The Leopold Szondi Forum

CHAPTER THREE (Book pages: 57 – 70) Genotropism and Family Relationships.)

I. Vocational Selection

In his extensive family studies Szondi raised the question of vocational choice. Does genotropism play a role in the selection of work? Do hereditary factors guide us toward particular vocations, whether in the industrial or service sectors? Common sense tends to exclude genetic origins of vocational choice and emphasizes social and economic factors instead.

If, however, we view the family as an evolving, trans-generational system, we will find evidence of genotropic patterns of vocational selection. For example, some families exhibit paranoia, homosexuality, and suicide along with artistically-gifted members; other families have deaf or hard-of-hearing members together with those who show outstanding musical ability. This fact is well illustrated in the biography of Beverly Sills, the renown opera singer. Her daughter “Muf! is deaf (Sills and Linderman 1987, 139). Her son “Bucky” is deaf as well as retarded, autistic, hyperactive, and epileptic. Likewise, she has one step daughter who is retarded.

Carriers of specific hereditary tendencies are inclined to take certain jobs. This does not entail a precise one-to-one correlation between every vocation and every person. Thus, not every ballet star is a latent homosexual, not every pastor a latent epileptic, and not every psychiatrist a latent schizophrenic. Rather, genotropic evidence points to probabilities among heterozygotes, who bear selection pressures toward corresponding kinds of work.

We choose jobs according to whether we descend from predominately paroxysmal, schizoform, contact, or sexually abnormal families. Tendencies in these family groups exhibit appropriate genotropic selection, because members have the potential for the major psychiatric disorders.

Chapter Three:

Genotropism and Family Relationships

I. Vocational Selection

Sometimes, however, serious pathologies are inherited and lead toward related professions, even though they cannot be located in the four major psychiatric groups. For example, cancer cuts across all four groups, and yet specialists in oncology may study that disease because they consciously or unconsciously suffer it. Many years ago, Johannes Fibiger, a Nobel Prizewinning oncologist, died in 1927 from the disease he studied (Szondi

1939, 56).

The following four sections of this chapter will present and illustrate types of vocational choices. Athough we discuss vocational selection in terms of the hereditary drive-needs, we recognize that sometimes work is chosen to sublimate more than one need. Gene coupling is a frequent phenomenon, and the most common need pairings are homosexuality and paranoia, homosexuality and oral mania, homosexuality and hysteria, sadism and epilepsy, sadism and depression, epilepsy and paranoia, hysteria and catatonic schizophrenia, and paranoia and depression (Szondi 1978, 338).

II. Paroxysmal Vocational Selection

Families may be designated paroxysmal, when they transmit hereditary epileptiform and/or hysteriform tendencies. Paroxysmal-epileptoid family members generally feel pent-up emotion, irritability, periodic outbursts of intense hostility, before and after which they express deep remorse, a resolve to be good, and religious states. They are Cain personalities who wear Abel masks.

These families are characterized by clusters of epilepsy, migraines, stuttering, and their equivalents, some of which are turbulent tempera ments, capacity for startle, gross Cain emotions, rigidity, and sudden change of psychic opposites. Some common examples of paroxysmal alternations are from calmness to restlessness, flexibility to rigidity, modesty to grandiosity, optimism to pessimism, vigilance to apathy, moderate eating to gluttony, abstinence to alcoholism, timidity to verbosity, loyalty to disloyalty, sociability to solitude, inhibited sexuality to excessive sexuality, sinfulness to holiness, domesticity to nomadism, and affirmation of life to desire for death.

Paroxysmal vocational selection takes place along the following lines:

(1) occupations dominated by sense organs (e.g., smell); (2) occupations oriented toward air (pilot, paratrooper), earth (coal miner, pioneer), water

(sailor), fire (smith, baker, fireman), and the psychic realm; (3) occupa tional contexts consisting of height and depth, ascent and descent, fluctuation and rotation; (4) occupations requiring motor vehicles; and (5) religious and other helping professions, such as medicine, law, and social work.

