IN THE CASE of George we considered a person who was not evil but was in grave danger of becoming so. Then, in the last chapter, to illustrate some of the principles involved, a couple was described who, for whatever reason, had crossed the line. Now I shall continue to describe others who are frankly evil. I shall also address the issue of healing those who, like Bobby, are their victims.
Since I met the men and women and families I am describing in my practice of psychiatry, I am concerned that the reader will think: Ah, yes, but these are special cases. These people may be evil, but he is not talking about my kind of people— my colleagues, my acquaintances, my friends or relatives. There is a tendency among lay persons to think that people who see a psychiatrist are abnormal, that there is something radically different about them in comparison to the ordinary population. This is not so. Like it or not, the psychiatrist sees as much psychopathology at cocktail parties, conferences, and corporations as in her or his own office. I am not saying there are absolutely no differences between those who visit a psychiatrist and those who do not, but the differences are subtle and, as often as not, reflect unfavourably upon the ‘normal’ population. The process of living is difficult and complex, even under the best of circumstances. We all have problems. Do people see a psychiatrist because their problems are greater than average or because they possess greater courage and wisdom with which to face their problems more directly? Sometimes one reason is the motive, sometimes the other, sometimes both. While the data I am presenting are drawn from my psychiatric practice, most of the time I shall be speaking not so much about psychiatric patients as about human beings anywhere and everywhere.
Indeed, the case of Bobby and his parents was truly unusual in only one respect: its relatively successful outcome. Bobby was fortunate that he did steal a car and attracted attention before he killed himself. It was fortunate that he had a relative who was willing to assume the burden of his care. And it was fortunate that through his parents’ insurance there was the money to support his psychotherapy. Most victims of evil are not so lucky.
But in other respects Bobby’s case was not unusual. Even in my small practice I see a new set of parents like Bobby’s every month or so. It is no different for other psychiatrists. We brush against evil not once or twice in a lifetime but almost routinely as we come in contact with human crises. And it is my contention that the name of evil should have a definite place in our lexicon. It is true that there are very real dangers to such naming, and they will be discussed in the final chapter. But without the name, we will never clearly know what we are doing in such cases. We will remain limited in our capacity to help the victims of evil. And we will have no hope whatsoever of dealing with the evil ones themselves. For how can we heal that which we do not even dare study?
While the reader may acknowledge that there was something evil about Bobby’s parents, many lay persons may be inclined to feel that the case was an aberrant one. Just because I say that we brush up against evil with regularity does not make it a fact. After all, there can’t be very many parents who give their children suicide weapons for Christmas! Therefore I shall present a case of another fifteen-year-old boy, who was both the identified patient and a victim of evil. The value of this more subtle case may lie precisely in its differences from Bobby’s. For here we will be talking about a boy whose parents were well-to-do and who, while they demonstrated no apparent desire to literally kill him, seemed bent, for whatever reason, on killing his spirit.
At one point during my career I held an administrative post in the government which generally precluded the practice of ongoing therapy. I did from time to time, however, see people for brief consultations. Often they were high-ranking political figures. One such was Mr R., a wealthy lawyer on leave of absence from his firm while serving as general counsel to a large federal department. It was June. Mr R. has consulted me about his son, Roger, who had turned fifteen the month before. Although Roger had been a good scholar in one of the suburban public schools, his marks had declined gradually but steadily throughout the ninth grade. In his end-of-the-year evaluation the school guidance counsellor had told Mr and Mrs R. that Roger would be promoted to the tenth grade but suggested a psychiatric evaluation to determine the cause of his academic decline.
As was my custom, I saw Roger, the identified patient, first. He looked very much like an upper-class version of Bobby. Wearing a necktie and well-tailored clothes, he still had that gangly, awkward look of late pubescence. He was similarly non-verbal and kept his gaze on the floor. He did not pick at his hands, and I did not sense him to be depressed to the same degree as Bobby had been. But his eyes had the same lifeless quality. Roger was clearly not a happy boy.
As with Bobby, I initially got nowhere talking with Roger. He didn’t know why his grades were so poor. He wasn’t aware that he was depressed. Everything in his life, he said, was ‘all right.’ Finally I decided to play a game I usually reserved for younger children. I picked up an ornamental vase from my desk.
‘Supposing this was a magic bottle,’ I said, ‘and if you rubbed it, a genie would appear who could grant you any three wishes you might want. Anything in the whole world. What would you ask him for?’
‘A stereo, I guess.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘That was a smart thing to ask for. You’ve got two choices left. So I want you to think big. Don’t worry if it seems impossible. Remember, this genie can do anything. So ask for what you really want the most.’
‘How about a motorbike?’ Roger asked without enthusiasm but with somewhat less apathy than he’d shown up until then. He seemed to like the game, at least more than he’d liked anything thus far.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘That’s a great choice. But you’ve got only one left. So remember to think big. Go after what’s really important.’
‘Well, I’d like to go to boarding school.’
I stared at Roger, caught by surprise. Suddenly the level had shifted to something real and personal. I mentally crossed my fingers. ‘That’s a very interesting choice,’ I commented. ‘Could you tell me more about it?’
‘Nothing to tell,’ Roger mumbled.
‘I suppose maybe you want to go away to school because you don’t like the school you’re in now,’ I suggested.
‘My school’s all right,’ Roger responded.
I tried again. ‘Maybe you need to get away from home, then. Maybe there’s something at home that’s bothering you.’
‘Home’s all right,’ Roger said, but there seemed to be a hint of fear in his voice.
‘Have you told your parents you want to go away to boarding school?’ I asked.
