How Not to Throw Banana Peels

The world last week was out flat on the analyst's couch. What started wars, it appeared, was that everybody felt as guilty as Cain. To get rid of the guilt feelings, you had to do something violent. After having done something violent, you of course felt guilty again. After that--and so on, until the decline and fall of Western civilization.

This diagnosis emerged from a meeting of 2,000 of the world's foremost psychiatrists and psychologists (with a sprinkling of educators, clergymen and other soul-searchers). They had come from 54 countries to meet in London in a UNsponsored International Congress on Mental Health. Not all went for the guilt theory. Holland's husky Dr. E. Krijgers-Janzen thought that wars were caused by sex. Too much "moral restraint," he said, caused sexual frustration which in turn caused people to become aggressive in other ways.

Aberdeen's Dr. D. R. MacCalman had an even simpler theory: children were being spoiled by the rod. "Parents and teachers proceed joyfully to knock hell out of the little blighters. And what can the little blighters do but wait till they are big enough to do likewise? Children so brought up are, as adults, aggressive and violent . . ."

Generosity & Atomic Bombs. White-haired Dr. Ernest Jones told reporters: "Germany never got over its sense of guilt for starting the first world war . . . [And] do you think the Russians have ever got over killing their Great Father [the Czar]?" Dr. G. R. Hargreaves, chief medical officer of Unilever, thought the British "experience a terrific amount of guilt about American generosity." In the U.S., he had noted a "national feeling of guilt for having dropped the atomic bomb."

Dr. Margaret (Coming of Age in Samoa') Mead, Associate Curator of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, admitted that guilt feelings were floating around the U.S.--especially among certain groups ("Liberals have always more guilt than anyone else"). However, Dr. Mead thought guilt could be healthy--"I mean the kind of guilt which makes people pay their taxes, not throw banana peels into the street, which makes people feel responsible . . ."

"Psychiatric Imperialism." Japanese life, Dr. Mead said, was built on group guilt feeling. "The child is taught that its entire family can be disgraced by a single act on its part. Such [acts] were punished severely, for example by kindling a fire on the navel."

Dr. Mead warned: "If we presume to tell all groups that they should conform to our patterns of collective guilt feelings," the psychiatrists themselves would be guilty of "psychiatric imperialism."

The Russians, at any rate, would not stand for anyone lighting any verbal fires on their navels. The Soviet Union did not send delegates to London.

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