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Serial Killers, Evil, and Us

Why are people fascinated by serial killers? The plethora of books, movies, and television documentaries about them attests to the public's obsession with these human killing machines. Yet compared with the number of spouses who kill their partners or drunken drivers who commit vehicular homicide, there are relatively few serial killers. The FBI estimates that at any given time between 200 and 500 serial killers are at large, and that they kill 3,500 people a year.

My hunch is that people are fascinated by serial killers because of their perceived resemblance to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As with Dr. Jekyll, most serial killers appear outwardly quite ordinary, like your neighbor or mine, living normal, everyday lives in which, just as we do, they fill the car with gasoline, hold down a job, and pay taxes. From behind this veneer of ordinariness their Mr. Hyde personality, representative of the darkest aspect of humanity, jumps out to torture and kill victims -- and to transfix us.

Prime examples uphold the stereotype. John Wayne Gacy was a building-construction contractor, twice married, active in community projects, and a member of civic organizations. In 1967 he was voted the Jaycee's Outstanding Member. Joining the Jolly Joker Club, he created the character of Pogo the Clown and, costumed as Pogo, went into hospitals to cheer up sick children. In 1978, Gacy was director of the Polish Constitution Day Parade in Chicago, and during the festivities he was photographed with First Lady Rosalyn Carter. But as Gacy himself once said, "A clown can get away with murder," and he did, raping, sodomizing, torturing, and strangling to death thirty-three young men over the course of more than a decade.

Theodore Robert "Ted" Bundy's mother considered him an ideal son. His political friends were convinced that he was on a fast track to one day becoming a governor or a senator. Dashingly handsome, intelligent, and witty, Bundy was a romantic dream come true for many women. Some described him as an attentive, tender lover who sent flowers and penned love poems. A photo shows Bundy immersed in happy domesticity, opening a bottle of wine as he sits with a girlfriend. At the moment the photo was taken, Bundy had already abducted and murdered twenty-four women and committed nightmarish necrophilic acts with their bodies.

How is it possible for someone who appears to be the guy next door to commit multiple horrific murders? People have always been gripped by the dark side of human behavior, especially when it is cloaked in the light of normalcy. Serial killers are at the far end of the spectrum for human cruelty. Our minds follow an inescapable syllogism: "I am human. Serial Killers are human. Am I, like them, capable of monstrous deeds?" Most people, having posed this question to themselves, conclude that the answer is "No, I am not even capable of thinking about such evil."

Evil is a thick rope of many complex, twisted, and intertwined strands. An effort to comprehensively define evil is an impossible task, a fool's errand; yet we all try to unravel this thick rope to understand the strands that make it what it is. As a psychiatrist and a forensic psychiatrist, I must try to aid in that understanding by tugging on just one strand of that rope, a psychological strand.

Here in psychological terms is a working though admittedly imperfect definition: Evil is the intentional or gratuitous infliction of harm by individuals committed against other individuals, groups, or entire societies. I exclude from the definition unintended, negligent acts that produce harm. Unintentional, incidental harm often results from conflicting strivings that inevitably arise between individuals. I exclude wars in which millions of people are killed, and which are declared "just" or "unjust" by participants on one side or the other, both praying for victory and convinced that God is with them and not with their enemies. My purpose instead is to isolate and focus on the inner psychological mechanisms that play essential roles when humans harm each other.

Evil is interpersonal. If you doubt that, read the Ten Commandments: their admonishments and strictures apply to the evils that beset our relationships with both man and God, but mostly with man. Evil is the exclusive province of human beings; it does not exist among animals. Harm directed at inanimate objects is not usually considered evil unless there is a concurrent element of human suffering. Some would expand the definition of evil to include cruelty to animals and other creatures. Thoughts that are considered evil invariably deal with doing harm to other human beings.