Religious professions are frequently found in paroxysmal families. In the course of several generations epileptiform pathologies can alternate with religious activities in accord with the Mendelian laws of recessive inheritance. Such families reveal metaphorically an on-going struggle between Cain and Abel. Case #48 in the Analysis of Destiny provides

an illustration (Szondi 1978, 275-276). A male patient enters Szondi’s institute in Budapest suffering hypogenitalism. His family is dominated by religious professions. The maternal grandfather of the patient as well as two maternal uncles are rabbis. His father is a synagogue cantor. The maternal grandfather is married to a woman with an epileptic brother. The patient’s father has an epileptic cousin, and he is married to a woman with migraines, who has two epileptic and one stuttering brothers.

A similar example follows in case #49 of the same volume (Szondi 1978, 276-277). The daughter of a Reformed pastor is an epileptic. Her husband is an alcoholic who displays fits of rage and, later in his life, suffers delusions. Their marriage produces nine children, of whom four die prematurely. Among the surviving children, two sons become theologians, and two daughters suffer migraines. One of the daughters gives birth to a son who, in the course of his life, exhibits bedwetting, lying, pathological wandering, and criminal tendencies.

On the other hand, paroxysmal-hysteroid personalities give the impression of being rough, masculine, or violent, but they actually conceal a need for love. The need is expressed in hysterical episodes, including theatrical displays and animal brain behavior, such as fainting spells, self-mutilation, or stereotyped motor movements. Hysteroid persons may identify with actors and actresses who play tragic roles in film and the theatre. They are Abel personalities who wear Cain masks.

Symptoms of paroxysmal-hysteroid families include hysteria, tics, anxiety attacks, and nightmares. Some psychological characteristics are startle behavior, acting out and simulating, repression of feminine tenderness, Cain outbursts, and animal defenses, such as motor disturbances, feign ing-death reflex, hypnoid talent, egocentricity, and lack of inhibition.

Typical hysteriform vocational types are the theatre, politics, sports, automobile dealerships, animal training, and those of business women.

Case #52 illustrates vocational patterns common to paroxysmal-. hysteroid families (Szondi 1978, 283). A landowner and his wife suffer severe hypochondria. They have five children, three of whom commit suicide. One, a daughter, has a serious case of hysteria, and she kills herself in a hysterical attack. Another daughter is healthy; she marries a farmer and gives birth to five children. One child is a hysterical neurotic who acts out dramatic scenes, and the other four children are normal. One of her healthy children, a son, becomes an actor against his family’s wishes. His vocational choice indicates that he is heterozygous for hysteria. He has a cousin who marries a playwright and who descends from a family of actors.

HI. Schizoform Vocational Selection

Some families transmit tendencies toward schizophrenic and schizoid personalities. They may be understood according to whether they belong to the general catatonic or paranoid branch.

Schizoform-catatonic families exhibit the following symptoms:

catatonia, schizoid neurosis, asthenic neurasthenia, obsessional neurosis, and conversion hysteria. There may be criminal tendencies, such as work-aversion, vagabonding, and world-wandering. Some psychological characteristics are aristocratic exclusivity, eclectic friendship choices, formal and systematic thinking, rationalism, pedantry, humorlessness, coldness, hypersensitivity, obstinacy, inhibition, bigotry, compulsiveness, omnipotence, and reserved personality.

Catatonic family members are likely to select vocationally education, military service, engineering, higher education, particularly in linguistics, logic, mathematics, physics, philosophy, social sciences; art history and criticism; book buying and selling; post office and telegraph services, printing, agriculture and forestry; night watchmen; mannequin work; and outdoor work.

Case #54 illustrates this type of family circle (Szondi 1978, 286-287). The patient is a 30 year old engineer who is a severe schizoid neurotic. As a child, he was lonely and friendless. He was, however, an excellent student. In speaking he is painfully correct and pedantic, humorless, and

rationalistic. Since puberty, he had been sexually inhibited. After four years of marriage, his wife was still a virgin.

Both blood and gene relatives of his belong to professions of the military, mathematics, music, education, economics, agriculture, and art history. Two relatives are pathological wanderers. One paternal cousin shares the patient’s schizoid nature. The father of the patient is a world-renown musician and composer.

