Traumatic Conformity: Robert Lindner's Narratives of Rebellion1

Readers of the February 1956 issue of McCalls magazine would have encountered, perhaps with surprise, an article entitled "Raise Your Child to Be a Rebel." "Are we destroying our children by trying to make them too well adjusted?" asks the subtitle. The author was Dr. Robert Lindner, a Baltimore psychotherapist, a prolific writer and social critic. On the 27th of that same month, Lindner would be dead at the age of 41, of what his obituary describes as a "heart ailment." In the McCalls article, his last public writing, Lindner tells in personal detail about his discussion with his friends Grace and Hal concerning their son Tony. Tony was getting in trouble at school and being called "maladjusted" and "abnormal" by his teacher. Lindner says that, after talking with parents and child, it occurred to him that Hall, Grace, and the teacher needed a lot more curing than Tony did; that Tony, like countless other teenagers, was "the victim of a vicious piece of propaganda-the notion that the 'well adjusted' child, the child who conforms, has the key to a happy life" (Lindner, "Raise" 103). If forced into conformity, the individual will have his naturally rebellious instincts distorted into destructive behavior, the therapist tells his (presumably female) readers. Lindner's concluding advice to parents on creating positive rather than negative rebellion in their children is to encourage in them "awareness, identity, skepticism, responsibility, employment, and tension" (104). Among his interesting definitions of these terms, the most tendentious is that of tension: "The mature person is tense in a special sense. He is profoundly conscious of wide gap between the world as it is and as it could be, and anxious to assist toward closing that gap" (104). In contemporaries' terms, a mature person has not a repressed "yearning for absolutes" (Keniston 193), but a sense of "wholes of meaning" which permits him/her "to create and sustain higher expectations about individual life" (Overstreet 273-74).2 Idealizing rebellion, linking it to inherent psychology as well as to the will to ameliorate the world, seems unsubtly predictive of social psychology of the next decade.3 How did Lindner's expansive vision of a "sick" society that considered itself healthy arise from his original limited experiences as a criminal psychiatrist dealing with the "abnormal"?4 And why has Lindner's prophetic and influential role in U.S. culture been mainly forgotten, or reduced to survival as a single catch-phrase?5 Robert Mitchell Lindner majored in psychology as an undergraduate at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he was to return as a Public Health Service psychologist at the Federal Penitentiary and a part-time college instructor. The first overt suggestion of his future orientation, however, can be found in his 1938 Cornell University doctoral dissertation, "A Functional Study of Emotion." Its primary assertion is that "few psychologists have troubled to provide a descriptive account of emotion in terms of its course, its stages, and its functional character" (Lindner, "Emotion" 3). Although Lindner's approach to providing such an account is obligatorily behavioristic, it is centered in an assumption that emotional responses to what he calls "predicamentive occasions" are basic to behavior. "Remembering" and "anticipating" these occasions create behavioral continuity over long periods, particularly insofar as they allow the triggering occasions to become "symbolic." Physiological response ("somatic events") to symbolic remembrance and anticipation is heightened "where acting is discouraged," and persists "until emotion disappears, the old predicament reasserts itself, or a new predicament obtains" (22). In his conclusion, Lindner reflects a narrowly behavioristic "explanation" for the process of "emoving"even though he has used a "black box" centrally in his analysis of its stages-emphasizing how much is as yet unexplained about the private causes and public consequences of emotion. …