Hatred

by Willard Gaylin

  Some of these attempts to give specific meaning to a symptom became convoluted to the point of embarrassment. I remember once reading that a peptic ulcer was the product of “the bite of the introjected [swallowed up] mother.” The fancifulness of some of these elaborations was a product of the ebullient enthusiasm of the early practitioners. Foolish as the elaborations were, they should not distract us from the recognition of the profound impact that these early studies of “disease” had on the everyday behavior of the well. Freud’s genius did not lie in his conjecture that all behavior could be explained by his Libido theory. His great contribution was his assumption that all behavior could be explained! Starting with the most bizarre symptoms, the irrational delusions and rants of the madman, Freud took that which was the mark of madness—crazy, meaningless, irrational, purposeless lunatic meandering—and offered it up as scientific data to be evaluated seriously. If one starts with a symptom, one could locate a cause. Once the cause was discovered, one was on the way to a cure.

  Over the years, certain early Freudian postulates were abandoned. But basic ones endured. Symptoms were still perceived as problem-solving devices. Symptoms were maneuvers designed to resolve painful dilemmas arising from many sources: perceived failures, cowardice, shame, impotence. They still had meaning, and they were still seen as failed attempts to ease psychic distress, that is, they were still seen as examples of the “cure” being worse than the disease.

  The great psychoanalytic teacher Sandor Rado referred to a symptom as a “misguided repair.” A symptom is an attempt to solve a problem, but it is misguided, since it does not really work. It will leave the patient worse off than he was in the life situation with the symptom he attempted to remedy. It is a plain term that I find useful.

  In inventing “mental” illness—illness of the mind as distinguished from brain disease—Freud started a process that led him well beyond his roots in medicine and his therapeutic intentions. Mental illnesses appeared in “normal” people, not just lunatics, and the absolute breach that had existed between the two was closed. It was not long before the major leap was made to an awareness that psychic conflict influenced all human behavior, not just the abnormal.

  This Freudian bombshell had fallout the extent and range of which could not possibly have been anticipated at the time. His basic theories derived from mental illness were insights that could be applied readily in analyzing all forms of social and political behavior, even as I do now in the analysis of hatred. The apparently crazy aspects of mental illness are only crazy when examined superficially. When exposed to dynamic evaluation, their purposes are exposed. The crazy behavior of suicide bombers can also be analyzed and demystified. By extension, we can use the same dynamic explanations used in mental illness to better understand the social phenomena of prejudice, bigotry, and hatred, all of which have psychological roots. Understanding them can help in dealing with them.

  Freud himself started the process. Since the same psychodynamic principles that operate with the sick operate with the healthy, we can understand motivation, character formation, values, prejudices, taste, and lifestyle. We can apply psychodynamic understanding to the underpinnings of legitimate religions like Christianity or the more bizarre uses of religious convictions demonstrated by the Christian militias.31

  Beyond understanding the individual in his normal and abnormal ways, the psychodynamic approach helps us understand the dynamics of group behavior.32 Group identities can be analyzed like individual identity—we can discover which psychological factors lead an individual to join a right-wing Christian militia. With these Freudian insights, we can examine the individual as part of his group, religion, profession, national roots. We can understand how an individual who has not himself been personally humiliated can suffer the shame and humiliation of the group with which he identifies. This explains the confusing presence of privileged members of the upper classes in hate groups. The awareness that an individual can only be fully understood within the various milieus he occupies legitimates a psychological study of environments and institutions like the KKK or Al Qaeda.

  The examination of cultural institutions in the light of Freudian theory gave birth to the field of psychoanalytic anthropology. 33 Cultural anthropologists could interpret the variety of differing cultural characteristics without resorting to genetic or racial assumptions. There is a varying amount of generosity and selfishness, aggression and passivity, trust and paranoia, in different populations. The average individual of a paranoid culture will become more paranoid than the average member of a trusting community.

  Religion was now fair game for analysis. Freud saw God as the product of man, not the other way around. The Bible was not revealed truth, or if it was, what it revealed was not God’s will, but man’s thinking processes.34 Now that religions could be viewed as products of culture, rather than the instruments of the Lord, we could analyze the disparities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We could explore their cultural differences, seeing where was the vulnerability for paranoia and hatred in each religion.

  And finally, the rise and fall of civilization itself could be reevaluated. Civilization as a constraining influence on human passion became a final concern for Freud, ironically just prior to the rise of Hitler.35

  The genie was out of the bottle; there was no getting it back in. Freudian theory became a tool for the biographer, the historian, the sociologist, and the anthropologist. Freud presented an alternative to the theological view of human nature supplied by religion and the purely economic explanation of human woes offered by Marxism. Social problems that seemed irrational were now subject to illumination via psychological analysis.

  With this psychological perspective, the excesses of hatred, bigotry, and other forms of destructive human behavior could be liberated from genetic determinism (bad seed); economic determinism (class struggle); or theological explanation (the work of the devil). A new frame of reference was created. Perversity in human behavior could be traced to its psychic roots.

