Hatred

by Willard Gaylin

  The contributions of Freud that have stood the test of time—and have been absorbed into commonsense understanding of how we behave—can be grouped into the following:1. We are not all as rational as we like to think. Freud assaulted the cockiness and arrogance of the technological optimists at the birth of the twentieth century by pointing out the limits of reason. He focused on the emotions that are often the hidden drivers of our actions, the sexual instinct and our aggressive needs. Admittedly he overemphasized the role of the sexual drive, but in the process he forced us to attend to the passions. He insisted that the rationale we offer for our behavior is often only “rationalization” (a word to which he gave its modern meaning) after the fact, disguising the emotionally driven intent of the behavior.

  2. We are not as free as we like to think. Many present-day actions are a product of our treatment in the past. This explains why seemingly like individuals will behave differently in the face of the same crisis. It explains why one person, when faced with an assailant, will run with fear, another attempt to appease or negotiate, and a third recklessly attack. This is a developmental point of view. When one says that we do “this” because of how we were treated by our parents in the past, there is the suggestion that “this” is not that freely selected an action. Such dynamic explanations have been labeled psychic determinism and have been viewed by many as a direct assault on free will. Most psychoanalysts “believe” in free will, but they are forced to struggle with a theory that drives one to conceding profound limits to human autonomy.

  3. We are not as insightful or self-knowing as we pretend. Nothing we do is caused by a simple stimulus-response mechanism. We do not make a decision at the moment, even though we may perceive it as happening that way. All behavior is a complex result of a number of forces and counterforces operating on us at that moment. Some of these influences arise from the past, some emerge out of the immediate present; some of our motives are operating consciously, others unconsciously and without our knowledge. All of these forces and counterforces act in concert, and their balance determines the specific action: Do we stop to help the elderly woman who fell in the street or do we walk on? Will we go on a diet or simply rationalize about it? Will we uncomfortably tell the truth or will we tell the convenient white lie? Will we act courageously or cowardly in the face of a crisis? This balancing of forces and counterforces driving us one way or the other constitutes a dynamic view of behavior—hence the term “psychodynamics.” This conception also threatens the view of our own autonomy and rationality to which we cling so dearly.

  4. We are less individual than we like to think. Actually, we are obligate social animals; we live in groups because we must. Other people are as essential to our survival as food, water, and oxygen. Therefore, exclusion from the group is a terrifying concept. The threat of ostracism becomes a potent means for forcing individuals to conform their behavior to the dictates of the community or its leaders.

  5. We live in a world of our own perception, to which actuality, that is, the real world, takes a secondary role. Once we go beyond the struggle for food and shelter, the basic struggle for survival, we enter into the world of our own imagination. Pride and shame, joy and despair, security or terror, will be fixed by our perception of what is happening, which only accidentally in rare moments will correspond with what is actually going on. This locates Freud in the tradition of German philosophical idealism, which dominated his education and milieu.

  The emphasis on the perceived world as the arena for human operations was not an original construct of Freud’s. It can be traced back to classic times. Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher, is quoted as saying: “What disturbs and alarms man are not the things, but his opinions and fancies about the things.” What Freud did was take ideas that were common currency in the philosophical world of the academy and apply them to the scientific study of human behavior then emerging from the psychological laboratories and the psychiatric clinics of Europe. But who could have predicted what followed from that? Freudian psychology, flowing out of its original clinical environs, saturated the entire intellectual community and, in the process, transformed our very view of ourselves.

  There was no area of creative activity that was untouched by Freudian influence, from surrealist paintings to plays, biography, literary criticism, and poetry. Nothing was immune, not movies, not haute couture. Dream sequences became de rigeur even in Broadway musicals, the former venue of double takes, pratfalls, showgirls, and chorus lines.

  People began to think and talk about their lives in terms of their unconscious desires, hidden motives, projections, idealizations, rationalizations, sublimations, repressions, self-delusions, and ego trips. And these were the most grounded and least fanciful concepts. Then there were the exotics: penis envy, castration anxiety, Oedipal and Electra complexes, Eros and Thanatos.

  The Freudian insights launched a democratic assault on the ramparts of Victorian society: its morality, its scientific optimism, its class distinctions, its rationalism. Freud leveled old distinctions and upset the traditional standards for human conduct established during the Victorian age. He introduced a wild card into the deck. He proclaimed everything as either directly or indirectly sexual, which of course was idiotic, but in the process it legitimated libidinal drives and started the sexual revolution, which would continue through the twentieth century. Freudian theory openly proclaimed that sexual appetite was ubiquitous, universal, and respectable. Everyone did it or thought about doing it. This proved liberating. Sex was no longer vulgar but the repository of the life force. We all acted under the influence of our libidos: aristocrat and commoner, man and woman, the elderly and the infant. Perversity was not just for the perverted. We all carried such impulses deep within our ids. Freud ushered in an electrifying and creative era.

  What was not so sanguine, however, was the unintended effect of what became known as the Freudian revolution on the basic principle of responsibility. The revolution made a tragic and profound contribution to the moral relativism that has fudged the concept of evil, leading to a substitution of understanding for justice.

