10 June 2007
Bruce JacksonWhy Tony's shrink got stupid
In the penultimate episode of HBO's "The Sopranos," first aired on June 3, Tony Soprano's psychologist Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) has dinner with a group of people at the house of her own psychologist, the water-bottle-toting and ethically-challenged Dr. Elliot Kupferberg (Peter Bogdonavich). Several people at the table refer to the work on the criminal personality by "Yochelson," and there is discussion about the possibility that "talk therapy" enables violent criminals to continue in their violent ways. Later, we see Melfi in bed reading from Samenow's book, and shortly after that she coldly dumps Tony as a patient. "As a doctor," Tony says, "I think what you're doing is immoral."The study discussed at Kupferberg's dinner and read in Melfi's bed—The Criminal Personality, by Samuel Yochelson and Stanton E. Samenow—is perhaps one of the worst studies of the criminal personality ever published. It is, in almost all regards, simply awful. The science is bad, the psychology is bad, the empirical data is bad, the writing is bad. A lot of people in the criminal justice field, however, loved it, primarily because it reduced a great deal of human complexity to a very trivial set of assumptions, the most important of which seems to be, "criminals are bad people because at a very early age they choose to spend their lives being bad people." That statement renders all rehabilitative work nugatory and all punishment justified.
Did the writers of the series have Kupferberg, Melfi and the other dinnertable shrinks reading, talking about, and then Melfi acting in terms of that trash because they themselves bought into the theories of Yochelson and Samenow, or were they letting us see highly trained professionals accepting without question bad science and one of them harming a patient because of it? It could be either or both.
In any case, here's a review I wrote of the Yochelson and Semenow book that appeared in the June 3, 1978, issue of The New Republic, soon after the book was first published.
The most important conclusions claimed by Yochelson and Samenow are these:
No social or psychological or genetic or economic factors cause or influence criminality. People become criminals only because they decide in early youth that they will be criminals. There are decisions, not influences.
There is no significant difference among types of criminals: a man who commits a crime of assault is likely to also commit property and sex crimes. Personality differences among murderers, checkwriters, dopesmokers, peepers, rapists, safecrackers and child molesters are not significant.
There is no such thing as a “first offender.” By the time a person is arrested the first time, “he has more than likely committed hundreds, if not thousands, of offenses.”
These are extraordinary claims and they have already received wide circulation in criminal justice circles. I recently heard criminal court judges in Houston and Buffalo refer to the significance of this study's conclusions. One judge said that for the first time he really understood "the criminal's mind." The Criminal Personality comes along at a time when rehabilitation and treatment programs are being abandoned in prisons across the country, and it offers a model that tells all the failed professionals that the fault was never theirs.
The authors offer an amazing self-evaluation: "The criminal has posed a challenge to all. With a new body of knowledge, with an emphasis on dissecting and rebuilding the thinking processes, and with new procedures, we have met the challenge."
Volume I tells us what the” criminal" is really like; volume II describes what Yochelson and Samenow think the only adequate program for habilitating the criminal to noncriminal life. The program requires three hours of group therapy every day, sexual abstinence (except for the married participants who are out of custody during participation in the program), unquestioning acceptance of Yochelson's and Samenow’s definitions of criminal attitudes, desires, needs and behaviors, thorough self-disgust, and abandonment of criminal thought and work.
Both volumes are badly written and clumsily edited, but they have the deceptive appearance of being responsible science because they seem to contain a lot of empirical information. The books are rich in illustrative anecdotes (these are largely from Yochelson's therapy and interrogation sessions; Samenow didn't join him until 1971, the ninth year of the project). The first person pronoun is almost never used: the discussions refer to "we" (even during the years Yochelson was clearly working alone) or the "A.C” (Agent of Change, a title the two came to prefer over therapist or clinical psychologist or psychiatrist). All the criminals are referred to as "C," so we can never know when a series of anecdotes refers to the same or different persons. Difference is consistently abolished or ignored: no information is given about race or age or education or criminal offense patterns. The terms sociopath, psychopath and criminal are used interchangeably.
There lurks somewhere in these eleven hundred pages the makings of a fair 200-page monograph. Such a monograph would describe a small group of patients (240, only 147 of whom were seen for more than 10 hours) whose criminal behaviors got them sent to a federal mental hospital, and it would describe a counseling program worked out successfully for 13 of those people by a psychiatrist had become bored with private practice and by a much younger psychologist whose previous work had focused on college dropouts. The monograph would describe apparent patterns of criminality among some of those patients and it would suggest adjustment techniques to help the few who had elected to quit crime.
But the pretensions here are far grander: we are offered a unified characterization of "the criminal," a model of behavior and personality appropriate not only to a small group of people in a special ward of a special hospital, but to all criminals everywhere.
The first problem is getting rid of all the causative factors social scientists have talked about since Cesare Beccaria invented criminology in 1764, Yochelson and Samenow note that many siblings of the criminals—who shared family backgrounds, city streets, schools and diets—did not grow up criminal, from which they conclude that external factors are not causal or influential. Criminality comes only to those who select it in early childhood. It is a curious rationale for a team in which the senior member was a trained physician. If three members of a family of eight develop TB or half the children in a class develop mumps, would one then say that all who developed the diseases did so because they had elected possession of the pathology?
