“Stress diseases”—that is, disorders of personality—are far more prevalent in the sprawling suburbs of the new America than in established communities, the authors of The Split-Level Trap make clear. The causes and cures of these emotional ailments are examined at some length by the authors—Richard E. Gordon, Katherine K. Gordon, and Max Gunther (who are a psychiatrist and his wife, and a professional writer who “put the Gordon’s observations into words”).
The Gordons base their analysis upon a close examination of life in Bergen County, New Jersey. They present a series of fictional case-histories—that is, representative accounts of distressed suburbanites, not taken from actual lives, but rather composite portraits of emotionally distraught suburban folk. The principal cause of the high rate of psychological illness among the dwellers in the split-level houses of Bergen County, the Gordons believe, is mobility: the rootlessness and restlessness of these “movers,” human flotsam in the new housing developments. They suffer, in short, from what Simone Weil called “the need for roots.” Lacking a sense of community and permanence, they fall victim to the obsessions and hysteria of the lonely crowd, reflected in shocking rates of divorce, juvenile delinquency, alcoholism, and visits to psychiatrists.
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