The Manson Women … By Clara Livsey, M.D. 244 pages. Richard Marek. $10.95.

In August of 1969, a group of groupies, primarily female, who had formed an unrelated “family” around a semi-literate petty criminal named Charles Manson, stabbed, slashed and butchered their way to infamy in what has become known as the Tate-LaBianca murders.

Six years later, two members of the gang hit the headlines again, when Lynette Fromme tried to shoot President Gerald R. Ford, and Sandra Good was arrested for her violent threats against American industrialists.

Clara Livsey, Baltimore psychiatrist and family therapist, was at the time planning to write her second book. The first had been about marriage; now she was going to advise people about parenthood. Noting, however, a kind of bewildered public sympathy for the Manson women, a disinclination to believe females could be such disgustingly violent criminals unless they were led astray by some fiendish male, she decided to write about the Mansonites instead.

Lest anyone miss the point of the project, she spells it out at the beginning. “This book is about these women,” she writes. “It is about their lives and about the motivations that drove them to their criminal behavior. It is about the ‘family’ they chose to form. It is about how they came of age as sinister criminals … [It] is essentially about the women of the infamous Manson case.”

That might not be exciting prose, but it is very clear, and the reader should be forgiven for expecting to dive right into a series of well-researched biographies and insightful analyses of what sent these particular women on their mad and destructive path.

This is not, however, the structure we face. Dr. Livsey has some pretty definite ideas about what is wrong with America today, and 125 pages of generalizations come first. We are too permissive with our children. We encourage them to do their own thing while we ourselves are busy taking care of No. 1. Our standards have deteriorated; we applaud ugliness and call it art. We are naive. We allow lawyers to use the law to protect the rights of criminals.

And we are evidently not bright, Dr. Livsey makes her points, and then repeats them. Unabashed, she even makes a point of the repetitions. “As I have already said,” she says, and says, and says. It is not only as introduction to the book that she announces her intentions.

She, however, knows about life and love. She has behind her 20 years of family counseling. Her education in the underside of human behavior started even earlier: the servants employed in her childhood home in Argentina let her overhear talk of passion and violence. Still, she was inexplicably surprised to discover that Manson and the women were, in the mid-Seventies, famous.

And she does seem rather awed by the mechanics of research: traveling to Los Angeles for the first time, in 1977, to interview him, she tells us she checked into the wrong hotel, but “the very next day,” she began an examination of courthouse records. Attempting to evaluate the women in-situ, she went out to their prison, only to find they’d been moved. Officials could not, because of rules of privacy, discuss them with her, but someone gave her a lecture on institution security instead, and she was grateful.

Eventually, after an exchange of letters, the imprisoned Charles Manson granted her an interview. He had given charisma a bad name, she says, but she wasn’t scared. When he whined about his innocence and “attempted to make me feel guilty in the best ‘Jewish mother’ tradition,” she kept her cool. He was not going to pull the wool over her eyes; she planned ahead of time to listen to him but also “to reflect on what I heard between the lines.”

As a result of the interview and the reflections, she thinks Manson must have been learning-disabled, emotionally damaged by his relationship with his “loose” mother and his strict grandparents, and generally incompetent. Had he been brighter, she says, he might have found an agent who would have recognized in him the potential for the bizarre and violent that passes for entertainment today. He’d have been rich and famous, like California’s other trash musicians, everyone would have been happy, and the whole awful tragedy would have been avoided.

The women — we do finally get to the women — were all in pretty much the same boat. They were troubled, childish, emotional cripples, trying to grab at the ring of the carousel without paying for their tickets. Their affiliation with Manson grew out of their need to compensate for their own insecurities with a make-believe father-lover who would encourage their fantasies. Like Manson, they had been buffeted by the unhealthy dynamics of their real families, which were marked by alcoholism, death and divorce, and sometimes by an emphasis on pleasant appearances in the face of unhappiness and upheaval as well. Some of them — and this is perhaps the most interesting insight the book can offer — grew up in a mold that equated docility with goodness and left them prime candidates for explosion.

So you see it was a matter of family life after all: the Manson “family” formed and rampaged because of what went wrong in the original families. Since that is so, the author concludes, the way to understand criminal behavior — and thus prevent it — is to understand the family dynamics that create the criminal, and the way to do that is to insist that the relatives of criminals “disclose certain facts that would be helpful for others to know.”

By GERRI KOBREN