Psychiatrists are medically trained and wedded to using the scientific method, so they avoid applying the term "evil" to the aberrant or horrible acts that they are sometimes called upon to understand and explain. Psychiatrists observe causes and effects in human behavior and try not to be judgmental about them. The determination that a particular behavior is or is not evil is a moral judgment, heavily influenced by subjectivity and context. What society may label as evil behavior, the psychiatrist tries to understand within the framework of mental illness and the psychology of daily life.

Nonetheless, the insight that evil involves acts of interpersonal harm opens the door to analysis of the psychological interaction between perpetrator and victim. The presence of empathy is key to determining an individual's capacity to maintain constructive, collaborative relationships with others. Empathy is not sentimentality. Empathy is the ability to put oneself in another's psychological shoes, to sense what the other person may be thinking and feeling. But empathy without compassion is not enough. Psychopaths (remorseless predators) are very skillful at divining what other people feel and think, but they do so in order to exploit them. They do not care one whit about other people, whom they regard as morsels to be voraciously consumed and the remnants discarded. Serial sexualkillers will not blink at taking a life in order to experience a powerful orgasm.

Edmund Edward Kemper III was a necrophilic serial killer who treated his victims as totally discardable objects. After being imprisoned, he was quite clear about his intentions: "I'm sorry to sound so cold about this, but what I needed to have was a particular experience with a person, and to possess them in the way I had to, I had to evict them from their bodies."

Suspension of empathy is necessary for someone to intentionally harm other people, and it is usually accompanied by the psychological mechanisms of devaluation and projection. Individuals intent on committing harm first dehumanize others and then project onto their victims their own disavowed, unacceptable traits and inner conflicts. These same mechanisms are involved in prejudice and scapegoating.

Serial sexual killers demonstrate spectacular failures in empathy and equally egregious use of devaluation and projection to rationalize their terrible crimes. We learn from interviews with John Wayne Gacy that during his childhood and adolescence, his father expressed contempt for Gacy's illness (psychomotor epilepsy) and for excessive pampering by Gacy's mother. The father also warned Gacy's mother that John was "going to be a queer" and heaped scorn on John by calling him a "he-she." Years later, after Gacy's killing spree, Gacy referred to his victims as "worthless little queers and punks." It is not difficult to perceive in Gacy's attitude toward his victims echoes of the contempt and verbal abuse that his father heaped on him.

Contempt toward victims also was frequently expressed by Ted Bundy, who professed genuine surprise that society was making a fuss over "these girls" whom he was accused of murdering, and that their families so deeply mourned their losses. "What's one less person on the face of the earth?" Bundy asked, and referred to his victims as "cargo" and "damaged goods."

Gacy, Bundy, and Kemper were serial sexual killers, a distinct subcategory of serial killers. Not all serial murderers are serial sexual killers. Some kill for reasons other than sex, such as money, jealousy, revenge, power, or dominance. Serial sexual killers enjoy torturing their victims (sadism) for one reason only: to obtain a maximal orgasm that they are unable to achieve in any other way. Most serial killers, regardless of type, are not psychotic; that is, they have not lost their grip on reality.

We consider evil entire societies that act like serial killers. But were all the members of the Nazi party during World War II psychopathic? Some leaders and chief sadists undoubtedly were, but most of the compliant members who took part in the killings were ordinary, nonpsychopathic citizens who rationalized the atrocities that they were committing by the mechanisms of empathic failure, devaluation, and projection. Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who directed the deportation and extermination of millions of Jews and other peoples, used these mechanisms as well. Interestingly, Eichmann was certified as normal by a half-dozen psychiatrists even though he had perpetrated monstrous, unconscionable evil. The psychiatrists' diagnosis was underscored by an odd incident that took place at his trial. A former concentration camp inmate had been waiting for years to testify against him, yet when he stood before Eichmann at the tribunal, the former inmate unexpectedly passed out. Upon being revived, the would-be w itness explained his fainting at such a crucial moment by saying, "Eichmann looked so normal."