‘Last fall.’ Roger’s voice was almost a whisper.
‘I bet that took a bit of courage. What did they say?’
‘They said no.’
‘Oh? Why did they say that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How did it make you feel when they said no?’ I queried.
‘It’s all right,’ Roger answered.
I sensed we had gotten as far as we were likely to get in a single session. It would take a long time for Roger to develop sufficient trust in a therapist to really open up. I told him I was going to speak with his parents for a while and afterward I would talk briefly with him again.
Mr and Mrs R. were a handsome couple in their early forties—articulate, impeccably dressed, obviously to the manor born.
‘You’re so kind to see us, Doctor,’ Mrs R. said, genteelly removing her white gloves. ‘You have an excellent reputation. I’m sure you must be very busy.’
I asked them to tell me how they perceived Roger’s problem.
‘Well, that’s just why we’ve come to you, Doctor,’ Mr R. said, smiling urbanely. ‘We don’t know how to perceive the problem. If we knew what was causing it, we could have taken appropriate action and wouldn’t have needed to consult you.’
Quickly, easily, almost conversationally, fluidly alternating their responses, they outlined the background for me. Roger had had a lovely summer at tennis camp just before the beginning of the school year. There had been no changes in the family. He’d always been a normal child. The pregnancy was normal. The delivery was normal. No feeding problems during infancy. Toilet training was normal. Peer relations were normal. There was little tension in the home. They—the two of them—had a happy marriage. Of course they had an occasional rare argument, but never in front of the children. Roger had a ten-year-old sister, who was doing well in school. The two of them squabbled between themselves of course, but nothing out of the ordinary. Of course it must be difficult for Roger to be the older child, but then that didn’t really explain things, did it? No—his fall in grades was a mystery.
It was a pleasure to interview people so intelligent and sophisticated that they answered my questions before I even asked them. Yet I felt vaguely uneasy.
‘Although you don’t know what’s bothering Roger,’ I said, ‘I’m sure you must have considered some possible explanations.’
‘We’ve wondered, of course, whether the school might not be right for him,’ Mrs R. responded. ‘Since he’s always done well until now, I hesitate to think so. But after all, children do change, don’t they? It may not be what he needs now.’
‘Yes,’ Mr R. contributed. ‘We’ve given some thought to putting him in a nearby Catholic parochial school. It’s right up the street and remarkably inexpensive.’
‘Are you Catholics?’ I inquired.
‘No, Episcopalians,’ Mr R. answered. ‘But we thought that Roger might benefit from the discipline of a parochial school.’
‘It’s got a very fine reputation,’ Mrs R. added.
‘Tell me,’ I asked, ‘have you given any thought to the possibility of sending Roger away to boarding school?’
‘No,’ Mr R. replied. ‘Of course we would if it was something you recommended, Doctor. But it would be a costly solution, wouldn’t it? It’s outrageous what those schools are charging nowadays.’
There was a brief moment of silence. ‘Roger told me he asked you last fall if he could go away to boarding school,’ I said.
‘Did he?’ Mr R. looked blank for a second.
‘You remember, dear,’ Mrs R. said, jumping in smoothly. ‘We considered it quite seriously at the time.’
‘Certainly. That’s right,’ Mr R. agreed. ‘When you asked whether we’d given thought to it, Doctor, I assumed you meant recently—since Roger’s had this problem with his grades. Back then we gave it considerable thought.’
‘I gather you decided against it?’
Mrs R. picked up the ball. ‘Perhaps we’re prejudiced on the subject, but both my husband and I feel that children shouldn’t just be sent away from the home at a young age. So many children, I think, go to boarding school just because their parents don’t want them. I think children do best when they’re in a good, stable home, don’t you, Doctor?’
‘But perhaps we ought to reconsider it now, dear, if the doctor thinks it is advisable,’ Mr R. interjected. ‘What do you think, Doctor? Do you think that Roger’s problem would be solved if we sent him away to school?’
I was torn. I sensed there was something radically wrong with Mr and Mrs R. But it was subtle. How could they have forgotten that their son had asked to go away to boarding school? But then they claimed they did remember. It was a lie, I suspected, a cover-up. Yet I couldn’t be sure. And so what? Should I build a whole case around such a little lie? I imagined there was something so wrong in the home that Roger desperately needed to get away from it—and this was why he sought boarding school. Still, that was just imagining. Roger wasn’t telling me about anything bad at home. On the surface Mr and Mrs R. were highly intelligent, concerned, responsible parents. I had a hunch that boarding school would be the healthiest place for Roger. But I had no proof of this. How could I justify it to his parents, particularly when they seemed so cost-conscious? Despite their wealth? And why were they so cost-conscious? Certainly there was no way I could give them any guarantee that Roger’s grades would improve or that he would be any happier if he were away from home. Yet might it not somehow hurt him if I equivocated? I wished I could somehow be somewhere else.
‘Well?’ asked Mr R., waiting for my response.
‘First of all,’ I said, ‘I think Roger’s depressed. I don’t know why he’s depressed. Fifteen-year-olds usually aren’t able to tell us why they’re depressed, and it customarily takes us a good deal of time and work before we can find out. But his falling grades are a symptom of his depression, and his depression is a sign that something is not right. Some change does need to be made. It’s not just going to go away. It’s not something he’s just going to grow out of. I think that the problem will get worse unless the right thing is done. Any questions so far?’
There were none.
