Zinberg on Adolescence and the Dow Affair

This paper by Dr. Norman E. Zinberg, assistant clinical professor of Psychiatry, was presented on Monday to Sectional Meeting 8 on "Physical and emotional stress among students" at the 23rd National Conference on Higher Education, sponsored by the American Association for Higher Education, Chicago.

IF WE are to have some clear picture of what the emotional stresses of adolescence are in the United States in the 20th century, we have to say something first about adolescence itself in our society, its advantages and its difficulties. For those adolescents who go on to higher education, we must understand how the phase of development conflicts with social institutions and creates stresses of all kinds.

In western societies as late as the 18th century, and in many societies even today, the transition from childhood to adulthood has been early, brief, and coercively controlled by inflexible rites of passage or apprenticeships. In these societies, adolescence, as we define it, rarely can occur. One of the extraordinary psychological achievements of industrial and post-industrial societies has been the gradual opening of an opportunity for a real adolescence to a great number of less privileged and less talented young men and women, with all of the rich possibilities for continued development this opening brings. What we have to say about adolescence must, therefore, be seen in an historical perspective which recognizes that adolescence, as we define it, is to a large extent a recent social and cultural phenomenon, still not available to multitudes of young people, primarily from low-skilled, working-class families. Where an adolescence is available in our society, that is, a gradual and imperceptible phase of life which leaves childhood and merges gently with adulthood, the possibility for any psychological strengths for a firmer development to mature is opened. Above all, it integrates the individual's search for an ideological form, for the valid, underlying rituals of our society in an attempt to counteract the meaninglessness and vagueness of society's conventions and values. [Ritual is used in the sense that Erikson describes ritualization: a mutually accepted interplay between at least two persons who repeat it at intervals and in recurrent contexts and which has an adaptive value for the go of each participant--a condition fully met by the way a mother and baby greet each other in the morning. From this earliest ritual, Erikson traces the process through childhood and into adolescence, where it acquires ideology which gives coherence to values and ideals, and structure to ideas.]

As soon as we began to understand the value of adolescence, we also began to understand the difficulty of having one foot in childhood and one foot in the grownup world. Even the saying that this stage of life is not a disease but a part of growing up, is a description of how troubling adolescence is for him and for us, i.e., the grownups. He has an infinite capacity for devising bedevilling situations and moral conundrums for the conventional adult world which makes our problem in coping with him infinitely stressful for all.

Erik Erikson, one of the idols of this college generation (his books are required reading at 800 colleges), coined the term "identity crisis" to describe the internal revolution experienced at this time of life. Probably few terms have come back to haunt their progenitor more perniciously than this one. Whenever a sophisticated adolescent scents trouble from an authority figure, he tends to justify himself on the ground of validity of his "identity crisis," and on this basis, to demand acceptance and even succor. In a way, this perverse reaction points up Erikson's meaning which is in no way invalidated by its abuse. For Erikson points to the late adolescent's subjectivity, his seclusiveness, his rebellion against his environment as well as the opposites of these traits--his striving for intellectual understanding and objectivity, his quest for all-embracing companionship, his search for answers from the adult world. In the presence of such routine inner turmoil, emotional stress is an everyday byproduct. In fact, in adolescence (an age which Erikson wryly says lasts "from puberty to maturity"), the psychological mechanisms which normally maintain emotional reactions within a reasonable range, swing so erratically that it is very hard to determine when the degree of stress is such that it is simply part of growing up and when it is part of an emotional disorder. No one would wish to institute psychotherapy with young men or women whose painful struggles are moving them closer to an understanding of themselves or of their relationship with the external world. But for other individuals, hard to distinguish from their fellows, the general confusions of adolescence mask a diffusion and despair not characteristic of a developmental phase, but indicative of emotional disorder. This differentiation of normal developmental crisis from emotional disorder, this ability to pick out disturbance but to avoid potentially weakening or infantalizing interference must be the concern of every educator and mental health worker.

