THE "NICE" PSYCHOTHERAPIST 65
of abandonment and rejection, reinforcing the patient's already impoverished self-image.
For many women, going to bed with their therapist is experienced as a personal triimiph. They have broken through, become "special" in the therapist's eyes and feelings, and have made a conquest, which also has acted as a leveler by removing the therapist from his godlike pose. It is also true that many women who have sex with their therapists have sent ouj, seductive signals. In a sense, they can be seen as using their sexuality in the service of aggression. Sexual involvement with the therapist becomes their way of trying to impact, to gain a foothold of power or control in a relationship in which they feel otherwise imable to assert themselves or make demands directly. Such women when seen intensively over a long period of time in therapy may even become difficult for the therapist to resist. Melissa, one of Dr. Chesler's interviewees, was quoted as saying, "I think that he just finally couldn't resist me any more. I think I just put too much pressure on him. ... I was making moves from the very beginning. . . .*'i8
There are instances when sex between therapist and patient might be justified. However, the writers feel that this is always contingent upon the signals being openly stated and clear. That is, the therapist should take responsibility for acknowledging his sexual desires and for acting them out for his own sake, not the patient's. Any pretension of sex for **treatment" we feel is a sheer travesty unless the therapist is equally willing to help all of his patients who are experiencing sexual difficulties in this way—men and women, yoimg and old alike—and to carry this course of treatment out to its successful completion.
HOW TO CHOOSE ANH EVALUATE YOUR PSYCHOTHERAPIST
A part of the obsession with "nice" in our culture is the manner in which patients often describe their "shrinks." A patient recommending a psychotherapist to a friend wiU often be heard to describe him as follows: "He's really nice. I know you'll love him. He's supersensitive, gentle, and kind."
This old model of the "nice" therapist is also one who encourages you in cathartic, hostile outbursts against absent
66 THE "NICE" PEOPLE
figures such as cold fathers, mean mothers, unfair employers or teachers, rejecting spouses, and friends who lack understanding. This "nice" therapist then sides with you against them, acting as your aUy. This invariably succeeds in making you, fiie patient, feel "understood" and temporarily better, but they do not deal effectively with the key issue of how you can express and mobilize aggressive feelings in the present in interchange with the person sitting with you. Your therapist, to be effective, must soon block the endless hostile ramblings about people who are not present by being real enough so that he faciUtates aggressive as weU as loving interchanges directly with him in the room.
Beware of the therapist who is always "nice." This ever-kindly, ever-loving therapist is an aggression castrater. By his behavior he makes you feel as if you*re guilty, disturbed, or in the throes of a "transference reaction" whenever you feel or wish to express angry feelings directly toward him. There must be something wrong with you if you feel so angry toward someone who loves, understands, and accepts you so totally. Consequently, he wiU probably join you in a trip back into your personal history to trace the neurotic causes for why you're feeling angry toward him.
In evaluating your therapist in this respect there are a number of questions you might ask yourself:
1. Is your therapist willing to mix it up with you? That is, does he give you critique, indicate openly when he's feeling bored or irritated, share his frustrations, and invite you to do likewise?
2. Is your therapist always loving, kind, accepting, and gentle, and does he treat you with kid gloves? If the answer is basically yes, ask him what he does with his aggressive feelings. Ask him if you're so perfect that he never gets angry, bored, or frustrated with you.
3. Does your therapist play a godlike role by remaining aloof and detached and never revealing his own personal feelings? Ask him why he's afraid to allow himself to be a real person in the room. Beware of the old-fashioned naive answer that you as a patient are there for an hour, which is to be spent exclusively discussing your feeUngs. There is another person in the room who is interacting and experiencing feelings. Why is he afraid to reveal them?
THE "NICE" PSYCHOTHERAPIST 67
Therapy at its best is a relationship between two people reaching for a mutual emotional reality.
4. Are you comfortable getting angry at your therapist? What happens when you do? Does it make you feel guilty or "sick"? Does your therapist suggest that these feelings are exclusively a part of your problem, or does he share his own negative feelings honestly and give you encouragement to share yours?
In general, our model of the constructive therapist is one who is not afraid to incur the wrath of his clients, feels free to share his own aggressive feelings, and does not always imply that these interactions are a product of "sickness." In sunmiary, we would like to quote again from Dr. Carl Whitaker, who offered the following meaningful prescription for the constructive use of aggression by the psychotherapist.
Let me list for you some of the things I think of as characteristic of a healthy aggressive assertive therapist. The therapist should fight for his own individuality right in the group: He has the right to be a person. One of the real compliments I enjoy is when I take an individual patient who enters a group and then he comes to me after the first group interview and says, "You know, you were mean as hell up there, you didn't pay any attention to me, in the group you acted like I didn't exist, you didn't introduce me, you didn't tell them anything about me, you're a rat." I think of this as a compliment. If I am going to be in the group I'll tell them ahead of time that I am going to be a person in the group. I am not going to be the Pop and they're not going to be my children. This is a round table. I am not going to be the director of that group either. So the therapist is fighting for his own right to be a person in the group. I think of it as a very healthy kind of aggression. One of the other forms of healthy aggression is battling the patient stereotyping the therapist, and they'll do it m the group. They'll stereotype you as being mature in your real life. You know if the therapist says so, it must be true. He must be loving, real loving to all patients and to everybody on the outside and consistent in having an untroubled life of his own. He can't have any personal
68 THE 'TVICE" PEOPLE
problems, his dreams must be just healthy dreams. "Wouldn't it be wonderful to be married to a psychiatrist?** My wife says "just have them talk to me. . . .
Why must we involve our aggressive feelings? Can*t we just let the patient experience his own? Isn't our love enough? Isn't our closeness, our tenderness and our warmth and our identification with the patient enough? And then again the Bible talks to us. "Open review is better than secret love," or another time, "He that hideth hatred with smiling lips is a fool 11"^^
CHAPTER 5
The ^^Nice^^ Crazywnakers
Crazymaking is a special and insidious form of indirect aggression that has the impact of slowly destroying another person's emotional health. It is indeed a draining and wearing experience to be intimately involved and dependent on a crazymakerl It is comparable on a physical level with being bounced off walls or even of being a ping-pong ball in motion, in a noncontroUable, nonstop situation. Emotionally it is an experience of being alternately seduced and lulled into a feeling of safety and comfort, being loved but where the supports are always in danger of being puUed out from under and the "love" suddenly becomes a raging hate.
The basic and necessary ingredients in a crazymaking relationship include:
1. Emotional dependency and thus vulnerability on the part of one of those involv^
2. An unequal power balance.
3. An intense core of rage and resentment, rarely felt or expressed in any direct ways by the crazymakers. Its indirect impact, however, is so powerful that it constantly contaminates the interpersonal interactions with unresov-able, destructive, and reality-distorting messages.
4. A socially traditional relationship, which cloaks these crazymaking interactions behind a mask of good intentions, helpfulness, caring, and love.
Crazymaking interactions can occur between parent and child, husband and wife, employer and employee, and among friends. Of course, the most lethal of such interactions are found within the context of the parent-child relationship, because within this relationship the dependency
76 THE "NICE" PEOPLE
is the most intense, the vubierability and power imbalance is greatest, and the child is locked into the relationship with no escape. In crazymaking interactions in employment settings the employer who has the power becomes "Daddy," and the employee relates accordingly in a childlike, dependent way.
The parents in the parent-child crazymaking interaction have a large core of consciously unifelt, unexperienced rage and resentment concerning their parental role and responsibilities. Having been heavily conditioned as to what constitutes being a "good" and "loving" parent, these negative feelings are blocked out of consciousness.
TBE CRAZYMAKING MOTHER
The mother in these crazymaking interactions who is faced with constant responsibility, pressured to be loving and to fill the needs of the totally dependent child, feels resentful and frustrated. Mother herself still has large unsatisfied, childlike needs of her own, and on an underlying level feels deprived, frustrated, and enraged. However, these feelings are not consciously experienced because of the mother's strong conscience and strong sense of guilt, which tell her that "good" mothers do not have these kinds of feelings. Only "bad," "destructive" mothers do. Consequently, this core of frustration, conflict, and resentment is never fully expressed or released and continually contaminates her relationship with her child. The mother oscillates back and forth between guilt-motivated "devotion" and "concern" followed suddenly, almost randomly by outbursts of hostility, rage, morbid preoccupation, the "blues," or intense anxiety, which can be precipitated by almost any deed or reaction of the child.
All of her actions are hidden behind the cloak of good mothering intentions. She always believes that what she does she does out of love and for the good of the child. The sudden unpredictability of her reactions, however, has an increasingly confusing, damaging, and disorienting impact on the child. Almost any behavior on the child's part might provoke either a rage response or a warm one. The child becomes emotionally seasick, and eventually out of emotional self-protection learns to detach, withdraw, and escape from emotional closeness from this kind of capricious motheriy behavior.
THE "NICE" CRAZYMAKERS 71
THE CRAZYMAKING FATHER
Like the crazymaking mother, the crazymaking father is also consciously trying to fulfill the social expectations of his role. However, his behavior too is in constant conflict with his own underlying pleasure needs, his own hunger to be dependent, taken care of, and paid attention to. When he first fathered his child he was trying to please society, his parents, and his wife. He expected to win love, approval, praise, and confirmation of his masculinity. But now that the reality of being a father exists, he feels frustrated because baby is getting all the love and attention and he is largely being ignored. Not only is the child taking the attention and love of his wife away from him, the child is also an obstacle to his own needs to indulge in impulsive, pleasure-oriented behavior. No longer does he feel free to look at and pursue the attractive women he sees daily, to go out for a drink with his friends, to play at sports, or to pursue his own interests. When he tries to he is gnawed at by guilt feelings, which tell him that he is being a bad father and husband, depriving and betraying his responsibilities to his wife and child. Therefore, he forces himself into dutiful husband and fatherly behavior.
He goes through the motions of being attentive, caring, and loving. He stays at home nightly, he diapers baby, comforts mother, all the while feeling increasingly deprived and starved. The hidden resentment seeps through continually to contaminate his interactions with his family. His behavior follows a pattern of hot and cold inconsistencies. One day he is filled with feelings of sentimental closeness. He caresses baby and expresses love for his wife. This is followed by days of unexplained, extreme detachment, preoccupation, and sullen or explosive outbursts of resentment and annoyance. He becomes too busy to look up from his newspaper or mail, to unglue himself from the television. Or he goes into brooding moods or tantrums over minor matters such as a dirty sink, a missing sock, or a slightly late meal.
THE CRAZYMAKING EMPW.OYER
In the work setting the crazymaking behavior of the employer assimies a slightly different form. On the surface.
72 THE "NICE" PEOPLE
the crazymaking employer enjoys the social approval that his position of power accords him. However, on an underlying level he resents the pressures and responsibilities of his job. Or he tries to play the role of "nice" boss but is repressing his strong power drives and authoritarian nature. Consequently, the office becomes a nightmare of erratic, unpredictable changes in which he is smiling one day and withdrawn the next, a "nice" guy one time and then making outrageous, unmeetable demands at another time. He confuses and upsets his employees with his vagueness about what he expects of them, or treats them as if they were stupid or helpless children.
On a conscious level these crazymakers, in any setting be it home or work, see their motivations as being pure, altrustic, and concerned. Their repressed aggression, however, emerges in several different ways:
1. There are gross fluctuations and an unpredictability to their reactions. In very short order and for the seemingly pettiest of reasons they oscillate from expressions of concern, caring, tenderness, and love to critical, rejecting, punitive, and even insulting outbursts.
The crazymaking parent will heap affection, gifts and attention one day and be withdrawn, rejecting, and sullen when the child approaches him or her the next. The crazymaking employer will encourage casualness, friendliness, and openness one day and then rage the next over the fact that not enough work is getting done.
2. The crazymaker often makes demands for perfection and production that are so unreaUstic that the victim invariably winds up feeling inadequate and that nothing he does is ever really good enough. TTie child's performance is compared negatively with the performance of other children, or the employee is made to feel that he is incompetent, inadequate, and unable to meet the "simple" demands that have been made.
3. The crazymaker often develops a worrisome, overly protective attitude in which in the name of love and concern he treats his victim as a child incapable of functioning independently. In the process, he thereby prevents the victim from thriving, growing, and becoming independently productive.
This crazymaking way of relating is an emotionally de-
THE "NICE" CRAZYMAKERS 73
'ensive form of blocking that was originally termed by Freud a reaction formation. In this process of reaction 'ormation the consciously unacceptable feelings of aggression are transformed into their opposites. For example, 'age becomes gentleness, a death wish toward another is transformed into great concerns over the person's health md safety. This defense allows the crazymaker to preserve an image of himself as being a benevolent, loving person.
This crazymaking defense will produce in parents a destructive overconcem for their child's welfare. They become so involved protecting him and doing things for him that they prevent him from growing up. They become constantly preoccupied with potential dangers such as kidnapers, automobile accidents, the hazards of the weather, molesters, bad social influences, and the amount of food the child eats. The child is learning to see the world as a terrifying place fraught with dangers. In the name of the child's welfare the parents are destroying their child.
One such mother, whose twenty-three-year-old son was tiospitalized for schizophrenia, would visit her son at the [lospital and bring him enough food, warm clothing, and medicines to practically take care of his whole ward. She would solicitously ask whether he was getting enough rest, remembering to wear his rubbers in the rain, and taking [lis vitamins. She was relating to him as if he were still an immature nine-year-old.
The crazymaking employer likewise is fearful of delegating responsibility and authority. In the name of helpfulness iie prevents his employees from progressing, and they tend to become increasingly dependent, passive, and stagnant.
One such crazymaking employer, the supervisor of a vocational placement agency, would inquire daily about each employee's health, and often remark about the fact that an employee looked weary. Indirectly, he encouraged only the very minimum possible amounts of productivity. He benefited because he could feel increasingly in control and reduce any sense of competition from the more superior employees.