‘Next, I think it is quite likely sending Roger away to boarding school would be the right thing—or one of the right things,’ I continued. ‘But there is no way at this point I can be sure. Most of what I have to go on is simply his own desire. Yet that’s a lot. In my experience, children this age do not make such requests lightly. Moreover, while they may not be able to express their reasons, they often have an instinctive sense of what is right for them. Roger still wants to go to boarding school six months after he first talked to you about it, and I think you should take his desire very seriously and respectfully. Any questions up to this point? Is there anything you don’t understand?’
They said they understood.
‘If you had to make a decision right at this moment,’ I concluded, ‘I would tell you to go ahead and send him to boarding school. But I don’t think you have to make that decision immediately. I think there’s probably time to take a deeper look. Since I can’t give you any firm guarantees at this point that Roger will do better in boarding school, and if you want to be more clear that it’s the right thing to do, I suggest you take such a deeper look. As I explained to you over the phone when you first called, I only do brief consultations, so I wouldn’t be able to help you further. Besides, I’m not the best person to do so. When we work with young teenagers who aren’t in touch with their feelings, one of the best tools we have is psychological testing. What I would like to do is refer you and Roger to Dr Marshall Levenson. He’s a psychologist who not only does testing but specializes in the evaluation and psychotherapy of adolescents.’
‘Levenson?’ Mr R. queried. ‘That’s a Jewish name, isn’t it?’
I looked at him, surprised. ‘I don’t know. I suppose so. Probably half the people in our business are Jewish. Why do you ask?’
‘No particular reason,’ Mr R. replied. ‘I’m not prejudiced or anything. I was just curious.’
‘You say this man is a psychologist?’ Mrs R. asked. ‘What are his credentials? I’m not sure I would trust Roger to someone who was not a psychiatrist.’
‘Dr Levenson’s credentials are impeccable,’ I said. ‘He is as trustworthy as any psychiatrist. I would be happy to refer you to a psychiatrist if that is what you’d like. But I honestly don’t know of one in the area whose judgment I would respect as much in this type of case. Furthermore, any psychiatrist would be likely to want to refer Roger to a psychologist for testing anyway, since only psychologists do testing. Finally,’ I said, looking at Mr R., ‘psychologists’ fees are a little less expensive than psychiatrists’.’
‘Money is no object when it comes to one of our children’ Mr R. responded.
‘Oh, I’m sure that your Dr Levenson is appropriate,’ Mrs R. said, beginning to put on her gloves.
I wrote down Marshall Levenson’s name and phone number on a prescription blank and gave it to Mr R. ‘If there are no more questions, I’ll see Roger now,’ I said.
‘Roger?’ Mr R. looked alarmed. ‘What do you want to see Roger again for?’
‘I told him that after I saw you I would meet with him again,’ I explained. ‘I do that routinely with all adolescent patients. It gives me a chance to tell them what I’ve recommended.’
Mrs R. stood up. ‘I’m afraid we need to go. We hadn’t expected this would take so long. You’ve been very kind, Doctor, to give us so much of your time.’ She held out her gloved hand for me to shake.
I took her hand. But as I did so I looked her in the eye, saying, ‘I need to see your son. It will take no more than a couple of minutes.’
Mr R. seemed in no hurry. Still sitting, he said, ‘I don’t see why you need to see Roger again. What business is it of his what you recommend? After all, it’s our decision, isn’t it? He’s just a child.’
‘It is ultimately your decision,’ I acknowledged. ‘You’re the parents and you’re the ones who pay the bills. But it’s his life. He’s the one who’s most concerned with what goes on in here. I will tell him that my recommendation of boarding school and/or Dr Levenson is just a recommendation, and that you are the ones who have to make the decision. In fact, I will tell him that you are in a better position to know him and what is best for him than I am. You’ve spent fifteen years with him and I less than an hour. But he has a right to know what is happening to him, and assuming that you do take him to Dr Levenson, it is only fair to explain to him what to expect. Not to do so would be rather inhumane, don’t you think?’
Mrs R. looked at her husband. ‘Let the doctor do what he thinks best, dear. We’ll be even later for our engagement if we sit around discussing philosophical issues.’
So I did get to talk to Roger again, and I explained to him the gist of my recommendations. I also explained that if he did see Dr Levenson, he would likely take some psychological tests. I told him that he should not be frightened of these. Almost everyone, I told him, experienced this testing as fun. Roger said it would be ‘all right.’ He had no questions. At the end, instinctively, I did something slightly unusual. I gave him my card and told him he could call me if he needed to. He had a wallet, and he put the card in it carefully.
I called Marshall Levenson that night to let him know that I had referred Roger and his parents to him. I told him that I was not sure they would follow through.
A month later I met Marshall at a meeting and asked him about the case. He said that the parents had never gotten in touch with him. I was not terribly surprised. I assumed that I wouldn’t hear of Roger again.
I was wrong.
It was at the end of January, seven months later, that Mr R. called me for a second consultation. ‘Roger’s really done it this time,’ he said. ‘The boy’s got himself in serious trouble now.’ He told me that Roger’s school principal was sending me a letter about the ‘incident’, which I should receive in a few days. We made an appointment for the following week.
The letter arrived in the next afternoon’s mail. It was from Sister Mary Rose, principal of the St Thomas Aquinas High School in the suburb where the family lived:
Dear Dr Peck
When I advised Mr and Mrs R. to seek psychiatric consultation for their son, they told me you had treated Roger previously and asked that I send you this report.
Roger came to us this past fall from the local public school where his grades had been declining. He has not done well here academically either, earning only a C– average for the term. His social adjustment, however, has been excellent. He is well liked by both students and faculty. Particularly impressive has been his performance in our community affairs programme. As part of his participation in this programme, Roger elected to work with retarded children in the area during after-school hours. He not only demonstrated visible enthusiasm about this activity to me, but in their report his supervisors stressed his unusual empathy and dedication in working with the children. In fact they even voted funding for him to attend a mental-retardation conference in New York City over the Christmas holidays.
