CAN WE CURE CRIME?
MUHLEN, NORBERT
Can We Cure Crime? SEARCHLIGHTS ON DELINQUENCY. New Psychoanalytic Studies. Dedicated to Professor August Aichhom. on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday. Edited by K. R. Eissler. M D ....
...of the woolliest ways of political deception...
...279 pp...
...crops valued at thirty million dollars are destroyed each year by pests: and 2.000,000 sheep every year die from preventable diseases...
...The validity of Dr...
...He contrasts these cases in which subsequent crimes were almost predictable, with four pathetic cases of emotionally sick, but protectable and curable people who, by/the assorted callousness, stupidity and negligence of social, legal and medical agencies, and (except for one case) by their socio-economic "external world," were left free to drive toward their personal break-up which meant murder...
...Doubleday and Company...
...Gregory Zilboorg submits in his brilliant contribution to the aforementioned volume on delinquency) can make him a victim (or a propagandist...
...Syria...
...New York: International Universities Press...
...mr Hindus has written this time a good...
...He can heal a criminal, but he cannot heal crime...
...How can th" lot of the common people in these countries be impioved...
...Wertham describes two cases of untreatable and highly dangerous criminals who were left free to roam the streets and endanger other people's lives,—one of them, as Dr...
...Hindus declares, they "would have had to be invented, if only to demonstrate to the Arab, and Iranian leaders and people, as well as to the diplomats of the outside world, that self-help, creatively and energetically directed, can achieve in backward countries whose lands are as damaged as the health of the people who cultivate them," The Arabs should and can follow the example set by the Jews...
...Wertham suspects without verifiable proof, by "protection" of sinister city politicians...
...While Dr...
...Neu- York...
...Instead, mr...
...Hindus' findings: In Egypt, three-fourths of the rural population is afflicted with hookworm...
...In Search of a Future is a M>rl of sociological travelogue through Persia, Egypt, Iraq and Palestine, 01 us the author puts it...
...3.00 Reviewed by NORBERT MUHLEN AFTER BEING STIGMATIZED and punished like crime for many centuries, so-called insanity is today understood, often cured and ¦ sometimes prevented like other diseases...
...Norbert Muhlen is a frequent contributor to The yew Leader...
...The feudal Arab leaders ..may not find to their liking the democratic socialist Jewish state, but, as mi Hindus points out correctly, "they can no mote disregard-Israel's solution to problems identical to their own trTan a sick man can disregard the penicillin a physician prescribes for him because it cured s neighbor with whom he has quarreled I. D. W. Talmadge, widely-known author and critic, is foreign editor of Scholastic magasine...
...And furthermore, wv have to supplement thei mental hygiene work by a very broad social hygiene work to free many borderline sufferers from almost unbearable economic strains—a factor which should be more scientifically integrated into the modern system of dynamic psychology...
...the high incidence of preventable diseases * * • HERE ARE SOME of Mr...
...After pointing out shortcomings of present-day America in several detailed cases, he demonstrates in one sweeping paragraph "the progress of a society," the Soviet society...
...If, nevertheless, we are very far from the abolition'' of crime in our society, it is not the fault, and has not even much to do with, the curative possibilities of the new treatment which is...
...It is a miscellany ut tacts and figures and observations collected by mr...
...Wertham speaks as an expert when he is concerned with these cases of individual sufferers, "he seems a biased layman in his critique of social phenomena and political institutions...
...And we furthermore know that murder in Moscow is often classified as "death by illness" (in a slave labor camp) while the murderer, rather than being convicted "in practically every case...
...Wertham is absolutely right in his insistence on the fact that the modern psychiatrist should give more attention to the social shortcomings and strains of our time, he demonstrates by Mis own example how easily his social protest and his social conscience (which are civic, not psychiatric-professional qualities, as Dr...
...3 00 reviewed by I. O. w. talmaDGE FOR THE NONCE, at an\ rate, Maurice Hindus has forsaken the green, collectivized pastures of his native Russia and turned his attention to the Middle East...
...270 pp...
...a New York psychiatrist, presents in his very readable and colorful book a few extensive case stories to show that murder could be prevented if our society (including most psychiatrists, judges, detectives, social workers) and its social "institutions and rationalizations" were changed...
...solid, informative book...
