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Preventing Mental Illness pp 39–60Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Imagination and the Prevention of Violence: Fredric Wertham, Mass Media and Mental Hygiene, 1946–1958

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Part of the book series: Mental Health in Historical Perspective ((MHHP))

Abstract

Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham claimed that the United States could prevent juvenile delinquency by censoring comics. Bellevue psychiatrist and DC Comics consultant Dr. Lauretta Bender endorsed comics for children. Doyle compares Wertham and Bender’s arguments, concluding the two sides could never resolve whether human imagination—especially that of a developing child—was able to safely internalise pop culture’s rapidly increasing barrage of images. Doyle also makes the claim that Wertham’s mental hygiene campaign attracted popular support precisely because his understanding of imagination and its role in society resonated with a post-war public that had made Walt Disney’s products its standard of an acceptable imaginative life.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (New York: Knopf, 2014).

  2. 2.

    Michael E. Staub, Madness Is Civilization: When the Diagnosis Was Social, 1948–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

  3. 3.

    Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America (New York: New York University, 2003); Mical Raz, What’s Wrong with the Poor? Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

  4. 4.

    Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000); Henry Jenkins, ed., The Children’s Culture Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Jacqueline S. Rose, The Case of Peter Pan: The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).

  5. 5.

    Antonio Damasio, “How the Brain Creates the Mind,” Scientific American 281 (1999): 74–79.

  6. 6.

    Matthew W. Dunne, A Cold War State of Mind: Brainwashing and Postwar American Society (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013); Andrea Friedman, “Sadists and Sissies: Anti-pornography Campaigns in Cold War America,” Gender & History 15 (August 2003): 201–27.

  7. 7.

    Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

  8. 8.

    Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 249.

  9. 9.

    “Prices and Questions,” Wizard: The Comics Magazine 148 (February 2004): 163.

  10. 10.

    Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 248.

  11. 11.

    Bart Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005); Amy Kiste Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1998).

  12. 12.

    Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart, 1954), 36.

  13. 13.

    James Gilbert, Cycle of Outrage: America’s Response to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 29–31; Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 20–21; Fredric Wertham, “Puddles of Blood,” Time 51 (March 29, 1948): 67; Hilde Mosse, “Aggression and Violence in Fantasy and Fact,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 2 (April 1948): 477–82; Fredric Wertham, “The Psychopathology of Comic Books,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 2 (April 1948): 472–73; Fredric Wertham, “The Comics…Very Funny!” Saturday Review of Literature 31 (May 29, 1948): 29, 95; Judith Crist, “Horror in the Nursery,” Collier’s Magazine (March 27, 1948): 22–23; Fredric Wertham, “What Parents Don’t Know About Comic Books,” Ladies Home Journal 70 (November 1953): 50–53; Fredric Wertham, “The Curse of the Comic Books,” Religious Education 49 (November–December 1954): 12–15; Fredric Wertham, “Do the Crime Comic Books Promote Juvenile Delinquency?,” Congressional Digest 33 (December 1954): 302.

  14. 14.

    Gilbert, Cycle of Outrage, 143–62; Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 135.

  15. 15.

    Gabriel Mendes, Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Andrea Friedman, Citizenship in Cold War America: The National Security State and the Possibilities of Dissent (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2014); James E. Reibman, “Introduction,” in Seduction of the Innocent (1954; repr., New York: Main Road, 2004), v–xxxvii.

  16. 16.

    Beaty, Fredric Wertham, 152.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 150.

  18. 18.

    Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 59; Mosse, “Aggression and Violence in Fantasy and Fact”; Beaty, Fredric Wertham, 122; “Discussion,” undated transcript of dialogue held at Park Central, 7th Ave., 1–8, folder 14, Box 3, Dr. Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, United States Library of Congress, Washington, DC [Hereafter Wertham Papers].

  19. 19.

    Beaty, Fredric Wertham, 125.

  20. 20.

