Page:1954 Juvenile Delinquency Testimony.pdf/172

160 may represent a continuing influence, not only on the national comics but conceivably all of the comic publications, to some extent.

T would say that I have been somewhat more interested in the comics, E am furnished with the comics as soon as they come out regularly. Tn fact, Tam furnished with three copies of them.

And I have in recent years especially been particularly imterested not only in this sort of thing, but some extremely interesting new phenomena in the comics.

The comics actually, if you follow the history of the comics, and I wish Dr. Werthar could have done this, because he is a brilliant scientist, if he could only realize what could be done with it, they have gone through phases of understanding the problems that the world is being shaken by continuously.

And now, most amuzingly, they have become aware of the problems which most concern us psychiatrists, and me particularly, and that is soinething which is a technical phase, the concept of the body image and what can happen to it, under different emotional circuinstauces.

These are psychological problems and the uncanny capacity for the script writers to delve dewn into their own unconscious and dig up these problems and depict them to me is an amazing phenomenon,

I only wish that L had the time trom my various other duties to sit down and do a jobnot with these, I confess they don't interest me muchbut with the psychological phenomena that have occurred in the comic books and in terms of what they might mean to developing children.

Now, there was one type of comic that I disapproved of very thoroughly. When the comics first came out, Superman, at least, the publishers of Parent magazine got out a Httle comic called

The. It used to be Hairbreadth Harry, in my day.

Dr. . Were they good?

The. Very good.

Dr. . The Parent magazine got out a comic called True Comics. They were really very bad. The reason they were bad is that they showed histericat situations of, let us say, sailors being thrown off the boat because the boat had been bombarded by the Nazis and they were jumping 1 an ocean of flaming oil.

There was just no help for these people

Mr. . What was bad with that? We saw pictures like that yesterday in some of these.

Dr. . O. K., but they weren't put out by the Parent Magazine Publications. The parents didn't approve of that, but these were approved by parents.

Mr. . You would disapprove of that?

Dr. . I disapprove of that.

They said, "This is good because it is history. This is real," which is another reason why it is bad.

They also gave a picture of colonial days where the mother was being tommyhawked by the Indians, with a baby at her breast, and the baby was being dropped on the ground. Now, this was history.

Certainly it is history, but do our children today have to be exposed to such things?

This is not history. I see no excuse whatsoever for a parent magazine group or an approved group approving that sort of thing. It