  Without a clear sense of responsibility, there is no morality. Without the same sense of responsibility, the law cannot function. Psychic determinism shredded to tatters our sense of human autonomy. Courts of law became courts of nonculpability, with itinerant psychologists acting as court jesters.

  On December 7, 1993, Colin Ferguson boarded the 5:33 P.M. commuter train to Hicksville, Long Island, pumped thirty rounds of ammunition and sprayed his fellow commuters, managing to kill six people and wound nineteen others. The mayhem was limited only because a heroic passenger overcame him before he could reload. The ever-imaginative defense lawyer, Ron Kuby, a colleague of William Kunstler, decided that his plea of not guilty could be supported by the fact that Ferguson was suffering from “black rage.” What is black rage? Well you might ask. It turns out that it is some “malignant psychological state” black people endure by dint of being raised in a white racist society.

  What a blessing that most black Americans living in the United States have not developed this maddening psychological condition that drives one to mass murder. At the risk of being a spoil-sport, let me mention that Colin Ferguson was raised as an affluent member of the decidedly black culture of Jamaica. There he suffered the indignities of being chauffeured back and forth in an expensive limousine from his expensive home to his expensive private school.

  Even Colin Ferguson seemed offended by this defense. He refused to use the plea, firing his lawyers instead. Still, the “black rage” defense lives on. It has been used in many courtrooms to explain and thus exculpate not only gratuitous black violence against whites but also black crimes against Hispanics, Indians, Koreans, and assorted other minority groups.

  Not to be outdone, defense attorney Erik M. Sears introduced the equally compelling diagnostic category, “early Arab trauma,” in defense of his client, Rashid Baz. In March 1994, Baz had opened fire with an automatic w
eapon on a group of children on their way to a yeshiva. This was no impulsive maneuver. Baz planted himself on the Brooklyn Bridge, carefully timing the arrival of the bus. Because he was shooting at a moving target, he was able to kill only one student, sixteen-year-old Aaron Halberstam, but he managed to seriously wound three others.

  Attorney Sears—lacking any serious defense for this premeditated slaughter of the innocents—emulated Kunstler and Kuby and proclaimed his client the victim. Baz had spent the first eighteen years of his life in Lebanon. He could not possibly be held responsible for this murder. He had been so psychologically scarred by the larger environment of his youth that he had no more understanding or control over his behavior “than a fire once lit understands why it’s burning.” All that was necessary was to locate an expert witness to lend scientific credibility to the defense. He had no trouble locating Nuha Abuddabeh, a Ph.D. in psychology, a practicing clinician, and the hostess of her own talk show, no less. It was she who introduced the disease “early Arab trauma” into the lexicon of psychologically exculpating conditions.

  Logically, this disease would seem to exculpate all people who were raised in an Arab culture for the first eighteen years of their lives from criminal charges of murder. If so, it could equally be grounds for banning this population—psychically incapable of controlling their murderous rage—from entering the country. While denigrating these defenses as ludicrous, I acknowledge both Ferguson and Baz to be “sick” people. But common people using common sense will almost inevitably convict them in a courtroom. And they should.

  All “mental illness” cannot be a free ticket to exoneration. “To understand all is to forgive all” is not an operative principle except in the psychiatrist’s office—in the context of medicine—where the patient is granted certain special privileges and understanding. Inherent in the definition of the “sick role” is the principle of nonculpability. The sick person is a victim, not a criminal. He is not to be held responsible and punished for his illness, whether that illness is typhoid fever, which can infect others and kill them, or schizophrenia, which can also produce behavior that kills others. That is all true in the sick room. But not in the courtroom and, for that matter, not in the mind of the ordinary person.

  Unfortunately, at the same time that psychiatrists were continuing to defend the nonculpability inherent in the sick role, psychiatry was vastly expanding the definition of mental illness. The population of those with some symptoms of mental illness came to include the majority. Still, the courts, in order to secure a society of law, had to defend the idea of a populace acting voluntarily and freely, therefore responsible for their actions. How could the courts do that, when almost everybody was now assumed to be a little sick?

  When confronted with this dangerous contradiction in definition and purpose, two distinguished students of human behavior articulated two opposing, and equally unmanageable, solutions. One decided that there was no such thing as mental illness. And the other announced that there was no such thing as human freedom.

  In 1961 Thomas Szasz published his immensely influential book, The Myth of Mental Illness, and became a hero of both the libertarian Right and the libertarian Left, who shared his anti-authoritarian and antiestablishment sentiments. In this book, as the title suggests, Szasz denied the very existence of a population of the mentally ill.

  The 1960s was a period that chose to romanticize the insane as saner than the rest of us, as demonstrated in such movies as The King of Hearts and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It took a long time for the liberal supporters of Szasz to realize that if you deny the validity of mental illness, the only proper place for a schizophrenic man dangerous to others was a prison—as Szasz, himself, would state.

  At the other extreme was the brilliant psychologist B. F. Skinner. In his influential book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, published in 1971, Skinner denied the very existence of freedom, thus any voluntary action. In his image of human behavior, the adult is tied to his past by connecting bonds of conditioned responses that force him into predictable and patterned responses. Skinner thus links Homo sapiens to the lowest living creatures in one seamless continuum. Autonomy is a myth that human beings perpetuate about themselves to narcissistically assert their superiority to lower animals.