    Duncan Whitehead, “Touch Tempora, Worse Mores,” Psychiatric Quarterly 28 (1954): 496–510; Review of Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, 28 (1954): 516.

  21. 21.

    Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 54.

  22. 22.

    U.S. Congress, Senate, Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, A Compilation of Information and Suggestions Submitted to the Special Senate Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce Relative to the Incidence of Possible Influence Thereon of So-Called Crime Comic Books During the Five-Year Period 1945–1950, 81st Congress, second session, 1950, 182–184; 189–90.

  23. 23.

    Lauretta Bender to Dr. Iago Galdston, March 2, 1944, file 6, box 16, series 7, Lauretta Bender Papers, Archives, Brooklyn College Library, Brooklyn, New York [Hereafter LBP].

  24. 24.

    Harry E. Childs to Lauretta Bender, February 25, 1944, file 2, box 16, series 7, LBP; Harry E. Childs to Dr. Lauretta Bender, February 28, 1944, file 2, box 16, series 7, LBP; Lauretta Bender to Harry E. Childs, March 1, 1944, file 2, box 16, series 7, LBP; Bender to Galdston; Iago Galdston to Dr. Lauretta Bender, March 6, 1944, file 2, box 16, LBP; M. C. Gaines to Dr. Max Winsor, May 22, 1944; Lauretta Bender to M. C. Gaines, July 18, 1944, file 2, box 16, series 7, LBP; M. C. Gaines to Lauretta Bender, August 14, 1944, file 2, box 16, series 7, LBP; M. C. Gaines to Lauretta Bender, October 27, 1944, file 2, box 16, series 7, LBP; Lauretta Bender to M. C. Gaines, file 2, box 16, series 7, LBP; Harry E. Childs to Lauretta Bender, file 6, box 16, series 7, LBP; Lauretta Bender to Harry E. Childs, August 3, 1950, file 6, box 16, series 7, LBP; J. S. Liebowitz to Lauretta Bender, September 7, 1954, file 6, box 16, series 7, LBP; Lauretta Bender to J. S. Liebowitz, September 17, 1954, file 6, box 16, series 7, LBP.

  25. 25.

    U.S. Congress, Senate, Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime, 183.

  26. 26.

    Lauretta Bender, “The Psychology of Children’s Reading and the Comics,” Journal of Educational Sociology 18 (December 1944): 225.

  27. 27.

    U.S. Congress, Senate, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Juvenile Delinquency (Comic Books): Hearings Before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, 83rd Congress, second session, April 21–22, 1954 and June 1954, quoted in Michael T. Gilbert, “Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt,” Alter Ego 3 (January 2010), 65.

  28. 28.

    Bender, “The Psychology of Children’s Reading and the Comics,” 223–26, 229; Lauretta Bender and Reginald Lourie, “The Effect of Comic Books on the Ideology of Children,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 11 (July 1941): 543, 544, 546–47, 548–49.

  29. 29.

    Lawrence Kubie, “Psychiatry and the Films,” Hollywood Quarterly 2 (January 1947): 113–17; Ernst Kris, “Psychoanalysis and the Study of Creative Imagination,” in The Creative Imagination: Psychoanalysis and the Genius of Inspiration, ed. Hendrick M. Ruitenbeck (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle, 1965), 28–30; Lauretta Bender and Harry H. Lipkowitz, “Hallucinations in Children,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 10 (July 1940): 470–71; Lauretta Bender and Frank Vogel, “Imaginary Companions of Children,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 11 (January 1941): 56.

  30. 30.

    Bender, “Imaginary Companions,” 64.

  31. 31.

    Bender, “The Effect of Comic Books,” 546.

  32. 32.

    Bender, “Hallucinations in Children,” 472.

  33. 33.

    Bender, “The Effect of Comic Books,” 546.

  34. 34.

    W. Edgar Vinacke, The Psychology of Thinking (New York: McGraw Hill, 1952), 195.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 211.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., 198–214.

