The Mad Sculptor (17 page)

This argument (which failed to sway the governor) reflected not only a larger trend in 1930s America—the growing belief in the power of psychiatry to heal society’s ills—but also Wertham’s personal and unabashed idealism. Rejecting the view that humans are an innately savage species, he clung to the conviction that, by eliminating the social conditions that gave rise to criminal behavior, murder itself could be abolished—that “the ways of violence will eventually be replaced by reason.”
¹¹

Despite a crushingly heavy case load—his work for the Court of General Sessions alone required him to evaluate roughly five hundred prisoners a year—Wertham made time to conduct “practically daily sessions” with Bob Irwin. For various reasons, Wertham found the younger man a fascinating figure. Besides his personable qualities—he initially impressed Wertham as “a nice, frank-looking young man who spoke with emphasis and conviction”—Bob presented the psychiatrist with a rare clinical opportunity. While the notion of a “castration complex” loomed large in Freudian theory, Wertham could think of no cases of “actual attempts at self-emasculation” in the annals of psychoanalysis.
¹²
That Bob was a sculptor made him even more intriguing to the psychiatrist. Not only was Wertham a connoisseur and collector of fine art but he also had recently married a sculptor himself—Florence Hesketh, a Maine-born, Wellesley-educated artist whose work would eventually be exhibited in some of the country’s leading museums.
¹³

For weeks after his admission to Bellevue’s “psycho ward,” Irwin
persisted in his efforts to have his penis cut off. At one point, a young surgical intern informed Wertham that Irwin had called him aside and “asked me to do a great favor for him, namely, to remove his penis. He told me he knew a doctor who could do it properly. He said if I didn’t, when he got out—even after a stay in a state institution—he’d find someone, even a man on the street, and pay him to amputate his penis.”
¹⁴

During their lengthy psychoanalytic sessions—held in a cubicle, with a female stenographer named Moore transcribing their exchanges—Wertham did his best to convince Bob of the impracticality of his plan. “When once the penis is removed that does not necessarily mean that the sexual libido disappears,” said Wertham. “As a matter of fact, one cannot tell whether the sexual urge may not come back in the form of some undesirable perverse acts when the normal sex act cannot be executed any more.” Prisoners in Sing Sing who “cannot have intercourse with women” don’t lose their “sexual desire,” he explained. On the contrary, “their brains are filled with sexual things. From what I’ve been told, a large percentage of them become homosexual or act homosexual in jail. Have you considered that?”

Bob conceded that, while he did in fact worry that “I will become a cocksucker,” he was “willing to take the chance.” The potential benefits of cutting off his penis far outweighed that risk.

Where had Bob gotten the idea in the first place? asked Wertham. Had he “ever heard or read about anybody doing what he had attempted to do?”

“No,” Bob replied with a distinct note of pride. “It was completely my own grand invention.”

Pressed about the supposed benefits he would derive from such an operation, Bob treated Wertham to one of his extended disquisitions on visualization and the half-baked Schopenhauerian ideas he had formed after reading Will Durant. Without his penis, he explained, he would be able to bottle up enough psychic energy “to solve the riddle of existence.”

“I want to get my mental radio running in such a way that I can get in complete touch with the Universal Mind,” he declared. “It sounds as fantastic as can be, but it isn’t.”

“It doesn’t sound fantastic,” Wertham replied. “It
is
fantastic.”

“Okay,” said Bob with a dismissive shrug.
¹⁵

Seeing that there was no point in mounting a logical argument against these deeply bizarre beliefs, Wertham turned to the classic techniques of Freudian psychoanalysis, leading Bob “to talk about his dreams, his daydreams, his earliest memories.”
¹⁶
From these lengthy sessions of free association, Wertham was able to get a general picture of Bob’s family history. He learned about Pember and Vidalin, both now doing time in the Oregon State Penitentiary, and about Bob’s lifelong sense of inferiority to his tough-guy siblings, his sense that he wasn’t man enough to measure up to such “commanding” figures. He heard about the charismatic evangelist B. H. Irwin, “a plain lowdown hypocrite” (according to his son) who—in one typical episode—“was given nine hundred dollars to start a new church and went out and spent it all on women.”

