The Trouble with Testosterone

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  It fits. The shamans, the forbidding, charismatic religious leaders in tribal life, the ones who sit and converse with the dead ancestors, who have solitary sojourns in the desert, whose huts sit separate from everyone else’s, who spend the night transformed into wolves or bears or hyenas, the ones who lead the trance dances and talk in tongues and bring word of the wishes of the gods.

  It was Radin who first focused attention on the idea that, in Western societies, shamans would be viewed as a bit psychiatrically suspect. “Throughout the world of primitive man some form of emotional instability and well-marked sensitivity has always been predicated as the essential trait of the medicine-man and shaman.” He branded the shaman with a label that, based on my perusal of the psychiatric texts of his time, I suspect was invented—“neurotic-epileptogenic.” I think this terminology reflected an odd, tragic chapter in the psychiatry of his era, in which epilepsy was considered a psychiatric rather than neurologic disorder, and where the preseizure auras of the epileptic were often grouped with the auras and hallucinations of the schizophrenic.

  Importantly, Radin focused on the notion not only of the shaman as “half-crazy,” but of his instabilities as the creative seeds of future religious convention. “{The shaman displays his possession by a spirit} by publicly reenacting his specific personal experience, that of a man suffering from a particular mental affliction. His projections, his hallucinations, his journey through space and time, thus became a dramatic ritual and served as the prototype for all future concepts of the religious road of perfection.” If you aspire to shape supernatural belief in your society for generations to come, some half-mad inspiration would help.

  Radin’s ideas were soon echoed by others. Erwin Ackerknecht, a physician and naturalist, discussed the shaman as the “healed madman.” Jules Silverman, a psychotherapist, weighed in with a similar view and explicitly compared the symptoms of the schizophrenic with the traits of the shaman. In a rather pungent statement, the psychoanalyst George Devereux wrote: “{Primitive} religion and in general ‘quaint’ primitive areas are organized schizophrenia.” By the 1960s, the anthropologist Richard Shweder was even conducting empirical studies in the field, demonstrating that shamans have different cognitive styles than other members of their societies.

  Probably the most insightful elaborations on Radin’s notion came in 1940 from Alfred Kroeber, one of the biggest guns in anthropology. “In some cultures one of the most respected and rewarded statuses known to the society is acquired only by experience of a condition which in our culture we could not label anything else than psychotic.”

  Kroeber emphasized a number of points. While Radin had focused on the generative and creative potential of the psychiatric afflictions of the shaman, Kroeber was more impressed with the fact that these afflictions are nonetheless framed within a preexisting cultural framework. You do not merely report on your time as a wolf or burst out in glossolalic babbling in order to get licensed as a witch doctor. Rather, there are rules as to how shamans go about being psychiatrically unruly. Kroeber discussed how in endless cultures, young individuals are recognized by the established shamans as showing the first signs of the hallucinations and psychoses and are thereafter trained in the particular patterns of shamanistic experience in that culture. Thus, the schizotypal traits are channeled and standardized.

  As a second point, Kroeber dwelled on the rewards of such psychosis. “To us a person that hears the dead speak or proclaims that he sometimes turns into a bear is socially abnormal, at best useless, and likely to be a burden or menace.” Shamans, instead, are anything but that. They are powerful, honored, feared, sought after. Shamanism is a highly rewarded state. It is true that in many traditional societies, such shamanism is associated with a reclusiveness, a social withdrawal often linked to celibacy. But in at least as many cultures, shamans and their kin are rewarded not just materially and with respect, but reproductively as well. Sure, you don’t want everyone to be a shaman. This was stated well by a Winnebago tribesman who turned to Radin during a particularly frothy shamanistic ceremony and said, “Well, it’s good that some of us are that way some of the time, but it would be disastrous if all of us were that way all of the time.” However, having the occasional shaman is highly valued by traditional societies, and these shamans are typically powerful, respected members. Insofar as shamanism and its attendant hallucinations, metamagical thought, and psychiatric instability reflect some genetic component, these are not unfit traits being winnowed from the gene pool.

  Kroeber encapsulated his idea of the acceptance and rewards of the traits of the shaman in the title of his essay, “Psychosis or Social Sanction.” That final word gave me a poignant twinge when considering its similar derivation as “sanctuary,” and the rarity with which the most modern of psychiatry can provide that for our mentally ill.

  In the years since Radin and Kroeber, most anthropologists have distanced themselves from the strongest versions of their ideas. There is, in fact, next to no evidence in any culture that shamanism is “always predicated” on psychiatric instability, that such status is “acquired only by” psychosis. In most traditional cultures, the majority of shamans appear to be quite mentally healthy and are often orphans who had been raised by shamans as surrogate parents. It is probably these average-joe shamans, punching in the ol’ nine to five clock, who mostly ply their trade through the classic shamanistic image of “tricksterism”—sleight of hand, ventriloquism, a certain degree of manipulative showmanship. There is little evidence that they are wired to have different cognitive styles from everyone else, and there are virtually no anthropologists who are trying to find that out. The main point of Radin’s and Kroeber’s ideas is not that all shamans are “half-crazy,” but that if you are half-crazy in the right way, shamanism constitutes a uniquely protected and rewarding refuge.

