Word: wertham
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Manhattan Psychiatrist Frederic Wertham had undergone, while conscious, two serious operations for dangerous blood vessel conditions in his legs. Due to the nature of his illness, scopolamine, the "truth drug," was given instead of an anesthetic. While the surgeon's knife cut into his flesh, Psychiatrist Wertham enthusiastically dictated to a hovering stenographer a stream-of-consciousness description of his mental processes...
Theory B. The second theory was advanced by Dr. Frederic Wertham, New York criminal psychiatrist, on new research presumably not available yet in Australia. In Dr. Wertham's psychiatric terminology, the Leonski case was that of catathymic crisis resulting from the same mother fixation which plagued Shakespeare's Hamlet, which for centuries has driven certain types of thwarted men to kill the thing they love the most. Leonski, according to Dr. Wertham, was a lonely, heartsick tenement boy suddenly deprived of all sense of comfort and personal love. Under these circumstances the inhibitions piled up from the time...
Dark Legend, A Study in Murder-Frederic Wertham...
Such a complex, of course, does not explain the act of murder. Many men, says Dr. Wertham, have matricidal impulses, never translate them into action. Instead they bury the desire in their subconscious, develop compulsion neuroses-a morbid dread of knives, persistent symbolic hand-washing, etc. If he had had a tendency toward ordinary forms of insanity, Gino might have killed himself instead of his mother. Or he might have withdrawn to the world of fantasy, developed schizophrenia...
...Wertham's conclusion: Gino's murder of his mother was a safety valve, an act to preserve his sanity. If he had not killed his mother, he would have gone mad. Said the doctor: "Gino acted like a man who cuts off his arm to escape blood poisoning. By the cruel deed, he eradicated his own mother-complex." Such a violent act to release a neurosis Dr. Wertham calls "catathymic crisis." It accounts, says he, for many murders committed by otherwise sane persons. After the temporary aberration they may have a good chance of returning to sanity again...