Understanding Militancy

Psychiatrists and psychologists are well aware of the pitfalls involved in at tributing common motivation to an entire group of people. Still, within bounds, such attempts at mass analysis can be useful. Last week two psychiatrists addressing the 124th annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Boston assessed the psychological forces at work within two of the nation's most militant if dissimilar groups--Green Beret volunteers and members of the Black Power movement. A third presented his views on the attitudes of white city fathers who must cope with militant blacks. -- Dr. Peter G. Bourne, a staff psychiatrist at Stanford University Medical Center, spent three months observing a twelve-man Special Forces "A" team--the Green Berets--operating in the remote, Viet Cong-infested Central Highlands of South Viet Nam. Comparing them to racing-car drivers, Bourne told how the enlisted men in the group repeatedly challenged their commanding officers to attempt missions fraught with the possibility of injury and death. In turn, the men attempted to match their commanders with death-defying exploits of their own. Such compulsive courting of disaster contrasts sharply with the attitudes of the average infantryman, said Dr. Bourne, probably as a result of the fact that the Special Forces soldiers had been aggressive, individualistic and self-reliant types since childhood. By surviving such constant exposure to hazard, Bourne felt, each Green Beret reconfirmed his own belief that he was invulnerable and omnipotent. -- Dr. Charles Pinderhughes, a Negro psychiatrist at Boston's Veterans Administration Hospital, likened those who join the Black Power movement to adolescents fighting for independence from resistant parents. The group's militancy, he told the meeting, stems from the failure of white "parents" to allow Negroes to take their rightful place in the American "family." Explaining the comparison, which most Negroes would dismiss as patronizing, Pinderhughes pointed out that a thwarted adolescent often becomes alienated and antisocial. Black Power militants, he said, might similarly reject the idea of rejoining the U.S. family as full-fledged relatives, even if such a status is eventually offered to them. "Much of the outcome," he said, "depends on the extent to which White America can support the movement."

Dr. John Spiegel, director of Brandeis University's Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence, approached black militancy from the opposite camp. Many municipal leaders, he reported, still deny that there is a racial problem in their respective cities. "If trouble comes, they blame it on punks, outsiders and Communists rather than on white racism and other injustices." Another group of city officials, said Dr. Spiegel, act as if they understand the problem, speak expansively about the steps they are taking, but in reality do little or nothing constructive. Spiegel calls this "the Jerry Cavanagh Phenomenon." Detroit, where Cavanagh is mayor, suffered the nation's most destructive riots last summer despite a race-relations program considered effective by the city's government. "We are more willing to settle for violence than to change the social attitudes underlying it," says Spiegel, "just as many people are willing to suffer neuroses rather than undergo treatment and work to resolve them."

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