Word: wertham
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Robert Kennedy was a natural target for what New York Psychiatrist Frederic Wertham calls "magnicide-the killing of somebody big." Historically, that somebody has often symbolized the political assassin's hated father; in the U.S., such murders are also frequently motivated by simple envy. Democracy, says Harvard Sociologist David Riesman, presents the question: "Why are you so big and why am I so small?" It is not legitimate to be a failure in America. And the frustration of failure adds New York Psychiatrist David Abrahamsen, is "the wet nurse of violence...
...fearful middle class, Negro as well as white, can no longer afford to ignore violence, a phenomenon from which no human being is exempt. Freud held that man has a death instinct that must be satisfied in either suicide or aggression against others. Many modern psychiatrists disagree. Dr. Fredric Wertham, famed crusader against violence, argues that violence is learned behavior, a product of cultural influences such as violent comic books. The violent man, he says, is the socially alienated...
...long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood, as it is perhaps also in ours." Further, Freud held that man possesses a death instinct which, since it cannot be satisfied except in suicide, is instead turned outward as aggression against others. Dr. Fredric Wertham, noted crusader against violence, disagrees sharply and argues that violence is learned behavior, not a product of nature but of society: "The violent man is not the natural but the socially alienated...
...burst out all the more fiercely later. At times the U.S. displays a kind of false prudery about violence to the point where, in the words of Psychiatrist Robert Coles, "almost anything related to forcefulness and the tensions between people is called violent." While this attitude (including Dr. Wertham's frequent blasts at anything from military toys to Batman) is plainly unrealistic, there is no denying that a gruesome violence on screens and in print is threatening to get out of hand. According to one theory, such vicarious experience of violence is healthy because it relieves the viewer...
THIS AGE OF VIOLENCE, by Fredric Wertham. A clinical psychiatrist's indignant analysis of the seeds of violence in contemporary society, from toy guns and war games to TV drama and current fiction. Not even Superman or the Unknown Soldier gets a clean bill of health in this unsettling though probably oversimplified book...