  We are still free to accept genetic determinants of behavior—God or nature. We can also exploit economic and political insights, whether from a Hobbesian, Lockean, or Marxist perspective. But we can now enrich the mix by adding the psychological dimension. We can now examine such subjects as prejudice, bigotry, and hatred with a more complex set of variables, recognizing them for what they are: psychological symptoms of sick behavior.

  8

  THE PARANOID SHIFT

  The words “paranoia” and “paranoid” have made the journey from psychiatric lingo to common parlance. We hear them everywhere these days. In everyday language, these words suggest a person who is suspicious, distrustful, and ready to feel unappreciated, cheated, and betrayed. These are precisely the same attributes that the psychiatrist sees as the symptoms of the paranoid patient.

  What has not followed in the transfer from the clinic to the marketplace is an understanding of the mechanisms of paranoia. The paranoid delusion—I am the agent of God; I am God—is one of the strangest of all symptoms, but one that is particularly useful in understanding the processes of hatred. For one thing, the delusion seems to defy all reason. It is so “crazy.” At cursory examination it seems to offer no relief for the patient. Some paranoids express grandiose ideas that conform to the idea of a symptom as a coping mechanism. Grandiosity is an attempt to relieve humiliation, but how does one explain the delusions of persecution— enemy aliens are beaming hateful accusations into my brain—that dominate the world of other paranoiacs and cause them abject misery? What purpose does this serve? How is paranoia a reparative maneuver, misguided or otherwise?

  Since paranoid mechanisms are at the heart of the phenomenon of hatred, to appreciate what goes on in the minds of those who devote their life to hatred, we must understand paranoia. To get to that understanding, we can capitalize on the insights learned about symptom formation and the meaning of symptoms. Armed with the awareness that both hatred and paranoia are symptoms, we c
an look at the “symptom” of hatred as a misguided repair and try to locate the underlying conflict that the hatred attempts to accommodate.

  The distortion that dominates paranoia is a quasi-delusional or delusional view of the world and one’s place in it. The underlying cause that leads to the delusion is invariably a severely damaged and debased sense of self. To protect pride and face—to preserve self-esteem—the paranoid utilizes his imagination to find enemies on whom he can blame his desperate straits. He searches for a person or group on whom he can displace his rage and envy, similar to the way that the phobic displaces his anxiety. He ascribes the cause of his personal misery and failure to some manipulative and vindictive enemy, preferring to see himself as a victim rather than a failure. This assignment of responsibility for one’s failure and misery away from oneself is called “projection” in psychoanalysis. I prefer the term “paranoid shift” for reasons that will follow.

  Everyday Paranoia

  Elements of paranoia probably exist in all of us, since it is a common derivative of that ubiquitous feeling of insecurity that plagues most of us in our competitive world. It is easily recognized by the associated feeling: “Isn’t that just my luck!” Take, for example, the nagging and irrational feeling that many people experience at the supermarket, where it seems that whatever line they join at the checkout counters will inevitably be the slowest. Or on the highways when drivers engage in the compulsive, dangerous, and irrational lane shifting during a traffic jam, convinced somehow that their lane is always the slowest. They seem to be joined almost exactly by an equivalent number cutting in the opposite direction suffering from the same fear that they were trapped in the slowest lane. I have tried to track lane progress by stubbornly staying in my lane and marking for memory a car in the adjoining lane. I have rarely noticed any evidence of progress made by lane switching.

  Most of us have on occasion suffered from the “just my luck” (always meaning bad luck) syndrome. I have watched the uneasiness of both friends and strangers who, on being led to a table by a maître d’hôtel, see in the assignment of tables some statement of respect or lack thereof. Being an early diner, I have been astonished by the significant number of people who refuse the first table offered. Diners will suggest the left side of the room when offered the right with almost the same degree of affirmation of their entitlements as those who choose the right side when offered a table on the left.

  On the many trips I have made to Scotland, I have been appalled by my bad luck with the weather, since the natives always assure me how sunny it had been in the weeks before my arrival. Of course I know that it rains a lot in Scotland. Still, does every trip have to be a wet one? Yes, it does. Only after stumbling across the data in an almanac and discovering that in August, my month for travel, one can expect eighteen days of rain in Scotland, did I reluctantly give up my “bad luck” feelings.

  The stock market, with its irrational vicissitudes, is another ideal locus for paranoid feelings. If I had waited, anticipated, held on, bought more, sold sooner, like—whom? Some unknowns who are presumed to have been wiser or luckier. It is the very possibility of winning—the upward mobility that promises so much—that feeds general feelings of exclusion from the ranks of the lucky. Those poor souls who deny statistics by buying lottery tickets beyond their means with the statement “someone has to win” refuse to accept the fact that, by definition, the one winner must be accompanied by hundreds of thousands of losers. One out of a million is the statistical equivalent of nobody winning.

