Reviewed by Chads O. Skinner
THE SHOW OF VIOLENCE. By Frederic Wertham, M. D. (Doubleday & Co. $3. 279 pp.)
M
URDER as few persons are permitted to see it-through
the eyes of a distinguished psychiatrist and one who is, incidentally, gifted with the fluency of a novelist-is the grimly engrossing, deeply disturbing subject matter of this new book by Dr. Wertham, who is president of the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy and director of the mental hygiene clinic of the Queens (New York) General Hospital. The reading of this book is no ordinary literary or emotional excursion. For it is a description of seven cases of mental derangement that led to murder because of society's failure-or more particularly the failure of misguided or stupid representatives of society in public office and public institutions—to recognize the accumulating marks of violence and effectively deal with them before it was too late. Even those who read. out of curiosity. Dr. Wertham's lucid. clearly understandable psychopa. thology of seven murderers will undoubtedly obtain a shocking awareness of the inadequacy of the country's mental hygiene program.
Dr. Wertham's thesis is that murder, like tuberculosis, is preventable; that murder is not committed
out of sudden impulse. "In the presented himsel¿ 10 times in four whole literature of psychiatry and and one-half years to the proper psychoanalysis.” he wrote, "there is not a single case where a violent medical agencies seeking help for act, homicidal or suicidal. constia disordered mind, one so badly tuted a symptom in an obsessivederanged that it led the sculptor to compulsive neurosis. It is therefore always bad psychopathology try self-emasculation. Irwin, Dr. speak of a compulsive murder or Wertham unqualifiedly says, "could a compulsive suicide." have been cured before he was permitted to commit all those murders."
No Desire to Kill
10
In dealing with the popular noDr. Wertham believes that, in tion that many mentally defective dealing with murder, we must be persons are potential killers. Dr. guided by the principle of what is Wertham categorically asserts: "If best for the protection of society, mental defectives are properly and not be motivated by desire to treated they have no more desire exact retribution. His belief is proto kill than have other people. If vocative and the buttressing evithey are placed in an appropriate dence he presents is potent, in an environment their inhibitions are appalling way. good enough for that environment. The trouble with mental defectives is that they place a greater strain on the constructive resources of society."
The psychiatrie case histories of the murderers Dr. Wertham presents, constitute strong stuff and. whether or not all schools of psychiatric thought agree with Dr. Wertham's thesis, they are educational in the field of mental hygiene.
In this book are some heavily headlined murders of not too many years past. Here is the case of · Madeline, who killed her two children and tried suicide because no one recognized, till too late, that she had retrogressed into a psy. chotic state after discovering that her husband was homosexual and after developing the belief that she herself was abnormal for loving him, and thus her children pos. sessed a doubly bad inheritance. Her reactive depression and delusions corrected by modern phychiatry. Madeline is now. years later. "sane and well adjusted.”
The most extensive treatment of any of the seven murders is given│ to Robert Irwin, the "mad sculptor," who in 1937 killed the model. Veronica Gedeon, her mother and a roomer in their house. Before he gave himself up, Irwin worked for a while as a bar attendant in downtown Cleveland hotel.
Dr. Wertham discloses that Irwin: