Quickly (7 March 1956)
The Village Voice, 7 March 1956; transcription provided by Jerry Lucas; proofread against the source 2026-06-01.
Column Nine
One of my few really good friends died last week at the age of 41. He was Robert Lindner, the psychoanalyst, and he had been suffering from a heart ailment for many years.
Perhaps some of the readers of this column are familiar with his work for he was a prolific author, and wrote Rebel Without a Cause (not to be confused with the movie), Stone Walls and Men, Prescription for Rebellion, The Fifty-Minute Hour, and Must You Conform?, which was published last month.
Bob Lindner was so good a friend that I simply have no heart to write about him now. I should go on at length about his charm, his generosity, his intellectual curiosity, his foibles, his weaknesses, his kindnesses, his ambitions, his achievements, his failures, and his great warmth (he was truly one of the warmest people I have known), but to write immediately about a man so complex, so individual, and yet so much part of our generation would be to do him a disservice, for Bob Lindner was nothing if not alive, and he would have loathed a facile eulogy.
So, rather, let me give the rest of this column over to a few passages from his books. These passages are undoubtedly not the best which could be found in his work, nor the most exciting, but they are representative of the main themes which preoccupied him. In addition to his early work on the criminal psychopath, Lindner was almost alone among analysts in his sustained argument that the healthy man was a rebel, and that it was crippling for psychoanalysis to try to adjust a patient to the warpings of an unjust world.
From The Fifty-Minute Hour, Rinehart and Company, Jan. ‘55:
Around psychoanalysis there has been built a fence of mystery and something resembling awe. Its practitioners, if not the objects yet of veneration and fear, are well on their way to elevation as priests of a certain kind; and the initiates—those who have lain on couches, that is—threaten to become a confraternity of the saved, a latter-day community of saints whose cancelled checks comprise a passport to heavens denied those less (or more?) favored by fortune.
A psychoanalyst is… an artist at understanding, the product of an intensive course of study and training which has—if it has been successful—rendered him unusually sensitive to his fellow men. And it is this sensitivity—in short, the analyst’s own person—which is the single instrument, the only tool, with which he performs. Only on himself, and on nothing else, does he depend.
From Must You Conform, Rinehart and Company, Jan. ‘56:
This is the day of the psychological mountebank. Everyone with access to print apparently conceives of himself as a psychologist, and few hesitate to pontificate about man, his nature, his mind, and his future.
One of the effects of this widespread psychologizing is a loss of precision in many of the key concepts important for the study of human behavior. Somewhere in the process of verbal mauling, words and ideas that have been arrived at laboriously in science or philosophy become vague and essentially meaningless. They acquire new semantic alliances which, in time, so distort them that they are rendered completely useless for the further pursuit of knowledge.
Such a word is maturity, and such a fate seems to be in store for it…
I am of the opinion that the definitions of maturity which assail us in such profusion currently are uniformly founded on the tacit hypothesis that human development is linked to human passivity. All that I have encountered assume that adjustment and conformity are the desirable modes of life, and that the closer one comes to a condition of domestication, the more mature one is.
None of them, to my knowledge, takes account of man’s nature and spirit, of his innate rebelliousness, of his intrinsic values, or of his individuality. With monotonous regularity, these definitions predicate themselves upon, and defend, a society that is everyday and everywhere becoming more and more oppressive. Hence, the standards for mature behavior they advise are those standards that may apply to mature cattle or mature puppets—but not to mature men.
The simple truth, stark and severe in its simplicity, is that we cannot conform; for it seems there is an ingredient in the composition of our cells, a chemistry in our blood, and a substance in our bones that will not suffer man to submit forever.
Built into man, the foundation of his consciousness, the source of his humanity and the vehicle of his evolution up from the muck of a steaming primeval swamp, is an instinct. I have chosen to call it the “instinct of rebellion,” since it reveals itself as a drive or urge toward mastery over every obstacle, natural or man-made, that stands as a barrier between man and his distant, perhaps never-to-be-achieved but always-striven-after goals.
It is this instinct that underwrites his survival, this instinct from which he derives his nature: a great and powerful dynamic that makes him what he is—restless, seeking, curious, forever unsatisfied, eternally struggling and eventually victorious. Because of the instinct of rebellion man has never been content with the limits of his mind: it has led him to inquire its secrets of the universe, to gather and learn and manipulate the fabulous inventory of the cosmos, to seek the very mysteries of creation. Because of the instinct of rebellion, man has never been content, finally, with the limits of his life: it has caused him to deny death and to war with mortality.
…
Man is a rebel. He is committed by his biology not to conform, and herein lies the paramount reason for the awful tension he experiences today in relation to Society…