Spector’s Flawed Study of American Innocence

Review Essay of Barry Spector, Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence (Berkeley, CA: Regent Press, 2010), ISBN 13: 9781587901737, 521 pages, paperback,

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While Barry Spector’s book demonstrates a prodigious amount of work and research, it reads like a polemic because it is highly personal and censorious. Essentially, Madness is an indictment of American society. It is a large book; well over 500 pages long, encyclopedic, cosmological, and impressive in its range of topics. This brief review can only mention some of the many ad-

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dressed by Spector, which include patriarchy, family, religion, capitalism, consumerism, racism, militarism, imperialism, sexism, illegal (and legal) drug use, genocide, medical care, crime, civil rights, and education. The author’s thesis is that the way these issues are dealt with contribute to the “madness” of American society.

I find two authors inspiring Spector to be problematic. Namely, Carl Jung, a person of poor moral character known for his split with Sigmund Freud, and Noam Chomsky, who has denounced psychoanalysis and is a harsh critic of the United States. These individuals set the tone for his work.

However, Spector also cites the eminent historian Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), honored by the Pulitzer Prize in 1964. But unlike Hofstadter, he holds the Puritans responsible for all the ills in the United States, from the formation of America to the present day. They are his bête noire, as he rails against them throughout the text. Hofstadter had a more tempered view, finding that the Puritans are denounced in “odious” terms because they were “the first class of American intellectuals,” and that it “is doubtful that any community ever had more faith in the value of learning and intellect than that of the Massachusetts Bay” (p. 59). The author’s observations on the contemporary United States are not without merit or foundation, but he curiously disclaims that he does this “not out of gratuitous America-bashing” (p. 250). In line with his orientation, Spector’s standpoint is that “as Jung taught, the society that emphasizes extreme Apollonian values and represses the Dionysian sets up a dynamic in which the god can only return in the symptom” (p. 359). Although the author’s aim is to study the United States from its beginnings, with emphasis on the last century and contemporary times, he inordinately and tendentiously spends several chapters (about 150 pages throughout the book) on ancient Greece. From this perspective, he considers the contemporary American predicament to be the unresolved interplay of the pervasive myth of Dionysius versus Apollo.

Spector gives an account of the American family that is grim indeed. He buttresses his views with telling statistics, demonstrating that children in the United States are medicated more frequently than children in other industrialized countries. The culprit is the pharmaceutical industry, with its vast army of lobbyists, who

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outnumber the legislators in Washington and engage “the medical priesthood,” which then prescribes Ritalin (p. 355). Physicians who receive payments from this industry are “five times more likely to prescribe drugs to children than those who have refused such payments” (p. 355). Furthermore, he reports that the United States produces and consumes “90% of the world’s Ritalin” and that approximately eight million children receive such medications for mental conditions. American physicians prescribe a variety of antidepressants to children “five times more likely than British doctors do” (p. 355). The use of such drugs is therefore employed to tranquilize children, especially boys. The author contends that rather than striving to eliminate conditions of poverty, “madness is big business under capitalism” (p. 355).

The history of ancient Greece, as described by Spector, was particularly violent and family conditions were marked by hostility. The story of Oedipus grew out of a concept that has universal validity and is central in psychoanalytic theory. The modern American family, too, manifests dysfunctional characteristics and the victims, in unprecedented numbers, are children. The statistics that he provides are appalling indeed. In the patriarchal family children are at times idealized, but they can also be abused, leading them to later, as adults, become oppressors themselves. These influences stem not only from the Greeks, but also from the Old Testament, the rise of Christianity, and the Middle Ages. To illustrate this attitude, Spector quotes Martin Luther, who asserts, “I would rather have a dead son than a disobedient one” (p. 106). Another momentous development that markedly changed family relationships and especially affected father-son relationships was the rise of factories in the Industrial Revolution. Previously, when America was more of an agricultural and rural nation, fathers interacted with their sons much more (p. 177). Women, according to the author, are scapegoated, too, “no different in any respect from similar girls in the Middle East” (p. 303). The author asserts that “family rape is the source of forty percent of teen pregnancies” (p. 303). In other words, America is producing children who become immature adults. The above issues notwithstanding, there is in the United States a vibrant feminist movement and conditions for women in this country certainly bear no resemblance to that of women in Muslim countries.

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The renowned French historian Michel Foucault contributed in a groundbreaking way to the exploration of dysfunctional behavior in society, as is explicitly stated in the title of his book Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961). Essentially, he researches and describes how society, from the 16^th to the 19^th centuries, responded to those people deemed to exhibit aberrant behavior. Surprisingly, Spector does not cite him.

Barry Spector ends up being overly judgmental in denouncing America’s foreign policy in general as one that looks for enemies. He negates that so often in American history, beginning with the Revolution, American armies have been armies of liberation—uniquely so since the rise of nation states. It is not that there aren’t serious problems in this country. Many of the issues he raises are well-founded, but presented in their totality amount to a potpourri of condemnations, lamenting as though it were Weltschmerz (sadness over the state of the world). Actually, Spector is not radical, as much of what he writes is common knowledge, especially to psychoanalytically informed historians. Rather, he is cynical. He describes well, conventionally, what has happened, rather than why it happened, despite his denunciations of corporate America and its Puritan background. He also mentions Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), in which Freud writes as a critic of society. But Spector just does not rise to his level. In his final pages, he argues for reconciliation and national atonement, for this would bring an end “of both Puritanism and its predatory shadow” (p. 441). In spite of its shortcomings, this work has merits, namely in being informative and alarming on the grave current social and psychological issues confronting this country.

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