Rebel Without a Cause

by Robert M. Lindner

  L: ‘Was there anything more?’

  Once in a while I imagine different things. Sometimes I imagine I’m watching a big cage of monkeys, and I get madder and madder, because they make an awful clatter and noise, and I feel like throwing my food at them.

  L: ‘Now let’s look at all this closely. First of all you saw lights shifting. We’ll start with that, when the sun came through the windows.’

  Yes; the sun came in through the windows, shifting.

  L: ‘And you immediately began to feel frustrated, to have that feeling of frustration. Do you remember now an incident in your life, when practically the same thing happened? Do you remember one morning when you saw your father and your mother having intercourse?’

  That—was—a long time, a long time back …

  L: ‘Now then; after that your mother took you into another room and there were three of you sitting at the table. You had just come through an extremely crucial experience. You practically reproduced that incident yesterday.

  ‘You were afraid of your father, of his penis, and the light in his eyes. You recall the times you moved to get out of the way of the lights in your father’s eyes? You recapitulated the same thing again yesterday, the whole incident. Then, after that, you were sitting at the table with two other people, your mother and your father. And you felt this very frustrating experience, the origin of which goes way back to that time. Do you get the connection?’

  Yes; yes. I get it. Everything seemed to be going so fast I couldn’t make anything out. I know the floor was rushing by me so fast. I was walking slowly, but the floor was going by like anything, so fast.

  L: ‘Let’s start tracing the pattern of your life, from the earliest memories we have brought up. The first is that of a crucial, bitter experience: A child, waking up in the morning, and seeing his father and mother in the act of having intercourse. Something strange, new. The mother seems to express, by her face, by her eyes, by her general expression, that there is something wrong; something she presumably does not like. She pushed the father away. And how did the child see this? How did he interpret it? He thought the father was hurting the mother, and she pushed him away. And when she did, the child saw his penis. The early memory, then, is not of the sexual act itself, but of the instrument with which it is performed. That was a sight hard to bear. It was not only new and strange. There was something else about it. You yourself, Harold, expressed it. You thought it was an animal. Your mother’s eyes, as you said, were soft and (I think you called them) pitiful; almost as if it hurt her. Your father’s eyes were hard. And so you, the child, became frightened. You were seeing something hurtful, and something forbidden. Perhaps in you there was something, some dim sense that you were present at some forbidden rite; and all this was coupled naturally with fear, with the fear of your father.

  ‘Now let’s get back to the breakfast table. You sat at the breakfast table and your father came in and sat down with you. Your mother was busy. She stood at the stove with her pots and pans. She was rattling them. There is a rattling noise, and she is cooking. You are with your father and your father is offering you some food. You reject it. And the reason you reject it is that you are afraid of your father. You fear that he is intending to harm you. Is that right?’

  O, yes; yes …

  L: ‘And you saw the light in his eyes. There may be something else here which we’ll get at later. But you were, as you said, afraid of his penis and his eyes, and you had seen something forbidden. This, afterwards, became transposed. It became a feeling of guilt.’

  From seeing, watching …

  L: ‘Yes. And it first made you close your eyes, having seen something forbidden. Later this feeling of fear of your father became more and more deeply imbedded as time passed. First because of what had happened, and second because of the intrinsic character of your father, because of the kind of person he was. Now when you got a little older, your father did two things. First he threatened you with the loss of your penis; and secondly he rejected you. He didn’t want you around him; he preferred your sister. He himself stated that your sister, a girl, should have been the boy. He even suggested that she should change places with you; and remember, she is a person without a penis. That was a suggestion pretty hard for you to bear up under because he had already threatened to deprive you of your penis. In addition to this, there was a perfectly good reason why you should credit him with the ability to do this to you: that was his business; he made his living changing bodies. Do you understand?’

  Yes …

  L: ‘Now we’ll go further than that. We are making a big forward jump in order to clear this point. Your father threatened you with castration. You were afraid of him, because of this threat and because of his own big organ. It effected you and led to the intensification of the feelings of guilt and inadequacy; guilt for having seen it, and fear. So you closed your eyes and ran away; not physically, because you couldn’t do that, but closing your eyes was your way of running away, was it not?’

  That’s right. I did run. That was the same thing …

  L: ‘Let us now consider the times when you had intercourse with your sister. Now, in one respect, that was a more or less innocent thing: you were after all just children. But you reacted to it in two ways. Your first reaction was caused by your mother taking you away from your sister, removing you. One reason why you had intercourse with your sister—beyond the curiosity factor—was to prove that you had a penis, was it not?’

  I know that’s right. I—when my—I know—the—. When I saw my sister naked, when we were sleeping together, I became troubled by my penis. I rubbed my hands all over my penis to prove to myself that I—that—I was—better—better than she was, better than she thought I was.

