Cracked Brains

Psychiatrists, crack experts on cracked brains, met at Toronto, last week, and for a moment entertained the scientifically crazy notion of forbidding a psychoanalysis of Abraham Lincoln's personality.

Dr. Abraham Arden Brill of Manhattan, a Freud disciple, was scheduled to read a paper on "Abraham Lincoln as a Humorist." Lincoln, from what Dr. Brill has been able to learn out of Lincoln biographies, was a schizoidmanic. That appellation is not so horrendous as it seems in type. A schizoid is a "split personality." He has subtle conflicts among the psychic components of his personality. A manic is a moody person, one subject to fits of exaltation and depression. When a manic or a schizoid or any type of mental aberration annoys his neighbors, they call him crazy and have him locked up. Yet there is no perfectly sane person on earth. Sanity is merely the general average of a community's general behavior.

Lincoln's moodiness. Dr. Brill reasons, was a result of his personality conflicts. "Two contrasting natures struggled within him, the inheritance from an untutored, roving and unstable father, who treated him brutally; and from a cheerful, fine, affectionate mother from whom Lincoln claimed to have inherited his power of analysis, his logic, his mental activity, and his ambition."

Another psychoanalytic peep at Lincoln: "Lincoln was a very aggressive person, and hence one would expect him to be also sexually aggressive. According to Herndon, Mr. Lincoln had a strong passion for women. And yet, much to his credit, he lived a pure and virtuous life."

Another peep: "What is very peculiar about Lincoln's stories and jokes, his own and those he appropriated from others, is the fact that many, if not most, are of an aggressive or algolagnic nature, treating of pain, suffering and death, and that a great many of them were so frankly sexual as to be classed as obscene.''

An analysis: "[Lincoln's] moods never reached to that degree of profundity to justify the diagnosis of insanity. At all times Lincoln remained in touch with reality. His ego never sought refuge in insanity."

Dr. Brill's intention to present this analysis of Lincoln to the American Psychiatric Association at Toronto last week, raised the catcalls of those who hate "debunkers"* of U. S. heroes. Dr. Edward Everett Hicks, Brooklyn psychiatrist and Son of the Revolution, cried: "It is about time the American people awoke to the fact that we have an element in this country/- who seem to thrive on slime and filth, even to attacking the memory of the greatest personalities. . . . Blaspheming the memory of the immortal dead should cease."

The American Psychiatric Association did not deter Dr. Brill from his Lincoln psychoanalysis at Toronto last week. The great majority of the mental specialists at the convention treated the controversy as an amusing byplay to their serious business of telling each other their pet methods of ameliorating and preventing psychoses. And their methods were not very new. The tenor of most was that the individual must not overstrain his brain, that the more he knows about his mental workings the better for himself and for society.

*e.g. Edgar Lee Masters on Lincoln (TIME, Feb. 16); Rupert Hughes, et al on Washington (TIME, Oct. 25, 1926).

/-Dr. Brill, 56, was born in Austria, got his Ph.B. from New York University 30 years ago.

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