In contrast, the paranoid branch of the schizoid families includes symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, quarrelsomeness, irritative neuras thenia, gross paranoid illusions, paranoid homosexuality, and narcomania, involving morphine, opium, or cocaine. Corresponding kinds of criminal activities usually consist of fraud and embezzlement.

Paranoid psychological characteristics include inclinations toward boasting, creativity, psychic sensitivity, omnicompetence, psychic inflation, irrationalism, fanaticism, exaltation, ambivalence, omnipotence, prophetic insight, magical thinking, spiritualism, occultism, and sectarianism.

Vocations in the paranoid group encompass exploring or directing expeditions, archeology, geology, paleontology, mythology, research, writing, medicine, music, monastic orders, chemistry, pharmaceuticals, prostitution, law, espionage, detective work and natural healing arts. Astrology and graphology belong here, even though they overlap with the hebephrenic group.

Case #55 exemplifies some of these patterns in the life of a 32 year old, female, music teacher (Szondi 1978, 288-291). She had sought medical help for her insomnia. Szondi’s initial analysis establishes that she is paranoid-homosexual, feeling both passion and hatred for other women, and that she is schizophrenic.

The analysis also discloses four phases in the life of this woman. The first began at age 13, when she felt homosexual desires for the young daughter of a neighbor and, one year later, for a famous female pianist. She wrote poems to this pianist and dreamed of kissing her hands and face. She reacted with hatred, however, when the pianist rejected her. Meanwhile, at age 16, she felt sexual desire for a female friend of her mother and, later, for a female associate of her father.

These homosexual feelings were periodically interrupted by sexual attraction toward men, one a musician, another a famous musical director. These heterosexual feelings were followed, still again, by homosexual

feeling for a female violin virtuoso, the wife of a lawyer, and others. All of these desires ended in feelings of hatred toward the people. This first, homosexual phase was also plagued by occasional crying fits as well as outbursts of rage and hatred.

The second phase is that of religious fanaticism and illusion. While enrolled in a school of music, she became attracted to a male student. He tells her that he has seen Christ and has spoken to him about a life of transcendence, poverty, and suffering. He preaches this message, and she attaches herself to him as though he were a spiritual father. She too begins to speak of transcendence, poverty, and suffering, but her family is shocked. She spends many hours in prayer, petitioning the Virgin Mary to return to earth and be transfigured. She starts converting men, even though she hates them. She adopts one young man as her spiritual child. She tells her family that she wants to become a nun and scolds them for not giving up their Judaism.

The third phase is dominated by theosophy. She continues her spiritual pilgrimmage by leaving Catholicism on the grounds that it has not solved her “psychological riddle”. She takes up theosophy and becomes attracted to a professor of theosophy. Her fantasies toward him are transformed onto a higher level, where she becomes his “holy wife” and identifies with the center of the world.

In the fourth and final phase she moves toward Hinduism and yoga. She also falls in love with a professor of philosophy and studies meta physics. However, her original symptoms of insomnia, fits of crying, and outbursts of rage return, so that she has to be admitted to a hospital, where she dies, one year after receiving her initial diagnosis.

There are several familial patterns to be considered in this case. A brother of the paternal grandfather is schizophrenic, and a brother of the maternal grandmother is a schizoid eccentric. A paternal grandfather is also eccentric as well as hypochondriac. The father and brother of the mother are quarrelsome paranoids. The marriage of the father and mother has sexual difficulties. The entire family has intellectual professions. For example, a maternal grandfather is the head of a publishing house. Many family members are interested in graphology and theosophy.

Not only does this case illustrate the psychoanalytically documented relation between paranoia and homosexuality, but it also demonstrates some basic dynamics of paranoid schizophrenia. On the one hand, the

paranoid goes beyond bodily limitations and gains a cosmic identification. On the other hand, the move from homosexuality to fanaticism, theosophy, and Hinduism exhibits a regression to the magical level of primitive religions. The end-stage is an elemental union with a collective soul. The movement toward the magical-occult level is due to the unique capacity of the paranoid to strip away bodily limitations.