The incident precipitating this letter occurred January 18th. On that afternoon, Roger and a classmate broke into the room of Father Jerome, an old retired priest who lives at the school, and stole a watch and several other personal belongings. Ordinarily this would be a cause for dismissal from the school, and, indeed, the other boy involved has already been dismissed. The incident, however, seems to us distinctly out of character for Roger. Consequently, despite his serious academic underachievement, at a faculty meeting it was voted to retain Roger in our school subject to confirmation from you that such would be in his best interests. Obviously we like the young man a great deal and feel that we have something to offer him.
One other piece of information may be helpful to you. At the faculty meeting several of his teachers commented that Roger seemed to them quite depressed after returning from his Christmas holidays even before the incident in question.
I am looking forward to hearing of your recommendations. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you desire further information.
Sincerely,
Mary Rose OSC
Principal
When the family came for their appointment I saw Roger first again. As before, he appeared depressed. What was different, however, was a faint hint of hardness. There was a touch of both bitterness and false bravado in his manner. He didn’t know why he had broken into the old priest’s room.
‘Tell me about Father Jerome,’ I asked.
Roger looked slightly surprised. ‘There’s nothing to tell,’ he said.
‘Is he a nice man or not a nice man?’ I pressed. ‘Do you like him or dislike him?’
‘He’s okay, I guess,’ Roger answered, as if he’d never considered the question before. ‘He used to invite us to his room sometimes for cookies and tea. I suppose I like him.’
‘I wonder why you would steal from a man you like?’
‘I don’t know why I did it, I told you.’
‘Maybe you were looking for some more cookies,’ I suggested.
‘Huh?’ Roger appeared embarrassed.
‘Perhaps you were looking for some more kindness. Maybe you need as much kindness as you can get.’
‘Nah,’ Roger exclaimed toughly. ‘We were just looking for something to steal.’
I switched the subject. ‘Last time I saw you, Roger, I recommended that yo go to a psychologist, Dr Levenson. Did you ever see him?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did your parents ever talk to you about it?’
‘No.’
‘What do you make of that? Doesn’t it seem strange that I recommended it and then you and your parents never mentioned it again?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We’d also been talking the last time about the possibility of you going to boarding school,’ I said. ‘Did you and your parents ever talk more about that?’
‘No. They just told me I was going to St Thomas.’
‘How did that make you feel?’
‘It was all right.’
‘Would you still like to go away to boarding school if you had the chance?’
‘No. I want to stay at St Thomas. Please, Dr Peck, help me to stay at St Thomas.’
I was surprised and touched by Roger’s sudden spontaneity. Clearly the school had become important to him. ‘Why do you want to stay?’ I asked.
Roger looked confused for a moment, then thoughtful. ‘I don’t know,’ he said after a pause. ‘They like me. I feel that I’m liked there.’
‘I think you are, Roger,’ I responded. ‘Sister Mary Rose wrote me and said very clearly that they liked you and want you to stay. And since you want to stay, that’s probably what I’ll recommend to her and to your parents. By the way, Sister Mary Rose said you were doing some fine work with retarded children. How was your trip to New York?’
Roger looked blank. ‘What trip?’
‘Why, the trip to the conference on retardation. Sister Mary Rose told me you’d been funded to go. It seemed to me quite an honour for someone not yet sixteen. How was the conference?’
‘I didn’t go.’
‘You didn’t go?’ I repeated stupidly. Then I began to feel a sense of dread. Intuitively I had an idea of what was coming. ‘Why didn’t you go?’
‘My parents wouldn’t let me.’
‘And why was that?’
‘They said I didn’t keep my room clean at home.’
‘How did that make you feel?’
Roger appeared numb. ‘All right,’ he said.
I allowed a note of outrage in my voice. ‘All right? You get awarded an exciting trip to New York City, all on your own merits, and then you’re not allowed to go, but you tell me it’s all right. That’s a lot of crap.’
Roger looked very unhappy. ‘My room wasn’t clean,’ he said.
‘Do you believe that the punishment fitted the crime? Do you think the fact that you didn’t pick up your room was sufficient reason to deny you such an exciting trip—a trip you had earned, a trip that would be educational for you?’
‘I don’t know.’ Roger just sat there dumbly.
‘Were you disappointed, angry?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you think that maybe you were very disappointed and very angry and that maybe that had something to do with your breaking into Father Jerome’s room?’
‘I don’t know.’
Of course he didn’t know. How could he? It was all unconscious. ‘Do you ever get angry at your parents, Roger?’ I asked softly.
He kept his gaze riveted to the floor. ‘They’re all right,’ he said.
If Roger’s depression was unchanged, so was his parents’ urbane composure. ‘We’re sorry to have to bother you again, Doctor,’ Mrs R. announced as I led them into my office after seeing Roger. She sat down and removed her gloves. ‘We don’t mind being here,’ she smiled, ‘but of course we did so hope for Roger’s sake that something like this wouldn’t be necessary again. You’ve received correspondence, I believe, from the principal?’
I acknowledged that I had.
‘My wife and I are very worried that the boy is well on the road to becoming a common criminal,’ Mr R. said. ‘Perhaps we should have taken your advice and sent him to that doctor you recommended. What was his name? It was a foreign-sounding name.’
‘Dr Levenson.’
