It would be another decade or so, though, before I sat down to actually read Seduction of the Innocent. I was actually pretty astonished. I mean, by then I knew the basic premise of his arguements -- I had read any number of pieces refuting his claims -- but what astonished me was how his ideas took hold in the first place. Because even if you read nothing but that one book, his arguements don't even make sense within that decidedly limited context. It's like that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Bedevere tries to tease out a logical case for proving a woman is a witch by comparing her weight to that of a duck. He moves the crowd through things one step at a time, and you can't help but go slackjawed at how nonsensical it is. Seduction of the Innocent reads just like that.
And that was still well over a decade before Carol Tilley went through all Wertham's archived papers and discovered how he flat-out lied about his 'research.'
I'll start by saying that this is indeed a full biography. Although we don't get anything about Wetham's childhood, we do join him in 1914 as he starts his professional education. He moves to the United States, changes his name to something less Germanic, gets married, and really gets his start as a psychiatrist. We follow his career around as he repeatedly gets forced out of various hospitals and instiutions basically for being an asshole, continually demanding that his diagnoses are correct and everyone else is wrong. It's not until 1946 that he starts the aforementioned Harlem clinic and it's there that he first discovers comic books. The story then runs through the parts of his life that you're probably already somewhat familiar with -- Seduction of the Innocent, the Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings, etc.
I don't know what Schechter's or Powell's opinions of Wertham were when they went into this project, but it seems like they tried to present as fair a take on the man as possible. They show him clearly very concerned with all of his "patients" (I only use quotes because some technically weren't patients in the strictest sense, even if/when he met and spoke to them in that manner) even those who openly admitted to murdering others. He seems to genuinely want to help people get better... however, he also really comes across as an egotisical asshole to everyone he deals with at a professional level. His career is littered with bosses and co-workers who refuse to even deal with him as soon as they aren't forced to. His books -- he wrote several before and after Seducation -- are read with mockery and reviewed unflatteringly, but he never seems to gain enough self-awareness to take on board ANY criticism. And to top it off, he never seems to have all but a very, very narrow view of how to approach psychiatry and remains willfully blind to other ideas.
The books ends with...
Ironically for a dedicated practitioner of depth psychology, he possessed a remarkably simplistic concept of the underlying operations of the human psyche. If there is a tragic element to his life, it is that this limitation -- his monkey-see-monkey-do view of human behavior -- has so thoroughly over-shadowed his many admirable traits. Fairly or not, in the world of comicdom, he will always remain 'Dr. Werthless.'Honestly, I think that's still generous. As I've said multiple times in this short review already, he sounds like he was an asshole to anyone who he wasn't in a position of power/authority over, and he spent much of his career -- even before the comic book stuff -- engaging in cynical and often baseless self-promotion. The care that he showed patients does come across as genuine, but that simplistic view of the human psyche he seemed to have makes me wonder how many people he legitimately helped. And of those, how many did he wind up helping by just being someone who listened? That's not nothing, to be sure, but on the flip side, how many people did he make worse by unintentioanlly offering bad counsel? Did the testimonies he offered at various trials help people any more than any other psychiatrist's would have? Given his overall approach, I doubt it, because I see little in his work that seems grounded in actual study.
Overall, the story is presented well. However, the almost strictly chronological approach was a bit off-putting at first when we bounce between Wertham's life and that of a serial killer he later works with. I get the intent might be to show how Wertham showed compassion to a truly awful and sick human being, but since they don't meet until 1934, there winds up being the first quarter of the book where large parts seem like irrelevant tangents. And given that the entire book does indeed include a few out-of-sequence scenes, I think that might have worked better as a flashback. But aside fromt that, things flow smoothly and Powell's portraits of Wertham throughout the book (not just Wertham but everyone) was spot-on.
I don't know if it'll necessarily change your mind about Wertham, depending on where you're coming from, but I don't believe it's intended to. It's just presenting a full biography of the man as honestly as possible, and that's certainly worthy of a read in my opinion. The book is published by Dark Horse and came out earlier this week, so it should be readily available. It retails for $29.99 US.
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