When crazymaking occurs between adults it usually assumes a different form from that of parent and child. However, the impact and effect are still controlling and sadistic (not consciously intended that way) and are also cloaked in socially acceptable coverings. In the work setting a
74 THE "JSICE** PEOPLE
crazymaking employer makes a vague or unrealistic demand on his employee and later attacks him for misunderstanding the instructions. A photographer briefing a model about the clothing needed for an assignment they were to work on together informed her on the telephone that he wanted her to "wear some dumb clothes.*' She asked him what he meant by "dumb clothes," to which he replied rather impatiently, "Oh, you know, dumb clothes," and hung up. She interpreted "dumb clothes'* to mean silly, campy-type clothing, and showed up for work the following day accordingly. When he saw what she had on he became livid. When he finally cooled down she discovered that by "dumb clothes" he had meant a plain, simple dress.
On other occasions the employer may encourage independent decision-making and shortly thereafter attack the employee for being "impulsive" or "stupid** for ha\Tng made a decision incorrectly or differently than the employer would have made it. The crazymaking employer in a benevolent mood will promote an atmosphere of casual-ness, relaxation, and conviviality and be the "nice** guy, only to explode a few days later because of the lack of respect and discipline he believes prevail, and resentment over the fact that the office is becoming a "social club** and his "niceness" is being taken advantage of. The employee in each of these instances is placed in an either-way-you-lose bind. If he conforms to ffie employer's demands he is attacked, and if he ignores them he will also be attacked.
Between spouses crazymaking is also a common occurrence, particularly when there are vast differences in the amounts of dependency, vulnerability, or fear of rejection or of abandonment that each experiences. The wife who screams that she knows what her husband is really thinking, or cries out 'Talk to me! Answer me!** while she is in the middle of a raging attack that makes this an impossible request is engaging in crazymaking. So is the husband who fails to make his desires or expectations clearly known and becomes resentful because his wife did not "divine" or automatically recognize that he needed such-and-such chore done at a certain time and in a certain way. The crazymaking spouse declares great love and involvement one minute and then turns suddenly cold and distant as his or her partner buys the message of love and reaches out for warmth.
TBE "NICE" CRAZ\^L4KERS 75
THE SOCiALLY APPROVED IMAGE
At a deeper level the crazy maker may really want to be an absolute dictator or resents responsibilities, for he or she wants to be taken care of, rather than taking care of others. Crazymaking spouses do not really want the limitations of a marriage, and resent relating in an equal way. However, they are li\'ing up to a socially approved image. Consequently, they play the role of loving wife or dutiful husband. However, the underKing. repressed core of anger over this continuously seeps through to c^xitaminate these relationships and unsettle the person with whom they are involved.
This then is another critical aspect of these craz\Tnaking involvements, an indirect consequence of the cultural taboo against openly displacing and enjoying one's power or dependency. We have been conditioned to feel shameful about our strivings to be powerful and to control others, or of allowing ourselves to be passic'e and dependent Today even parents often feel guilty regarding their positions of power over their children and therefore feel they must try to relate to their children as adults or equals. The ambitious politician is another illustration of this. He knows he must hide his power appetites behind mouthings about public welfare and benevolent concerns. On the other side of the coin, indi\iduals are conditioned to repress their dependency motivation and their wish to be taken care of. Open displays of these feelings are largely tabooed. Many men feel uncomfortable and become embarrassed if they are doted on or taken care of. Many women today also fe^ they need to constantly prove their independence.
These cultural taboos in the dimensions of power and dependency create crazcTnaking interactions. The powerful person acting as a crazcTuaker goes back and forth from giving ofif verbal messages of equality and humilitc', to sudden arbitrariness and a pulling of rank. Likewise, the dependent person protests he needs nothing, and then becomes frustrated and resentful because he is not being properly taken care of. The communications in these instances therefore come out in a confused mixture of love, then hatred or rage.
Crazymaking interactions are particularly difficult to recognize because on the face they often appear as the ultimate in socially acceptable beha\ior. On the surface
76 THE ^^NICE" PEOPLE
crazymakers are concerned, responsible, dedicated, fair, etc. They would undoubtedly be described by neigiibors, associates, and friends as conscientious and good people. This is the most insidious aspect of crazymaking behavior. It is lethal aggression cloaked in well-intentioned, socially respectable behavior and is therefore almost impossible to recognize and even more dilBScult to confront and block. The damage is all done through subtle bindings and manipulations in the name of concern, caring, and good intentions.
Crazymaking relationships are particulariy difficult to root out or change because victims tend to collude with their crazymakers. Persons can drive themselves crazy through excessive isolation. However, one cannot drive another crazy without the full cooperation of the victun, albeit this cooperation is largely unwitting and unconscious. Even though crazymaking ultimately proves very destructive to its victims, causing extreme detachment, instability, overdependency, chronic anxiety, and even breakdown, the victim's poor self-image and deep feelings of inadequacy tend to cause him to cling to the crazymaking relationship and to view it as a critical, life-sustaining involvement. Such a relationship of hate disguised by love is all the victim feels he is worth. For example, yoxmg people in mental hospitals often protest vigorously that their parents were loving and good and had nothing to do with their craziness. Those involved with crazymaking employers frequently reassure themselves about how benevolent and loving the employer really is in spite of the few minor "faults.** The victims have learned to be frightened and overwhelmed by the "crael, evil worid** outside, and the crazymaking relationship, destructive as it is, seems safer and more secure than the uncertainties of the "real" worid out there. It is comparable to the situation in which recently released prisoners commit still more crimes so that they can be returned to prison where they have experienced at least some safety, security, and recognition, or of mental hospital patients who are greatly improved and then regress into crazy behaviors as the time for their discharge approaches.
A long-term relationship with a crazymaker is an exhausting one, physically and emotionally. As opposed to an aggression-healthy involvement that revitalizes, the crazymaking interaction is one of chronic oscillations, unpredictability, manipulativeness, confusing messages, and
THE "NICE" CRAZYMAKERS 77
bindings. The only way out for the victim may be a total emotional breakdown, physical illness, or a violent outburst. Even in short encounters with crazymakers, one may find oneself wishing to run away, feeling fatigued, reaching for cigarettes or alcohol, becoming headachy or escaping into sleep. These reactions are indications of a subliminal awareness of the poisonous, contaminated communications of the "nice" crazymakers.
PART TWO
The Not So ^Wlce^' Society
CHAPTER e
The Terrorizable Society
This book was born of outrage and anger. These feelings are our response toward a socio-emotional climate in which it has become increasingly dangerous to casually engage in everyday activities or partake of simple pleasures. A walk in the park or through the streets; leaving one's home or apartment empty during a weekend outing or vacation; spending a night making love or sleeping outdoors at the beach; taking an airplane trip; picking up a hitchhiker in a spirit of friendliness; going out alone in the evening; leaving one's belongings momentarily unattended in a public place; wearing one's prized jewelry; and children going trick or treating on Halloween are but a small number of routine personal pleasures that can no longer be enjoyed without carefully premeditated self-protection. The sensible citizen has learned to always be careful and take precautions.
Evidence of a growing distrust and fear of one's environment can be seen everywhere. The Hilliard family, for example, lives in a large apartment in New York City. Their front door has three locks on it plus a chain. In the middle of the door is a peephole. No one enters without first being looked over. A German shepherd trained to attack strangers
80 THE NOT SO "NICE" SOCIETY
barks viciously at any unusual sounds. The Hilliards never leave their place without turning the radio and lights on so that others will think that they're really at home. When they decide to go away for a weekend, they give their superintendent extra money to keep a special eye on their apartment. Their two sons, age twelve and fourteen, though long-haired, bearded, and "love oriented," have been taught to never talk to strangers and to always cany at least five dollars on them when they go out in order to pacify potential muggers. Mr. Hilliard and his two sons all take classes in self-defense, not for pleasure or exercise, but for protection.
IS IT PARANOID TO BE ^VARANOID^^?
The Hilliards are not atypical. City dwellers everywhere are putting unattractive metal bars in front of their windows and peering out at the worid through a front-door peephole. Burglar alarm systems and trained attack watchdogs are being sold at premium prices and in all-time high volumes. Police are encouraging and educating people to mark each of their belongings with a hidden identification mark so that they might get them back from a pawn shop after a burglary. Karate and other martial arts of the Orient have become increasingly popular in the past ten years. These forms of self-defense have gone from relative obscurity in the Western world to becoming household words.
This prevailing "paranoid" climate may in fact not really be paranoid at all. Paranoia, in the psychiatric sense, is a condition characterized by a gross distortion of reality. The fear of others today has a considerable basis in reality. Over one himdred million guns are privately owned in the United States, and over half of American homes have at least one gun. The rate of gun homicides in America is over two hundred times that of most other large countries. For example, in Tokyo, the world's most heavily populated city, there were only three gun homicides in 1970. In that same year, New York City, with only three fourths the population, recorded the killing of over five himdred people by gunfire.
In American cities murder, particularly of one person, has become so commonplace and impersonal an event that it rarely draws our interest or attention unless the
THE TERRORIZABLE SOCIETY 81
victim is a person of renown. Today attention seems to be paid primarily to the mass killings in which a number of people or a whole family are killed.
Mary Warner, a mother of three children and in her late thirties, was referred for psychotherapy. She was a slightly overweight, attractive woman who looked very much harassed. She described herself as a "nervous wreck." She spoke of a childhood in which she had always been trusting, confident, and fearlessly independent. Now she said she was becoming increasingly "scared of everything," as she put it "I really don't trust anybody. I'm always checking windows and clinging to my husband. I'm afraid to walk our dog in the evenings. Everybody around me seems so cold and inhuman."
If a person living in any major city—^Los Angeles, Chicago, St. Louis, New York, Dallas, or any other, were to come to a psychologist or psychiatrist with these kinds of bothersome feelings of chronic anxiousness, suspiciousness of others, fear of the environment, and a sense that people might harm them, the responsible psychotherapist would have to be cautious before making an evaluation. That is, he would first have to clearly delineate how much of these feelings were, in fact, normal responses to the traumatic realities of our society, rather than being symptoms of emotional problems.
Indeed, the "paranoid" attitude toward one's environment may be becoming the normal, reality-oriented one. Openness and trust are increasingly being seen as naive, childlike, and even self-destructive ways of responding. They result all too often in hurt and disappointment. It is not surprising that cynicism, playing it "cool," and being detached and distant have become viable, even admired ways of responding to situations and people. Contrary to the lip service often paid to the value and joys of honesty and open conmiunication, the successful, sophisticated person in our society is usually the one who has learned to play the cards close to his chest, disguising his real feelings and motivations and responding to others with an attitude of guardedness and cautious involvement.
OVR rvnWTANlCAL,, NAIVE ATTITrBES
A diatribe on the socio-emotional climate of this ooimtry
82 THE NOT SO "NICE" SOCIETY
is, however, really not our purpose in this book. Nor is this state of affairs even our major preoccupation and focus of anger. Rather, our anger is directed at the incredible fact that even the rampant violence and the atmosphere of distrust and alienation in our society have not transformed our puritanical, moralistic, naive attitudes toward the phenomenon of aggression. Aggression expressed openly on a personal level, such as in the free expression of anger, the frank admission of resentment, and honest confrontation are all still considered behaviors that are at best embarrassing, in poor taste, or impolite. Most typically they are considered rude, inappropriate, unacceptable, and even "crazy."
At parties, social events, or any gathering of people, these aggressive displays will almost certainly result in social ostracization. Only "friendly," "nice," "polite," and "interested" conversation is considered to be appropriate and acceptable. Small wonder that so many people are increasingly finding social gatherings and parties boring, phony, and hard to endure. The important dimension of aggressive human interaction is taboo, making other social interactions routine, predictable, and emotionally barren and unreal. Consequently participants at these affairs invariably numb themselves with alcohol and food.
The kinds of individuals who are popular and well liked in this society, and the phrases commonly used to describe them, are very reflective of the prevailing conscious dislike and dread of personally aggressive openness.
1. "She doesn't have an angry bone in her body."
2. "He wouldn't hurt a fly."
3. "He's gentle as a lamb."
4. "They're a beautiful couple. They never argue or fight."
5. "He's really sweet. He'll do anything for you."
6. "She doesn't have a bad word to say about anyone."
In all of these instances the qualities that are praised and admired are those of nonaggressiveness.
AGGRESSION OUTLETS
Many of the institutions in our society have assumed the role of providing outlets for repressed aggressive ener-
THE TERRORIZABLE SOCIETY 83
gies. Politicians provide outlets for righteous aggression by targeting "enemies"; entertainment media program violent fantasies on film, in television series, books, and even as part of many teenage rock concerts. Professional sports that can provide the most brutal action seem to become the most popular. Newspapers that focus on body counts in war or traffic accidents or who headline brutal murders guarantee themselves huge sales. This successful exploitation of impersonal and anonymous aggression outlets is possible, we believe, primarily because personal outlets in the course of daily living in our society are taboo. We live in a time of intense and insane social violence on the one hand, and taboos against the expression of even the simplest emotions of personal aggression on the other.
This ethic has created a peculiar double standard that says that it's all right to enjoy cruelty and viciousness in anonymous, vicarious ways, but that any personal expressions of face-to-face anger are "bad."
The history of man is replete with mechanisms and attempts to control aggression. People have tried to pray it away, wish it away, or play it away. More recently they have tried to psychoanalyze it away and meditate it away. Others stUl try to drink or drug it away. But it does not seem to go away! AH we end up doing is giving it away to social exploitation. The increase of violence and brutality in our society is evidence that the traditional approaches to the channeling of aggression have not been sufficiently successful; the authors feel a new ethic for aggression is needed.
A DEFINITION OF AGGRESSION
Aggression and its various expressions are a source of great fear. To most people aggressiveness is synonymous with unprovoked, senseless, and hurtful hostility. This horrific definition of the term, which we believe is a distortion of a potentially constructive process, has embedded itself rather firmly in the consciousness of most people.