  In a competitive society such as ours, there will always be sources of anxiety and insecurity—a sense of entitlement unfulfilled—that can lead anyone to the occasional feeling of paranoia. But some people feel this all the time, in all manner of odd places. These are people who can be categorized as having a paranoid personality. Their paranoia defines their lifestyle.

  The Paranoid Personality

  At one time most psychiatrists drew a sharp distinction between neurosis and psychosis. The neurotic had difficulty adjusting to the real world. The psychotic was operating outside the real world. His perceptions of where he was and who he was were askew. We label this disorientation as to time, space, and identity a difficulty in reality testing and a hallmark of the psychotic. With the increasing awareness that we all are more inclined to credit the authenticity of the world of our perception than any actual world, the distinction between normal and psychotic has become somewhat obscured.

  Strong elements of the paranoid psychotic are present in people who are said to have a paranoid personality. Nevertheless, when we talk of a “break” with reality, we mean that some border is crossed that transcends the normal distortions of perception. The psychotic may not know the date, the day of the week, or what century he is living in. He may not know whether he is in a hospital or a prison. And he may think he is Elvis Presley or Christ. There is a confusion of time, space, and person that introduces an element of the impossible into his thinking process.

  Granted that none of us experiences reality directly. We all accept the distorted evidence of our perceptions as a true representation of the real world. Still, there is a difference between the normal boundaries of distortion and the gross break from reality required in delusion formation. Many a person obsessed with weight may feel fat when she is well within the borders of normalcy. But when an anorexic teenager who is hovering dangerously near emaciation and cachexia thinks she is fat, a line has been crossed into the area of delusional thinking. Similarly, the classic teenager who says to himself, “No one likes me,” is profoundly different from the one who is certain that he is surrounded by a cadre of enemies acting in concert to destroy him.

  The cultural level of distortion and the direction of that distortion differ remarkably. Some cultures set normal standards of wariness and suspicion that would be labeled paranoid in other cultures. Privacy standards vary within cultures. The threshold level of what is considered “normal” in an individual’s behavior must account for the cultural standards under which he has been raised. Even with such similar countries as France and the United States, the level of openness and trust differ. The French view American openness as a sign of our ingenuousness. In contrast, Americans moving to Paris for business purposes are often shocked at the Frenchman’s lack of hospitality. Executives are now often advised by industrial psychologists to be aware that an invitation to a French colleague’s home is not as likely to be proffered as it might in the American Midwest. What Americans might view as aloofness would be judged as a proper sense of reserve by the French.

  The line between more diverse cultures such as Afghanistan and the United States will be even more extreme. Whether a terrorist, or even a suicide bomber, may be considered mentally deranged will depend in great part on how far he has strayed from the norms defined by his culture. In a culture that will accept stoning a woman to death for infidelity, stoning an enemy’s child to death may not seem so aberrant.

  Further, the kind of an individual who will become a terrorist will differ from culture to culture. In the culture of modern America, we find a disproportionate number of psychotics among our homegrown, native terrorists. Optimism, a passion for life and the things of life, so dominates our society that when an American terrorist appears, like Ted Kaczynski—the infamous Unabomber who terrorized American academics in 1993—who turns his back on our culture, we are not surprised to find him a characteristic paranoid schizophrenic.

  On the other hand, there seems little evidence that the terrorists who executed the 9/11 bombings were psychotic. They were probably not typical of the population from which they came, but their peers did not view them as deviant or sick. And the terrorists, prior to their suicidal acts, were not that different in their day-to-day behavior from the general population from which they emerged. They were students and civil servants, construction workers and professionals. There may have been some truly psychotic individuals among them, but the evidence at hand seems to suggest that the majo
rity were not. They were, at worst, the paranoid extremes in a generally paranoid culture.

  A paranoid population is not a population of paranoids. Rather, it is a group led by psychotic individuals who encourage paranoid elements endemic in the culture and in their individual personality. For example, the Turks who participated in the slaughter of the Armenians in 1915 could not have all been psychotic, any more than the Polish citizens of Jedwabne. We know that even those who enthusiastically carried out the massacres of the innocents under Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot were not all psychotics. Two brilliant, but somewhat contradictory, studies about the same group of professional Nazi killing groups known as “Order Police” insist on this very point, as is evidenced by the titles given to their books: Ordinary Men36 and Hitler’s Willing Executioners.37

  The paranoid personality shares all the elements we will observe in the paranoid psychotic, while still holding onto a modicum of reality, that is, without shattering his hold on a plausible world. There have been many terms coined to characterize the paranoid character, but they all tend to include the following personality traits:

  Negativism. Paranoids display a negativism that underlies their view of life and colors their expectations. This is an extension of the “just my luck” assumptions previously described. Since attitudes influence judgments and expectations influence outcomes, the “unluckiness” of the paranoid becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.