‘Yes. As I said, perhaps we should have sent him to your Dr Levenson.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ I expected the answer would be well prepared. Returning to see me, they would have known the issue to be unavoidable. Indeed, they had wasted no time in raising it themselves. But I was curious to hear their response.
‘Well, you left us with the impression that it was up to Roger,’ Mr R. replied facilely. ‘I remember your saying that it was his life—or something like that. And then I know you talked to him about it. When he expressed no enthusiasm about it, we assumed he did not want to go see your Dr Levenson, and we decided it would be better not to press the matter.’
‘Then we were also concerned with Roger’s self-esteem,’ Mrs R. contributed. ‘Since he was already doing badly in school, we were worried what effect his seeing a psychologist would have on his confidence. Self-esteem is so important to young people, don’t you think, Doctor? … But perhaps we were wrong,’ she added with a charming little smile.
It was clever. With a few words the issue of their not following through with my recommendation had become a combination of my own fault and Roger’s. There seemed to be no point in arguing the matter with them. ‘Do you have any idea why Roger might have become involved in this stealing incident?’ I asked.
‘None at all, Doctor,’ Mr R. replied. ‘We tried to talk with him, of course, but he wouldn’t give us anything to go on. No, we’re at a total loss.’
‘Stealing is often an angry act,’ I said. ‘Do you have any idea why Roger might have been angry or resentful lately? Angry at the world or angry at the school or angry at you?’
‘No reason that we know of, Doctor,’ Mrs R. answered.
‘Is there any interaction that you can think of that you had with Roger in the month before his stealing that might have made him angry or resentful?’
‘No, Doctor,’ Mrs R. answered again. ‘As we told you, we’re at a total loss.’
‘I understand that you wouldn’t allow Roger to go on a trip to New York to a mental-retardation conference during the Christmas holidays,’ I said.
‘Oh, is Roger upset about that?’ Mrs R. exclaimed. ‘He didn’t seem upset when we told him he couldn’t go.’
‘Roger has great difficulty expressing his anger,’ I said. ‘It’s a large part of his problem. But tell me, did you think that he would be upset when you wouldn’t let him go?’
‘How should we know? We can’t predict that sort of thing,’ Mrs R. responded with faint belligerence. ‘We’re not psychologists, you know. We just did what we thought was right.’
A picture flashed before me of the endless strategy sessions Mr R. attended in the councils of power where politicians made and discussed just such predictions. But again there would be no use in fighting the issue. ‘Why did you think it was right not to let Roger go on his trip to New York?’ I asked.
‘Because he won’t pick up his room,’ Mr R. replied. ‘Time and again we’ve told him to keep his room clean, and he just won’t do it. So we told him he was not fit to be an ambassador abroad when he couldn’t keep his own house in order.’
‘I’m not sure what being an ambassador abroad has to do with a weekend trip to New York City,’ I said, becoming exasperated. ‘I also think your expectations in this regard are unrealistic. Very few fifteen-year-old boys keep their rooms neat. In fact, I would worry about them if they did. It doesn’t seem to me an adequate reason to prevent a young man from going on an exciting educational trip that he has earned by is own efforts in a worthy field of endeavour.’
‘Well, we have some questions about that, Doctor,’ Mrs R. said gently, even sweetly. ‘I’m not at all sure it’s right for Roger to be working with those retarded children. After all, some of those children are mentally ill too.’
I felt helpless.
‘This chitchat is all very nice,’ Mr R. pronounced, ‘but we’ve got to get on with it. Something’s got to be done or the boy will become a common criminal. In the summer we were talking about sending him away to boarding school. Would that still be your recommendation, Doctor?’
‘No,’ I answered. ‘Back in June I was sufficiently uneasy about it to recommend that Roger ought to see Dr Levenson before making a definite decision. I don’t want to absolutely rule out boarding school, but I’m even more uneasy about it now. Roger likes his new school. He feels cared for there, and I think it would be quite traumatic for him if he were suddenly removed. I see no need for anything to be done precipitately, so once again I would recommend that Roger see Dr Levenson.’
‘That just puts us back at square one,’ Mr R. exclaimed, obviously annoyed. ‘Don’t you have anything more definitive to recommend, Doctor?’
‘Well, I do have one other recommendation,’ I said.
‘What’s that?’
‘I strongly recommend that the two of you go into treatment. I think Roger needs help very badly. I think that both of you also need it.’
There was a moment of deadly silence. Then Mr R. smiled a slight, amused smile. ‘That’s very interesting, Doctor,’ he said equably. ‘I would be very interested as to why you think we need treatment, as you put it.’
‘I’m glad you’re interested,’ I responded. ‘I’d thought perhaps you’d be upset. I think the two of you ought to get into psychotherapy yourselves because you really seem to me to lack empathy for Roger, and your own psychotherapy would be the only thing I can think of that might enable you to understand Roger better.’
‘Really, Doctor,’ Mr R. continued equably and urbanely, ‘I do find your recommendation intriguing. I’m not boasting, but it seems to me I’ve been quite successful in my profession. My wife also has been rather successful. We have no problems with our other child. And my wife is very much a community leader, you know. She’s a member of the zoning board and highly active in church affairs. I’m intrigued as to why you might consider us mentally ill.’
‘What you’re saying,’ I paraphrased, ‘is that Roger’s the sick one and the two of you are healthy. It’s quite true that Roger is the one whose problems are most visible. But first of all, Roger’s problems are your problems. And from my point of view, everything you’ve done to cope with Roger’s problems in the past years has been wrong. Roger wanted to go to boarding school. You refused him without looking into the matter any further. I advised that you take him to see Dr Levenson. You rejected that advice. And now, when he was rewarded for his own role in community affairs, you refused him his reward without even thinking of the effect it might have on him. I’m not saying that you consciously want to hurt Roger. But I am saying that from a psychological point of view your behaviour indicates that on an unconscious level you have a good deal of animosity toward him.’
