahab and Kafka's K. Yet, in contrast to the "trickster" who is bent merely on narcissistic gratification, the hero becomes a culture hero to the extent that he recognizes the deeper values of his society...
...Koslow claimed that nobody could get him and that therefore he need not take precautions...
...We need to shift our focus from the pathology of juvenile delinquency to the creative energies it expresses in a distorted form...
...Everybody is really...
...For they prevent its body from growing fat and lethargic, help to galvanize its energies and revivify its traditional values towards a dynamic humanism...
...Sadism is most apparent in the male figure which is poised with the precision and final readiness for a perfect killing...
...It's disgusting...
...Reading about Jack Koslow and his loyal buddy Melvin Mittman suggests the analogy to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza...
...He was the strategist of the group whose aim was to wipe all bums from the earth...
...Here, he can "cooperate" within a sub-society whose members are brought together by their shared experiences...
...J The gang is the hard narrow core which provides the adolescent with a personal and social identification he cannot find on the "outside...
...He stands alone...
...That's all the talk you hear around anyway...
...Through the gang, he can enact a Robin Hood kind of social justice...
...A second contrast is in the form and direction of the "journey...
...And the two drawings he made at Raymond Street jail of a Grecian baker and a female Egyptian dancer provide supportive material for his pseudoaggressive defense against sensuousness...
...It's everywhere...
...For this crime, he suffers expulsion and must go on a "journey...
...Koslow held a lit match to Menter's feet and then, pulling him up, told him to come along...
...Wertham: I'm a fascist and a white supremacist...
...I would suggest that he—and especially the gang leader—does this by playing the game of being a magical-mythic hero...
...The group walked to a pier near the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn...
...Of the delinquents who have come to my attention, Jack Koslow comes closest to a distorted figure of a mythic hero, suggested by his intense interest in Greek mythology...
...In these various ways, the delinquent proclaims his individual identity and thus gives meaning to his life...
...Koslow told Dr...
...He too would be his own law, claiming that "knight-errants are beyond all jurisdiction, their only law their swords, while their charter is their mettle and their will in their decrees...
...Homecoming is assured because, in his very rebellion, the hero represents the symbols of his group in a higher phase...
...His self-assertion was also a selfaccusation, meant to invite retaliation...
...Judah, not Joseph, receives the final blessing from Jacob in Thomas Mann's epic...
...In contrast, Melvin has a solid, barrel-like body, with blunt features and wide shoulders...
...This becomes possible through knowledge and consciousness, knowledge of his own motives and consciousness of the excess in his quest...
...He could still be convinced that there are firm norms of good and evil, that Dulcinea exists, that beauty, honor, peace, justice, equality and freedom are worth fighting for...
...In passing it might be noted that this admirer of Greek mythological heroes drew one heel of his Greek baker in a manner suggesting a stumped or wounded heel—a kind of Achilles heel...
...The artlessness with which the juvenile delinquent betrays his act entails what Erik Erikson calls a "confessioncompulsion...
...The first indicates Greek homosexuality as well as Hellenic sensuousness, both of which he was in dread of...
...Moreover, the very negative behavior in delinquency incorporates a certain hidden affirmation of social values...
...The juvenile's feeling that he is fighting ghostly corporate powers has its analogue in Quixote's battle against giants concealed as windmills...
...There' is no hair on the male and only the barest indication of a severe hair-do on the female...
...Erikson suggests that the delinquent escapes neurotic regression in that gangrites forbid showing guilt, shame and remorse...
...And when the Negro fell into the water, Koslow cried out: "Now, we're all murderers," expressing thereby not only the need to socialize his guilt, but also to confess himself a murderer...
...Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment has some cause for personal resentment against the woman with whom he has pawned his watch...
...His manner of exacting justice brings injustice...
...The effect of the pictures is of attempted perfectionism, of figures insulated from their earthy environment and denuded of sensuousness...
...Yet, the rigidity of the baker, from the lunging lines of his stance to the position of his trowel, also suggests a kind of "rigor mortis...
Vol. 8 • July 1961 • No. 3