In this book the term "aggression" will refer to a whole gamut of behaviors. Our definition includes behaviors such as the direct I-thou verbal expressions of anger, resentment, and rage; self-assertion; 0|)en, leveling confrontations, the active reaching out to situations and people rather than approaching them passively; conflict expres-
84 THE NOT SO "NICE" SOCIETY
sion and exploration; open manifestation of personal power strivings; identity protection; negative self-assertiveness, i.e., learning to say "No" with the same comfort and directness with which one has learned to say *'Yes"; and nonhurtful physical expressions. Aggressive energy, as we see it, can add a vital dimension to the process of living. That is, it can, when expressed constructively, intensify the depth and authenticity of personal and interpersonal relationships and experiences.
Tragically, traditional ethics have prevented the open expression and even enjoyment of such personal aggression. The repression of aggression begins with the parental admonitions not to raise one's voice, talk back, argue, yell, or rebel. When aggressive communication is blocked and inhibited in relationships, whether they be transient or intimate, individuals enter into a reality-distorting, dishonest contract with each other. What they are saying in effect is, **You pretend these feelings and impuls^ don't exist in me and 111 pretend that they don't exist in you." This mutual, largely imconscious h3T)Ocrisy then destroys much of the capacity to define or control this large reality in oneself and to recognize it in others. It is the critical beginnings that make individuals and societies "terroriz-able'*—^that is, because of the fear of confrontation and other aggressive encounters, we believe that people severely impair their capacity to discriminate between the real and unreal dangers of our society. Manipulators can hide their intent behind a smile, a flattering comment, or a friendly manner, comfortably certain that they will not be challenged or unmasked. This inability to gauge the aggressive potential in others makes individuab vulnerable to being "shocked" and "surprised" when that "nice," "quiet," "helpful" boy or girl down the street is revealed to be a cold-blooded criminal. Most disturbing and personally harmful is the large element of fragility and ten-uousness that the repression of aggression adds to even our closest relationships. People find these relationships suddenly going from intense intimacy to total estrangement. This is a common experience in our society. Father finds himself a nonconunimicating stranger to his son. Sister turns on sister. Co-workers who liked each other yesterday, suddenly can't look at each other today, because one of them said something "wrong," and husbands and wives
THE TERRORIZABLE SOCIETY 85
of years' standing suddenly become mortal enemies "because of a petty crisis.
Aggressive feelings that have been blocked from conscious expression within the normal flow of the relationship suddenly emerge in indirect, intense, and uncontrollable forms. The presumed "harmonious" relationship suddenly turns sour as accumulated, hidden resentments and hostilities come pouring through.
The repression of aggression also produces an atmosphere of ahenation, which we believe is really in part a fonn of insulation against one's own aggressive expression and the aggressive expression of others. Many social scientists have attributed alienation to the pace of technology, the sickness of society, or the competitive nature of capitalism. However, a major overiooked root cause is the fear of and inability to genuinely and constructively encounter and relate to each other as the aggressive beings humans are.
Over the years the authors have noted the existence of three distinct coping styles used to avoid direct aggressive encounters. The most prevalent style is the seeking of one's solace and primary satisfactions from the impersonal, material products of our society. This is done by getting stoned or drunk, watching television for hours on end, plugging oneself into the stereo, or hiding inside one's automobile. The second style of coping and avoiding is one of total cynicism in relation to people. People become objects, things to be used for an immediate gratification and then discarded when their utility has been drained. This is a way of viewing others on the basis of the momentary "services" they can provide. The third style is that of wearing a mask of despair. Human beings are perceived as despicable creatures and life as ugly and depressing. This "giving up" attitude ends in negativism, emotional breakdown, or suicide.
A new understanding and way of perceiving and coping with aggression is needed or an even cruder, more alienated style of being than that which exists today will emerge. First, the destructive aspects of repressing personal aggression must be recognized and a new ethic developed to replace the unreal, humanly impossible ones we have set up as our goals in the past. This new ethic must do more than simply free aggression. It must provide guidelines, techniques, and an orientation and basis for understanding
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and controlling this phenomenon. Then it must also sensitize and educate individuals to the many hidden and indirect manifestations of aggression people exhibit and are victims of daily. For example, many schizophrenic children have been nurtured by seemingly "ideal" mothers. Re-seardi shows that these mothers are totally unaware of their aggressiveness and destructiveness. They are mothers who experience their motives and feelings as being pure and loving. Nowhere in their conscious awareness is the rage and resentment that is destroying the child. An awareness of the many shapes and faces of indirect aggression that inevitably must emerge from all who are a part of this aggression-repressive society is critical as a protection against the kinds of destructive hostilities and perversions of aggression that are rampant today.
AN AGGRESSION TRAINING PROGRAM
The authors, througji their practice of psychotherapy, have developed a theoretical framework along with a concrete aggression training program. This program is designed to serve as a stepping-stone toward the evolution of a realistic ethic of aggression. Our view of aggression on which the ethic discussed in this book is based is that the so-called *'beast'* of aggression can be tamed and its energies used for the good of the individual and society. We believe that the traditional fears of aggression have been based on a perverted and distorted form of this potentially constructive source of human energy.
The past ten years have already seen the emergence of dramatic new forms of psychotherapy that can produce deeply rooted changes of behavior througih the constructive release of aggressive energies. These are changes that could previously not have been brougiht about Still more exciting is the discovery that the open sharing of aggressive feelings—anger in particular—can be effectively utilized for individual growth and profoimd, intimate bonding between people. Individuals in our aggression training programs learning to express these feelings constructively within their family milieu or work settings find themselves rising to exciting levels of personal growttL They have also found that these feelings can be expressed without guilt.
TBDE TERRORIZABLE SOCIETY 87
without excessive hurt, and with much genuine warmth and humanness.
The interpersonally aggression-repressing society is the terrorizable society. The aggression that is prohibited from surfacing in open, personal ways, we believe, eventually creates a perverse attraction for and indirect or direct encouragement of extremely violent fonns of behavior, either in the street, on the battlefields, at home, or vicariously through our entertainment media. The repressed aggressive energy searches for displacement targets in the form of scapegoats, stereotypes, and politically approved enemies. A paranoid climate emerges as the aggression that is blodced within each of us individually is projected onto and seen as existing in others, who then become more fearsome than they really are. Our personal lives and relationships also become vuloerable as we are not able to gauge or control our impact nor accurately read the emotional messages of others.
Traditionally, the two major sources of repression in Western man and the primary sources of emotional and interpersonal problems have been repressed sexuality and repressed aggressioiL Sexual enlightenment, the undoing of its repression, is now well under way. The remaining psychological frontier is the area of aggression. Attempts at liberation of this energy will undoubtedly meet greater resistance than that experienced by the sexual revolution. Aggression has acquired an aura of pain, while sexuality has an aura of pleasure.
The choice that confronts society, however, is clear. Either people begin to accept the risks involved in recognizing and experiencing the aggression within them and leam to utilize its energy constructively, or they continue to deny its existence and give over the responsibility for finding socially approved and acceptable outlets and enemy targets to others and find themselves increasingly more in a terrorizable and paranoid climate.
CHAPTER 7
The '*Nice" Killers
"People spend too much time looking at the moon and not
enough making love." CHARLES MANSON (quotcd in Life magazine, December 19,
1969)
The personalities of many of the most highly publicized mass murderers of the past decade have typically been described in very positive terms by those who knew them personally. Some of the descriptive phrases used by their friends and neighbors were "aU-American boy," "a quiet, peaceful man," "the class favorite," "an exemplary father," "a fine Christian," "well-mannered and sensitive," and "respectful of elders."
During the preparation for this chapter the authors combed through numerous reports and interviews with the people who were acquainted with these mass murderers. It was very rare indeed to find that a friend or family member of the killer indicated they suspected that a violent act would occur or that they sensed the person was troubled and that something of this nature was even a possibility. Instead, they invariably expressed shock and amazement over the event. Some were convinced that the police had the wrong man. Others searched for a cause in the killer's recent life to rationalize that "something had gone wrong," to prove that "the behavior was totally out of character** and that the killer was "not himself' at the time that he had committed the crime. Specifically, it was remarkable how often friends and intimates of the killers made an equation between "quiet" or "polite" behavior and harmless-ness. It was as if their notion of what killers and killing was aU about had come from the old-time Hollywood
THE "NICE" iOLLERS 89
movies in which the killlers were portrayed as "bad guys**— surly, overtly hostile, foul-mouthed bully types.
The prevalent fixation on this stereotype of violent people and violent behavior may stem from the fact that it is a safe and comfortable one to hold on to. It allows individuals to maintain the reassuring belief that killer personalities are a distinct breed who are different from everybody else and are recognizable because they are obviously hostile, aggressive "mad dogs.** Evidence garnered from our study and psychological research suggests that more often than not the exact opposite is true. For example, research psychologist Dr. Edwin I. Megargee, who has studied this kind of behavior intensively, reported that "In case after case the extremely assaultive offender proves to be a rather passive person with no previous history of aggression." ^ He further described these violent individuals as people who have powerful inhibitions against any expression of aggression and who rarely ever showed anger no matter how intense the provocation. Instead they buried their resentment beneath rigid controls. Our own evidence suggests that not only were the mass murderers "civilized** in their behavior, they were indeed often the very model of our cherished stereotype of a "nice,** "well-socialized** person. They were polite, quiet, sensitive, and outwardly gentle.
It is interesting indeed that the bulk of the population who were personally unfamiliar with the killers and who only knew of them by reading newspapers or watching television reports had the opposite reactions to those people who knew die killers personally. To the former the killers were in fact "mad dogs,** horribly infected beasts who had to be put to death or isolated in prison for a lifetime to insure the safety and protection of the public. In the minds of these people the kiUers automatically became objects of revulsion, symbols to hate, and nonpeople. Neither those who knew the killers personally nor those who didn't could see the killer as a total person. Those who knew them personally bought the outward, superficial image the killer presented. Those who didn't could only see the violence but could not see the humanness and personality characteristics the killer shared in common with other people. For indeed, these killers were only more extreme versions of the prevailing ethic that requires the suppression of aggressive feelings. They were self-
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controlled and repressed in their expression of these feelings like the rest of us, only more so. Then finally one day the boiling kettle overflowed and destructive behavior occurred. Contrary to popular notion, however, the eruption of violence was not an unpremeditated, impulsive, "out of character" behavior. As Dr. Megargee has indicated and our clinical evidence also shows, these "quiet, retiring'* people had a history of being preoccupied with violence in fantasy.
DUANE rOPE: MUUDEU MN THE BANK
"A representative of the worth and dignity of the American small college and the American small town.**
It was the morning of June 4, 1967, when a green Chevrolet pulled up near the Farmers State Bank in Big Springs, Nebraska. The man who stepped out was well dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and striped tie. The poUce chief, who didn't recognize this stranger, imagined him to be a bank examiner because he was well dressed and carried a small briefcase.
Duane Pope walked over to the bank president's desk and inquired about a farm loan. When informed that the bank didn't make farm loans, Duane took a gun from his case and calmly pointed it at the banker. The tellers began to empty their cash drawers of $1,598, and dropped the money into Pope's briefcase.
Pope then motioned everyone to lie down on the floor on their stomachs. Then with a .22 Sturm-Ruger gun equipped with a silencer, he shot Andy Kjeldgaard, the seventy-seven-year-old millionaire bank president; Frank Kjeldgaard, his twenty-five-year-old nephew; Mrs. Lois Ann Hothan, a thirty-five-year-old widow with two sons; and Glenn Hendrickson, fifty-nine, a cashier. He shot them each twice, once in the neck and once in the back, to get to the heart. Three died instantly, and Frank Kjeldgaard managed to survive because the bullet narrowly missed his heart. Duane Pope took the money, walked to the door, and politely said "Good momingl" to a wheat farmer coming in. Within thirty-six hours of the shooting, the FBI knew who the killer was. He was a shy, smiling farm boy who had been graduated from McPherson College in Kansas only five days before.
THE **NICE" KILLERS 91
The people from his hometown were incredulous. They all remembered Duane as an amiable, quiet young man who had worked his way through college on a scholarship by sweeping classrooms and hauling trash. He had been co-captain of the football team in his senior year and "apparently, he had no problems at all." Duane Pope was someone who the college and community looked up to as "a representative of the worth and dignity of the American small college and the American small town."
Duane's cocaptain and roommate for 3V^ years said, **They got the wrong Pope. There are lots of Popes in Kansas and they got the wrong one." Nick, his roommate, remembered how he and Duane had been studying one night when a spider started to crawl across the floor. Nick had yelled, "Kill him, Duane, he's coming your way." "Nah," Duane had answered, "I don't want to." "And the damn bug crawled right under him. Duane just didn't like killing nothing. He used to stand in the middle of the dorm and swat flies with his 'M'-club paddle, but he only liked to stun them. He didn't like to kill them."
Duane was the fourth of eight children. If he stood apart in his younger days it was only because he Was better behaved than most farm boys. His eighth-grade teacher recalled, "There were some fiery mean ones, reaching to make war on the others. But not Duane Pope. He was one of the best."
His high school yearbook listed him as senior class president and a student council member. He was photographed as the basketball captain with the pretty, formally gowned "Homecoming Queen" on his arm. "You want to know what they thought of Duane in Roxbury?" his former roommate asked. "They looked at him and said, T hope my kids are like him.'"
His roommate was the only one who knew that Duane could even feel anger. At college Duane hid frustrations behind his smiling, farm boy mask. He wasn't capable of anything else. His roommate recalled, "He never rebelled against anything or anyone."
Duane was also a moralist in college. He wouldn't sample his roommate's homemade Italian wine that they sneaked onto campus. He would turn to the wall to undress and insisted on wrapping a big towel around himself rather than walk naked in his room.
The night after the murders Duane sat in a Salina night-
92 THE NOT SO "NICE" SOCIETY
club against the bar and bragged to the owner that he was a singer with a rodeo. He then sang "Harvest Moon" and danced with a bargirl. When someone mentioned this later to Sid Smith, his football coach, the coach said, "Duane sing and dance? Lord, no! Don't tell me any more. The more I hear, the more confused I become."
