Word: adelson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This murder and four similar ones are described in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association by Pathologist Lester Adelson of Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University. The phenomenon of the "battered child" who has been killed or maimed by his parents is well known (TIME, Nov. 7, 1969), but the existence of what Adelson calls the "battering child" has scarcely been recognized. To Adelson, the importance of his five cases "far transcends their number"; while death wishes in children are known to be common, very few adults are aware that a preschool child...
...Adelson culled his examples from the records of the coroner's office in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, during a period of 42 months. The victims ranged in age from seven weeks to eight months-their assailants, from two to eight years. Of the six little murderers, one was retarded, one was a "slow learner" and four were "apparently normal." Three of the young murderers assaulted relatives: a cousin, a brother and a nephew. One killed an unrelated infant his mother was caring...
...allay any doubt that the murderers were really young children, Adelson reports that investigation "failed to raise even a scintilla of evidence of adult maltreatment." The motive in each case, according to Adelson, seems to have been intense jealousy. Each of the young killers wanted to get rid of a younger rival who threatened "his sense of security or place or priority in the household...
...Adelson also takes issue with the wing of the movement that often equates male sexuality with rape -sometimes seeing rape symbolically as the distillation of the normal male sexual attitude. Says Adelson: "As any clinician knows, these days the problem in male sexuality lies in the opposite direction, not in phallic megalomania but rather in sexual diffidence and self-doubt...
Will there some day be a "unisex" society with no differences between men and women, except anatomical ones? It seems unlikely. Anatomy, parturition and gender, observes Psychologist Joseph Adelson, cannot be wished away "in a spasm of the distended will, as though the will, in pursuit of total human possibility, can amplify itself to overcome the given." Or, as Psychoanalyst Therese Benedek sees it, "biology precedes personality...