The first deliberate, systematic genocide of the twentieth century occurred with the extermination of an estimated 1.5 million Armenian men, women, and children by the Ottoman Turks. More recently, during the Argentine terror, torturers placed live rats inside a tube plugged at one end and inserted the open end into a victim's anus or vagina. The rats tore away the victims' internal organs and killed them. Were the perpetrators of such horrific acts sadistic psychopaths? Assuredly they were, but it is also certain that their acts were facilitated and condoned by an infrastructure of compliant supporters whom psychiatric evaluation would in all likelihood have diagnosed as normal. For every paid sadistic torturer, there were numerous "administrators" who participated in the killings by answering telephones, keeping records, driving cars, and performing other day-to-day tasks so that the business of torture and evisceration could go on -- just a regular part of an administrator's ordinary day at the office. Th e unmistakable lesson is that ordinary, "good" people, devoted to their families, their religion, and their country, are capable of inflicting horrific harm on those whom they dehumanize and demonize.

What about more-or-less law-abiding, responsible respectable folks? Qualification is necessary because we are human beings nature has built into us the instinct to survive, and in order to do so we are (and must be) adaptively self-centered to over-empathize with others would make us inattentive to out own basis needs and expose us to danger. "If we were not so excessively interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it," wrote Arthur Schopenhauer, a nineteenth-century philosopher. Perfect empathy and compassion are the province of saints, and as George Orwell observed, "Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent." For the rest of us, more-or-less ordinary human goodness is good enough.

We are all self-referential. But there is a fundamental difference between adaptive and maladaptive self-reference. Healthy self-esteem is the cornerstone of the positive regard and empathy that we are able to feel toward others. People who do not like themselves are often critical of others and reject them. As a psychiatrist, I have found that individuals who are unable to accept themselves make vehement criticisms of others, which are often self-criticisms. Serial sexual killers have extremely low self-regard and project it onto their victims. The serial sexual killer, in a perverse egocentric empathy corrupted by self-loathing and cruelty, puts his hated self in the shoes of the victim, then tortures and kills that person. Some serial killers play god, bringing their victims back from the brink of death over and over, before finally killing them.

Most of us live between the extremes of serial killer and saint. We all participate in what I call the "evils of everyday life" by feeling that our lives and needs are the most important of all. In our seeking and striving to accomplish our personal goals, we inevitably tread upon the striving of others and may unintentionally, or even intentionally, harm them. However, underlying some of these "trial evils" may be the same failures in empathy, devaluation of others, and projection of our dark side onto others that can be observed at full throttle in serial killers.

No bright line separates unintentional harms caused by ordinary human failings from the intentional infliction of harm. Our unintended transgressions toward others are distributed along a continuum that sometimes reaches the level of intentional harm to others. Forgetting a spouse's birthday or anniversary often causes hurt and may contain some element of empathic failure and perhaps even a measure of devaluation and projection. Further along the continuum, examples of failure in empathy include harmful actions based on commonly held stereotypes and prejudices or the failure to act against social wrongs where one has the power to make a difference.

What can we do to constructively channel our natural self-centeredness? To combat envy, for instance, we can work at empathically identifying with the good fortune of others. The scenario that poisonous envy usually follows is this: "You have something that I want but do not have I feel resentfully deficient and angry I must destroy what you have (or you)." But empathic identification with the good fortune of others allows us to put ourselves in their shoes so that This is a healthy adaptation of human self-centeredness. Temporarily suspending our natural egocentricity is the prerequisite for empathy and compassion, making possible goodness, unselfish love, and generous self-sacrifice. We more-or-less healthy people can do this; serial sexual killers cannot. Mental-health professionals use empathy to dip into patients' psyches to better understand their inner struggles. But we have our limits. Few people, even professionals, can or would want to descend into the fantasy inferno of serial sexual killers.

