Page - 15 - in Rebels without a cause? - ‘Criminals’ and fascism in The Authoritarian Personality

Kranebitter 15 (Lindner, 1944: 16). To be sure, Lindner saw the solution to this necessary ‘cleansing’ of society in the re-education and psychoanalytic treatment of psychopaths. After all, he considered his hypnoanalysis with Harold – which, again, led to his total submission to the psychiatrist as authority figure – as nothing less than a cure and boasts of having healed a fascist (who had never been one). ‘Gone is that sneering sullenness, that arrogant aggression, that Storm-Trooper mentality, that disregard for the rights and feelings of oth- ers. He knows that he was a psychopath; he knows why he was a psychopath; he knows that he needs to be a psychopath no more. . .’ (Lindner, 1944: 320). However, it is all too easy to socially engineer a solution to a ‘problem’ once it has been defined as such. The pathologisation of fascism, the externalisation of fascism as a problem of psycho- pathic criminals, weighs down The Authoritarian Personality. Some cultural scientists later argued that Lindner was, in fact, a subtle ‘analyst artist’ (Waage, 1999: 29), whose books were full of irony – as was the title Rebel Without a Cause. In this view, Lindner basically had blamed society for Harold’s deeds and was simply referring to the absence of an ideological justification for his crimes (Waage, 1999: 26). This, however, remains wishful thinking. Lindner’s book was a manifestation of the current criminological dis- course, not a piece of art. Like Lindner, the San Quentin psychiatrist David Schmidt imagined ‘psychopaths’ as people who could not accept their place in society. ‘We all want what we want when we want it, the way we want it, as children; and only those of us who will not, do not – and refuse – to learn from experience that we can’t have every- thing turn out to be psychopaths’ (Schmidt, 1948: 33). Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck were also on the lookout for the ‘eternal criminal’, cal- culating correlations and predictive statistical models. Laub and Sampson (2003), re- visiting a number of the Gluecks’ ‘delinquent boys’ at the age of 70, retrospectively proved the Gluecks’ prediction models for future delinquency as under-determined. The Gluecks, in turn, had written a foreword to Lindner’s book, praising hypnoanalysis as a satisfactory procedure for pinpointing the 15 to 20% of incorrigible psychopaths among America’s prisoners. They bedevil the administration for other prisoners and the directive personnel. They are among the ring leaders in planning escapades. They resort to assaults upon guards and fellow prisoners. They are, in a nutshell, the truly dangerous, ‘hard-boiled,’ ’wise guy’ and least reformable offenders. (Glueck and Glueck, 1944: xi) Phenomenologically completely different ‘types’ were homogenised into a group of hard-core criminals, the slang expressions revealing that identifying ‘the “born criminal type” described so minutely by Lombroso’ (Glueck and Glueck, 1944: xi.) was not about scientific typologies but everyday labels. The solution to the problem of the eternal crim- inal in terms of social engineering would therefore consist in hypnoanalysis, but the details were kept deliberately vague. The Gluecks, as well as Lindner, demanded a greater role for psychology and sociology in court judgements and sentencing. In this they side-lined existing legal statutes, emphasising instead that sentences should no longer be fixed according to the offence, but rather adjusted by an expert panel who