His defense claimed temporary insanity. The U.S. district attorney scoffed at that. "The boy is calm, cool, deliberated, poised. He knew everything that was said and he looked me right in the eye. No, those weren't murders at Big Springs. Those were executions." ^
CHARLES WHITMAN: SNIPER ON THE TEXAS TOWER
**A real, all-American boy."
Charies Whitman was an Eagle Scout at age twelve. He had also been an altar boy, a pitcher on the church-school baseball team, and a newsboy with the biggest route in town. A neighbor recalled, "Why, Charlie, he was a nice little boy. And he made a handsome man . . . tall, broad-shouldered, and crewcut."
As he grew older, Charies was a Marine and an architectural engineering student who married the Queen of the Fair at NeedviHe, Texas. He also became a Scoutmaster. The father of one of his charges recalled, "Why, I remember last summer [one year before the killings] when he had to go away, my son cried because Charlie wouldn't be aroimd."
The summer of 1966, Charles Whitman stepped out onto the observation deck of the twenty-seven-story limestone tower at the University of Texas campus at Austin. He had already killed his wife and his mother. He peered through the sights of his .30-caliber semi-automatic carbine and fired. He fired again and again and again. In the end, not including his mother and his wife, there were fourteen more dead and thirty wounded.
When Whitman was brought down from the tower dead, his friends were incredulous. A slight, thoughtful boy named Gary Boyd, who had shared classes with Whitman, described Whitman as "A real, all-American boy,'* big, strong, handsome, neat, hard-working, pleasant to be around, and interesting to talk with. He had made straight
THE "NICE" KILLERS 93
A*s the previous fall, and in the spring his average was B. He enjoyed civic work, graciously helped fellow students with their studying, admired his professors, and had no enemies.
Even his psychiatrist at the university, whom Whitman had gone to see at the urging of his wife because he had become violent toward her on several occasions, was rei>orted in Newsweek magazine (August 15, 1966) to have said that Whitman seemed to be an "ail-American boy." The psychiatrist, who recognized that Whitman was "oozing with hostility" because of some of Whitman's reported fantasies, had not become too concerned when Whitman told him four months prior to the killings that he kept thinking about going up on the tower with a deer rifle and shooting people. According to the doctor, it was a fairly common fantasy among the students on that campus.
Even his father, whom Charles had openly acknowledged to intimates that he hated "with a mortal passion," could not recognize the anger Charies had for him. His father was quoted as saying, "Charlie hate me? Why, I was speaking to him no more than two weeks ago and that boy told me, *Daddy, I love you.'"
Charles Whitman hid himself behind a sunny face of good nature and warmth. Scores of people were fond of him, and when Charles was brought down from the tower dead, a friend remarked, "Thafs not the Chariie Whitman I knew. When he got up there he was somebody else." ^
MARK SAMES ROBERT ESSEXs TERROR IN NEW ORLEANS
"A nice, quiet boy."
His seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Lydia, remarked, "I'd just say it's not him. He's too nice, sweet, and kind. If I had seen it happen, I wouldn't believe it."
And yet Essex had kept the city terrorized for hours on top of the Howard Johnson Motel. Before his body was finally riddled with bullets, there were at least six dead and nine wounded. Seven among these fifteen were policemen. And Essex was linked to two other police murders that had taken place at the beginning of the year.
Some attributed the killings to his hatred of whites. However, others who were close to him never knew of this
94 THE NOT SO "NICE" SOCIETY
anger. His girlfriend said, "He never said nothing about that. Seemed like he was for everybody. He never said nothin' against the white, or for the colored." A drinking buddy, Henry Day, said Essex "was just a regular dude on the comer. Nothin* political ever came up when we rapped."
Essex, a twenty-three-year-old Navy veteran, was working as a trainee in a federal- and state-financed job training program, learning vending machine repair at the time. The director of the project said, "Essex was probably the best student in the class." Both his instructors and fellow students described him as "a very mild-mannered man.*' He didn't fraternize much with the other students, however. At lunchtime he would sit by himself, studying his course work.
The residents of his hometown in Emporia, Kansas, described him as "a nice, quiet boy,'* "the average American kid," "the type of guy who didn't deal with dope or nothing like that," "a good Christian boy, "a boy like all the others.'*
The Reverend W. A. Chambers had felt that the Navy had caused a change in him but eulogized Essex, saying, "I'm satisfied that Jimmy knew Jesus. He not only talked it, he lived it as long as he was in this church.'*
Most significant was the comment from his girlfriend. "Sometimes you could be talking to him and he wouldn't listen and would have to ask you again what you'd said. He was so-o-o-o quiet. I used to say, 'James, say something.' He'd just look at me with a smile on his face and say, *What is there to say?' " ^
JfUAN CORONA: YUBA CITY MURDERS
"An exemplary father and a fine Christian.**
Juan Corona was a taciturn farm labor contractor. His conmiitment to the Church was obsessive. He said the rosary every night with his family. He went to Mass three times a week and had recently won a trophy for float decoration at the annual Our Lady of Guadalupe parade. Married and the father of four daughters, he was an active member of a group called the Cursilistas, who were trying to revive religion among the Chicanos.
In January 1973 he was convicted of having slaughtered
TBDE **NICE'' KILLERS 95
at least twenty-five men. The faces and chests of these itinerant farm workers, whom Corona had recruited from among skid row winos of Yuba City, had been hacked with a heavy, knifelike machete. In his labor camp and his 1971 Chevrolet van, police had found an arsenal consisting of two hunting knives, two butcher knives, a double-bladed ax, a club with bloodstains, pistol shells, and a machete. The killings were not those of a man gone berserk. The laborers had been systematically killed over a two-month period.
The Reverend Joseph Bishop of St. Isidore's Church, who said he had known Juan Corona for six years, called him an "exemplary father and a fine Christian." His wife, Glorida, said, "He was always a good husband. He treated us right, without violence. Such a good husband and father could never have done such a thing.** His brother testified, "He reads the Bible and writes all the time.**
Juan Corona would go to his brother's bar at night and never drink. **He would just sit silently and look at the rest of us,*' his brother testified.**
CHARLES **TEX'» WATSON: MANSON^S EXECUTIONER
"His mother's *pride and joy.' **
Charles Watson was convicted as the major killer in the Tate murder case. According to the testimony, he announced himself as "I'm the devil. I'm here to kill,** and kill he did. He shot Steve Parent, eighteen, the friend of the property's caretaker. He stabbed Sharon Tate while she was screaming, "Please let me have the baby." He shot Thomas John (Jay) Sebring, and after ordering Susan Atkins to stab Wojcieck Frykowski, Watson hit him over the head with a gun butt, shot and stabbed him, and then kicked the dying Frykowski in the head.
Photographs of the babyfaced Watson taken at his high school in Farmersville, Texas, reflected an all-American boy, a big, good-looking kid who starred in football, basketball, and track. "Tex** got all A's and B's in school. He was a regular churchgoer at the Methodist Church near his brother's little grocery store and sometimes led services from the pulpit for the preacher.
At the school he had been "popular all-ever3^thing." He
96 THE NOT SO "NICE" SOCIETY
was the sports editor of his high school newspaper. He had been voted the class favorite. He belonged to the Spanish Club, was a yell leader, had a part in the senior play, won a prize for playwriting, was an honor student, and was a member of the 4-H Club, the Future Farmers of America, and the Boy Scouts.
His mother talked of him as her "pride and joy," and related the time in August when he called her and happily told her how he had met a "Jesus named Manson.'* "^
LEO HELD: PENNSYLVANIA'^S KILLEH OF SIX
"A quiet, peaceful man, devoted to his family.*'
It was October 23, 1967, in the town of Lock Haven, I Pennsylvania. Mr. Leo Held, the father of four children, " active in the Boy Scout movement, terrorized two communities with a ninety-minute shooting rampage during which he killed six people and wounded six others before he was shot down in a gun battle in the backyard of his home.
He had reported to work on that Monday morning at the Hammermill Paper Company. He suddenly opened up with two revolvers, and his victims "thought he was joking until they saw him shooting.'* Even after Held had killed a number of coworkers, including a female member of a car , pool he belonged to, he went home and replenished his ammimition by brealdng into his neighbor's gun cabinet while he was there. In the process, he killed his twenty-seven-year-old neighbor, Floyd Quiggle, while Quiggle was asleep.
Held's relatives, friends, neighbors, and coworkers were shocked. They could offer no explanation for Held's behavior. His brother-in-law, Harold M. Brungard, a bank executive, described Held as "a quiet, peaceful man, devoted to his family.** The Reverend Stephen McKittrick, who had worked actively with Held in the Boy Scout movement, said, "I have no personal evidence other than that he was a level-headed, upright citizen with no more problems than the rest of us. He is a good family man." ®
THE LESSONS TO BE LEARNED
There is much to be learned about our culture's attitudes
THE "NICE" KILLERS 97
toward aggression, and awareness of violence from these case histories. Indeed, the murderers described are but a small handful of similar personalities written about daily who have "surprised" their families and friends by exploding into violence. In a technologically sophisticated society the common reaction of "shock" that intimates and friends express is an upsetting reflection of a profound naivete about the nature of aggression in most people. Because society cherishes a fantasy of the aggressionless man and chooses to believe that anger and hostilities don't exist unless they appear in obvious, outward behavior, individuals are bound to be repeatedly surprised, as the intimates of the mass murderers were. People seem to be all too willing to buy external trappings of socialized behavior as reflective of the reality of inner feelings.
Although we are not trying to make an equation between "nice" behavior and violent potential, we wish to destroy the stereotype that causes "nice" behavior to be bought as being emotionally authentic and desirable. Not only is being "nice" no insurance against the triggering of violent behavior, it is perhaps the worst kind of behavior that a society trying to deal with the problems of violence can reinforce. For example, the "nice" killer successfully feeds on the prevailing taboos and anxieties regarding overt and personal expressions of anger and the unreal notion stemming from this, which equates harmlessness with qualities such as "quietness," "politeness," "niceness," and an extremely "sensitive" or "soft-spoken" manner. We believe that all of these manifestations when they exclusively prevail LQ a person are emotionally unauthentic, a self-protection against the expression of anger. When aggressive feelings are expressed openly, they can at least be dealt with. When they are suppressed and hidden behind "nice" exteriors, they cannot. A culture that remains fixated on an "aggression splitting" orientation, which says in effect that some have it and some don't and we better protect ourselves against those who do, is a natural prey for sudden, unexpected, and highly destructive tragedies. The state of California has been terrorized for years by the "Zodiac" killer. He has never been caught, and we predict that many people will be surprised when he is. To have been so successful in escaping attention all of these years he has obviously acquired all the trappings and symbols of "nice" behavior.
98 THE NOT SO "NICE** SOCIETY
A PROPOSAL FOR PREVENTION
The incidence of sudden, unexpected violence by so-called "nice" people has reached significant proportions. Though we all tend to deny that it can happen to us, or even around us, indeed it is happening every day, everywhere. The writers lay the blame for this directly on the doorstep of our culture's pathological devotion to the privileges of privacy, and the social ethic that defines it as "nice" and "good neighboriy'* to never confront, ask questions of, or in any way become aggressively involved with the lives of those around us, unless we are specifically invited to. This excessive respect for privacy is a natural breeding ground for the potentially violent person hiding behind a mask of smiles and polite manners. That is, the potentially violent people are often the withdrawn loners who thrive on anonjonity and the knowledge that their real feelings will never be exposed nor their behavior challenged so long as they present a friendly face.
Our basic belief about the nature of aggression in each person is that authentic trust and security cannot be established with another person imless one first knows what a person does with his aggression, specifically his anger, frustrations, and resentments. The ever-sweet, ever-smiling, essentially passive person is particularly one who cannot be genuinely trusted because we believe he is behaving in ai humanly unreal way. We feel much safer and more secure with the neighbor who will openly complain about or yell at his neighbor's dog, or even kick the dog when he becomes particularly obnoxious. The chances are lessened that he will quietiy and secretly poison the dog at night Likewise, in the interaction between people, we feel that the person who will openly complain and confront is safer, more real, and more to be trusted than the neighbor who pretends to be accepting of everj^thing.
As a major step toward protecting the community against sudden, unpredictable violence, it is then first necessary to reject the traditional definition of the good neighbor. Typically, in our society this has meant the person who is always friendly, leaves others alone, never gets personal, is polite and smiling, clings to ceremony, and is always predictable in his "nice** way. Our new model of a good neighbor who can make the commimity safe is one who
THE "NICE" KnXERS 99
will share his negative feelings and displeasure openly, who will criticize and confront as well as praise, who will level about what he really feels and will engage others freely in a give-and-take repartee of a negative as well as positive nature.
Indeed, it is the aggression-phobic society, demanding the suppression of negative feelings, that is most vulnerable to the bizarre outbursts of violence that have become a part of our culture. Overcoming this means that people will have to once again be unafraid to become a nation of brother's keepers and reject the prevailing ethic and fanatic beUef m privacy, "nice" behavior, and the privilege of non-involvement.
Society will be far less vulnerable when it has recognized and accepted the normal, natural buildup and need for constructive release of anger and hostility in all people. Rather than admiring the person who has learned to suppress or hide these feelings behind a mask of nonaggressiveness, society will begin to cherish those who risk expression of their aggressive feelings and who seek out ways of doing this constructively.
CHAPTER 8
The Hidden Aggressors at Home and at Work
The nature of hidden aggression is such that though an overt aggressive encounter is avoided, the end result is a confused, destructive, and unauthentic form of human interaction. In the long run, as these unconscious forms of aggression avoidance continue and compound, relationships become increasingly more difficult to handle, reach an impasse, stagnate or fall apart. The once joyful parts of the relationships become thoroughly contaminated, and whatever spontaneity, pleasure, and genuineness there was in them is severely diminished.
