Expert Worrying

There was hardly a worry in the world that wasn't worried over in Washington last week. In that city of furrowed brows, 1,500 of the most furrowed were to be found at the 104th annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. They talked about the atom bomb, and why children hate their parents, about sex, and why church people sometimes don't like psychiatrists. Being all for sanity (though they might not agree on a definition of what it is), they applauded a ringing endorsement of sanity by President Truman as "the greatest prerequisite for peace."

Child v. Mother. Babies hate life in general and their mothers in particular, reported Baltimore's man & wife research team, Drs. J. G. N. Gushing and Mary McKinniss Gushing (parents of two). The hatred, they said, begins even before the child is born; it hates confinement in the womb, but it hates being born even more. They studied pictures of human fetuses, said they found "avoidance reactions"* as early as 14 weeks after conception: "a squinting of the eye, a swallow and tongue reflex, a Babinski reflex (curling of the toes) and a screwing up of the facial muscles which has all the elements of a sneer." They added: "At 20 weeks we saw pictures of at least one fetus with the stance of a John L. Sullivan who warded off stimulations with what appeared to be aggressively defensive movements. The baby is introduced into a world that is colder by 20DEG than the one it has known, is wrapped in clothes that are rough to its sensitive skin, is assailed by bright lights and loud noises, has hunger contractions in its stomach. Mother love tries to make up for the tough time the baby has had, the Drs. Gushing reported, but "the store of hostility in the child is so great that it cannot be entirely compensated."

To such Freudian fantasy Manhattan's Lauretta Bender gave the scientific equivalent of a pish & tush. Dr. Bender, who has spent 14 years trying to understand nearly 8,000 children who have passed through Bellevue's psychiatric division, reported that the average child brought up at home has an inborn drive toward normality, is capable of loving and being loved. Children can tolerate most of life's troubles, cracked she, including "the inadequacies of too ordinary parents."

Psychiatry v. Religion. The psychiatrists had called in a handful of prominent churchmen to find out why they could not get along better. Manhattan Psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg* begged the churchmen to "explain to us what it is that we in psychiatry miss in our too narrow sphere . . . This can be done, and without acrimony."

Father Noel Mailloux, of the University of Montreal, was ready to oblige. The psychiatrist, said he, runs the risk of getting out of his depth when he tries to play the theologian; the priest will be grateful for what he can learn from psychology, but "will look to theology for light on the nature of moral and religious conflicts." Boston's boyish Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman, author of the bestselling

Peace of Mind, had a formula which he thought would clear everything up: psychiatry, he said, is indispensable, but not sufficient; religion, also indispensable, "is perhaps also not sufficient. The prose of psychiatry, and the poetry of religious aspiration, these allies may yet lead our humanity ... to the genuine maturity of peace."

Mind v. Brain. Schizophrenia (split personality) is probably the commonest form of insanity. Where does it start, in the mind or in the brain? Most psychiatrists think schizophrenia is faulty functioning of the mind. On the basis of postmortem studies of ten patients with schizophrenia, Philadelphia's Nathaniel W. Winkelman came to the contrary conclusion that the disease should be considered organic: there are, he reported, changes in the brain that can be seen under the microscope. He found, for instance, a decrease in ganglion cells, and an unusual amount of fat in the cells. Most of his subjects had had electric shock treatments; one psychiatrist suggested that the shock treatment itself might have produced the changes.

* Pictures that showed a fetus thumbing its nose were accidental, they conceded.

*Two of his notable patients: Marshall Field III, Ralph McAllister Ingersoll.

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