  Kroeber emphasized an additional and critical point in his writing on the subject. He made clear that even the most floridly addled of shamans are typically not what we would now classify as schizophrenic, at the extremes of psychotic dysfunction. He noted how even traditional societies have little use for someone who perpetually believes himself to be a tree and acts as such. As a by-product of some of my own research in East Africa, I have had the occasion to observe that traditional societies there are no less unnerved by and intolerant of schizophrenics than ours is. But these are not shamans, whose psychoses are more controlled. Shamans hear voices during times of crisis rather than all the time, or bellow in tongues during ceremonies rather than at the critical silent moment during a hunt. “In general, the psychopathologies that get rewarded among primitives are only the mild and transient ones,” Kroeber wrote. Years before the invention of the term “schizotypal,” Kroeber had linked shamans to that classification rather than to schizophrenia.

  II. The Evolution of National Holidays in Western Societies

  Thus, the psychopathology theory of shamanism of Radin and others suggests that mild forms of schizophrenia lead one toward the highly adaptive role of being a shaman in traditional society. Stated in modern terms, schizotypal personality disorder and schizophrenia are on a genetic continuum, and the selective advantages of the former are sufficient to maintain the broad genetic trait, including the maladaptive schizophrenic variant, in the human gene pool. Or, to put it more simply, having the occasional cousin who is schizophrenic is the evolutionarily tolerable price of having a ready supply of schizotypals.

  These musings were presented with a subtext whose error forms the heart of this piece. There is a trend in some circles to use contemporary multicultural standards and catchwords as a means to wield a pretty censorious tone about our intellectual forebears (read: dead white males). This is often politically correct giddiness. Nevertheless, one cannot help but recoil at the foundations of racism that run through the history of social anthropology.

  Eugène Delacroix, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (detail), 1853—63; St. Suplice, Paris, Giraudon/Art Resource, New York
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br />   Many of the thinkers discussed took pains to note how uniquely the psychopathology of the shaman is an issue of the folks with the bones in their noses. As is clear from some of the quotes above, “primitive” runs through all these considerations. Radin imposed a pseudomathematics on this judgmentalism, claiming that there was a quantitative correlation between how “simple” a society is and the extent to which the shaman class is dominated by the half-crazy. My favorite version of this was in Kroeber’s work, which discussed the psychotic shaman as a feature of “low cultures,” in contrast to the higher cultures freed of them. Toward the end of his essay, he went off on a humane, impassioned lament about the racism of prior anthropology, its ethnocentrism in imposing Western standards of progress. Having gotten that off his chest, Kroeber then clearly links “progress” of a society to the rejection of shamanistic nonsense and its attendant confusion of reality with psychotic subjectivity. “I cannot rid myself of the conviction that there does exist a real relation between on the one hand certain symptoms justly reckoned psychopathological . . . and the degree of cultural advancement or progress.”

  Some contemporaries of these individuals attacked this racism. In 1946, Ackerknecht deplored the statement that “primitive” religion is nothing but organized schizophrenia, claiming that only the gigantic vanity of our own culture could give rise to that idea. It seems to me that Radin and Kroeber were wrong in distinguishing between “primitive” theology and our own. But not wrong in the way suggested by Ackerknecht, who in effect said, How dare you imply that the theology of those cultures is shot through with a psychiatrically suspect confusion of subjectivity with reality? Their theology sure as hell is shot through with such confusion. The main point is, so is that of Western societies. As seems intrinsic to the whole process of religious belief.

  The most provocative implication of the theory of shamanistic psychopathology is that it is not just about the Clan of the Cave Bear or the folks with no clothes in the National Geographics. Ackerknecht noted the demise of supernaturalism in Western societies. “Our culture is unique in its consequent outlawing of the irrational.” The reports of the death of such subjective confusion are greatly exaggerated. A few statistics that will perhaps shock the sheltered readership to as great an extent as they did me: In a recent Gallup poll, 25 percent of Americans fessed up to believing in ghosts, while 36 percent admitted to believing in mental telepathy, 47 percent in UFOs, and 49 percent in extrasensory perception. A majority of the citizenry of our fair land claimed to believe in the devil and 49 percent believed that it is possible for someone to be possessed by said devil. Mind you, this was a poll of American adults (i.e., individuals generally allowed to vote, operate motor vehicles, or serve on juries). The mind, at least that of this reporter, reels.

  Our daily lives may not be as permeated with superstition and supernatural belief as are those of many in traditional societies, but our society on the threshold of the next millennium is nevertheless splotched with irrational subjectivity. Some variants of such irrationality have been concocted out of air in recent times. This is the silly world of crystals and channeling and healing pyramids, the fast-food spiritualism of nouveau medieval peasants in hot tubs. But some of the beliefs whose embrace cause vast numbers of us to abandon rationality come with pedigrees stretching back millennia.