BUT THE problem is complicated because some adolescent feeling and behavior are in fact ominous. Adolescence is the stage of life when a whole series of self-destructive and socially-destructive adaptations, from criminality to schizophrenia, first make their appearance. In adolescence, these adaptations are least rigidified, and are easiest to prevent or treat. Separating these ominous developments from the normal difficulties of adolescents is an important task. In the end, the skilled adult who attempts to differentiate the ominous from the normal must fall back on developmental criteria, attempting to judge whether the adolescent's behavior reflects the routine turbulence of forward movement or the agitation of truly blocked development.

But even the most experienced clinician finds such differentiation difficult. And in our experience, the greater his experience, the more reluctant he is to label, characterize, and "diagnose" adolescent behavior. Untold harm is done by adults who attach to some transient aspect of the adolescent's behavior a self-confirming label like "delinquent," "schizophrenic," "homosexual," or "psychopathic." The vulnerable adolescent, already confused as to who he is, may seize upon even such negative labels in a despairing effort to be someone. Many of the disturbances of adolescence that endure into adulthood are the products of a similar interaction of the adolescent's hunger for self-definition with the adult world's thoughtless willingness to label him on the basis of a single act or episode.

The reverse, i.e., the masking of disturbance by adolescence the goal of all interventions with adolescents, then should be to strengthen and confirm them in their development. Some adolescents may need special help, but the purpose of this help should not be to "cure" them of their "illness" (much less of their adolescence); rather it should be to restore to the adolescent his capacity to proceed in his growth without special help. Too much help can be enfeebling, just as too much understanding without respect can be undermining. Even today, much of what passes for "counseling" of adolescents ends up short-curcuiting adolescence by undercutting the questioning, rebellion, and search that should accompany adolescent experience. As more adequate "special help" becomes available for American youth, that help must seek to intensify, deepen, and in many cases, prolong adolescence, rather than simply to hasten the passage to adulthood.

In order to illustrate the complexity of the problem faced by the adolescent in our culture and its attempt to deal with the adolescent, I would like to discuss a recent incident at Harvard College. On October 25 a group of 300-400 students spontaneously filled Mallinckrodt, the chemistry building, to protest the napalm-making Dow Chemical Company's recruiter being permitted on the campus. Several of these students had participated in the peace march on Washington on October 21, while others had lived vicariously through the stories of the beating and tear-gassing of the marchers by the Army's Military Police. The hysteria on campus resulted not just in what the students saw as their own government's brutal response to their protest, but also from what the students experienced, and what they proclaimed in the Harvard CRIMSON as the national press's unfair reporting of the entire incident. The school had taken no notice of the Washington march or its aftermath, but several of the administrators admitted later that the whole business left them pretty edgy. This tension in all departments of the University contributed a lot to the events of the next few days.

The protesting group, leaderless but determined (the campus Students for a Democratic Society the night before had voted against any act of civil disobedience), refused to allow the Dow Chemical representative to leave Mallinckrodt until he signed an affidavit promising never to return. He refused good-naturedly, and the students even permitted him to speak without too much uproar. The 6-7 hours that the Dow Chemical man was "imprisoned" saw great student turmoil as it was virtually a constant mass meeting with students voting on all sorts of radical political questions. Along with this intellectual ferment went such ludicrous touches as the somewhat elderly campus police linking arms in the basement of Mallinckrodt practicing a flying wedge, should they be called on. Several deans on the college administrative board sat out the furor with the Dow Chemical man, but along the way took students' names and demanded that every participating student turn in his bursar's (identification) card. Many students, unable to participate because of urgent classes--the radical of the sixties is serious--dropped by just to turn in their bursar's cards; so just who actually blocked passage is hard to know to this day. By dinner time the students relented, deciding that the Dow Chemical man was but a symbol and that they had no right to infringe on one man's civil liberty, and they let him go.