An illustration of the impact of hidden aggression can be seen in the following brief anecdotes. In each instance the hurt that was inflicted by one person on the other was done indirectly and with a seemingly loving or friendly motive. Since neither party was consciously aware of the repressed aggression behind the deed, the situation that evolved was not manageable by the individuals involved. The hidden hostility could only be seen through the ultimately hurtful impact of the consciously well-intentioned words or actions.
1. Rudy Shapiro was told by his doctor that he had to lose thirty pounds or he would be in imminent danger of having a heart attack. On his birthday, five weeks into a Weight Watchers diet during which he had lost fourteen pounds, his wife Sheila took him for a surprise dinner at their favorite Itahan restaurant. Rudy ordered a salad, and Sheila ordered ravioli and a pizza. She managed to finish only a small part of her food and then she said to Rudy, who had been eyeing her ravioli hungrily, "Oh, go ahead dear, why don't you finish it? After aU, it is your birthday,
THE AGGRESSORS AT HOME AND AT WORK 101
and you can always go back on your diet tomorrow. YouVe been doing so well lately that you really deserve it" Rudy wanted to believe that Sheila was right, and so he ate up the rest of her food. It threw him off his diet, and, it took a good two weeks before he was able to start losing weight again.
2. Skip and Jean were in bed making love. Skip, who had recently been having problems maintaining an erection, was getting very turned on, and his penis was very hard. His wife Jean was so happy that she blurted out, "Skip, this is so exciting! You're doing terrific, I just hope you can keep that great erection this timel" WTiereupon Skip's penis became soft.
3. Karen Smitty, who was a shy, twenty-four-year-old college graduate, Uved at home, never dated, and was employed doing a menial bookkeeping job. The work was far below her intellectual capacities. One evening Karen was reading an article on psychology and casually mentioned to her mother that she felt she could use some psychological help. Upon hearing this, her father looked up from reading his newspaper and in a loving and comforting voice said, "Oh, you really don't need that psychotherapy crap, honey. You're just a late bloomer and you'll do real fine. Besides, it's really hard to find one of those head doctors who's competent and whom you can trust. Julie Nimitz, the daughter of a close friend of mother's, went to one and believe it or not he tried to rape her."
4. Tom and Ginger were supposed to be leaving for a two-week trout fishing trip the following week. Tom hadn't had a vacation in over a year and eagerly looked forward to it. Ginger, who secretly hated fishing trips, didn't want to spoil Tom's plans. She pretended to be very enthusiastic while she was actually dreading it because she wanted to be a loving wife. Two days before the trip Ginger fell in the kitchen while preparing dinner. She broke her kneecap and the vacation had to be canceled altogether.
5. The owner of a series of apartment houses, a volatile and gruff man, was getting into financial trouble because a high proportion of his tenants were consistently paying their rent late. He instructed his building managers that, effective immediately, eviction notices should be sent out if rent was not paid on time.
The manager of one of the buildings who felt he knew his boss well, thought he would protect him against himself.
1«2 THE NOT SO •^NTCE" SOCIETY
His reaction was, "I know he doesn't really mean it. He's just in one of his pissed-off-at-the-world moods. If I put that kind of pressure on the tenants now, a bimch of them will just get insulted and leave." So instead he said nothing to the tenants and doctored up the accounts to cover up for the late payers. This continued for eight months until one day the owner's books and tax records were audited and charges were filed against him for the doctored books. A number of tenants were also shocked when they subsequently received eviction notices without prior warning.
6. Michael Rubin had been with a major shoe store chain for eight years. He thought of himself as one of their best and hardest-working salesmen.
When an opening arose for the position of store manager in his location, he was passed up in favor of someone who had been brought in from outside the chain. He complained bitterly to his wife, who, unbeknownst to Mr. Rubin telephoned the vice president of the company and chewed him and the chain out for being **ungrateful bastards." Shortly thereafter Mr. Rubin received his termination notice.
Rud5r*s wife, Sheila; Jean; Karen's father; Ginger; the apartment manager; and Mrs. Rubin all believed themselves to be responding out of loving, positive motivations. In each instance, however, the outcome of their "nice," loving behavior was a hurtful one. Rudy was seduced away from his diet. We can assume that on an underlying psychological level, Rudy's diet was a threat to Sheila. Feeding Rudy had always been Sheila's way of proving her love and worth as a wife. Rudy's diet made her feel she had lost an important measure of control over him.
Skip lost his erection when Jean began to wax so ecstatically over it. We can safely conjecture that underneath Jean's "joyful" response was a need to keep Skip impotent. That way she could continue to teU herself that she was a very sexually responsive person and that all of the problems were because of Skip. In addition. Skip's impotency had given her some emotional leverage over him, which was also gratifying to her on an underlying level.
Karen was derailed from getting help for herself after finally coming to the painful realization that something was wrong in her life and that she needed help. Her father, however, on an imderlying psychological level apparently
THE AGGRESSORS AT HOME AND AT WORK 103
needed to keep Karen dependent and controllable, and he was threatened by her desire to change and grow up.
Tom never got to go on his long-anticipated fishing trip. Ginger's resentment about going, which she couldn't express openly because she wanted to be loving, was finally manifested in her self-destructive accident. It forced the trip to be canceled. But now Ginger didn't have to feel that she was responsible for depriving Tom, which might have been the case had she originally indicated that she didn't want to go.
The manager of the apartment building saw himself as being motivated by concern for the owner. In the process of trying to "save the owner from himself," he got him into serious di£Bculty. On an underlying psychological level, the manager had long been resentful over the owner's authoritarian and arbitrary ways. The manager unconsciously created a situation in which he could feel powerful while indirectly sabotaging his boss. Not only did the owner suffer from the "well-intentioned" act, but it also resulted in the evicdcm of several tenants who had never been informed or warned of the situation beforehand.
Finally, Mrs. Rubin's righteous indignation and her conscious desire to be a loving, supportive wife precipitated her husband's losing his job. Her gesture of telephoning the vice president suggests that she really saw her husband as someone who was weak and couldn't fight his own battles. By coming to his aid she actually weakened him and placed herself in a stronger position in the relationship. He was now unemployed, and she could be the supporting rock who would stand by him through the bad times.
The aggression in each instance was expressed indirectly and in a socially acceptable way. None of the hidden aggressors would have been faulted by an outside observer. Open, aggressive encounters in each case were successfully avoided. However, because they were avoided, the underlying aggressive motivations wtU continue to emerge in other forms and have a contaminating, destructive impact on the relationship. With the best of loving intentions Sheila will finally push Rudy prematurely into a heart attack. Skip's impotency, which was reinforced by another failure, will become worse. He will undoubtedly feel increasingly inadequate, agonized, and gmlt-ridden over not being able to perform well sexually for his "loving" wife. Karen's father wiQ continue to abort her striving
164 THE NOT SO "NICE" SOCIETY
for growth and independence until perhaps she's finally so anxious and withdrawn that she becomes increasingly less functional and has a breakdown. Tom and Ginger will continue to play "ideal couple," thoughtful and understanding with each other imtil a crisis arises that forces upon them the realization of their total lack of communication and genuine closeness. The owner of the apartment buildings wUl suffer embarrassment and expense over the incident with the Internal Revenue and will become less trusting of his employees. His evicted tenants will suffer also. Mr. Rubin's wife will now be in a position where she can console her husband and be the strong one while he goes through a crisis that will undoubtedly impair his confidence in himself.
From infancy on, as is explained at length in the chapter entitled *The 'Nice' Mother and the TSTice' Father," the socialization process for most people reinforces the masking of hostility. In so doing, children are being taught to be hidden aggressors. Since aggressive feelings are not permitted open expression, except under very specific and approved conditions, the children learn to aggress through manipulations, through passive resistance, or in sundry other covert and indirect ways. In the name of social appropriateness and politeness, authentic communication is being sabotaged. By adolescence and then into adulthood the original aggressive feelings and impulses have long been repressed and are finding expression in transformed, indirect, but socially acceptable shapes. The original underlying aggression motivations are lost to the perpetrator and also remain beyond the awareness of his or her target.
THE MASKS OF HOSTILITY
We have chosen a number of the more prevalent styles or masks of hostility. All of these are unconscious and automatic. Therefore, the hidden aggressor is not aware of the real intentions of his own behavior. The aggression can be recognized because the impact of the behavior on the victim is a hurtful one. Typically, however, the victim is also unaware of the meaning because the hostility is disguised behind the noblest and most loving of intentions.
We feel it is important to clearly define these forms as a first step toward their recognition. In the final analysis, the victim will carry the brunt of demasking the indirect ag-
THE AGGRESSORS AT HOME AND AT WORK 105
gression by confronting the hidden aggressor with the hurt he experiences and that is being inflicted in the name of "love." Included along with these descriptions and illustrations are tentative suggestions for self-protection or "insurance" against the hidden aggression. However, we do not underestimate the subtlety of these interactions nor the difficulty in combating them effectively.
COLLUSION
The father who out of the kindness of his heart gives his twenty-nine-year-old son money to buy liquor and encouragement to live at home is a hidden aggressor. He is colluding with his son*s resistance against becoming autonomous and responsible for sustaining himself. In the same vein the employer who brings his obese secretary a box of her favorite chocolates for her birthday is a hidden aggressor. He is colluding with her self-destructive eating habits. The mother who leaves her pocketbook open and full of money in easy accessibility of her drug-addicted daughter is in collusion with her daughter's self-destructive behavior. The "nice" guys on the college faculty personnel committee who routinely stress and praise the teaching skills of a young, nontenured faculty member and do not put pressure on him to publish are in collusion with his lax-ness and his apparent unawareness that his academic survival will depend on his publications, not his teaching ability. And tiie secretary of a technical publications division who secretly corrects the gross terminology errors of a fledgling writer with a drinking problem, thereby saving him temporarily from criticism, is also in collusion with his self-destructive behavior.
An extreme example of collusion was reported by a colleague in a case he had worked with while interning in a public mental health clinic. The hidden aggression was so blatant as to be almost unbelievable, and yet the patient was unaware of the hostility that existed behind her behavior. The patient was a forty-three-year-old married woman with a nineteen-year-old daughter. She came to therapy wanting to know how to help her husband, who she said had been acting strangely recently. That is, he had been alternately withdrawn then suddenly violent. It came out during the course of her sessions that her husband had had sexual relations with their daughter when the latter
1#6 THE NOT SO "NICE" SOCIETY
was twelve years old. The daughter had told the mother, who then proceeded to report her husband to the authorities. The father was sentenced to a hospital for the criminally insane for five years. During the time he was in the hospital, the patient, along with her daughter, became avowed nudists and joined a nearby group, which they frequented regularly. When the father was released from the hospital he was encouraged by the mother to join her and the daughter in their nudist activities. The mother was behaving as if nothing had ever happened between him and the daughter.
It is readily apparent, even to an imtrained observer, that the woman was unconsciously provoking her husband into further inappropriate behavior and another incident. In addition, the patient herself, who was both frigid and highly moralistic, could use her husband's hangups and emotional problems as a reason to escape from sexual involvement. On the deepest level she did not even want him around, but her moral self-image did not aUow her to recognize this fact. Instead, she unconsciously provoked him in the hopes that he would do himself in again instead.
Other forms of collusion are often less deeply rooted or hidden in their manifestations. These more conscious forms commonly take place in the everyday lives of most people and come under the guise of politeness. As an example, the Berlingers, who are white, were invited over by the Craw-fords, who were black, and had just bought the house next door. Mrs. Crawford prepared some "soul food" dishes, which she thought the Berlingers would enjoy trying. The Berlingers, who were Jewish, and who ate primarily kosher foods, could barely manage to eat it. However, since they didn't want to ojffend their new neighbors, they ate with phony gusto and were constantly remarking about how delicious ever54hing was. During dinner the Berlingers, groping for common conversation ground, talked about how they admired Ralph Bunche, Jackie Robinson, and Martin Luther King. The Crawfords, who wanted to relate as people and not as black symbols, resented this stereotyping but pretended great interest and enthusiasm in return. At the end of the long evening both couples exchanged compliments and said they looked forward eagerly to socializing again. Of course, they never did.
A young, gifted television commercial actress was sent by her agent for an audition that called for eight women
THE AGGRESvSORS AT HOME AND AT WORK 107
to pose as King Henry's wives for an important canned soup commercial. She went to great lengths to prepare for the audition. She outfitted herself in an elegant Victorian dress and bought an expensive wig. The director conducting the auditions recognized immediately that her face was too thin for the part. However, he liked her personally and didn't want to hurt her feelings. So he said to her, "Oh my God! You're perfecti You're beautifull I love you!"
The model was elated and went home thinking she had gotten the job for sure. When she was never called she felt bitter and betrayed. At a later date when her agent referred her for another audition with the same director, she refused to go.
Had either the Berlingers or the Crawfords risked being impolite, the beginnings of a real relationship could have been made. However, under the seeming motivation of avoiding unpleasantness each behaved in a phony manner, and the possibilities of a genuine relationship were destroyed. It was sabotaged in the name of politeness. Likewise, the conmiercial director, who didn't want to level with the actress, destroyed the possibilities of any trusting work association with her in the future.
COLLUSION INSURANCE
In the more deeply rooted forms of collusion the parties involved are usually being gratified, and the collusion becomes difficult to break. The employer who brought his obese secretary candy was doing something each could temporarily feel good about. Therefore it really becomes the responsibility of the recipient or the victim (in this case the secretary) who is being injured in the name of "love" to reject the gift. It may anger the gjver but it wiU also create the beginnings of a genuine interaction.
In the situation between the Crawfords and the Berlingers, a mild confrontation in game form such as saying, *T want to share a reservation I have about this evening and then I'd hope you'll share one in return." The Crawfords might then have said, 'The reservation we have is that we feel you see us as black symbols. It makes us feel imreal, and we care enough about having a relationship with you to want you to see us as people." Any such gamelike confrontation will run some risks and cause some anxiety.
108 THE NOT SO '^NICE" SOCIETY
However, it can also open up a floodgate of stifled feelings and transform stu£fy and unreal interactions into vital, dynamic ones.