Our capacity for empathy, though it may reach glory in compassion, is limited. We can only absorb so much pain from the lives of others, and we certainly cannot encompass the monstrousness of genocide. We are unable to mentally put ourselves in the shoes of hundreds, thousands, or millions of people who have been tortured and murdered. Josef Stalin, one of the worst genocidal killers of the twentieth century, understood this well. He was reported to have said, "One death is a tragedy; twenty million deaths is a statistic." The extreme depravity of serial sexual killers is also well beyond the conscious mental life of most people. To feel empathy and compassion toward others, we must be able to discern at least some redeeming human qualities.

I cannot fully explain why "bad men" act out antisocial impulses while "good men" channel potentially destructive psychic forces into constructive action. To say that the proclivity to act out antisocial impulses is a function of personality, mental illness, substance abuse, and stress, while true in some cases, does not explain the universal human capacity for evil. But I can and must ask: Have you been mentally torturing anyone lately, perhaps subtly -- maybe even yourself? Have you manipulated others for personal advantage? When you slowed down to "rubberneck" at an accident, was it mere curiosity or was it your dark side peeking out?

We must no longer permit ourselves to doubt that "bad men" do what "good men" dream (R.I. Simon, Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior. Washington, D. C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1996, paperback edition, 1999). All men and women struggle with their dark sides, but that is not reason to despair. One of humanity's greatest achievements is the ability to turn the mind on itself to gain insight and growth. Self-reflection replaces insouciant self-deflection. If we can acknowledge and channel our demons, we are able to harness powerful forces. Dr. Karl A. Menninger, the noted American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, observed that, "To 'know thyself' must mean to know the malignancy of one's own instincts and to know, as well, one's power to deflect it."

The serial killer is incapable of transforming the basic drives that we all have into higher, life-affirming attitudes and behaviors. Their destructive behaviors are what psychiatrists call failures of sublimation. Their pathological self-centeredness, the mark of the psychopath, is in large measure the consequence of unsocialized, unchanneled sexual and aggressive impulses. Driven to gratify his deadly desires, the serial killer has no joy in his life, only a transitory sexual release at the death of a victim, a release that soon requires the torture and death of a new victim. Instead of engaging in passionate relationships and work interests, as mentally healthy people do, the serial sexual killerpursues the total life-and-death domination of others. Instead of having the commitment to life goals and a vision of personal growth and achievement that characterizes mentally healthy people, the serial killer is doomed to repeat a never-ending cycle of compulsion and death. Serial killers teach us that life com mitments undertaken without love, compassion, and moral responsibility are dead ends.

The ability to examine unacceptable antisocial thoughts and feelings without translating them into action is not just a requirement for psychiatrists or their patients. Most people are able to curb or modify feral instincts, often with the help of knowing that a policeman stands on the corner. An enormous difference exists between thinking evil arid doing evil, and while some religions do not accept this distinction, the law does. If it did not, all of us who occasionally or regularly have antisocial thoughts would be in jail, perhaps even on death row. As the pioneering psychoanalyst Theodore Reich observed, "If wishes were horses, they would pull the hearses of our dearest friends and nearest relatives. All men are murderers at heart."

Jeffrey Dahmer killed and cannibalized seventeen young men. His father Lionel Dahmer wrote, "He [Jeffrey] had awakened, as I had awakened at times in my youth, feeling a terrible certainty that I had committed murder. The only difference was that Jeff had actually done it, had actually done what I had only feared having done. I had awakened in a panic that consciousness soon ended. Jeff had awakened into a nightmare that would never end" (L. Dahmer, A Father's Story. New York: William Morrow, 1994). Lionel Dahmer worried that he had passed on to his son a killer gene that had caused Lionel's murderous dreams to burst full force into Jeffrey's brain and actions. Various theories emphasize different combinations of environmental, biologic, and genetic factors operating in serial killers (R.K. Ressler, A.W. Burgess, J.E. Douglas, Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives. Lexington, MA: DC Health, 1988). But no one knows why Lionel's dreams stayed as dreams, and Jeffrey's were acted out as murders. We can only echo the prophet Jeremiah, who concluded, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?" (Jeremiah 17:9).

