From the Shrink Blaine on Youth

IT JUST isn't intellectually fashionable to dismiss student radicalism as part of an international Communist conspiracy. But psychiatrists like the University of Chicago's Bruno Beuclhcim have hit upon a more sophisticated method of diverting attention from racial criticism of American society. Like the right-wing paranoids, they do this by assuming that radicals can't really be all that unhappy with society-that there must be something else behind their protests. To these psychiatrists, that something can be found in Freudian psychological theories.

Graham B. Blaine. Jr.. psychiatric chief at Harvard's University Health Services, gave his own version of the Bettelheim argument in a speech to the American Social Health Association on November 1. The text of the speech-entitled "What's Behind the Youth Rebellion?"-was reprinted in the magazine section of last Sunday's Herald-Traveler.

Blaine's talk focused on two large groups of young people- "the dropouts and the violent ones." The first group, he said, "are dropping out completely from established society and using harmful drugs regularly." The other group, meanwhile, "is using violent means in an attempt to destroy the structure of [universities]." Blaine subjected both groups to psychological scrutiny in his speech.

Dropouts, he said, are characterized by a desire to take risks "in order to test their capacities as well as their courage . . . . Some take drugs and go on to escalate dosage and experiment with more dangerous substance . . . . Fast driving and irresponsible sexual behavior are other risk-taking activities engaged in by young people deprived of challenges . . ."

The main problem with this theory is that human behavior is rarely so simple that it can be understood in terms of a single motivation like risk taking. Blaine made no mention of the other functions drugs can fill-including the fact that taking drugs can be enjoyable. It's also hard to figure out how he came up with "fast driving" as an integral part of today's youth culture, and he must realize that most of the risk has been taken out of "irresponsible sexual behavior."

Blaine offered two major explanations for the dropouts desire to take risks. The first was the affluence of American society: "Young people brought up in a world where everything has come easily to them begin to long for challenge and they cast about for risks to take . . . ." The other came right from Freud: hippies act like "infants and children [who] demand instant gratification . . . demanding from drugs an instant and constant happiness." They are immature people, for "if maturity comes, it brings with it the capacity to tolerate some present pain in order to achieve a greater pleasure at some later time."

Certainly many dropout types fit Blaine's description-as do many adults. But to dismiss hippies as people who haven't grown up is simplistic in the extreme. Surely a life style which stresses enjoyment of the present instead of planning for the future can attract people who aren't emotional infants.

TURNING to activists, Blaine attributed a large measure of their frustration to "the relatively permissive upbringing to which [they] have been subjected . . . Inconsistency and softness . . . results in the . . . belief that authority can be bent or gotten around. It is infuriating to meet a stone wall when one had expected . . . a soft hedge . . ."

But must authority be a stone wall? Is Blaine suggesting that parents teach their children to subordinate their own will to the commands of inflexible authority?

The most helpful viewpoint expressed by Blaine was that a large part of student unrest occurs because "the nature of the college population has changed and yet the colleges have not changed to meet the different kinds of needs which this new type of population comes with." The percentage of high school students who go on to college, Blaine pointed out, has jumped from 10 to 55 in the last 15 years. As a result, "fewer students are intellectually curious, scholarly, academic types . . . . More are . . . interested in directly coping with the problems of living . . . ."

Blaine then told his audience that on most college campuses "the student body falls generally into four categories. About 58 per cent are conformists-glad to be part of an educational community [and] fairly content with what is being offered them . . . . Another 30 per cent are discontented . . . [and] have a lot of untapped energy available for any kind of project which is diverting and promises some excitement. About 10 per cent . . . belong to, or sympathize with, the SDS . . . Finally, at the center of the trouble there are about 2 per cent . . . whose main goal is the destruction of the university as a first step towards a national revolution."

These highly dubious categories and percentages came to life as Blaine presented "the battle plan of the SDS." which amounted to little more than his interpretation of last April at Harvard. "First." he said. "a cause is found which has some support already among the students . . . Then, ostensibly to force action on the issue from the administration, a building is seized. The actual purpose of the seizure is to provoke violence and cause some blood to be shed . . . all the discontented students [then] rally against the apparent perpetrators of the violence and a number of the conformist students also are temporarily 'radicalized' out of sympathy for the few who may have been injured . . . a strike is [then] called as a first step toward shutting down the institution."

Here we have some paranoia mixed in with the psychology. When radicals occupy a building, Blaine is saying, they don't do it because they want administration response, as they claim. Their real motive is "to provoke violence" which will set off a chain of events resulting in the destruction of the university. Blaine ignores the obvious fact that building seizures can be effective in winning demands-the elimination of ROTC, for example-which have nothing whatsoever to do with destroying the university.

Blaine offered a cure for campus unrest along with his diagnosis. "The reformers and the discontented must be listened to and action taken on those demands which are reasonable ," he said.

But who decides what is reasonable? Not the SDS "revolutionaries." according to Blaine, for he admitted that his entire plan "is the most effective way to render them impotent." And when radicals are seen as dangerous people to be silenced rather than as sincere people to be heard, the chances of communication are slight.

SDS tell under Blaine's attack for thinking that the university, instead of being "essentially neutral . . . should make itself a political force . . . by counteracting certain forces which they feel as evil-undermining the Armed Forces, for example, by eliminating ROTC or . . . denying the government access to university facilities . . ."

It is strange logic-though often used-which holds that university involvement with ROTC and government research is in keeping with a neutral role. but that refusal to be linked with these things is a highly political act aimed at "undermining the Armed Forces."

Blaine ended his speech with a pitch for "realizing the tremendous value inherent in the idealism of today's young . . . youth serves an important function when it startles us out of complacency and stirs us . . . to act toward a healthy change."

Yet focusing on the motives instead of the demands of radicals can only serve to obscure the real issues involved. To do so makes no more sense than would analyzing Dr. Blaine's speech in terms of why he felt a need to castigate a large segment of today's youth.