Page - 12 - in Rebels without a cause? - ‘Criminals’ and fascism in The Authoritarian Personality

12 Journal of Classical Sociology 00(0) 1944: 20f.). In the analysis, the patient re-experienced past events non-verbally. As well as dedicating 46 sessions to Harold, Lindner (1944) also received his information from social workers and court files, which were not problematised as sources (p. 29). During the sessions, Harold soon opens up to the psychiatrist, whom he comes to trust through this interaction, and openly reports homosexual fantasies and even a murder he had never talked about before. He too, like the interviewees in San Quentin, shows a desperate desire to satisfy the psychiatrist’s ideas – describing his relationship with the ‘Doc’ as a ‘slight friendship’, which is confirmed by the psychiatrist: ‘Yes, you see, Harold, there is and there has to be complete trust between us’ (Lindner, 1944: 222). With Lindner (as with Morrow), the interaction goes so far as to manipulate the actions of the patient who trusts him, whom he seeks to protect from homosexual acts with his fellow inmate Perry: ‘You told me not to make any crucial decisions without talking to you first and I guess you meant about him too, so I tried to forget about everything and just let things go by’ (Lindner, 1944: 131). The psychiatrist appears to have greater problems with homosexual acts than Harold himself, whom he thinks is aggressively repressing his latent homosexuality. The centrepiece of the book is an extremely one-sided interpretation of Harold’s childhood experience of watching his parents having sex through the bars of his crib: I saw my mother all the way up, all the – hair and – everything, her – genitals. He seemed to be saying she should lie still and that he is not hurting her or anything. He said it in a way . . . I guess he must have been hurting her. It seemed he didn’t care about anything. She was saying he was hurting her, he should stop it. When she looked over at me I could see her eyes. I guess I was afraid, looking at her. When my father looked over at me I saw his genitals – so I got more afraid – that he’d be coming over to me and – hurting – me with – his genitals. I – I – my father was hurting her. (Lindner, 1944: 230f.). Lindner interprets this event, which Harold clearly describes as marital rape, as normal ‘sexual intercourse’ and ignores all references to violence that are always central to Harold’s multiple narrations of this episode. This shift is symptomatic – Harold’s descrip- tions of the physical and sexual abuse he suffered are also de-thematised. In his diagno- sis, Lindner finally asks: ‘Do you remember one morning when you saw your father and your mother having intercourse?’ (Lindner, 1944: 265), only to give the answer himself: ‘And a child, waking up in the morning, and seeing his father and mother in the act of having intercourse. Something strange, new. [. . .] How did he interpret it? He thought the father was hurting the mother, and she pushed him away. And when she did, the child saw his penis’ (Lindner, 1944: 266). The description of a rape thus becomes a story of normal marital intercourse and a child’s penis envy and castration anxiety. Violence is declared fantasy, and consequently normalised. Lindner’s diagnosis culminates in the almost vulgar psychoanalytic hypothesis of attempted oedipal patricide. Harold allegedly wanted to murder his overbearing father because he wanted his mother to love him instead. Because Harold could not kill his father himself, he tried to kill another man in his father’s stead after the man had called