‘I’m glad to hear you refer to your point of view, Doctor,’ Mr R. said in his smoothest lawyer’s manner. ‘Because it is just your point of view, isn’t it? And there might be other points of view, mightn’t there? I will admit I am beginning to feel a certain amount of animosity toward Roger now that he seems to be becoming a common criminal. And I know that your psychological point of view might hold us, his parents, to be responsible for every little nasty thing he does. But it’s easy for you to point the finger at us. You haven’t sweated like we have to give him the very best education and the most stable of homes. No, you haven’t sweated at all.’
‘What my husband’s trying to say, Doctor,’ Mrs R. said, joining in, ‘is that there might be some other explanation. My uncle, for instance, was an alcoholic. Isn’t it possible that Roger’s problem has been inherited, that he’s got some kind of defective gene, that he would have turned out bad no matter how we treated him?’
I looked at them with a growing sense of horror. ‘You mean, isn’t it possible that Roger’s incurable—that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?’
‘Well, we’d hate to think that he’s incurable. I should hope that there’d be some medicine or something that could help him,’ Mrs R. said calmly. ‘But we certainly can’t expect you doctors to have found a cure for everything, can we?’
What could I say? I had to remain scientific, detached. ‘There are many psychiatric conditions that are wholly or partially inherited and genetic in basis. There is absolutely no evidence, however, to suggest that Roger’s difficulties are part of any such condition. My diagnosis in your son’s case is that he is suffering from a depression that is not hereditary and not incurable. To the contrary, I believe his difficulties are completely curable if he is helped to understand his feelings and if you can be helped to change the way you respond to him. Now, I cannot guarantee that my diagnosis is correct. It is a best guess based upon my experience and judgment. I would estimate that chances are ninety-eight percent that my diagnosis is accurate. I cannot tell you that it is a hundred percent accurate. If you are distrustful of it, you should get additional consultation from another psychiatrist. I can recommend several others to you or you can seek one on your own. But I must tell you that I do not believe there is much time. While I think his problem is curable with the proper help at present, I’m not sure it will be if he doesn’t get that help very soon.’
‘So it is just your opinion, isn’t it, Doctor?’ Mr R. was boring in on me in his best trial-lawyer fashion.
‘Yes,’ I acknowledged, ‘it’s just my opinion.’
‘And it’s not a matter of scientific proof, is it? You think, but you do not know what Roger’s problem is. That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘So it is in fact perfectly possible that Roger has a hereditary, incurable condition that you are not able to diagnose at this time.’
‘Yes, possible, but hardly likely.’ I paused to light a cigarette. My hands were shaking. I looked at them. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘what strikes me about all this is that the two of you seem more eager to believe that Roger has an incurable illness—more willing to write him off—than to believe that you yourselves might be in need of treatment.’
For a fraction of a second all I could see was fear in their eyes, pure animal fear. But within an instant they had recovered their urbanity.
‘All we are trying to do is to get the facts straight, Doctor. You can hardly criticize us for wanting to separate fact from fiction, can you, now?’ explained Mr R.
‘Many people are afraid of entering psychotherapy,’ I commented, feeling as if I were attempting to sell Bibles inside the Kremlin. ‘It’s a natural reluctance. No one is eager to have his or her inner thoughts and feelings examined. But once you get into it, it’s not so fearful. If it would make it any easier for you, I would be willing to work with you myself. It would break my rule that I do only consultations, but I would do anything in my power to see that you and Roger get the help you need.’
I certainly did not expect that they would take me up on this offer, and one part of me certainly hoped that they wouldn’t. But I felt compelled to make it. Much as I found the notion of trying to work with them distasteful, I could not in good conscience automatically refer them to someone else. Now at least, seven years after the case of Bobby, I had some idea of what I would be up against.
‘Oh, I’m sure you’re right, Doctor,’ Mrs R. said amiably, as if we were chatting at a tea party. ‘It would be pleasant to talk about oneself and have someone to lean on. But it is so terribly time-consuming and so terribly expensive, isn’t it? I do wish we were in the upper-income bracket so we could afford it. But we have two children to educate. I’m afraid we simply don’t have thousands of dollars to spend year after year on an art form.’
‘Whether you are in the upper-income bracket, I do not know,’ I answered her, ‘but I do know that in all probability you are covered under the federal government insurance programme, which offers the best benefits anywhere for outpatient psychotherapy. Probably you would only have to pay a fifth of the cost of treatment yourselves. And if you are still worried about the expense, you might want to consider family therapy, in which the therapist would talk to you and Roger together.’
Mr R. stood up. ‘This has been a most interesting conversation, Doctor. Yes, most enlightening. But we’ve taken quite enough of your time. And I must be getting back to my office.’
‘But what about Roger?’ I asked.
‘Roger?’ Mr R. looked at me blankly.
‘Yes. He’s guilty of breaking and entering. He’s doing poorly academically. He’s depressed. He’s frightened. He’s in trouble. What’s to become of him?’
‘Well, we’re going to have to give a lot of thought to Roger,’ Mr R. replied. ‘Yes, a lot of thought. And you’ve given us a lot to think about also, Doctor. You’ve been most helpful.’
‘I hope I have,’ I said, standing up as well. The interview was clearly being terminated whether I liked it or not. ‘And I do hope you’ll give serious thought to what I’ve recommended.’