In conclusion, paranoid-schizoform families frequently bear epileptoid symptoms, such as migraines and stuttering, in neurotic forms. Such families often produce psychiatrists and psychologists, who are likely to specialize in depth psychology, psychoanalysis, and extreme disorders.

A similar coupling of schizoform and epileptoid families is common among theologians and students of religion. This fact may be illustrated anecdotally. In April, 1979, a distinguished biblical scholar visited our campus, and I discussed with him my Szondi studies. He told me that every professor of New Testament in every major American graduate school is married to a musician. He said this could not be a matter of chance. Appropriately, he is married himself to a musician, is the father of an epileptic daughter, and his lectures betray intermittent gaps known as petit mal absences.

IV. Contact Vocational Selection

Contact families may be broadly classified as manic or depressive. Symptoms of the manic branch include mania, hypomania, irritative hypomanic neurasthenia, tendency toward diabetes and gall stones, alcoholism, nymphomania, and such criminal activities as fraud, bigamy, and impostering.

Some corresponding behavior characteristics are optimism, hedonism, activism, materialism, light-heartedness, freedom, lack of responsibility, geniality, and orality. Typical vocational choices are those of an oral character (e.g., cooking, bartending, music, speech), banking, politics, and the performing arts (e.g., singing, managing artists, directing music schools, writing lyric poetry).

Symptoms of the depressive branch embrace melancholia, cyclical depression, irritative-depressive neurasthenia, tendency toward diabetes, and, with respect to criminality, theft. On occasion, depression may mix with catatonia. Some of the behavioral characteristics are clinging, death

fantasies and disgust with life, inhibition, tendency toward crying, sentimen tality, lack of satisfaction, scrupulosity, self-criticism, lack of appetite, and anality. These characteristics could also take on a paranoid depression and a bi-polar manic depression. Vocational choices are those of anal qualities (e.g., collecting antiques), museum work, garbage disposal, tending store, painting, tanning, chemistry, banking, and street crossing attendant.

Case #70 exemplifies this group (Szondi 1978, 307-310). The patient is an art and music critic who lives in a foreign country. Originally, however, he wanted to be a composer. Although married and the father of one child, he is constantly looking for new wives. He fears the seriousness of divorce and contemplates suicide with an oral method. He suffers periods of depression followed by those of mania. During his manic phases, he becomes euphoric and fabricates grandiose schemes but then slides into a manic-depressive psychosis.

The familial background corresponds to the patient’s condition. His father, daughter, and brother suffer manic-depression. He, a paternal uncle, paternal cousin, and a paternal grandmother make suicide attempts with depressive periods. The patient’s father and a gene relative of his wife have diabetes. The patient’s daughter also has gall bladder disease.

Family members are inclined to choose contact professions. The father and mother of the patient are both lyrical poets. All family members tend to associate with lower class people, which is common for contact-oriented persons. Finally, the patient’s nephew marries a cook.

V. Sexual Vocational Selection

Human nature is essentially bi-sexual, a fact established in both cell and gene biology. Sexual disturbances arise, when we cannot reconcile our respective masculine and feminine natures. For example, sexually disturbed males display excessive tenderness and passivity, deviation from factuality, and preference for fantasy and subjectivity. Females show masculinity and activity, desire for facts, objectivity, rationality, and ethical strength. Accentuation of either kind of pattern indicates an intermediate or incompleted stage of sexual development.

The principal forms of such disturbances are genital hermaphroditism, bodily hermaphroditism or androgyny, transvestitism, homosexuality, and matatropic inversion. Corresponding criminal activities are fraud, espionage,

and prostitution. Vocational outlets for men are those that require a costume, fashion designing, fine arts, dance and ballet, textiles, hair dressing, cooking, baking or pastry-making, mathematics, music, gynecology, lyrical or sentimental literature, and espionage. Vocational outlets for women are those requiring male uniforms, fine arts, singing, dance and ballet, sports, manicure and pedicure, and that of a lady’s maid.