  Nevertheless, most of us are prepared to accept both: a concept of human freedom, with its element of accountability for action; and a category of the mentally ill, who being sick must not be held fully responsible for their behavior. Simple prudence must be exercised. Both constructs, autonomy and mental illness, need a little pruning at the edges. And if we approach the problem with a clear head, we can allow these contradictory theories of human behavior to coexist. In certain contexts we must assume one, while in other contexts we are obliged to accept the alternative.

  Obviously, Colin Ferguson and Rashid Baz are not normal variants of their cultures. They are individuals obsessed with hatred. Their behavior is clearly pathological. They would undeniably be diagnosed as mentally ill by a modern psychiatrist—as would be the murderers of Matthew Shepard, the Oklahoma City bombers, and the men who chained James Byrd, Jr., to the back of a truck, dragging him to his death. All of them would be sent to jail by a jury of their peers. And rightly so. There is sick and then there is “sick.”

  7

  UNDERSTANDING “SICK” BEHAVIOR

  The average physician starts the diagnostic process by taking a history, a testament to the continuing importance of symptoms even in this day of CAT scans and MRIs. A doctor wants to hear the patient’s “complaints.” Is he suffering from headache, tightness in the chest, excessive thirst, or undue fatigue? Is he demonstrating shortness of breath, dizziness, insomnia? The doctor is directed to further investigations by the nature of these symptoms.

  The psychiatrist approaches her patient in the same way. She is interested in emotional and mental symptoms. These can be particularly confusing, especially in modern times where the definition of mental illness has been expanded well beyond its original conception and the terminology has become more complicated. “Abnormal,” “sick,” “crazy,” and “insane” are confusing terms, used quite differently in different environments and by different observers. At times the same observer adopts different attitudes toward the same behavior, dependent on the context. As a psychiatrist, I am prepared to accept rude and aggressive behavior from my patients in my office that I would not tolerate from others. Such behavior in the framework of a therapeutic relationship would not even be labeled “rude.” It would be analyzed for its unconscious motives. I am not interested in the “unconscious motives” of the ugly drunk at the bar—nor for that matter, of a friend in my living room—and am not prepared to passively and benignly endure such behavior.

  The hatred that is of concern here is by my definition a psychological phenomenon. An essential premise of this book is that hatred is rarely a rational response to a real threat or affront. Acts of hatred represent displacements of an internal conflict onto external sources. They are “symptoms” of a basic emotional disorder. Hatred is obsessive, irrational, self-serving, and ultimately—like any other symptom—self-destructive. We, however, do not grant an act of hatred the same immunity from judgment or punishment that we would when a psychological phenomenon is perceived as a symptom of a disease. We use a different set of criteria in the public political arena. The therapeutic attitude should have little influence there.

  The problem of judgment, culpability, and punishment is complicated by the fact that the constituency of terrorists comprises at least three distinct populations. The single, lone-wolf terrorist—what I call the entrepreneurial terrorist—is often a confused and psychotic loner. The institutional terrorists, those who join Al Qaeda, Hamas, and other terror groups, may act in a manner that seems equally insane. but they are not psychotic; they know exactly what they are doing. The members of the professional SS Einsatzgruppen, who volunteered to slaughter the Jews by hand before the Nazis built their gas furnaces,
were largely psychopaths or, at the very least, individuals with severe character disorders.27 For purposes of justice as well as our own self-defense, we must handle these groups quite differently. But first, we must attend to the often confusing terminology used to distinguish among them.

  Abnormal Behavior

  Normal behavior refers to conformity, conforming to “a norm, standard, pattern, level or type.” So what is abnormal behavior for a human being? The question can be answered only by a series of other questions. Am I referring to physiological behavior? Interpersonal behavior? Public or private? In relation to the standards of the species or of the culture? If the latter, what are the cultural norms and can they be considered normal?

  The problem of defining behavior relates to the uniqueness of that perverse species, Homo sapiens. It is easier with lower animals. Consider the single-celled animals. Observing these simplest of creatures under a microscope, one is impressed by both their anatomical similarities, one to another—they are all essentially formless blobs—and by the identical quality of their behavior. The amoeba randomly bounces from one place to another, absorbing nutrients and excreting wastes. That’s about it. And it does not matter if the swamp water in which it lives is in Toronto or Timbuktu.

  In the case of the amoeba, normal behavior is easy to describe, since there can be little variation from the norm. The simplicity of the amoeba’s functions allows for nothing abnormal short of cellular destruction. These single-celled creatures are the purest individualists—they do not even require another individual to reproduce; they simply split themselves asunder, creating two where there was one. Still, it is hard to treat them as individuals. It is safe to assume no protozoologist names or romanticizes these simple creatures. They have no individuality. In contrast, I have a dear herpetologist colleague with whom I have collaborated in research on “animal rights” who ascribes emotions and personality to his cold and slithery charges, upbraiding me for being a “speciesist” with a bias toward warm-blooded animals.