During the next few days the administrative board met repeatedly, the Deans of the College called an emergency faculty meeting, the students held rallies, and nobody in any way connected with Harvard talked about anything else. Many professors wanted the students involved kicked out. Their arguments ranged from judicious concerns--no issue, even the Vietnam war, is important enough to override anyone's civil liberties--to moral righteousness--it's time those kids were taught a lesson. At the opposite pole one professor proclaimed that if they were thrown out, he went too, while many others vigorously supported the students' actions without making them their own. One group was terribly concerned that the University family would be torn apart on the issue and that the students and their faculty would end up more as antagonists than as pupils and teachers in the finest sense of both of those words. After all the meetings and all the behind-the-scenes phone calls, out of such violently opposing opinions, came a bland compromise: the Administrative Board proposed, and the faculty ratified, the decision to put on a virtually meaningless probation any student whose bursar's card had been turned in.

Throughout this vital incident, vital not just to Harvard but to many of the nation's colleges who themseles might have followed Harvard's lead in dealing with student political disobedience, as far as is known, no one in authority consulted directly with the great pool of psychological talent available to the University. Further, out of that fateful faculty meeting, there came one great advance: the faculty voted to form a joint student-faculty committee to consider the whole question of student relationship to the college. When the makeup of this tremendously important committee was announced, no psychologist was included.

The omission of any psychologist from the student-faculty committee indicated that the University was primarily treating the incident as a disciplinary problem and did not understand the extent to which they were facing a problem in our culture in the relationship between generations. This lack of understanding became even more evident when President Pusey issued his Annual Report on the state of the University. In this Report he found the Dow incident disgraceful and said that no one had learned anything of importance from the episode.

In fact, many students felt that participation in that episode was one of the most important events in their lives. One student put it graphically. He described how he had fought to get into Harvard, and that at the moment when he turned in his bursar's card he knew he was faced with the possibility of being kicked out. He felt that he had to face completely the extent of his convictions about the Vietnam war and about the morality of its destructiveness. He had, in that moment when he knew he might have sacrificed what was of such importance to him, grown up. This student learned the meaning of commitment, even if it turned out that his commitment wasn't a cause that may have been the best.

I am not in this paper espousing the Dow demonstration, but simply using it as an example to indicate what could be learned. Many faculty members went to that faculty meeting with a greater understanding of their position, not just as teachers but as college administrators. They knew that they would have to vote on a proposition which would involve the degree to which they felt it necessary to police the political activities of the students. These faculty members had to re-appraise their own positions and to re-focus their own concept of themselves as administrators of students' morality. They also had to assess the importance to them of the closeness of the college "family," and where they saw their position in preserving it and their own definition of how a family is best preserved, by the degree of permissiveness or of strictness.

Most of all, it seemed to me that what should be learned from the incident, what certainly President Pusey didn't see, was that we had to have an appreciation of what the emotional stresses were on an adolescent in college today. What are they saying to us when they demonstrate or when they don't; and what are our responsibilities as their teachers? Is it necessary for us to even teach them how to be politically active? What is the most effective protest? This Dow incident took place in a college at a time when the whole concept of the traditional custodial care role of the college is in an uproar and the administrators faced by many complex decisions. The college is an institution which, like so many other such in our modern society, is in the process of rapid change. We find that we no longer can even think about what stress is when we find it so hard to think about what mental health is. With each passing year we can see what a slippery concept mental health or the absence of stress is. Our concept of what it is to get along in our society is an ever changing process, and to conceive of it in any absolute sense useless at any time of life and especially during adolescence.

If we are to understand this period of life and the stresses that go with it, we have to understand it is a developmental period, and we have to look carefully at our cultural institutions. We must run like hell to stay in the same place. What is gained from adolescence, as we said in the beginning, is of enough importance for the adolescent to make the inherent stresses worthwhile, which does not mean that we set out with any motive but to increase communication and dialgoue. We can't make the stresses of adolescence go away, but we can understand them