Case #74 offers an example for this group (Szondi 1978, 324). The patient is 43 years old, married, and lives in a fashionable hotel. He has studied at a university and possesses an extensive knowledge of music. Currently, he manages the hotel, which is owned by his father. He complains of impotence toward his wife, while being attracted to little children.

His father is a paranoid-masochist, and the brother of the father is manic. The mother of the patient is a hysteric who has the most energy and power in the family. A sister of the mother is a hysterical liar. One brother of the patient is a physician, while another brother has an impulsive domineering nature.

The other group of sexual pathologies, besides those of gender disorders, is that of sadism. The symptoms arc mainly active anal homosexuality, pederasty, and sodomy. The principal criminal form is murder, which involves lust and robbery. Vocational choices are those that use tools, such as hatchet, knife, scissors, drill, tweezers (e.g., surgery, manicure, pathological anatomy), axe, hammer and chisel, whip-in-hand (e.g., circus animal trainer), sports, and machinery operator.

Sadism is difficult to study because it may mix with other forms. For example, it could fuse with homosexuality and take an inflative form, or it could be sublimated as a part of a healing profession like surgery. Families of sadistic murderers could even have religious professions, which could take extreme forms of expression, such as monastic orders, where asceticism and flagellation are practiced. Monks may struggle against the sexual drive or the sadistic impulse toward cruelty.

Case #76 concerns a man born in a Swedish village in 1905 and who was raised in poverty (Szondi 1978, 328-329). While attending school, he was a good student, particularly in arithmetic, but he began to steal from his friends. He did not like to work and developed interest in religious movements and rituals. For one year he served in the Salvation Army,

later becoming a Baptist and then a Pentecostal brother. He became

Pentecostal due to his excommunication by the Baptists.

In 1931 he suffered a hysterically-tainted mental illness with hallucin ations, compulsions, and crying spells. In the same year he made a nonfatal suicide attempt. Five years later he became a milkman, the significance of which, with respect to sadism, is its connection with animals. He made a favorable impression on people, as he delivered milk. He also expressed a desire to conduct religious services in a local parish.

However, on the stormy night of June 20, 1936 he stole an axe and hammer and went to the pastor’s house. The pastor welcomed him at the front door, led him to the kitchen, where he was hit three times on the head by the visitor with the axe. The man then ran into the bedroom, killed the pastor’s wife, and stole money, a gold watch, and other valuables. The man was later arrested and charged with the two homicides. The villagers believed that the murderer was, in fact, the pastor’s son.

The murderer had had an unhappy childhood. The mother was a washer-woman, the maternal grandfather an alcoholic. One cousin committed forgery and fraud. The murderer himself had a refined, effeminate appearance and red hair. Such an appearance suggests latent homosexuality. Thus, the case manifests the linking of homosexuality, Cain-homicidal, and sadistic-aggressive impulses.

VI. Friendship Selection

Szondi was often asked whether genotropism would be a factor in the

choice of friends. He would reply affirmatively but admit the difficulty in

distinguishing between love and friendship selection. Several case studies

are available, showing that the inclination to choose certain friends

represents mutually shared characteristics.

As an example, two men have been close friends since the first grade (Szondi 1972, 92-93; 1978, 248-249). They sustain their friendship through elementary school and university years and into adulthood. The families of both men have members with paroxysmal-epileptiform disorders, and they are listed below in terms of their distribution:

Male #1 Male #2

Epilepsy 0

symptom. Be conceptualizing reality as a whole, it is possible to discover the relationships among diseases. For example, asthenic constitutional types incline toward schizophrenia, peptic ulcers, and they frequently die by tuberculosis (Szondi 1978, 343).

Disease selection may also be governed by periods in the life cycle. Puberty and menopause are two critical times. The central issue is which hormonal cycles influence these periods and which gene groups are implicated. Puberty and menopause are genetically related to such degenerative diseases as diabetes, high blood pressure, and cancer. Hormonal crises can activate any disease in the gene stock, influence gene tempering, and control the timing of the onset of symptoms.