  37. 37.

    U. S. Congress, Senate, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Juvenile Delinquency (Comic Books): Hearings Before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, 83rd Congress, second session, April 21–22, 1954 and June 1954, quoted in Michael T. Gilbert, “Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt,” Alter Ego 3 (March 2010): 61.

  38. 38.

    Bender to Gaines, November 16, 1944, LBP.

  39. 39.

    Bender, “The Effect of Comic Books,” 546.

  40. 40.

    Fredric Wertham to Just Lunning, January 7, 1955, folder 14, Box 53, Wertham Papers.

  41. 41.

    Gilbert, Cycle of Outrage.

  42. 42.

    Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 232.

  43. 43.

    Fredric Wertham’s notes on Louise Bechtel’s Books in Search of Children, [1946?], Folder 11, Box 42, Wertham Papers.

  44. 44.

    Fredric Wertham, “Reading for the Innocent,” 2, reprint of Wilson’s Library Bulletin, 2, folder—Articles by Fredric Wertham, Hilde L. Mosse, and Others, box 2, Lafargue Clinic Records, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundation, New York [Hereafter LFC-SCRBC].

  45. 45.

    Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 233, 248.

  46. 46.

    Jed Rasula, “Nietzsche in the Nursery: Naïve Classics and Surrogate Parents in Postwar American Cultural Debates,” Representations 29 (Winter 1990): 70.

  47. 47.

    David Beres, “Communication in Psychoanalysis and in the Creative Process: A Parallel,” in The Creative Imagination, 211; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2014), 199–206, 213–14.

  48. 48.

    Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 86.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., 117.

  50. 50.

    Ibid., 86, 99, 109, 139, 171, 357, 365, 377.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., 95.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., 115.

  53. 53.

    Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 24–32, 39–50; Kathleen Jones, Taming the Troublesome Child: American Families, Child Guidance, and the Limits of Psychiatric Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 50–56.

  54. 54.

    Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 190.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., 76–77, 80, 83, 87, 93, 186, 190.

  56. 56.

    Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 117, 171, 183.

  57. 57.

    Wertham to Lunning, Wertham Papers.

  58. 58.

    Wertham Seduction of the Innocent, 232–33, 236–38, 362, 365; Wertham, “Reading for the Innocent,” 2.

  59. 59.

    Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 63, 365, 379, 380.

  60. 60.

    Ibid., 233.

  61. 61.

    Ibid., 244.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., 248–49.

  63. 63.

    Ibid., 236.

  64. 64.

    Reibman, “Introduction”; Mendes, Under the Strain of Color.

  65. 65.

    Hilde Mosse, “Ideas for a Paper for International Congress of Psychiatry in Vienna, 1961,” 22 July 1960, folder 13 “Ms. by Hilde Mosse, 1961,” box 4, LFC-SCRBC.

  66. 66.

    Kenneth Spencer, “Sans Funds, Lafargue Clinic Survives,” The People’s Voice, 13 July 1946, clipping, folder “Clipping re. Lafargue,” box 3, LFC-SCRBC.

  67. 67.

    Fredric Wertham, untitled and undated written notes on lined paper concerning a manuscript by Emanuel K. Schwartz [1956?]; Fredric Wertham, personally annotated reprint of Emanuel K. Schwartz, “A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fairy Tale,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 10 (October 1956): 759–62; Fredric Wertham, notecard with annotations regarding manuscript by Emanuel K. Schwartz [1956?], folder 16, box 40, Wertham Papers.

  68. 68.

    Wertham, “Comics…Very Funny!,” 6, 29.

  69. 69.

    Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 362. See also 355–56, 368–81.

  70. 70.

    Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 120; Judith Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy (Malden, MI: Blackwell, 2001), 22, 171–72, 209–12.

  71. 71.

    Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2007), 204–10, 275–96; Wasko, Understanding Disney.