If a man is criminal, they reason, then all his behaviors-—back to very early childhood — must be read in terms of his criminality; if he is not a criminal, then his behaviors are read in terms of his innocence. The same behaviors have polar meanings, but the meanings are not fully apparent until death because it is only after we know whether or not the person turned out criminal that we can read the earlier behaviors properly. Adolescence and puberty and even pre-pubescence are all held for potential revisionary evaluation. Perform one criminal act and all the previous actions change their signs. "No crimes," they tell us, "have occurred when they were thought of for the first time." Characteristics we might have thought indicative of a bright or artistic child turn out to be only the early deceptive manifestations of rank criminality, and the fact that they deceived us all about their criminality for so many years is only further evidence of the extent of their consuming depravity. Criminals, the authors assert flatly, are "a different breed of person, . . .” One becomes guilty not of writing that bid check or holding up that liquor store, but of a lifetime of mendacity and chicanery, of a continuing state of moral disjunction aggravated by the success with which one—from short pants till the moment of first overt criminality—hid it all from the rest of us.
They accurately describe many characteristics of thinking and behavior found among career criminals; unfortunately, most of the same characteristics are found among non-criminals. What is the difference? The non-criminals don’t commit crimes and the criminals do. " The consequences of a lie told by a criminal and a lie told by a noncriminal are very different. The same is true of anger, perfectionism, and all the other patterns described." The difference between the criminal and the non-criminal doesn't rest only with action: " . . . in the criminal, the thought is as criminal as the act. This is not true of the noncriminal" (their italics).
Because the decision to be a criminal is made early, the authors discuss at some length "the criminal child" (that is, someone who in later life comes to commit crimes). They analyze these children with a terrific insensitivity to normality. Among other things, the "criminal child" tries to make explosions with chemistry sets; he likes go-carts, minibikes, motorcycles and fast cars; he finds thinking about sex more interesting than mathematical or scientific equations written on a blackboard; he conceals ideas and emotional reactions from his parents; he pays no attention to boring television programs; and he is stimulated by pornography. And he is exploitative: "The criminal child expects his family to meet his needs." The "criminal child" is sneaky, mendacious and malicious. If he does not appear to engage in those negative behaviors, it is only because he is so sneaky he covers them up. These conclusions are based on work with no children: they derive from reports given by some adult inmates of St. Elizabeth's hospital in Washington, D.C., who agreed to be interviewed by Yochelson.
Many of their observations about the behavior and personality of adult criminals are equally epidermal: Some criminals "grow beards, moustaches, or goatees to conceal blemishes or otherwise improve their appearance." "The criminal may stop short of marriage, but lead a woman on with the expectation that a wedding may occur. This results in pregnancies and broken hearts." "Sexual release is not the objective; if it were, the criminal would be content with masturbation." "The criminal is in solid contact with reality, but he is unrealistic." “The criminal lacks the thinking patterns needed to make prudent decisions." "The criminal refuses to endure pain — physical or mental. Suffering, as the responsible person knows it, is foreign to the criminal." "It is remarkable that within a couple of days a criminal [in Yocheson’s program] can rid himself of troublesome erections if he sets his mind to it.
Isolated from their context, these lines are banal and absurd, but they acquire an internal appearance of legitimacy because of the authors' central assumption: "We have described the criminal population as a different breed—a group of humans with the same physical needs as the rest of us but with an entirely different view of life and an entirely different set of thinking patterns. The criminal is oriented: i.e., he knows what he is doing and what others are doing. But he has his own reality, in which society's values and rules are absurd or unimportant. He chooses his reality, not ours."
Armed with this knowledge, they are prepared to deal with any felon. When first encountering a potential informant or patient, "we strive to have the criminal see himself as he is. Rather than ask him who he is, we present him with a profile of who he is. Our objective is to establish valid facts rather than listen to his self-serving reports. We let him know right away that we know how his mind works." Most of the "criminals" encountered by Yochelson and Samenow quickly elected to have nothing to do with their program for change, a decision the two authors read as evidence of a continuing commitment to criminality. Only the criminals ready for radical change can take part in their program and the others can only continue in a life of crime; there are no other alternatives suggested. If a man enters the program and fails, then it is only because he was dishonest in his hope for salvation.
These two volumes represent a lot of bad science and they probably have the capacity for doing great evil. The true evil of bad science rests in the potential for the misinformation to modulate behavior and to subsequently hurt people. If we accept the claim that criminals are a "different breed" and that only the few who elect to submit to a moralistic therapy program are redeemable, then we can only conclude that most offenders are truly and forever lost, that they have been lost since shortly after birth, that society can and need do nothing to reduce the incidence of criminality or treat it when it does occur.
The study legitimizes abandonment of people in need of help and it rationalizes punishment without hope.
Copyright 2007 by Buffalo Report, Inc.