  L: ‘More like your father?’

  Yes …

  L: ‘All right. Now, as I have said, you reacted in two ways. Your first reaction was a further intensification of guilt. You have carried that feeling of guilt about with you all your life, and you have tried hard to hide it. Have you ever again talked about those occasions with your sister?’

  No. I didn’t. I tried to forget it.

  L: ‘A further development of your technique of running away. Now, when your mother removed you from your sister, what happened? She impressed upon you the fact that this thing you possessed, your penis, was a guilty object? Is this true?’

  I—Yes. I know, when I was younger … You know, young kids, when they have to urinate, they just do it anywhere; and when other kids see you do it they point one finger at you and rub one finger over another. I used to hide behind my mother for fear that somebody would see it. I didn’t like anybody to see it.

  L: ‘Now, secondly, your father rejected you, thereby throwing you more and more closely on your mother. You resented your father, and coupled with this resentment was a resentment against your mother for the reason that she obviously preferred your father to you. Because she was accepting his penis and rejecting yours, you were jealous.’

  And I disliked him …

  L: ‘You disliked your father and your mother for almost the same reason; is that right?’

  I think so. I think so. I disliked my mother for that; and I know I disliked my father much more.

  L: ‘As a matter of fact, Harold, is it not true that you wanted to take your father’s place with your mother?’

  I—she—when my mother got into one of those arguments with my father she would chase my sister or me to sleep with him. She would sleep in another room. I never liked to sleep with him. He didn’t like me. He preferred my sister to sleep with him. He liked my sister better. Usually it was only for one night and then she’d go back to sleep with him. My sister slept with him quite a bit when we were young. I always wanted to sleep with my mother.…

  I—I never thought—I could take—my father’s place—with my—mother; but now I see that really was what was in back of it all. When my mother got into one of these arguments with my father she wouldn’t talk to him fo
r a while and I’d feel good about it. Then after a few days she’d go back to him and everything would be the same again. I used to think, why do they do that? Why don’t they argue? If they go back to each other … I never wanted her to hit me. If she hit me I’d go back and tell her I was sorry.…

  I was always conscious of his big shoulders, his big chest, his big body, everything big. I always thought of myself as a small, skinny kid. Compared to my father in every way I was nothing …

  L: ‘And you were jealous of that? You resented it?’

  Yes; I did. I know that I was jealous.

  L: ‘You resented it so much that when you grew up you liked to play with guns, because only by possessing such a weapon could you be on equal terms with your father.’

  Yes. I knew when I had one I didn’t care what he said to me. I could always take care of him …

  L: ‘Then a gun was your protection. It was a weapon as powerful as his weapon.’

  More powerful; because I could hurt him when he was ten or fifteen feet away from me and not just a few inches.

  L: ‘In other words, you had a bigger, more powerful penis than he had, wasn’t that it?’

  Unless the penis is not … Unless the pistol is not a symbol for the penis. It’s like that.

  L: ‘Why do you think that the pistol symbolizes the penis?’

  Well; it has a protruding end—and—it’s really an extension. Therefore, it is a symbol for the penis. And so is a knife.

  L: ‘Now, you stole a pen knife from your father and once, when you were a child, you stole his razor. But you said you never stole money from him. Money; you stole that from your mother.’

  I was—afraid of him …

  L: ‘Why should you have been afraid to steal money from him and not afraid to steal his pen knives?’

  The money—the coins—round—maybe for the—the vagina … I—that my mother …

  L: ‘When you had possession of a gun you claim you also had a feeling of manliness. You had something your father had, you felt, tried to deny to you. In effect, then, you felt your father had castrated you.’

  Yes—yes.

  L: ‘So that you felt when you had a weapon you were in possession of an instrument that was better than your father’s penis. In another sense you stole it from your father. You tried to rob him, symbolically it is true, of his potency.’

  Yes. I know that.

  L: ‘You never stole a knife from your mother; but you used the money you stole from her to buy a gun; not once but more than once. Is that not right?’

  Yes; that’s right. The whole thing is getting clearer and clearer to me now.

  L: ‘You wanted, then, to prove to your mother that you were more manly than your father. You wanted to show your mother that you had the same thing as he. As a matter of fact, you wanted to show her you had an even better gun than he had.’

  I think I see the whole thing now. What you just said, that’s right.

  L: ‘Now let us go on from there. Some time later in your life—we’re jumping over a considerable period now—you planned to do away with your father. And very characteristically, if all that you have said is true, you chose to do away with him by using a big gun. Not only that; but you planned to do two other people, three people in all. Now, why? Why not four people? or half a dozen? Why did you settle on three?’

  Well—of course—I didn’t want to kill too many.

  L: ‘Can it be that the number three has a symbolic reference similar to the material we have been discussing? When we were discussing one of your dreams you told me that this number had a decided symbolic significance for you. You said that three represents the penis and testes.

