Robert M. Lindner was an American author and psychologist, best known as the author of the 1944 book Rebel Without A Cause: The Hypnoanalysis Of A Criminal Psychopath, from which the title of Nicholas Ray's 1955 film was adapted. His book described a psychopath as someone who is "incapable of exertions for the sake of others". Lindner's arguments on gambling psychology are well regarded and have been noted as "definitive statements" by the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Early life and education
Robert Mitchell Lindner was born in New York City on May 14, 1914 to Charles and Sadie Lindner. He was educated in the public schools of New York and earned a BA at Bucknell University in 1935. In 1937 he married Eleanor Johnson while a graduate student at Cornell University, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in psychology in 1938. In the ensuing years, while working as a consulting psychologist for the state mental health authority in New Jersey, he studied psychoanalysis in New York City and Philadelphia, while also undergoing his own analysis with Theodore Reik.
Career
In 1941 Lindner was appointed chief of the combined psychiatric-psychological services of the United States Public Health Service. In 1943 he was commissioned an officer of the Public Health Service, with the naval rank of lieutenant junior grade. He also served as a staff psychiatrist at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania where he compiled the case history he published as Rebel Without a Cause. He left the service in 1945 and settled in Baltimore, where for ten years he was chief of psychological services for the Maryland Department of Correction, while simultaneously maintaining a large private practice in psychoanalysis, sometimes analyzing his patients under hypnosis. Among the large number of patients he treated during this period, the best known to have been publicly identified was the author Philip Wylie, who settled in Baltimore in 1952 to undergo a full analysis with Lindner, whom he had been seeing intermittently since meeting him while serving as a Navy officer during World War II. In 1947-1948 he served as the Maryland state chairman of the liberal Progressive Citizens of America, which became the state organization for Henry A. Wallace's quixotic 1948 third-party presidential campaign. In 1948 he was added to the national board of the PCA. The movie adaptation of Rebel Without a Cause brought Lindner a measure of notoriety when it was released, although the story by Nicholas Ray bore no relation to the case history in Lindner's book. In 1954 the publication of "The Jet-Propelled Couch" as a two-part article in Harper's caused a small sensation with its tale of the mental crack-up of a key government scientist, "Kirk Allen", and his treatment by Lindner; the identity of Kirk Allen has been debated since and the story bears some similarities to the much later book and film A Beautiful Mind. It was collected in The Fifty-Minute Hour, in which he described a number of case studies from his clinical practice. An ambitious attempt to adapt the story into a musical with songs by Stephen Sondheim came to nothing. In 1957 it was dramatized as an episode of TV's Playhouse 90 starring Donald O'Connor, Peter Lorre, David Wayne, Gale Gordon, and Vampira. Lindner was active in a number of professional associations. He was a fellow of the American Psychological Association, senior analyst of the National Association for Psychoanalysis, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an officer of the Medical Correctional Association. In 1953 he was elected an honorary fellow of the Fortean Society.
Death
Robert Lindner died on February 27, 1956 at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he had been a heart patient since January 14. At the time of his death he had started work on another book, The Wizard, which was to have been a study of a psychoanalyst. Shortly after Lindner's death plans were made for a memorial research foundation to be called the Robert Lindner Foundation. Norman Mailer, who had become friends with Lindner after reading Prescription for Rebellion, came to Lindner's funeral and became one of the sponsors and donors in setting up the foundation, along with Wylie, Max Lerner, Gerald W. Johnson, and Baltimore businessman Morton Abrahams. Theodore Reik was appointed to the foundation's professional committee, and delivered two lectures under the auspices of the foundation later that year.