‘Of course, Doctor,’ Mrs R. purred. ‘We’ll give everything you’ve said serious consideration.’
As before, Mr and Mrs R. attempted to prevent me from talking to Roger again. ‘He’s not a piece of furniture,’ I insisted. ‘He has a right to know what’s going on.’
So I spent a few final moments with Roger. I found out that he still had my card in his wallet. I said I would call Sister Mary Rose and advise that he continue at St Thomas. I told him I had recommended that he should still see Dr Levenson. I also told him I had recommended therapy for his parents. ‘You see, Roger,’ I said, ‘I don’t think it’s all your problem. I think your parents have psychological problems that are at least as big as yours. I don’t think they try very well to understand you. And I don’t know that they will get the help you all need.’
Roger was, as expected, noncommittal when we parted.
Three weeks later I received a cheque in the mail enclosed with a note from Mrs R. on her tasteful, personal stationery:
Dear Dr Peck:
You were so kind to see us again last month at such short notice. My husband and I truly appreciate your concern for Roger. I wanted to let you know that we have followed your advice and have sent Roger to boarding school. It is a military academy in North Carolina, and has an excellent reputation for working with children with behaviour problems. I am sure things will be better from now on. Thank you so much for all you have done for us.
Very sincerely yours,
Mrs R.
That was ten years ago. I have no idea what happened to Roger. He would be twenty-five now. Occasionally I remember to pray for him.
One respect in which it is difficult to write about evil is its subtlety. I began with the case of Bobby and his parents because of its obvious clarity. To give a child his older brother’s suicide weapon is an act of such gross outrageousness that anyone would think, Yes, that is evil all right. But there was no such grossly outrageous act committed by Roger’s parents; we are dealing only with trip permissions and school choices—the ordinary kind of decisions that parents routinely make. Simply because the judgment of Roger’s parents in these matters differed from my own may not seem grounds for labelling them evil. Indeed, might I not be guilty of evil myself by so labelling clients who disagree with my opinions and fail to take my advice? Might I not be misusing the concept of evil by facilely applying it to any and all who oppose my judgment?
This problem of the potential misapplication of the concerpt of evil is a very real one and will be considered at some length in the final chapter. Certainly it is my obligation to justify my conclusion that Roger was the victim of evil. It is particularly important for me to do so because, of the two cases, Bobby’s and Roger’s, Roger’s is the more typical. While evil may manifest itself obviously, as in the case of Bobby, it rarely does so. More commonly by far its manifestations are seemingly ordinary, superficially normal, and even apparently rational. As I have said, those who are evil are masters of disguise; they are not apt to wittingly disclose their true colours—either to others or to themselves. It is not without reason that the serpent is renowned for his subtlety.
It is exceedingly rare, therefore, that we can pass judgment on a person as being evil after observing a single act; instead, our judgment must be made on the basis of a whole pattern of acts as well as their manner and style. It is not simply that his parents chose a school against Roger’s wishes or contrary to my advice; in a period of a year they made three such choices consecutively. It is not that they disregarded Roger’s feelings on a particular occasion; they did so at every possible opportunity. Their lack of concern for him as a person was utterly consistent.
Still, is this evil? Might we not say that Mr and Mrs R. were remarkably insensitive people and leave it at that? But the fact is that they were not insensitive people. Highly intelligent, they were finely tuned to social nuances. We are not talking of poor dirt farmers in Appalachia but of a well-educated, gracious, politically sophisticated couple, quite adept in the committee and at the cocktail party. They could not have been who they were had they lacked sensitivity. Mr R. would not make an unconsidered legal decision and Mrs R. would always remember to send flowers on the right occasion. But Roger they would not remember or consider. The fact is that their insensitivity toward him was selective. Conscious or unconscious, it was a choice.
Why? Why should they make such a choice? Was it merely that they did not want to be bothered with Roger and that all their reactions to him were predicated on what would be cheapest and easiest rather than on what he might need? Or did they actually, in some dark way, want to destroy him? I do not know. I never will know. There is, I suspect, something basically incomprehensible about evil. But if not incomprehensible, it is characteristically inscrutable. The evil always hide their motives with lies.
If the reader reviewed my account of the interactions that Mr and Mrs R. had with me, she or he would find somewhere between one and two dozen lies. Here again we see this striking consistency. It is not a matter of one lie or two. Roger’s parents lied to me repeatedly and routinely. They were people of the lie. The lies were not gross. There was not one they could have been taken to court on. Yet the process was pervasive. Indeed, even their coming to see me at all was a lie.
Why did they seek my services when they neither had any real concern for Roger nor any real interest in my advice? The answer is that it was part of their pretense. They wanted to appear as if they were trying to help Roger. Since it had been advised by his school in each instance, they would have seemed remiss had they not sought attention. In case others might ask, ‘You’ve taken him to a psychiatrist, haven’t you?’ Mr and Mrs R made sure they were in a position to respond, ‘Oh, yes. Several times. But nothing has seemed to help.’
For a while I wondered why they had brought Roger back specifically to me the second time when our first meeting had not been exactly pleasant for them and when they knew they would have to face the issue of their failure to follow my recommendations. It seemed like an odd choice. But then I remembered I had been very clear about the fact that I did only very brief consultations. This meant there could be no significant pressure on them to follow through on recommendations. Their escape route was wide open. My schedule fitted the pretense.