  The notion of the psychopathology of the shaman works just as readily in understanding the roots of major Western religions as well. This is the first place where I must tread carefully, as many readers will no doubt be offended by these ideas, despite my warnings at the beginning of this piece. Put succinctly, it is not usually considered to be a sign of robust mental health to hear voices in burning bushes. Or to report that you’ve spent the night wrestling with an angel, or that someone who has died has risen and conversed with you. Who originated those beliefs? Who first reported the number of days it took for the world to be made? Who first emerged with the fact that there was once an Edenic garden and that snakes bearing apples are up to no good? Who announced that virgins can give birth? These weren’t the products of some committee after careful market research. Each had to have come from the metamagical subjectivity of some formative and formidable visionary, whose identity is usually lost to us forever but whose fevers took hold.

  So long as one bypasses the idea that there is occurring literal reportage of divinely dictated events, there appears to be a rich vein of schizotypal behavior and belief in the cornerstones of theology of major religions. And the rewards of it are no less than in non-Western culture. Oh, sure, one can overdo it, and our history is darkly stained with abortive religious movements inspired by messianic crackpots. But it appears to be a continuum: too much, and you are arguably in the realm of a Jim Jones, David Koresh, or Charles Manson, all of whom were able to lead followers into a maelstrom of paranoid delusion. In the cases of Jones and Koresh, one can only do armchair forensic psychiatry to try to guess their afflictions, but Manson, alive and well, is a diagnosed schizophrenic. However, if you get the metamagical thoughts and behaviors to the right extent and at the right time and place, then people might just get the day off from work on your birthday for a long time to come.

  III. Cleanliness Really Is Next to Godliness

  Thus, it seems to me that plausible links can be made among schizotypal behavior, metamagical thought, and the founding of certain religious beliefs in both non-Western and Western societies. This is typically big-picture theology—how the world begins and ends, what happens after you die, how many gods there are and how they get along with each other. These are steel girders, the superstructure of religious belief.

  But religion is not just a handful of precepts that form the dominating core of one’s particular beliefs—the Holy Trinity, or “I am that I am,” or “There is but one God and he is Allah.” Religion is not just a foundation of thought and faith. Nor is it just a set of moral imperatives, or a set of cultural values to be shared with a community. In its traditional, orthodox incarnations, it is also a collection of small habits, behaviors, and prohibitions, a myriad of everyday activities and sayings. “Religion is meant to be bread for daily use, not cake for special occasions,” said Henry Ward Beecher. If the devil is in the details, then so is God, and for the average practitioner, religion is in the rituals and rules of quotidian life. It is here where I believe there is a second critical link between a neuropsychiatric disorder and features of religious belief and behavior.

  Mark Tansey, Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight, 1981; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Warren Brandt; courtesy Curt Marcus Gallery, New York

  During periods of stress or of anxiety in our lives, most of us will find ourselves having certain small behaviors or thoughts that we cannot suppress, little rituals that, repeated once, are benign, but repeated at length, become irritants. Perhaps we are unable to stop from counting the number of steps we climb on a staircase or cannot stop some profoundly insipid and distracting commercial jingle from running through our heads. There are times when, to our visceral horror, we are unable to prevent ourselves from thinking something unthinkable—What if the person who is most important to me on earth suffered a horrible accident? What if that person were killed? You swim in the details of being notified by the police, of being accompanied to the morgue, of the inconceivable sight of a body—all the while thinking, Stop torturing yourself! Why are you thinking this? Stop it! and yet the thoughts leak on. We may not be able to begin working on a difficult and anxiety-provoking report until the pens and erasers at the desk have been arranged properly. Or when mailing off a critical application, we might check the slot on the mailbox a second or third time to assure ourselves that the letter has gone in and maybe even look behind and underneath the mailbox. Irritated, we may try to prevent ourselves from doing these things, but often, we can’t help it. We check, just to make sure, just to make sure.

  We are all subject to many of these small rituals. Here’s an unexpected o
ne that I have found to be remarkably widespread in children of late-twentieth-century American culture. Consider the following highly technical diagrams:

  The schematic on the left represents a tray of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies marshmallow treat; the stippled pattern is the uneaten part. The schematic on the right represents what the Rice Krispies Treat looks like if you leave a person armed with a kitchen knife alone with it for a few minutes. Most of us have the irrepressible urge to cut away and eat a sliver of the stuff so that it straightens out the edge.

  I have actually surveyed generations of my students as to why they carry out this behavior. Do they straighten out the edge so that their subsequent nibbling is less readily detected and somehow doesn’t count as much as cheating on a diet? Rarely. Do they do their cutting so as to decrease the exposed length of edge, thereby preserving the freshness of the delicate slabs? Never. It’s the same answer as I would give—there’s just an itch, a sense of incompleteness, that makes it impossible to leave it alone. It’s just not right to have an uneven edge of Rice Krispies Treat. The eating is almost an afterthought.

  This is benign nonsense, as are those occasional, uncontrolled repetitions of thoughts or behaviors for most of us. They are generally thought to become more common in most of us at times of anxiety or stress because they provide a comforting sense of structure, at least about some little things, at a time when a Big Thing seems as structured and reliable as quicksand. But for a subset of us, these rituals of thought and behavior become a crippling psychiatric disorder.