Had the commercial director simply said, "I like you very much and appreciate the efforts youVe gone to. I want to work with you sometime in the future but you're too thin for the part," the lines of communication would have been kept open for an unimpaired future relationship.
THE ^^SICKNESS TYRANTS^^
Rather than openly asserting themselves and making direct bids for control and power, the "sickness tyrants'* use their illnesses and their symptoms to gain these ends indirectly. Typically their message of hidden aggression is: "How can you talk like that to me when I have a headache? You're aggravating me and I'll get sick again." Or, "Do you want to see me in an early grave?"
People do require some accommodations in time of illness. However, the tyrannical invalid who is always either sick, recovering, or on the verge of another illness uses these to manipulate, control, and generate guilt in those aroimd him. A former patient of one of the authors said that he was still living with his mother even thougji he was thirty-two years of age because she had a bad heart, and if he moved out she might have a heart attack and die. The bad heart was being used by his mother as an instrument of control over him.
"Sickness tyrants" never seem to get completely healthy. They need their symptoms as a mode of controlling relationships. Even when they feel good they say it in such a way that it indirectly suggests a dread of the next illness. Usually as children, "sickness tyrants" were extremely repressed in the area of aggression by highly authoritarian parents who prevented them from asserting themselves, displaying anger openly and directly, or talking back. As children they were deprived of any power or sense of control. However, when they became ill, they suddenly found themselves being treated as important, allowed to be powerful, receiving special attention, and being allowed to make demands. Sickness became their safe mode of aggression. As adults this style carried over. They use their illnesses tyrannically to create and generate guilt in others and to gain power and control
THE AGGRESSORS AT HOME AND AT WORK 109
MNSrRANCE AGAINST ^^SICKNESS TYRANTS''
Genuinely sick people are strongly motivated to get better as quickly as possible. The "sickness tyrant" who is chronically wallowing in his symptoms and uses them to make undue demands on others needs to be confronted. There is, to be sure, a socially conditioned anxiety in confronting someone who is sick because of a fear that one will be accused of being heartless or even of being responsible for making him sicker. However, for the mental health of all concerned, the "sickness tyrant" needs to be told that he will not be accommodated forever, and that those around him will not permit their lives to be curtailed cr limited by guilt manipulation. Hearing this will undoubtedly make the "sickness tyrant" angry and resentful. However, it will also be an excellent first step toward achieving a state of realistic aggressive interaction.
THE PASSIVE AGGRESSORS
Particularly those individuals who have been brought up in severely repressive, authoritarian homes in which they were prevented from expressing anger openly will be prone to expressing their aggression in passive ways. There are many varieties of passive aggression, and the following are but a few of the principal ones:
FORGETTING There are two major forms of forgetting as hidden aggression. In the first and more obvious form of hidden aggression, the aggression affects others. Someone whom you are heavily depending on to do something for you forgets to do it The chronic forgett^ is often an overtly passive, acquiescent person who is unable to assert himself openly by saying, "I don't want to do this." Instead, he passively agrees to everything and then proceeds to forget.
This style of passive aggression has the effect of driving the victim up tide wall. After all, what can one say to someone who says, "Gosh, I'm really sorry, it just slipped my mind"? This hidden aggressor is also very selective in his forgetting. He never seems to forget what is important
or pleasurable to himself. He only forgets that which is important to someone who is depending on him.
Eventually the chronic forgetter succeeds indirectly ijtt achieving what he was unable to assert openly. That is, people closely involved with him learn not to count on him or ask him to do anything important because they know it might be forgotten. The "forgetter** is thus spared from having to say "No" to requests directly.
Another form is self-destructive forgetting or passive aggression against the self. In this self-inflicted aggression the person forgets something important to himself. "I forgot to call him back for the business appointment," "I forgot my airplane ticket and my wallet," "I forgot where I put the keys to my car," or "I forgot to save the receipts that I needed for tax purposes," are typical examples.
This form of aggression against oneself is directly related to the other kind of forgetting. That is, a person who is unable to assert to himself openly and directly, "I don't want to do such and such," because he doesn't want to feel he is shirking social responsibility, achieves the same result passively by simply forgetting to do it.
To understand the possible hidden meanings of "forgetting** behavior, substitute the words "didn't want to" in place of the word "forgot.** This will be helpful to you in interpreting your own forgetting behavior and the forgetting behavior of others.
MISUNDERSTANDING In this form of passive aggression, aggression is also expressed behind a cloak of great sincerity. "I thought you said you wanted the report a week from TTiursday," or "I thou^t you wanted me to buy a long-sleeved shirt, not a short-sleeved one,'* or "I could have sworn you wanted me to mention to your boss that you were thinking of quitting your job.**
The impact of misunderstanding on the victim is often quite hurtful. In employment or socially sensitive situations particularly, misunderstanding can produce very costly and destructive consequences. The misunderstander innocently and naively says, "Gee I thought you meant . . .'* as the victim tears his hair in frustration and d^pair.
A well-known psychiatrist in Chicago specializing in hypnosis formed a foimdation and conducted periodic training seminars. To coordinate his schedule he hired a full-time office manager. On a day-to-day basis the psychiatrist
THE AGGRESSORS AT HOME AND AT WORK 111
was a tyrant with his staff and would particularly terrorize his office manager with last-minute rush demands. The office manager was, however, too frightened to express her resentment or to offer any overt resistence.
On one occasion the doctor decided upon very short notice to hold a weekend seminar. He indicated that he wanted 150 announcements to go out that very night. The office manager, who felt she was being unfairly used and pressured, nevertheless proceeded to try to rush out the material. In the process, she "mistakenly" inverted the numbers of the address where the seminar was to be held. Instead of typing 6920, she typed 6029. The problems this would cause him was her way of getting back at her tyrannical boss.
PROCRASTINATION The stock-in-trade phrase of the procrastinator is, *'Don*t worry, we'll get to it real soonl" The procrastinator passively aggresses with his exasperating delays and refusal to be pinned down to a fixed date or time. He also induces guilt feelings in his victim with admonitions such as **Don*t be so impatient," or "Relax, you'll live longerl"—and then continues to express his hostility by moving at a snail's pace.
Often the procrastinator is one who is expressing his contempt for those who work with him by keeping them waiting or forcing them to repeatedly remind him of the time of a meeting. The hidden aggression behind procrastination is clearly seen by its selective nature. Typically, the procrastinator only keeps certain people waiting and only in certain settings. When he is "turned on" and genuinely involved, he meets the schedule. For example, an unemployed actor took a part-time job in the post office to keep himself going. At the post office he was known as the guy who was always "dragging his ass around." He had to be continually reminded about certain of his duties. However, whenever he was called for a television or movie audition he became "Mr. Prompt" and always arrived earlier than his appointment time.
THE LATECOMERS This form of passive aggression was formerly viewed as being predominantly a characteristic of women. Being kept waiting by a woman was traditionally considered a normal, acceptable experience. However, individuals who chronically arrive late for meet-
112 TBE NOT SO "NICE" SOCIETY
ings, dates, or appointments are indirectly expressing their hostility for the person or persons kept waiting. The prima donna attitude of certain celebrities, consciously or unconsciously wishing to assert their feelings of superiority, often shows itself through late arrivals at meetings and interviews.
In other instances an individual who feels exploited by those he is working with yet feels impotent in terms of changing the situation may also show his resentment by constantly arriving late. This was noted in the interaction among three partners in an advertising firm in Philadelphia. The firm was only a little more than a year old and the partners had initially signed a five-year contract that committed them to an equal, three-way split of the profits. One of the partners felt resentful over the fact that he was responsible for bringing in the bulk of the business. His hidden anger over the situation came through in the fact that he always arrived late for the twice-weekly , luncheon meetings. Though his excuses always had a legitimate ring, the chronic lateness was his way of saying, "I'm more important than you, so you'll just have to wait for me.'*
One other illustration will help to point up how chronic lateness can be a form of passive aggression, a way of indirectly expressing feelings of being exploited. In the mid-1960s the federal government was financing multimillion-dollar poverty projects in ghetto communities across the coimtry. In one major West Coast city a group of psychologists were contracted to service a number of Head Start programs for preschoolers in a large black community.
The psychologists, with only a rare exception, were Caucasian Ph.D.s. They would be assigned to work an eight-hour day once a week at the ghetto site and were paid very handsomely for this. Since they were only at the Head Start agency once a week, they would plan staff conferences and meetings with teachers well in advance. Invariably, the Caucasian psychologists had the frustrating experience of arriving at a 9:00 a.m. meeting to find that a large part of the staff was not present. The absent j members would straggle in slowly and often unenthusi-^ astically over the next hour.
The psychologists, who did not wish to further impair] the already fragile rapport, were loath to make an issue
THE AGGRESSORS AT HOME AND AT WORK 113
of it. The lateness of many of the black personnel was their uncx>nscious way of expressing resentment over the intrusion of a Caucasian professional, whom they saw as being there to tell them how to relate to the children of their own community. "How can a white man understand a black person?** was their unspoken message. When, after about two years, most of the Caucasian psychologists were replaced with black mental health workers, the lateness stopped.
Latecomers are also usually creative apologizers who have a wide assortment of excuses ready at hand. These are designed to move the victim off the offensive and onto the defensive. The hidden aggression in this case can be clearly recognized by its impact. Waiting for someone who is late is irritating, frustrating, and humiliating. We assimie then that the passive aggressive intent behind being late is to do just that: to irritate, frustrate, and humiliate.
NO CARRYOVER OF LEARNING A recently divorced woman who was talking about her husband remarked, "For eight years I had to tell him each time where my clitoris was.** There was no carryover from one experience to the next
This type of passive aggressor expresses his or her aggression by never anticipating the needs of someone who depends on him or learning from previous experience. Instead, they force the victim to request anew each and every time. Victims of the no-carryover passive aggressors feel frustrated and hmt by this thoughtless behavior. However, they are often manipulated off the defensive by the hidden aggressor, who says something like, *1 can*t think of everything aU of the time,** or **Don*t get so uptight. If you want something just tell mel**
The humiliating and provocative aspects of this form of passive aggression are the clearest indications of its undertones of hidden hostility. The husband who puts his wife into the position where she has to remind him daily to put away his clothing or to take out the garbage is expressing his latent resentment
One client who attended one of our ofBce aggression seminars and who worked in a small shoe repair shop reported that every Friday he would have to remind his
114 THE NOT SO "NICE" SOCIETY
employer to pay him his salary. "He made me feel like he was giving me a handout," was the employee's reaction.
MNSUKANCE AGAINST PASSIVE AGGHESSORS
Individuals who are closely involved with a chUd, lover, spouse, friend, employee, or business associate who chronically manifests these passive aggressive behaviors should ask themselves these two questions: (1) Am I overly controlling and dominating this person (the passive aggressor) and therefore making it impossible for him to assert himself directly? In other words, am I preventing him from expressing his anger or resentment directly and thereby forcing him to do so passively? (2) Am I actually more comfortable with passive aggression, even though it*s annoying as hell, rather than having this person show his feelings to me openly and directly?
If the reader can answer botii of these questions comfortably with "No" and there is a real desire to effect change, the next question should be: In what ways am I allowing this person to get away with this passive aggressive behavior?
There is a common tendency to feel reluctant to confront passive aggressors for fear of being called a nag. After all, the victim rationalizes, they didn't really do it intentionally. Passive aggressors can be very manipulative in their presentation of themselves as innocent and well intentioned. This tends to induce guilt in the victim, who is manipulated away from his offensive position to a defensive one. He may even wind up apologizing for having gotten angry or annoyed.
In dealing with a passive aggressor, one must first avoid being seduced by one's own guilt over getting angry ati these behaviors. The important thing is not the benevolent intention of the passive aggressor's behavior but rather its: impact. If it hurts, scream in rage and don't feel ashamed of displaying the hurt Certainly if it happens over and over again, one can assume there is an underlying aggressive motive involved.
The ideal way of dealing with a passive aggressor is to try to surface the hidden hostility and bring the hidden resentment out into the open. If that is not possible, targets of passive aggression must demand some kind of
THE AGGRESSORS AT HOME AND AT WORK 115
Structure that will guarantee them that matters will not be forgotten, delayed, or misunderstood in the future.
To avoid the "misunderstandings" of this form of passive aggressor, have him or her repeat back the instructions or assignment you have given before they set out to perform the task. Never take it for granted that they have understood.
To deal with a procrastinator, set a precise, never vague deadline and estabhsh a penalty for delays. Be sure to carry out the penalty if the procrastination occurs.
Likewise with latecomers: Made a clearly defined agreement, such as, "If you're more than ten minutes late and you haven't called, I'll leave.'*
Once a stand has been taken to combat a passive aggressor, failure to carry out one's position is disastrous. That is, passive aggression is an indirect way of expressing hostility. The more the passive aggressor gets away with it, the more likely it is that he will continue doing it
THE ^^RED CROSS NVRSE^^ SYNDROME
With all due respects for the fine work done by the Red Cross organization, we have chosen these colorful words to describe a specific pattern of hidden aggression. We use the term "Red Cross nurse" to describe the person who seeks out, nourishes himself on, and indirectly perpetuates the weakness, helplessness, and vulnerability of other people.
The "Red Cross nurse" enters into and is comfortable in a relationship primarily where the other person is hurting or in trouble. His or her way of helping is a kind of over-protective mothering and doing things for the other person rather than helping the person function for himself. The "Red Cross nurse'* also joins the victim in pointing a finger at the cruel outside world rather than helping the person focus on his own responsibility in controlling what happens to him. As often happens, the "Red Cross nurse** will become threatened and resentful when the other person shows signs of becoming independent and strong. At this point he or she no longer feels needed or valuable because "helping" is the only way he or she feels strong and secure.
A striking example of this is often seen in the relationship between alcoholics and their spouses. So long as the alcohoUc remains crippled by his habit, the spouse, though
116 THE NOT SO '^NICE" SOCIETY
masochistically complaining about his or her lot in life, still has a raison d'etre. The day the alcoholic stops drinking is often the day the relationship begins to faU apart totally.