...while discussing preventable deaths by starvation and industrial accidents -(in a sloppy confusion of this phenomenon with death by violence), is only denouncing such instances in England, the United States, British-ruled India and the Belgian Congo, without any mention of the Soviet Union and its "progress of a society...
...to quote Freud, "a natural science like any other.'' To apply it on a large level to societal use...
...THE VOLUME WHICH, as often happens with collections of the kind, can hardly be reviewed with fairness to all its individual contributors, offers a useful, stimulating and broad crosssection of present research in the field which was discovered by Aichhorn Taken as a whole, the collection communicates to us the conviction that society has today the theoretical means to reduce delinquency by individual treatment of the delinquents under proper social conditions...
...Doubleday and Company...
...In Iraq, the average life span is 27 years...
...There are few rhapsodical passages about the quaint beauty of the Orient...
...The psychiatrist can cure a victim of society, but he cannot cure society...
...the book is about people and land...
...It can often be cured and sometimes prevented by hygiene and psychiatric treatment The first to devise exact psychological methods of therapy for delinquents was August Aichhorn, a Viennese gradeschool teacher who discovered that Freud's system which had been devised as therapy of severe neuroses could also be used successfully for the treatment of wayward youth Today, we are apt to forget what a trail-blazing exepriment this unusual man performed after the first World War While the famous Soviet movie showing the Besprtsomi's re-education gave many people all over the world the impression that work of this sort was a Communist monopoly, Aichhorn's revolutionary methods became the basis of the Child Guidance Clinics of the (then Social-Democratic) Vienna municipality, and were studied, copied and elaborated in many other countries...
...thJ Arabs cannot achieve in Iraq...
...ice hindus...
...If there were no Jews in Palestine, Mr...
...then backw .11 dnesi, the inhumane brutality of the absentee landlords, the devastation of the soil through ignorance, greed, and neglect...
...While Dr...
...And speaking of political mass murder, he points to the rightist suppressors of the Parisian Commune and the Nazi Gestapo, but remains silent about Soviet Russia and its satellites...
...His recent seventieth birthday was celebrated by his surviving disciples and colleagues with a Festschrift in which thirty-seven contributions discuss general, clinical, therapeutical, etiological and social problems of juvenile delinquency in our time...
...M D . Ph.D...
...Hindus Goes East IN SEARCH OF A FUTURE by Maw...
...456 /);> $10 00 THE SHOW OF VIOLENCE By Fredric Weriham...
...Hindus on a tour ut these countries ia the autumn ot 1!)47 — a journeyman journulists's luggaite of acquired statistical souvenirs 1*o be sure, it's not the kind ol stuff that's published in the National Geographic...
...FREDERIC WERTHAM...
...Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Iran If only there were a force, internal or external, that would lift the pall of apathy and stagnation from the lowly Mhi/i anl unleash his creative energies...
...Nothing that the Jews in Palestine have accomplished," the author asserts...
...As proof, he quotes Soviet statistics showing the alleged great decrease of murders in Moscow, and the conviction of fewer murderers "in practically every case" as a triumph of the Five-Year Plan...
...Hindus found the answer in Jewish Palestine—in Israel...
...Wertham's social allegations must be doubted, since we know that international comparisons of delinquency statistics mean very little in themselves, with quite different crimes and misdeameanors being counted in different countries under the same headings...
...we necjd the money and the personnel—perhaps a dozen psychiatrists and psychiatric workers to every cop...
...But we are only beginning to know that crime itself can often be understood as a symptom, or a crisis, the behavior pattern, or the last stage of a specific mental disease...
...Hindus deals with the unpoetic realities of life in the Moslem lands—the exploitation of the landless felluhi'i...
...It seems significant that Dr Wertham...
...It is there, on a land more impoverished and negl"cted than in any of the Arab countries, that the Jewish settlers have accomplished miracles — made the deserts bloom, cleared hills of rocks and ston", drained pestilential swamps, eradicated the scourges of malaria and trachoma, and built a co-operative society with the highest standard of living in the entire Mediterranean area...
...is often decorated with a breastful of medals...
...One of the worst gaps between modern sciences seems to divide the understanding of the economic-social and the psychiatric bases of personality disorders although one is bound to remain only half-etAcient without the other...
...In Persia, the peasantry is ravaged by malaria which could be wiped out at a cost of only $5 per family...
Vol. 32 • June 1949 • No. 24