Finally, familial heredity influences susceptibility to infections and traumas. Genes may be latent until traumas or toxins strike. Szondi raises the question as to why a bodily trauma produces blindness in one person, paralysis in another, and deafness in still another. These observed conditions presuppose the fact that genes create thresholds, which function as dispositions toward particular disorders.

VIII. Death Selection

The last kind of genotropism pertains to death, and it is called thanato-genotropism or, more simply, thanatotropism. The term derives from the Greek thanatos, which Szondi translates as both death and murder (1978, 357). The translation reflects the existential fact that death may be both natural and tragic. Furthermore, thanatotropism coincides with three obvious facts: (1) everyone dies; (2) life expectancy is inherited, and; (3) fatal diseases run in families.

First, the fact that everyone dies corresponds to the maximum life span, which, currently, is about 110 years. The span is evolutionarily stable, and it is acquired by individuals at the moment of their conception. The span is genetically-determined, species specific, and independent of the environ ment (Walford 1984). The gene group that regulates life span also controls the immunological system, whereby toxins are destroyed through a surveillance mechanism. As we near the end of the life span, we become more susceptible to degenerative diseases due to inefficiencies in the immunological system.

Second, thanatotropism entails a life expectancy because of a built-in time clock in the bodily cells. Experimental data show that bodily cells, when placed in a culture, will divide and replicate themselves so many times and then stop (Hayflick 1980). This fact is known as the “Hayflick limit,” and it attests to an ancestral memory inherent in nature. There are two exceptions to the Hayflick limit; sex and cancer cells replicate themselves indefinitely.

Third, thanatotropism conforms not only to the fact that fatal diseases run in certain families but also to the existence of death genes that kill either germ cells, zygotes, or newborns (Szondi 1978, 357). We may consider the incidence of cystic fibrosis and Tay Sachs as well as the several thousand babies born each year so defective that they cannot survive. Some are born without skulls, brains, or kidneys, some with defective lungs, conditions which virtually kill them.

Familial patterns of fatalities even extend to suicide methods. Paroxysmal-epileptoid persons generally choose immolation and impact, that is, jumping from high places, as means of self-destruction. Sexual suicides are characterized by suffocation, hanging, or cruel cutting with knives, scissors, daggers, or hatchets. Paranoids select poison and firearms, catatonics starvation. Contact methods are primarily oral, as in an overdose.

Finally, thanatotropism accounts for the fact that frequently murderers are related to their victims by blood or by genes. It is even not uncom mon for victims to choose their own murderers. The selection may occur unconsciously through marriage choice and not become manifest for several years. Within the marriage one partner acts so as to bring about one’s own tragic death. This potential is particularly present in couples who descend from paroxysmal-epileptoid stock.

The relation of victim and murderer is well known to homicide detectives, and it is represented by a specific ritual in African tribal religion, which Szondi quotes (1978, 370) from a book entitled Jungle Ways (Seabrook 1931, 266-270). In the mountain tribe called Hebbe

there lived a gardner, named Yaro, who killed a man named Kogu. The high priest, a relative of the victim, consoles members of both families. The mothers of the murderer and the victim grieve together. The murderer prays all night and, in the morning, announces to the assembled villagers that an ill thing had befallen both him and Kogu.

The murderer must now go on a three-year exile. His mother and the mother of the victim give him food for his journey. He wanders on his exile, as though he were dead. After the three years are ended, he returns from exile, from death, in order to be purified. Wearing a white shroud and holding some salt, Yaro sacrifices a black bull. He is welcomed by his family and by the family of the victim. Both families eat the sacrificial bull. The sacrifice purifies the community.

The sacrifice is followed by a restoration of the deceased. The family of Kogu, the murder victim, must use its blood to bring him back to life. The high priest chooses a boy and a girl most closely related to the deceased. In this case he selects Kogu’s brother and a niece. They lie together, she conceives and gives birth to a baby. The child is given the name of the deceased, Kogu, and is granted his inheritance. Thus, the murder is expiated, and the dead person has returned to life. This tribal custom portrays the mythic return of the ancestor within the cosmology of primal religion.