Likewise we have often noted that many parents of emotionally disturbed children are extremely loving while their child is in the throes of his disturbance. However, once the child is in jwychotherapy and begins to behave independently and aggressively, the parents rush to take him out of therapy.
The president of a small printing company had constant employee problems because of his volatile temper and his insulting manner. Employees would suddenly quit without notice because of their deep resentment toward him. He had, however, one loyal "Red Cross nurse" employee who would work fourteen-hour days and weekends when such a crisis occurred and who would support the employer in his practice of always placing the blame on the "ungrateful" employee. By his "helping** behavior, he was making it easy for the employer to continue his destructive style of relating.
ENDURANCE AGAINST THE ^RED CROSS NURSE^
It is gratifying to be cared for by someone when one is in need. However, those who find themselves deeply into a relationship with a "Red Cross nurse** are often using this hidden aggressor to avoid facing up to the responsibilities that come with being emotionally and physically healthy. Victims of "Red Cross nursing** are inviting this form of control. The best insurance against it is acceptance of the responsibilities of one's own independence. "Red Cross nurses" get their kicks out of the neediness of their victims. If one is no longer expressing or communicating neediness, the "Red Cross nurse" will often leave or be forced to change and relate in a more directly assertive way based on your strength rather than your weakness.
MORAL ONE'UPMANSHMP
Behind their holier-than-thou attitude, there exists an unspoken hidden manifestation of a power striving. The moralist's real message is, "I am on a higher plane of consciousness than you.*'
THE AGGRESSORS AT HOME AND AT WORK 117
There are moralists in many areas of life. In politics they may be represented by the pacifists, who see themselves as genuine peace lovers who are in opposition to the "hawks'* and the "killers," who lust after war. On the other end of this spectrum, the right-wing moralists who see themselves as the only true supporters of the democratic way of life view all the rest of the population as communist contaminated. In religion, the moralist may be the yoga, Buddhist, or Christ worshiper who sees himself as being on a higher plane of consciousness, enlightened, and with a personal pipeline to God and truth. In other areas of life, the moralist may be the vegetarian who doesn't "kill" to eat or the communalist who feels he has risen above the greediness of the masses and the desire for private ownership.
This is not intended to lump all those seeking more meaningful lifestyles into a group labeled "hidden aggressors." Rather we wish to point out a potential hidden aspect of this behavior that allows the moralist to feel superior and to express his contempt for others behind a mask of spiritualism, righteousness, and higher truth. In the presence of a moralist one may be prone to doubting oneself and one's values and to feel a little less worthy and a little less pure than the moralist. Generating just this kind of impact may be the hidden aggression motive of the moralist
The underlying hostility of the moralist can be seen in its impact rather than in its intention. For example, many parents have agonized over the loss of their children to the "Jesus freaks" or to some form of cultist religion such as Scientology. Inevitably the child's fanatic attempts to convert the family hides an arrogance and contempt that is really designed to express hostility and alienate the parents. The authors interpret moralistic behavior by its impact, which is an indirect way of aggressing by making oneself superior.
A new form of moralist has recently arisen from the "religion" of psychotherapy. This phenomenon originally began with patients who had gone through a Freudian analysis and felt that somehow they were, as a result, more insi^tful or emotionally healthier than the rest. One divorced man who had undergone psychoanalysis said that it was difficult for him to find a suitable mate because his analysis had made him "psychologically overqualified." In recent years, many fad psychotherapies have produced individuals who claim superiority by being able to feel more
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deeply or by being more aware or authentic than others. These contentions can best be mterpreted by their impact. If the impact is one of setting oneself off and making the other person feel like a lesser being, then we take that to be the real message of hidden aggression that lies behind the psychological "moralists."
DEFENBING AGAINST THE ^^MORALIST^^
In interaction with a "moralist" there is a temptation to agree with their puristic principles intellectually, while resisting and even feeling resentful of what is being said on an emotional level. The latter feeling is usually accompanied by other feelings of unworthiness for this resentful reaction toward a person who is striving to be so pure. It is suggested that the resentfulness may indeed be a true and healthy reaction to the hidden message of superiority of the "moralist." Accept the feeling, trust it, and express it. Do not be seduced into feeling guilty or less worthy for having this reaction. This is the best defense against the "moralist.'*
Families who have lost one of their members to a religious cult will be prone to try to seduce him back in pleading, guilt-ridden ways because they are reacting solely to the overt religious messages of their child and the concomitant feelings the messages generate that somehow they have messed up and failed their child. Only a family that can read the real message of hidden aggression can begin to make sense of and react appropriately to the situation.
THE INTELLECTVALIZERS
At the outset it is necessary to differentiate intelligence from intellectualLzing. Intelligence serves to facilitate and improve life. The intellectualizers, however, use their words and ideas to keep others at an emotional distance and to avoid the experiencing of feelings.
The intellectualizers relate primarily by judging, explaining, analyzing, philosophizing, and dissecting. Their impact is cold and mechanical. Individuals involved with intellectualizers find themselves feeling frustrated and frozen out when they try to make emotional contact. The
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intellectualizer is a hidden aggressor who expresses his hostility by not giving of himself emotionally and thereby frustrating and depriving the other person. The aggression is expressed through detachment and intellectual pontificating. This behavior masks underlying hostility as rationality or understanding.
The preoccupation with techniques in order to solve interpersonal problems is a prime example of this phenomenon of intellectualization as a way of masking hostility and avoiding a direct, aggressive encounter between two people in our society. For example, a couple who is having problems with their sex life will buy books on sex techniques to find out what they're "doing wrong." This avoids a confrontation over the underlying resentments and conflicts that are probably the real source of their problem.
A small chemical products engineering corporation was having communication breakdown problems because of resentments that had built up between their research department and their marketing people. The president decided to deal with this problem by bringing in "experts" to give lectures and conduct courses on psychology and human relations. This was a way of intellectualizing the problems rather than dealing •with them head on.
In another instance, a female employee who was constantly at odds with her boss made an appointment to talk with him about their problems. He proceeded to tell her that aU their problems were due to her strong latent resentment toward male authority figures. This was his way of avoiding a gut-level exchange of their mutual, personal resentments through intellectualizing the problem and interpreting her behavior psychologically.
COMBATING THE INTELLECTUAUZEU
Because intellectualism is traditionally held in high esteem in our society, there is a tendency to be awed by the "profound" pronouncements, explanations, abstractions, and ruminations, even when the experience of being closely and emotionally involved with an intellectualizer is in reality a boring and frustrating experience. The less brainwashed reactions of children who yawn and become restless in the presence of an intellectualizer represent a spontaneous, authentic response to the intellectualizer's intrinsic lack of emotional vitality. Few adults, however, would
12« THE NOT SO ^'NICE" SOCIETY
feel free or comfortable enough to respond to an intellectu-alizer by saying, "Your intellectualizations are boring and we're evading the issue of how we really feel about each other. I feel put off by your intellectualizations, and I don't like it/'
Combating the intellectualizer means allowing oneself to accept and be comfortable with one's gut reaction to him, which is one of boredom and impatience. Trust the feeling and don't allow yourself to feel less worthy for experiencing resentment over this emotionally empty form of responses. Rather than allowing oneself to be seduced into a game of inteUectual one-upmanship, it becomes a challenge to provoke the intellectualizer into an emotional interchange. "Cut out the intellectual crap and tell me how you feel" would be an appropriate opener.
THE NONREWARBER
As employer, spouse, teacher, friend, associate, or lover, the nonrewarder expresses his aggression by never giving positive, rewarding feedback. He or she never says, "That was a job well done," "I really liked that," "Good work," or "That was great!" This will tend to instill feelings of anxiety and insecurity in individuals who are dependent on them. Inevitably the dependent or approval-seeking person is left to feel that they have said or done something that offended or displeased the nonrewarder. Nonrewarding is a way of keeping others at a distance and preventing them from making demands or getting too close. Spouses of nonrewarders often wind up in therapists' offices or on lovers' couches seeking the positive reinforcement they are not getting at home. Friends eventually leave in frustration, and employees of nonrewarders will have to draw on their own sense of worth in order to survive and feel comfortable.
DEFENDtNG AGAINST THE NONREWARDER
The nonrewarder is usually not conscious of the rejection of others which he communicates by his detachment. Direct confrontation with a demand for positive or negative criticism and questions such as "How do you feel about what I did?" are therefore necessary in relating to a
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nonrewarder. This is particularly vital in work situations, where knowing how one is being evaluated is so important to one's sense of security and competency.
THE DOUBTER
Doubters arouse anxiety and feelings of insecurity in others at critical moments and in the name of concern when their victim is most vulnerable. The spouse who says to her husband, "Did you notice how irritated your boss looked last night during dinner? I wonder if it was something you said?" Or the person who says to his friend, "Maybe you should get a trade instead of going to college like you've planned. I hear college degrees are worthless and graduate schools are impossible to get into." In general, they promote feelings of doubt in others in the name of helpfulness.
After the death of his father, the son joined his mother in carrying on the family's restaurant business. Though there had been many opportunities in the past to expand the business, the mother's fears and doubts had always caused the father to hold off from developing the business to its potential. Consequently, financial survival was always a struggle.
The ambitious son clearly saw the great possibilities that existed and proposed a concrete, workable, and relatively conservative plan for expansion. Her reply was, "You never Uved through the depression, so you don't know what it's like. Another depression might be right around the comer. Besides, good help is so hard to find. If we start hiring more people, you only have more people to watch over so that they don't steal from you. You don't want to die of a heart attack before you're thirty-five, do you? I'm just telling you these things for your own good."
Behind the mask of concern and helpfulness, the doubter plants seeds of fear and self-doubt in those around him. His perception of situations and people is consistently negative. Behind his "helpful" counsel is the hidden, hostile wish that you share his cynicism and frustration and that you don't thrive or succeed anymore than he has.
DEFVSiNG THE DOUBTER
Doubters have an emotionally poisonous impact. They
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seek comfort for their own inadequacies and self-doubts by instilling the same in others. They don*t want to be sur passed or to see someone close to them become too secure or successful. Theirs is a very negative orientation and needs to be ignored or confronted with anger and a clear statement that their concern is really not helpful at all.
THE HELPLESS AGGRESSOR
The helpless style of hidden aggression involves the use of weakness, tears, vulnerability, hurt, and fragility as a way of generating guilt, avoiding responsibility, and controlling others. The message communicated is, "You're so capable and I'm so inadequate, you've got to help me." However, once the helpless hidden aggressor has found a victim, he will proceed to drain him with possessiveness, demands, and guilt induction. It is a powerful form of using and manipulation. In the long run, within such a relationship, the helpless aggressors emerge as the powerful persons. Their helpless pose is actually a cover for a tenaciously controlling and engulfing style.
HELPLESS INSURANCE
Those who need to reassure themselves regarding their strength and worthiness will be the ones who are the most vulnerable to seduction by the helpless aggressor. In other words, individuals with strong self-doubts and a vulnerability to flattery will be attracted to this kind of relationship.
Insurance against helpless aggressors requires a cautious response to anyone who brings out a protective urge or the desire to take over and do things for them. The hidden aggressive style of getting others to take over one's responsibility for functioning is inevitably a seductive, appealing one.
To tap the real strength and rage behind helpless aggression, the following experiment is suggested. In the next en-coimter when "helpless" is in the midst of playing weak, crying, or looking hurt, say, "I don't believe you. In fact, I really feel you're manipulating me and that you're a hell of a lot stronger than I am." It is predicted that the helpless pose will be quickly transformed into a reaction varying
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anywhere from a rageful tantrum to a stony silence. The real person behind "helpless" is now being engaged at last.
The styles of masked hostility described in this chapter are but a small handful of an endless variety of indirect and hidden aggression patterns. All are the by-products of suppressing open, direct aggressive interaction and the clinging to a romanticized image of man as being altruistic and peaceful, one who only becomes aggressive when provoked and for righteous reasons. Confronting the hidden aggressor is difficult because he will tend to respond by saying, "I only tried to help," "I didn't really mean it," or "I am not angry." His self-image will not tolerate a perception of himself as an aggressor, let alone a sneaky aggressor.
Hidden aggression can only be effectively recognized, understood, and responded to in terms of its impact on the victim. It controls, humiliates, punishes, induces guilt or dependency, and in general achieves an aggressive purpose behind a socially acceptable mask.
The short-run effect of hidden aggression is to avoid an aggressive interaction. However, the longer-range price for this pseudopeacefulness is great. Communication is distorted and obscured. Manipulation replaces genuine involvement. The vital potential of human interaction is significantly decreased and replaced by emotional alienation, stagnation, and petty preoccupations. Worst of all, forcing aggression into hidden paths results in a loss of awareness and control over it and consequent vulnerability to its unpredictable, unexpected, and disastrous consequences.
CHAPTER 9
nances Around the Beast
Unlike sex, aggression has never lent itself well to avoidance through hiding or by pretending that it didn't exist Its fruits were too apparent to be ignored. Wars, crimes, the outbreak of feuding and hostilities within and outside of families made the ugly, bothersome "beast** of aggression an undeniable fact. The most that could be done was to deny its existence on a personal level and to point a finger to the outside, placing the blame for its existence elsewhere. To keep it impersonal and channeled as much as possible, numerous socially acceptable outlets, rituals, and vicarious games have been developed throughout the history of man.
All were designed, we believe, to serve basically similar purposes. The major one, of course, was to provide sufficient impersonal outlets so that aggression wouldn't have to be experienced or expressed personally. By creating taboos against its expression on a personal level, it would be possible for each person to maintain an image of himself as altruistic, peaceful, loving, and helpful. At the same time it would allow for the creation and perpetuation of the dichotomy between the "good," "altruistic" us and the "hostile," "destructive" them. Still to this day, few people are able to pinpoint the source of aggression during a conflict within themselves. Rather, people have become highly adept at locating the origin of aggression in outside forces.
