For Freud, for Society, for Yale
In Arrowsmith, his famed novel about the medical profession, Yaleman Sinclair Lewis pilloried pretentious scientists by describing an imaginary and phony temple of science called McGurk Institute on Manhattan's Cedar Street. Arrowsmith was published before the founding of Yale University's Institute of Human Relations, but by a luckless coincidence Yale's Institute in New Haven also stands on a Cedar Street. Yale's Institute has many critics who make the most of that coincidence.
The Institute of Human Relations is an unorthodox, pioneering institution. First of its kind in the U. S. it was founded ten years ago by two bright Yale deans, Robert Maynard Hutchins of the Law School (now University of Chicago's president) and Dr. Milton Charles Winternitz of the Medical School (now retired). They decided that physical scientists and social scientists working together might start a new science of human relations whereby man could learn to be happier and on better terms with his fellows.
The Rockefeller General Education Board helped by building for the Institute a fine five-story Georgian home and by granting $2,500,000 for ten years' running expenses.* Soon there moved into this structure an odd assortment of men, women and beasts. Famed Child Psychologist Arnold Gesell brought a children's clinic for studying infant feeding and other phases of moppets' development. Psychobiologist Robert Mearns Yerkes brought his famed apes, clapped them into a huge cage atop one wing of the building and continued to study ape behavior. Psychiatrists brought a group of deranged men & women, locked them up in another wing. With their paraphernalia of rats monkeys, cages, microscopes, slide rules, test tubes and books, in moved other psychologists, economists, educators, historians, statisticians, physiologists and a few Yale students studying research. Then its 150 savants and their disciples donned white coats and set to work studying such things as crime, disease, unemployment, war depression, adolescents' speech defects, people's reactions to relief and to parking tickets.
Leader of this motley crew now is broad-beamed Dr. Mark Arthur May, a psychologist, expert on educational movies and onetime theology instructor. Dr. May, who has been with the Institute since 1931 and its director since 1935, found that scientists are individualists, hard to team up, harder still to hold to a program of research. Moreover, the Institute had no clear program. Some individual divisions, notably Dr. Gesell's, turned up much valuable data, but the Institute as a whole wandered all over creation. Yale's famed Anthropologist Albert Galloway Keller sneered at the whole affair.
Three years ago Dr. May and colleagues decided that if the study of human relations was to become a science, they should, like other scientists, find a hypothesis to unify their research, test it, eventually reduce it to mathematical formulae. Thereupon they formulated a tentative theory with 14 definitions, eight postulates and about a dozen theorems. This theory was based on Sigmund Freud's frustration-aggression hypothesis, i.e., whenever an individual's natural impulses are frustrated, he commits acts of aggression against the frustrater, against others or against himself; aggression always indicates frustration. The Institute's scientists proceeded to apply this theory to social as well as individual behavior. With it they sought to explain strikes, suicides, race prejudice, reformism, lynching, satire, crime, the reading of detective stories, wife-beating, war. They hoped the explanations would provide a formula for predicting and guiding the behavior of social groups.
This week the Institute published a summary of that study with considerable evidence to support its theory.** It was written by eight men representing several sciences. Salient conclusions:
> Education, a process of tempering and redirecting natural impulses, is itself frustrating. Sample pupil aggressions: throwing spitballs, putting a toad in teacher's desk.
> Most prone to commit crimes are frustrated groups such as undersized people, soldiers, divorcees, poor people
> In Germany and Italy aggression resulting from people's frustrations is directed against foreigners, Jews. It also crops out in jokes against the Government, many petty infractions of minor regulations.
> In Soviet Russia, aggression is directed against "exploiters, wreckers."
> In the U. S., frustrated people usually blame for their failures not their leaders or foreigners but themselves. Results: ruthless competition for individual advancement, much individual violence, escape in movies and pulp literature.
The Institute's scientists conclude that Democracy, Fascism and Communism in their present forms contain so many frustrations that unless they reform, all three forms of society face the danger of popular revolt.
Last week another experiment aptly illustrating the frustration-aggression theory was reported in the Harvard Educational Review by University of Iowa's famed Psychologist Kurt Lewin. In the University's Child Welfare Station, research workers formed two clubs of boys & girls about ten years old, set them to work making masks. One was a "democratic" group, with an adult leader who let the youngsters decide how to work, the other "autocratic," with a leader who gave orders and criticism without reasons. Observers' findings:
> Children in the democracy were more cooperative, friendly and matter-of-fact with each other.
> Children in the autocracy quickly became apathetic, hostile to each other, domineering.
> In the autocracy the group ganged up on one child, treated him so badly that he dropped out of the club. Thereupon the club began to bully another "scapegoat."
-Last year G. E. B. renewed its grant for another ten years but cut the yearly allowance from $250,000 to $80,000 compelled some trimming and the transfer of some branches of the Institute to the Yale School of Medicine.
FRUSTRATION AND AGGRESSION--Yale University Press ($2).
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