We may not be able to know the heart, but we can discern that "big and little evils" occur when we ascribe our unacceptable thoughts and feelings to others through the processes of dehumanization and projection. If we can acknowledge the beam in our eye we will be less likely to stigmatize the mote in the eye of others. To have to hold and to recognize the universality of the darker side that we have within ourselves can be the key to enhancing our ability to experience a shared humanity, rather than yielding to the impulse to persecute others for our frailties. An important element of what the world calls evil is our failure to see an aspect of ourselves in others' behavior, especially in their bad behavior. The mote in his eye is the beam in mine, and to acknowledge that fact is essential to achieving ordinary human goodness.

Empathic failures, excessive projection, and devaluation and demonization of others are the usual suspects involved in harmful actions deemed evil. So glaringly apparent in the serial killer and in the genocidal perpetrator, these same toned-down psychological mechanisms drive the prejudices we hold and the everyday gratuitous harms that we inflict on each other. It can be a transforming insight when one fully realizes that the human proclivity to ascribe one's dark side to others is a powerful psychological engine for human suffering.

Character, our core personality, is a dominant force in determining whether we behave constructively or destructively toward others. "A man's character is his fate," observed Heraclitus more than two millennia ago. But our character not only determines our destiny, it also has an impact upon the destiny of others. Hitler's character destroyed the lives of millions. Mother Teresa's character enriched and ennobled the lives of many Although character has a genetic component, much of it is shaped by the nature and quality of our early relationships and experiences. Childhood role models, experienced good, bad, or both, become embedded in the child's developing personality, exerting their influence on adult character. When adults undergo intensive insight psychotherapy, they become reacquainted with important Per sons from childhood, some of whose character traits live on within and through them.

Since we learn to love and hate early in life, age-appropriate courses should be taught in our schools that examine the human dynamics of constructive and destructive behaviors. World history and literature are replete with countless examples of good and evil. Children (and adults) must learn that when we intentionally harm others, we instantly sacrifice a piece of our humanity. We are immediately diminished. This is what I believe Emerson meant when he wrote, "All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedily punished." Understanding that our behaviors have human consequences for good or for ill is every bit as important as learning about science and mathematics. Some would say it is more so. Let us educate our children for character, for their destiny.

Understanding and insight about our psychological mechanisms, such as projection, dehumanization, and the ability (or inability) to empathize, permit us to exercise options rather than to be bound by reflexive behaviors. We have the ability to learn about ourselves from multiple sources; from everyday experience, especially tragedies; from education; from arts and literature; from our relationships, whether constructive or destructive; from personal therapy; and from the myriad other ways knowledge and insight may not be enought. Some people understand themselves quite well. but have neither the desire not the emotional and mental capacity required to.

Robert I. Simon, M.D., is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Program in Psychiatry and Law at Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1999).

It is the human condition to have dark demons and to struggle against them. "Man is born into trouble as the sparks fly upward," Job laments yet the remarkable fact is that there are so many "good" people in this world; able to rise above the destructive impulses that we all possess. When we acknowledge the dark side of our humanity, when we locate the possibi lity of evil within ourselves, when we attempt to tame our demons by channeling them into dreams, creative achievements, and a capacity for awe and spiritual growth, we are doing what humanity as a whole has done in taming fire even though, inevitably, sparks continue to emerge and threaten us. It is the undaunted human spirit that strives to harness these demons in the pursuit and fulfillment of our individual and collective human destiny -- a destiny shaped by a deepening capacity for compassion, for commitment to an ennobling life vision that affirms and sustains the best in ourselves and in others.The point is that in all cases of mass killings and sadistic acts -- by the Nazis, by the Khmer Rouge and their killing fields, by the Stalinist purges, and by those who have committed genocide in Africa and in the Balkans -- dramatic failures of empathy and caring must take place. There must also be enormous excesses of projection of unacceptable thoughts and feelings to permit the perpetrators to perceive their victims as detestable human rubbish.

DMU Timestamp: March 07, 2019 02:52





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