Most College Inefficiency Caused By Fears And Complexes Declares Psychologist--"Women Want To Depend On Men"

"A course in practical psychology and three or four expert psychoanalyists would be more useful and helpful to the undergraduate body of our colleges than all the subjects in the curriculum and the entire faculty," Gertrude Steele Chambers, most prominent woman psychologist in the country, and pupil of both Freud and Jung, declared in an interview yesterday.

"I would say that about 80 per cent of the inefficiency and so called stupidity of undergraduates is caused by fears, confusions, and complexes which can readily be cleared up by simple psychology. The unusually large number of sensitive people, cases of nerrous breakdown, and even many cases of apparent physical disorder are due to the fact that our culture is a culture of suppression, especially in New England. "Mourning Becomes Electra" and "Ethan Frome" are true pictures of the abnormality and irritation in personalities caused by suppression.

"Among savages and more primitive peoples there is no waste of nervous energies since there are healthy outlets, but college students, failing to realize that the pleasure-seeking impulse dominates, suffer excruciating agonies and drive their only pleasure from the social life. Fully 75 per cent of undergraduates should not be enrolled. They have come to study because of pride or the fact that they think that college training is a necessity. Consequently their outlook is prejudiced toward studies before they arrive.

"Women in spite of all their protests to the contrary want to be dependent on men. Men will feel hurt if a woman begins to dominate the household. The custom and experience of generations cannot be wiped out in a decade.

"Squelched children are the cause of most psychological maladjustments. Ninety-eight per cent of American mothers so thoroughly suppress their children before the age of six that they are unfit for the strife that is a rule of the world. Their first instinct, that of hunger, is denied when they are punished for eating a cookie between meals; then their acquisition instinct is curbed when they are unable to understand that a diamond bracelet is more valuable than a rocking horse. When the sex instinct makes its appearance, it is unhealthily denied by the parent's explaining as my parents explained to me, that no decent person ever had such a thing as sex. Finally when the self-preservation instinct develops, it is fought under when the father punishes the child for scrapping with the boy next door. A baby is nothing but a bundle of instincts, and gentleness, never punishment is essential to rearing a child. Sublimation of instincts incompatible with social organization is perfectly possible.

"Sham respectability, a survival of the mediaeval idea that instincts were from the devil, ideals from God, accounts for intense unrest in America. A psychologist is the only one who completly understands human nature.

"Arrested developments are the result of this suppression of instincts, and we have in America a lot of social, sexual and intellectual babies. The average man is incredibly undeveloped; 12 years is the average actual age. In the four stages of sexual development, the mother-fixation age, the self-love period, the stage of attachment for members of one's own sex, and finally the stage of heterogeneous love, less than half of our people have attained full maturity.

"Three millionaries have been my patients during the past year. All of them have been cases of arrested development. The people who do the great work of the world are usually desperately unhappy. Inferiority complexes disguished under a superior attitude drive them constantly to work but achievement cannot satisfy their complaint. The senior Mr. Morgan was a tangle of intricate complexes, and the case of Ivar Kruger testifies to the truth of this discovery.

"Happy people live a more or less bovine existence. Psychological study has proved the falsity of Emerson's doctrine of compensation. There is no divine balance which compensates and insures equal happiness to every individual.

"Geninses are cases of a complete split between the intellectual and emotional sides of human nature. With mind divorced from the emotions greater concentration is possible, but occasionally the emotions that have been sublimated will unconsciously demand release. This accounts for the periodic violent debaucheries that geniuses frequently indulge in.

"Psychoanalysis is far superior to the old dynamic psychology, by which a man was able to bolster up his courage, but once defeated, was almost irreparably broken. By what Freud calls the 'transfer of the libido' psychoanalysis removes all cause of troubles and pushes on arrested development. The European analysist never tells his patient anything, the American practioner tries to be very friendly with the patient. Self-analysis is perfectly possible but leads to introspection and the disease called 'thinking'.

"H. G. Wells has hailed psychoanalysis as the 'new hope of the world' which will ultimately replace religion. Religion offers only consolation, psychology removes all necessity for consolation. It is the first science to study man himself.

"Man is his own worst enemy. His imagination pictures terrors which become just as real as actual obstacles in the course of time. Habit is never so strong that the psychoanalyst cannot overcome it. The Duke of Wellington said 'habit was ten times as strong as nature' but an analysist only needs a little more time to untangle personalities schooled and cemented in the wrong outlook.

"Detractors of psychology are led into error by thinking that the extreme left-wing of expressionists, such as the New Yorker criticizes, in this week's issue, constitute the whole movement. Freud too has been misinterpreted. He does not mean that that an Oepidus complex (father-fixation) or a Jocasta complex (mother-fixation) is necessarily sexual.