Unsurprisingly, given the preoccupations of Freudian theory, Wertham pushed Irwin to talk at length about his mother, particularly after Bob shared a tidbit about her child-rearing practices.

“My mother read books prior to my birth about how to raise children and to acquaint them with sex knowledge rather than let it get to us in a smutty way,” Bob explained. “They were about how a mother should behave in front of her children so that it wouldn’t be a mysterious thing, and she used to bathe in front of us and we could see from the waist up.”

“Do you remember seeing your mother’s breasts?” asked Wertham.

“Absolutely. Oh, she had nice breasts. They were neither too large nor too small. They didn’t hang or anything and she was quite old at that time. She was about forty-five.”

“And how old were you at the time you saw your mother’s breasts?”

“Oh, about nine.”

Perhaps, Wertham ventured, Bob’s “later interest in breasts” could be traced to this childhood experience. “Tell me,” said Wertham, “what do you like to do with breasts? Are you interested in the nipple itself? Do you have fantasies of doing what a baby does?”

“I know what you’re aiming at,” said Bob, who had picked up a smattering of Freud in the course of his omnivorous reading. “You’re aiming at the Oedipus complex.”

Though he staunchly denied that the sight of his naked mother had aroused conflicted sexual feelings in him, Bob admitted to a deep ambivalence toward her. “I can’t understand it for the world, but even though I would do anything for my mother, I don’t love her,” he said in a voice thick with emotion. “I’m ashamed to say it, but it’s so. The only explanation I have is this. When I was from this high up, I was stuffed so full of religion that for years I was an agnostic. I completely turned against it. I hated the religion.”

Here, he burst into such violent sobs that he was unable to continue for several moments. “My mother is a wonderful woman,” he said after regaining a measure of control. “I don’t know how the devil I can feel that way about her but I realize that for the first time in my life not only that I don’t love my mother but I hated her all my life.”

Wertham had no doubt that Bob was in the grip of a severe mother complex. Equally striking to the psychiatrist was the young man’s fear of being perceived as effeminate. “Whenever I went to a new school I was always considered to be a sissy,” Bob related. “I don’t know why they called me a sissy. The only way I could convince them out of it was to knock the tar out of them.” As Wertham delved more deeply into Bob’s past, it became clear that his patient had a long history of near-homicidal outbursts directed at men who had questioned his masculinity.

Given the act that had brought Bob to Bellevue—the attempted self-amputation of his male member—Wertham could not help but wonder if the young man’s inordinate sensitivity to being branded a
sissy was a classic case of “reaction formation”: an exaggerated form of behavior concealing an unacceptable, diametrically opposite impulse (as when, to use the most obvious example, a man engages in violent acts of gay-bashing to protect himself against his own latent homosexuality). When Wertham explained this principle to Bob and suggested that his actions might mask “a deep, underlying desire to be a woman,” the younger man conceded that the interpretation made sense from a psychoanalytic point of view but insisted that “in my case it is not true.”

Gradually Bob began to show signs of improvement. In a session that took place on January 26, 1933—exactly three months after he was admitted to Bellevue—he recounted a joke he had first heard two years earlier.

“I thought of a dirty story that fits my case,” he told Wertham. “There was a Scotchman, an Irishman, and a Jew and they didn’t have anything to do, so they raped a woman. They got in court and the judge said, ‘We will cut your prick off, but just to show I’m a regular fellow, I’ll give you a break and let you choose the way.’ The Scotchman says, ‘Hell, get a hatchet and chop it off.’ The Jew insisted upon the finest doctor and anesthesia. The Irishman says, ‘Well, if you don’t mind, you can just suck mine off.’ ”

By the time he reached the punch line, Irwin was already laughing so hard that he could barely finish the joke. Wertham waited until his cackling subsided, then asked, “Why does it fit your case?”

“Well,” said Bob, “it doesn’t really fit my case, only I wanted to cut my penis off, too.”