  ‘But let’s go further. The reason you didn’t do this, kill your father and two other people, was because you realized that you couldn’t fill your father’s shoes.’

  I know. I realized that I—wasn’t—as good as my father. I realized I couldn’t take care of those women, my mother and sisters.

  L: ‘Now when you went with girls … In the first place, you had a lot of girls, didn’t you?’

  Yes; I guess I had …

  L: ‘You were trying very hard to prove that you were manly, weren’t you?’

  I—yes; I admit that.

  L: ‘And what did you do when you wanted to impress these girls? You pulled out a gun and showed them that you had a gun, that you carried with you a powerful weapon. Why?’

  I—I wanted to—show them I was—better than most men, that I had great strength and—manliness. I—wanted—to show them—I had a big—a powerful penis …

  L: ‘Now let’s get to the other incident. Why should you have wanted, after a time, to kill the man who called you a mother–f——r? It’s rather obvious now, isn’t it?’

  Yes; I see now …

  L: ‘Try and tell me.’

  Well, it’s that he reminded me of my father by his actions and his speech. To prove to my father that I was better than he was, after all.

  L: ‘But why would you be wanting to kill him? And what for? You were killing for two reasons: first, the whole thing brought up in you the incident of your early childhood, the first thing that made you hate your father; and second, because he reminded you—in an obscure manner—of the one thing you did not want to be reminded of: that throughout your whole life you struggled to get into your father’s shoes. By harming this man you were harming your father for having had intercourse with your mother, and hurting her: in the second place, you were asserting your superiority over your father: and in the third place, you have had the obscure feeling, all these years, that you really were trying to take your father’s place with your mother. In a word, you really are what he called you.’

  Yes—yes. It all came out when I wanted to get rid of him. But why—why did I change my mind—after nursing it all those years?

  L: ‘That’s a good question, Harold. You changed your mind because you realized that you couldn’t, under any circumstances, be as good a man as your father. He convinced you of that.

  ‘Now what was the method you used? On the surface you used a knife because it was noiseless. There is, however, more to it than that. There are many reasons why people do things; some are rational, some are disguised to appear rational. You used a weapon which, for you, is a symbolic representation of the penis, and which you had stolen from your father. You actually used the weapon most suited to the working through of your conflict. You used, on the representative of your father, the substitute of the weapon which he had taken from you, and which you now stole from him.

  ‘So there you are. A child sees something that is forbidden, that he apprehends in some dim way as forbidden, and at the same time he is terribly scared. You, the child, become prey to feelings of guilt, and these are later intensified by feelings of inadequacy. You run away by closing your eyes. That thread runs through your whole life. You are running away. The fear of your father, the knowledge that you are not as good as your father … your whole life is a struggle with him and a running away from him and your inadequate self. Finally you commit a symbolic murder to rid yourself of him.

  ‘And the fear of castration that you have always had; it’s shown very well by many incidents. You slept with your aunt and you awakened in the morning to find her hand on your penis. She wanted to steal it from you! And you dislike her. One time you slept with this man who was a boarder at your house, and he also slept with his hand on your penis. And, one night, you saw someone who was trying to break into the house, ostensibly to steal. Do you know if that man was really there?’

  I’m not sure he was there. I heard—the screen in the window rattling, and I think …

  L: ‘Whether or not he was actually there does not matter. At any rate, it intensified your fear of being robbed of your penis, did it not?’

  Yes. It’s true. I never felt a great fear consciously. I never felt a great fear, but I was more afraid of my father, that my father would hurt me that way. I was consciously afraid that
he would hurt me with his big hands, great big hands, that stuck way out, big, round, muscular. Maybe his hands are symbols for his penis, his hands and his arms. He used to pick me up and just drop me. I ran away from him but he always seemed to be able to catch me some way or other. Mostly his hands; he used mostly his hands, only once in a while a stick. I was afraid of his hands. When he said he’d sic the dog on me to bite my penis off I was afraid of him then. I was small, but he, he looked so—big, so big and brutal. I was afraid of him, his big arms—his big arms and hands, his big, powerful muscles. He had a grip like a vise.

  L: ‘I see that you realize you did not grow up with a conscious fear of his penis, a verbalized fear. That fear was displaced by fears symbolic of his penis. Let us not forget, moreover, the reason for your eyes behaving as they did.’

  I—I know—everytime he tried to slap me in the face I would hold up my hands to protect my eyes. I didn’t care about the rest of the face. It was my eyes I was worried about. I tried to hide the sight of him from me too, the sight of his arms and his big hands. When I broke his razor, what was the singing? I heard a singing. When he hit me a lot of times I’d hear singing, and sometimes I’d hear a big noise, a racket.