Page - 13 - in Rebels without a cause? - ‘Criminals’ and fascism in The Authoritarian Personality

Kranebitter 13 him a motherfucker in a bar fight (Lindner, 1944: 262f.). The overreaction to this swear word obviously seems highly symptomatic, since, according to Lindner: ‘In a word, you really are what he called you’ (Lindner, 1944: 271). For Lindner, Harold’s multiple thefts are also due to an oedipal fixation. Harold ultimately stole to prove his masculinity and to own his mother. Moreover, his burglaries symbolised nothing less than the desire for sexual intercourse with her. Why had he stolen, the psychiatrist asks for the umpteenth time, and finally provokes the ‘right’ answer from the baffled patient: ‘It symbolizes – walking through a door – having an intercourse. Now I see . . . I – I couldn’t have anyone else go with me. That was one way to – possess – my mother. . . Now I see. I can see – all these things – what they mean. And it is right’ (Lindner, 1944: 304). One can clearly see the analogy with San Quentin’s fascist ‘Buck’, who expresses anti-Semitic imprecations upon provocation by Morrow, or with the German ‘mass murderer’ Bruno Lüdke, who had admitted dozens of unsolved murders to his Nazi criminal officer to single-handedly improve crime statistics. As Doßmann and Regener (2018: 109) have noted, ‘Lüdke did not want to answer the police questions truthfully, but rather ‘correctly’: he wanted to satisfy ‘Commissioner Franz’ with his answers’. These articulations were not manifesta- tions of a compulsion to confess, as Reik (1974) had believed, but rather extreme forms of the effect of social desirability. The therapy fitting Lindner’s diagnosis of oedipal patricide consists in the total excul- pation of the father – and every paternal authority figure. The father, here also symbol- ised by the psychiatrist and the punishing state as father imagos, is declared inculpable in light of Harold’s individual ‘oedipal’ deformation. The rebel, who had actually had a reason to hate his father, is declared a rebel without a cause. Consequently, the psychia- trist demands reconciliation with the father (cf. Lindner, 1944: 309) and the outcome of the therapy is submission to the previously disregarded authority. The result is, paradoxi- cally, the very authoritarian personality that had allegedly caused the crime in the first place. This misunderstanding is as tragic as it is obvious: Harold is by no means a high scorer according to all the rules of the F-scale (cf. Adorno et al., 1950: 222–280). He shows neither an anti-intraception, nor a suppression of his manifestly expressed homo- sexuality (Lindner, 1944: 71), which he contrarily accepts as a ‘female part of me’ (Lindner, 1944: 133). Harold reads a lot (Lindner, 1944: 83) and, unlike his family, does not believe in god nor wants to go to church (Lindner, 1944: 81f.). He does not care about money, which he deems a compensatory satisfaction (Lindner, 1944: 39), is not egocen- tric, nor thinks the world controlled by overpowering forces (Lindner, 1944: 122). Yet he is labelled a ‘psychopath’. This diagnosis comes at a high price: Lindner has to de-thematise all social compo- nents of delinquent behaviour – such as the banal fact that Harold’s gang, of which he was leader, provided him with high social status for the first time in his life (Lindner, 1944: 292f.). Harold’s narrative is bursting with thefts and burglaries in youthful gang structures and yet only he is declared an individual ‘psychopath’. This individualisation not only promotes the role of hypnoanalysis as a psychotechnology for prisons and the armed forces, but more generally suggests that solutions to crime can be socially engi- neered. If one could recognise the ‘type of personality disorder that is responsible for much of crime’ (Lindner, 1944: xv.), then the right political steps could be implemented. For Lindner, Harold resembles this core of criminals responsible for a large part of all