"Dances around the beast'* is our phrase for describing the many rituals, games, reaction patterns, and social conventions that have evolved over the history of man to allow him to avoid acknowledging the aggressive realities within himself. In this way he could avoid dealing with
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this real part of his emotional experience on an immediate, personal level. These "dances** have served to institutionalize personal aggresson such that these impulses could be released impersonally and behind a self-righteous, socially legitimate, anonymous mask.
Some are solemn "dances," others are playful, and many are lethal. Regardless of their impact, they all serve this same ultimate function. They allow each of us individually to disown aggression as a reality existing within and between us, helping to maintain the taboos against its personal expression, and facilitating the maintenance of our own altruistic self-image. Some of the most prominent of such "dances" in our culture that will be examined in this chapter include the "spectator dance," the "religious dance," the "police dance," the "sporting dance," the *Var dance," the "pacifist dance," and the "scientific research dance."
Periodically these "dances" break down and their deeper, destructive essence temporarily surfaces. Such is often the case during wartime, when it is suddenly discovered that a village or city of innocent, unarmed people including women and children have been senselessly and viciously brutalized by "our side." The aggression that had been legitimized as a part of the self-righteous "war dance" has apparently been indulged in, for no seemingly justifiable purpose. Everyone is "shocked." Or this breakdown may occur as a by-product of the "sporting dance." We are angered and "revulsed," for example, when a boxer is killed during a boxing match.
It then becomes necessary to rationalize these "lapses** in the ritual in order for people to maintain their illusions of righteous, ideologically pure motivations and their lack of personally aggressive motivations. The senseless war killings may then be blamed on battle conditions, morale breakdown, fatigue, or as the result of a temporary lapse. In extreme cases where the sense of guilt is too great, a few soldiers may be pinpointed as being the real culprits, and they are then scapegoated. In the case of the boxer*s death, there are usually outcries that the sport be abolished or that reforms be instituted. In each instance the blame has been placed, appropriate noises about change have been made, everybody feels better, and the "dance** continues.
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THE ^^SPECTATOR DANCE^^
"On a March night in 1964 at least 38 neighbors in the Kew Gardens Apartments in New York City watched a young woman named Kitty Genovese being stabbed to death by an assaultive maniac. Although it took him more than half an hour to murder her, brutally and in cold blood, not one of the witnesses ever lifted the telephone to call the police. The victim*s cries of terror and her : attempts to fight back left no doubt in anyone's mind about what was going on. It was 3:00 a.m. but no one helped." i
The Kitty Genovese case was a clear incident in which the "spectator dance" broke down or went too far. Traditionally, the steps to this dance go something like this: A person picks up the morning newspaper, watches television, or listens to the radio and avidly reads about the latest rape, murder, or war statistic. Then the person says to himself something like, 'This city is getting scary. There are a lot of crazy people running loose," or "There's a real breakdown in moral fiber," or "When will *they' j ever learn that violence is senseless?" In no case is there an awareness of receiving vicarious pleasure from reading about these killings or crimes.
The "spectator dance" may also take other forms, such as watching television's violent movies or going to violent . sporting matches. In the mid-1960s during the Watts riots j in the Los Angeles area, the authors were frankly amazed at the hordes of people who tried to drive into Watts so as to be able to watch the action from close up. In spite of the reports of danger, viewing the violence at close hand was for many people an irresistible attraction.
Nothing guarantees the sale of huge volumes of newspapers more than a gory and shocking murder. Details about the Sharon Tate murder case and the Kennedy assassinations filled newspapers and magazines for months. The public's appetite for the details seemed to be insatiable.
The essence of the "spectator dance" is to provide people with a vicarious outlet while at the same time allowing them to rationalize their fascination and interest as motivated only by curiosity, or for information or educational purposes. Few, if any, ever can or do say to themselves,
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■'I enjoy watching violence'* or "I love seeing somebody get killed or beaten. It satisfies a real need."
The Kitty Genovese murder incident was miiisual mainly for its detailed docimientation of the destructiveness behind the spectator stance. If they were aware of any vicarious excitement or enjoyment in witnessing this cruel scene, and undoubtedly most wouldn't have been, the witnesses would have been loath to own up to it. Instead, they rationalized their paralysis in the face of seeing someone brutalized as the result of being too "frightened," "embarrassed," or simply not wanting to "get involved.'*
It was absolutely essential for the witnesses to maintain their own altruistic self-images by rationalizing this vicariously pleasurable hostility release with more consciously '*imderstandable,** self-comforting, and sympathy-promoting motivations, such as "Maniacs should be dealt with by the police or by a psychiatrist,** or "It was none of my business," or "I figured somebody else had already called,'* or "It was just too horrible and I couldn't think.**
In this dance, then, vicarious release is received through observing. The spectator need not even be consciously aware of receiving any pleasure, and, in fact, rarely if ever is. When as in the Genovese case the spectator seems to be caught red-handed, engrossed with the action and doing nothing to stop it, the already mentioned rationalizations have to be created.^
THE ^^RELIGIOUS UANCE^^
**TmTi the other cheek. . . .**
Every Sunday millions of people listen to religious preachers on the radio. One such preacher was recently saying, "Do you know what the No. 1 killer of man is?" Then in a voice both urgent and weighty with wisdom, he answered his own question. "Resentment,** he said, "is the No. 1 destroyer of human souls.**
The preacher was acting as a choreographer for the "religious dance,** which is designed to exorcise the devilish demon of aggression. Step 1 of this dance involves labeling a feeling or behavior such as anger or resentment as evil or the work of the devil. The second step involves disowning oneself from these feelings or impulses and "rising above them.** In the final step, convinced that these feel-
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ings no longer exist within themselves, one sets out to help others become equally as pure. Should the religious person falter and occasionally betray the existence of these taboo feelings within himself, the rationalization process begins. *'I was just not myself," "The devil made me do it," "I probably haven't really given myself over fully to Jesus yet."
The theme behind the "religious dance" is that religious or spiritual people are not personally aggressive. Hate, power drives, resentment, and jealousies are unspiritual feelings belonging to the nonreligious. These feelings are kept suppressed by warnings about sin, guilt, and punishment by hell fire. This creates in the religious person a splitting off from this important element of his humanness and in its place creates a "not me" situation. That is, should the feeling or impulse momentarily break out, the person can reassure himself it was "not the real me, but a part of the evil or ungodly me."
Religion, it can be posited, has derived much of its power by providing a process of aggression control through worship of a god who is said to have control over all horrific elements and bad demons. By so doing, it has also assumed the role of gatekeeper over the aggressive impulse. When aggression is acted out, the religious leaders will decide who, in the name of God, its victims will be. It is almost cliche to point out the innumerable wars and killings that have occurred in the name of religion and holiness. The wars in Pakistan and Ireland are only two very recent examples.
Religious leaders have also always seemed to have an uncanny knack for placating and allying themselves with existing aggressive power structures. Though the Pope makes his annual prayer for peace, the Church rarely if ever takes a stand against the warring efforts of a particularly powerful country. Instead, a loose rationalization system always allows it to find appropriate justifications. The Reverend Billy Graham was imdoubtedly a better breakfast sermonizer and golf partner to President Nixon than an influence against the wars then going on in Vietnam and bombings that were taking place in other parts of Southeast Asia.
The writers as psychotherapists have seen the effects of traditional conservative religious positions on the process of human communication. In a recent psychotherapy
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marathon, one highly religious Caucasian male, age twenty-four, repeatedly responded to others in the group who asked him how he felt about them by saying that he loved everybody in the room and had no negative feelings about anyone.
The effect of this young man's proclamations of love for everyone, interestingly enough, was an alienating one rather than one that facilitated trust and intimacy. His "love" for others was not experienced by them as real. In fact, it was experienced as dehumanizing, for he related to everybody in an identical way. Underneath the "love" this young man communicated an arrogance or "put down" attitude that in effect was saying, "I am not bogged down with petty emotions of anger or resentment. I have risen above them."
Radical elements in the Church have begun to have a humanizing impact on it. Many religious leaders have become students of psychology and participants in various self-liberating experiences. Thus, many are beginning to own up to their real feelings and personal aggressiveness. However, so long as religion perpetuates the dichotomous perceptions of people in terms of "good" and "bad," "evil" and "holy," it will remain a powerful force in perpetuating the aggression sickness of our culture.
THE ^^POLICE DANCE'^
The basis of the "police dance" is the **mad dog** perception of aggression. This produces the myth that says, "If we capture and isolate those 'mad dogs* who have been infected by this aggression *virus,* the rest of us will be safe.**
It has been said that society hates its criminals but loves its crimes. It is one of the striking characteristics of aggression-phobic cultures such as ours that crimes are a source of intense public fascination. Bizarre mass murders assure the media of huge audiences. The book and film The Godfather, known mainly for its endless succession of criminal violence and the romanticrzation of top dog criminals, became one of the most successful commercial films ever made. Over fifty million dollars in gross receipts were received within the first nine months of release.
The "mad dog'* choreography also fosters a dehumaniz-
13i THE NOT SO "NICE" SOCIETY
ing, alienating, and emotionally unrealistic dichotomy among people. There are the "criminals" and the "law-abiding" citizens, or the "good" guys and the "bad" guys.
Every once in a while a "Watergate" phenomenon occurs, such as that in 1972-73, during which some of the final authorities and symbols of "law and order** in this country were revealed to have engaged in criminal behavior themselves. Nothing is so fascinating and makes for such delicious gossip as when a "good" guy is suddenly revealed to be a "bad" guy. Watergate, for many of the American population, became like a television serial in which the latest developments and intrigues were anxiously awaited. As in all extreme breakdowns of dances designed to maintain the taboos, rationalizations about Watergate abounded. Criminal behavior was interpreted as lapses of judgment, too much zeal, or a trumped-up vendetta by the press.
An inherent danger in this compartmentalized way of viewing people as "good" and "bad," "criminal" and "good citizen,** is that sensitivity to the actual aggressive potential of others is lost. We become liable to being suddenly "surprised*' by that "nice" kid next door who is suddenly revealed to be a vicious killer. This has become an increasingly common phenomenon in our culture. After a particular bizarre killing or killings, friends and neighbors of the killer, when interviewed, remarked that they "couldn*t believe it.*' "He was so quiet and unassuming," they say, or, "They've got to have the wrong man.'* What is the lack within ourselves that causes us to remain insensitive to these kinds of destructive vibrations until a crime has already been committed? The authors feel the cause lies partly in the unrealistic, image-oriented way of dichotomizing people as "aggressive" or "nonaggressive," "criminal** or "lawabiding citizen,*' "good** guy or "bad" guy and not being aware of the many variations and degrees of aggressive potential in each person.
It may seem a cliche to point out that criminal potential exists in almost everybody. However, in plain fact, from a legal point of view, most people have been guilty of criminal behavior. This may range from white-collar crimes such as stealing materials from the oflBce to smoking marijuana, cheating on income taxes, acting out secret and technically Ulegal sex practices, or committing traffic oJQfenses when the police are not around to observe. The
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true crime in our society has become getting caught or being so poor that one cannot afford to hire the finest legal assistance to get one off the hook.
Personal aggression-phobic societies also seem to need their criminals as targets and outlets for righteous wrath for, indeed, they seem to indirectly promote and perpetuate criminal behavior. The prevailing attitude in our society toward the drug problem is one such obvious example. Though some of the most respectable elements of our society have openly acknowledged using marijuana, LSD, and even cocaine, and openly and laughingly smoke pot in their own homes and at parties, those who get caught continue to be labeled as criminals. Society is especially venomous in its reaction to dealers. They are viewed as social scum while they are in reality only satisfying an existing demand. Furthermore, by continuing to deny hard-core drug addicts legal access to drugs, they are forced to go underground and enter into criminal lifestyles to support their habit. While the increasing numbers of burglaries and muggings are bemoaned drug addicts are literally pressured into performing these crimes through the refusal to deal with them openly. Furthermore, legal prohibition of abortion until a few years ago made criminals out of distressed, pregnant women, and often well-intentioned, courageous doctors. Prostitution or patroniza-tion of prostitutes continues to be a crime in spite of the fact that a very high percentage of men would openly admit to having patronized a prostitute in the course of their lifetime.
All of these point to the fact that on a subconscious level, society may be purposely creating the conditions to produce criminal behavior. In that way it can continue to assure itself of targets for indignation and righteous wrath.
Occasionally, the "police dance" breaks down in a blatant way. It may be discovered, as they did in New York City, for example, that a very high percentage of the police themselves were corrupt. By taking "payoffs" they were guilty of criminal behavior. The "police dance" also breaks down when we read of outrageous police brutality or the impulsive shooting or arrest of innocent people by the police. Sometimes in extreme cases a policeman is prosecuted. Most times these behaviors are simply viewed as "part of the game" and ignored.
At present, the "poUce dance" is a necessary and often-
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times successful approach to getting the more blatant and vicious criminals off the streets. However, in the long run, criminals need to be seen in part as aggression scapegoats or targets for aggression-phobic parasites who derive stability and gratijBcation from labeling some individuals as criminak and prosecuting them accordingly. Ultimately in an aggression-healthy culture the "police dance" will be recognized for its polarizing and dehumanizing impact— one that makes emotional hypocrites of us all.
THE ^SPORTING DANCE^*
We like boxing champions to be vicious animals in the ring and docile gentlemen outside of it. People need to believe that the boxer's behavior in the ring has no valid emotional connection to his behavior or feelings outside of it. Occasionally, as in the case of the late former heavyweight champion, Sonny Liston, who appeared to be as angry in private as he was in the ring, people become very offended by this breach of sport ethics.
Similariy, in football, hockey, or other violent sports, society encourages extreme aggressiveness on the playing field and then demands that these feelings be denied off the field. The "sporting dance" is theoretically designed to allow participants to "blow off steam" and to discharge aggression through the ritual of sports in a way that is impersonal. As an outlet for an energetic, aggressive interchange, the "sporting dance" can be one of the most pleasurable "dances around the beast." As a meaningful way of dealing with conflict and aggression, however, it is sorely lacking.