Though Wertham was distinctly unamused, he thought it significant not only that Bob was able to joke about what he had done but also that, in speaking of his desire to cut off his penis, he used the past tense—a sign, as the psychiatrist saw it, that his patient’s obsession with castrating himself was beginning to “loosen up.”

That impression was confirmed in the following days. Discussing “the idea of self-emasculation” in the first week of February, Bob confessed that he was “really a little shaken in my belief in it. I don’t
have that inner determination to have it done at all costs.” Now, he was willing to settle for a far less radical procedure: surgical sterilization by “ligation of the seminal cords, as is done to sex criminals in California.”

Before long, he had given up even this fantasy. “During the last few weeks, he has never mentioned the idea of amputation or operating at all,” Wertham recorded in his case notes in early March. By then, Bob had made such progress that Wertham—no longer afraid that his patient might attempt another act of self-mutilation—“permitted him, under the supervision of an attendant, to use sculpture tools.”
¹⁷
Bob now spent much of his time on “serious efforts to improve his sculpturing and drawing.” Eager to wean him from his bizarre obsession with visualization, Wertham encouraged him to abandon his preferred method—studying a book or magazine illustration, then replicating it from memory—and draw directly from life. When a few of the older, married nurses saw his work, they asked if he would be willing to make small portrait busts of their children. Bob agreed, charging them a modest fee and working from photographs supplied by the mothers.

Still, for all the strides he had made, Bob clearly had a long way to go on the road to recovery. On two occasions he threw the entire ward into an uproar when he flew into a rage over trivial provocations, beating up a medical student who “touched a clay model on which he’d been working” and attacking an orderly “over some question of whether or not he should be shaved.”

And then there was the incident with the stenographer, Miss Moore. A pretty young woman, she had been impressed by Bob’s sculptures and commissioned him to make a little bust of her. Wertham saw the piece when it was nearly completed and thought it “beautifully done.” Not long afterward, when Wertham arrived for one of his sessions with Bob, he found the young sculptor in a savage mood. Miss Moore, Bob bitterly related, had “backed out of the deal on account of money.” After agreeing to his original asking price, she had “tried to vamp me into doing it for nothing.” When Bob offered to lower his fee, she had given him the go-ahead. Then, just as
he was putting the finishing touches on the piece, she informed him that she couldn’t afford it and was canceling their arrangement.

“And how does that make you feel?” Wertham inquired.

Bob considered the question for a moment, then answered with a vehemence that took Wertham aback.

“I’d like to cut the titties off the damned bitch,” said Bob.

12

Bug in a Bottle

O
N MARCH
17, 1933, after five months as an inmate of Bellevue’s “psycho ward,” Bob Irwin was transferred to Rockland State Hospital in upstate New York.

Situated on a six-hundred-acre “rural campus” in the hamlet of Orangeburg, twenty miles north of Manhattan, Rockland was regarded as “among the best-planned psychiatric hospitals in the world” when it took in its first patients in February 1931. By the end of the decade, however, this supposedly model institution had degenerated into a grim, prison-like asylum, known to its inmates as the “House of Despair.”
¹

In early 1938, after posing as a mental patient and having himself committed to Rockland for several weeks, Allen Bernard, a reporter for the
New York Journal-American,
published a series of scathing, page-one exposés on the nightmarish conditions at the hospital: The endless hours locked in a dayroom with seventy-five other men and no diversions besides a single checkerboard, a partial deck of cards, and a broken player piano. The barely edible meals and forced feedings with a nasogastric tube for recalcitrant eaters. The medieval
“treatments” with electroshock therapy, Metrazol injections (to induce convulsions), and hours-long immersions in cold, constantly running baths. The brutal beatings by sadistic orderlies. The accidental lethal overdoses administered by careless nurses. The hopelessly inadequate psychiatric care meted out to the 4,700 inmates who—in a hospital staffed with thirty full-time physicians—could expect to see a doctor only once a month. A few years after Bernard’s series caused an uproar, the asylum gained even greater notoriety with the publication of Mary Jane Ward’s bestseller
The Snake Pit,
a thinly disguised account of her hellish experiences at Rockland following a nervous breakdown.
²