  72. 72.

    Gabler, Walt Disney, 102, 200, 398; Wasko, Understanding Disney, 3, 111.

  73. 73.

    Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda and trans. Alan Upchurch (Calcutta: Seagull, 1986), 3–4, 8, 21, 39.

  74. 74.

    Ibid., 21, 39, 43–46, 64.

  75. 75.

    Gabler, Walt Disney, 275, 415; Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 65–66.

  76. 76.

    Gabler, Walt Disney, 275, 415; Wasko, Understanding Disney, 139.

  77. 77.

    Gabler, Walt Disney, 200, 402, 415, 438, 442–43; Wasko, Understanding Disney, 113, 117–18, 125, 128.

  78. 78.

    Susan L. Ohmer, “Measuring Desire: George Gallup and Audience Research in Hollywood,” Journal of Film and Video 43 (1991): 8, 10.

  79. 79.

    Ibid., 19, 23.

  80. 80.

    Wasko, Understanding Disney, 187, 209–12; Gabler, Walt Disney, 442–43.

  81. 81.

    David Berland, “Disney and Freud: Walt Meets the Id,” Journal of Popular Culture 15 (1982): 98–103; Fredric Wertham, A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence (New York: Warner, 1969), 215; Wasko, Understanding Disney, 138–89; Tracey Mollet, “‘With a Smile and a Song’: Walt Disney and the Birth of the American Fairy Tale,” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 27 (2013): 109–24.

  82. 82.

    Wertham, A Sign for Cain, 215.

  83. 83.

    Wertham, untitled and undated written notes on an article regarding fairy tales [1956?], folder 16, box 40, Wertham Papers.

  84. 84.

    Berland, “Disney and Freud,” 99.

  85. 85.

    Bruno Girveau, “Walt Disney at the Museum?,” in Once Upon a Time Walt Disney: The Sources of Inspiration for the Disney Studios, ed. Bruno Girveau (New York: Prestel, 2008), 18, 22.

  86. 86.

    Robin Allan, “Disney’s European Sources,” in Once Upon a Time Walt Disney, 100.

  87. 87.

    Ibid., 101, 125, 186; Bruno Girveau, “Beyond the Mirror: Walt Disney and Literature and Cinema,” in Once Upon a Time Walt Disney, 172–80; Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, 120; Lella Smith, “The Collections and Origins of the Animation Research Library,” in Once Upon a Time Walt Disney, 38; Gabler, Walt Disney, 18, 46, 312; Marc Eliot, Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince (New York: Birch lane, 1993), 7, 9, 10.

  88. 88.

    Gabler, Walt Disney, 18–24.

  89. 89.

    Allan, “Disney’s European Sources,” 100, 104, 106, 108, 110, 118, 134, 141–42, 144, 148, 156, 162, 166; Girveau, “Beyond the Mirror,” 176, 178, 188, 190; Girveau, “Walt Disney at the Museum,” 22, 24–28, 36; Smith, “The Collections and Origins of the Animation Research Library,” 48.

  90. 90.

    Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight.

  91. 91.

    Ibid., 107, 118; Wasko, Understanding Disney, 22, 171–72.

  92. 92.

    Girveau, “Beyond the Mirror,” 205.

  93. 93.

    Eliot, Walt Disney, vii.

  94. 94.

    Wertham, “Reading for the Innocent,” 1; Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 89–90.

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  1. St. Louis College of Pharmacy, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Dennis Doyle

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History and Archaeology, University of Crete, Rethymno, Crete, Greece

    Despo Kritsotaki

  2. School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Vicky Long

  3. Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

    Matthew Smith

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Doyle, D. (2019). Imagination and the Prevention of Violence: Fredric Wertham, Mass Media and Mental Hygiene, 1946–1958. In: Kritsotaki, D., Long, V., Smith, M. (eds) Preventing Mental Illness. Mental Health in Historical Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98699-9_2

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