Mama's Boys

Psychoneurotics ?

"Nuts," said the colonel. "Somebody has thought up a new two-bit word for being yellow."

Brigadier General Elliot D. Cooke, visiting a forward command post in North Africa, eyed the colonel thoughtfully. As he was to discover before he finished his Army-wide inquiry, the colonel had pretty well summed up the attitude of many U.S. combat officers in World War II.

General Cooke, a hardened soldier himself, started with much the same idea ("I didn't know enough about psychoneurosis to find the word in a dictionary"). But his assignment from General Marshall was to "seek the neurosis in its lair"--and he found it among some of the bravest troops. In an eminently readable book (All But Me and Thee; Infantry Journal Press; $2.75), he now tells what he reported to General Marshall.

Tracked Down. The Army uncovered more than 2,400,000 psychoneurotics (1,875,000 rejected in the draft, 600,000 discharged after induction). Four-fifths of those discharged had cracked up under training-camp discipline before they saw any fighting. General Cooke found many a plain & fancy coward: at Massachusetts' Camp Edwards, where 2,800 reluctant soldiers facing shipment to battlefronts were imprisoned in a stockade, he discovered that, to avoid going, men threw away their false teeth, hid in coal bins, jumped off harbor boats, paid up to $1,000 to civilian doctors to tell them how to fake illness. But he also found "psychopathic personalities," and among the toughest outfits: in North Africa soldiers in a crack airborne division took pot shots at Arabs to test their marksmanship, tossed hand grenades among their own men as a practical joke.

The Army, General Cooke admits, was baffled by its NPs. Their officers tried discipline, closes of salts, a little psychiatry, but failed in most cases to salvage them; those who were returned to duty after treatment usually landed back in a hospital.

Mothers' Sons. What was the matter with them? General Cooke hazards no guess; but Psychiatrist Edward A. Strecker, an expert who helped in the medical phase of General Marshall's inquiry, does. In most cases, says he, it was Mother. In a companion book to General Cooke's (Their Mothers' Sons; Lippincott; $2.75), Dr. Strecker argues that "smother love" was the root of the psychoneurotics' trouble.

Dr. Strecker considers it significant that when Bing Crosby toured the South Pacific, the song which troops demanded most often was Brahms's Lullaby. Plaintive, demanding letters from mothers to their sons in the service, he thinks, did much to undermine the boys' morale.

"Momism," of both the clinging and domineering varieties, is a widespread, "hereditary" U.S. disease, says Dr. Strecker, for which the nation is paying in general immaturity. "Instead of censuring mom for her shortcomings, we encourage her with misplaced adoration."

Dr. Strecker's prescription: let parents help children grow up by careful nourishment of traits that lead to maturity: "1) a desire to move, 2) a readiness and willingness to imitate, 3 ) an alert response to suggestion, 4) a reasonable amount of the love of power, 5) a strong leavening of curiosity, 6) a dash of childhood savagery, and 7) a spark of romancing."

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