Parents & Children

Scientists who remained in Chicago last week for the continued discussions of the American Association for the Advancement of Science turned on one hand to problems of Engineering (see p. 37). on the other to problems of Society, especially to problems of parents & children. As a corollary to his epochal discovery of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud found that children did not grow up to puberty as sexless neuters, but had sexuality from birth and responded to parental fondling. His principal hypothesis held that most dreams were explainable by suppressed sexual urges; so that when young men told him of dreams in which they saw their fathers dead and young girls reported similar dreams about their mothers, he formulated his concept of the Oedipus Complex,* which holds that all youngsters--in some small degree at least --unconsciously hate parents of the same sex, are erotically attracted to parents of the opposite sex. Thirty-three years have passed since Die Traumdeutung was published. Today Sigmund Freud, ill and old (77), almost never emerges from the seclusion of his curio-filled Vienna home. His work has been honored, but it has also been severely criticized. Many a onetime disciple has drifted away, revising, overhauling, stripping the flesh from the impregnable skeleton of the original discovery and clothing it anew. One early disciple. Dr. Alfred Adler, discovered the Inferiority Complex, whose wide acceptance has nearly shouldered aside the Freudian interpretations, among them the Oedipus Complex. Today the word ''Freudian" is far less used by bigwigs of the psychological sciences than by literary and dramatic critics to pigeonhole incestuous novels and plays. But the Oedipus Complex leaped from desuetude last week when the University of Wisconsin's Dr. Ross Stagner reported a survey which seemed factually to confirm its validity. Addressing the American Sociological Society in Chicago. Dr. Stagner said he had questioned a large group of boys & girls in their 'teens, found the girls invariably fonder of their fathers, the boys invariably fonder of their mothers. Dr. Stagner found that when children were reprimanded the Freudian "censor" (which ordinarily keeps the unconscious buried) was likely to be off guard, that boys then resented scoldings more from fathers than from mothers, that the converse was true of girls. The Oedipus Complex, thought Dr. Stagner, was clearly entitled to a thoroughgoing reappraisal. The echo of Freudian concepts matched the echo of marital concepts preached by neglected Benjamin Barr Lindsey, one-time Judge of Denver's Juvenile Court. Long has peppery, little Judge Lindsey trooped up & down the country with a marital Utopia under his arm and at the end of his tongue, wrangling with churchmen and standpatters, touching off a conflagration of protest. One of Judge Lindsey's pet anathemas has been what he calls "bootleg divorce," i. e. divorce by amicable agreement but fixed up to look as though one party had been wronged by the other, to conform to the law. He violently wants to change that.

Judge Lindsey is a member of Section K (Sociology) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Last week a fellow member, the University of Indiana's Charles R. Metzger, trotted out one of the Lindseyan formulas, with a few-new furbelows but apparently identical in substance. He recommended divorce by mutual consent for couples who cannot be reconciled. Legalization of such divorces, stated Professor Metzger. would end "much subterfuge and perjury which is now prevalent in every divorce court in the United States." He said his plan had nothing to do with Judge Lindsey's "companionate" marriage, but Judge Lindsey's longtime opponents could see no difference. Fumed the United Presbyterian Church: "The proposal loses sight of the fundamental nature of marriage. . . . Marriage aims at ... the founding of a permanent home. . . . Any such loose lowering of our standards shows diseased thinking."

Professor Metzger's pound of cure for marital crackups was part of a "Round Table'' conference on "The Family." An ounce of prevention was suggested by the University of Chicago's Dr. Leonard S. Cottrell Jr. in a report garnished with brand new statistics. For more than two years with Professor Ernest Watson Burgess. Dr. Cottrell plied 526 young married couples with questions, got answers. They found that chances for harmony were best:

1) When courtship lasted from three to five years.

2) When both husband & wife had interests outside the home.

3) When husband & wife had both religious and secular education.

4) When there were no widowed mothers-in-law on the scene.

5) When, in the selection of a mate, the advice of a father had been followed and the designs of a mother ignored.

*So called from the Greek myth in which Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother, unaware of either's identity. But Fate, not Sex, was what interested the Greeks who wrote great plays based on this story.

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