Naturally, since it is designed to hide its opposite, the pretense chosen by the evil is most commonly the pretense of love. The message Mr and Mrs R. sought to convey was: ‘Because we are good, loving parents, we are deeply concerned about Roger.’ As I pointed out in the previous chapter, the pretense of the evil is designed at least as much to deceive themselves as others. I am quite certain that Mr and Mrs R. actually believed they were doing everything they could for Roger. And when they would say—as I am sure they would—‘We have taken him to a psychiatrist several times, but no one could help him,’ they would have forgotten the details of which truth is composed.
Any experienced psychotherapist knows that unloving parents abound, and that the vast majority of such parents maintain at least some degree of a loving pretense. Surely they do not all deserve the designation of evil! I suppose not. I suppose that it is a matter of degree, that in consonance with Martin Buber’s two types of muths, there are the ‘falling’ and the ‘fallen’. I do not know exactly where to draw the line between them. I do know, however, that Mr and Mrs R. had crossed it.
First there is the matter of the degree to which they were willing to sacrifice Roger for the preservation of their narcissistic self-image. There seemed to be no lengths to which they would not go. It bothered them not at all to think of him as a ‘genetic criminal’—to blandly offer him up to the designation of hopeless, incurable, and malformed as a defence against my suggestion that they themselves needed therapy. I sensed no limit to their willingness to use him as a scapegoat if necessary.
Then there is also the degree—the depths and distortion—of their lying. Mrs R. wrote: ‘I wanted to let you know that we have followed your advice and have sent Roger to boarding school.’ What an extraordinary statement! It says that I advised them to take Roger out of St Thomas when I specifically advised against such action. It states that they followed my advice when they specifically did not; my primary advice was that they themselves have therapy. Finally, it implies that they did what they did because I advised it when, in fact, they considered my advice irrelevant. Not one lie, not even two lies, but three lies, all twisted around each other in a single short sentence. It is, I suppose, a form of genius that one can almost admire for its perversity. I suppose also that Mrs R. actually believed it herself when she wrote ‘we have followed your advice.’ Buber stated it well when he wrote of ‘the uncanny game of hide and seek in the obscurity of the soul, in which it, the single human soul, evades itself, avoids itself, hides from itself.’1
The most typical victim of evil is a child. This is to be expected, because children are not only the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society but also because parents wield a power over the lives of their children that is essentially absolute. The dominion of master over slave is not far different from the dominion of parent over child. The child’s immaturity and resulting dependency mandate its parents’ possession of great power but do not negate the fact that this power, like all power, is subject to abuse of various degrees of malignancy. Moreover, the relationship between parent and child is one of enforced intimacy. A master could always sell a slave if the relationship was one he found intolerable. But just as children are not free from their parents, so it is not easy for parents to escape from their children and the pressures that their children impose.2
Another typical—and rather intriguing—feature of the cases of Bobby and Roger is the extraordinary unity of their parents. Each set of parents functioned as a team. We cannot say that Bobby’s father was evil, but his mother was not, or that his mother was evil and his father was just along for the ride. As far as I could tell, they were both evil. So it was also with Mr and Mrs R. Both seemed equally ungenuine; both seemed to participate in the destructive decision-making; both seemed equally willing to write off Roger as incurable when they were implicated in his problem.3
The victims of evil encountered in everyday psychiatric practice are not, however, always children. Let us turn now to the case of Hartley and Sarah, a childless couple in their late forties. I shall describe a single interview that I had with the two of them together. It will demonstrate that the victimization of an adult by evil is in some ways radically different from that of a child. It will also give us a clue to the further understanding of the phenomenon of the ‘evil couple’ which we have just been discussing. Finally, the case will reveal a new and puzzling dimension to the problem of the psychiatric classification of human evil.
I first saw them a week after Hartley had been discharged from the state hospital. A month before, at 11 o’clock on a Saturday morning, Hartley had cut both sides of his neck with a straight-edge razor. Bare-chested, he walked out from the bathroom into the living room, where Sarah was balancing their chequebook. ‘I just tried to kill myself again,’ he announced.
Sarah turned around to see the blood streaming down his torso. She called the police, who called the ambulance. Hartley was taken to the local emergency room. The cuts were relatively superficial; he had failed to sever either the carotid arteries or the jugular veins. After the cuts were sutured he was transferred to the state hospital. It was his third suicide attempt and third admission to the state hospital during the preceding five years.
Because they had recently moved into the area, Hartley was referred for follow-up care to our clinic after he was discharged from the hospital. His discharge diagnosis was ‘involutional depressive reaction.’ He was on high doses of antidepressant and tranquillizing medication.
When I went out to the waiting room to greet him, Hartley was sitting silently next to his wife, staring into space with dull eyes—an average-sized grey man who seemed smaller, as if he had been crushed into a very little space. I felt tired looking at him. Lord, I thought, I wish the state hospital would try to get these people a little better before they kick them out. He’s still as depressed as the Black Hole of Calcutta. But I tried to look welcoming. ‘I’m Dr Peck,’ I said to him. ‘Come on into my office.’
‘Can my wife come too?’ Hartley mumbled in a pleading tone.
I looked at Sarah, a thin, angular woman, smaller than her husband, yet seeming considerably larger. ‘If it’s all right with you, Doctor,’ she responded, smiling sweetly. Her smile did not make me feel any happier. Somehow it was incongruous with the faintly bitter expression conveyed by the tight wrinkles around her mouth. She wore steel-rimmed spectacles and reminded me of a missionary lady.
I led them both into my office. Once we were all seated I looked at Hartley. ‘Why did you want your wife to come in with you?’ I asked.
‘I’m more comfortable when she’s close to me,’ he replied flatly. There was no particular warmth in this; it was just a statement of fact.
I must have looked quizzical.
‘Hartley’s been that way for the longest time, Doctor,’ Sarah announced, smiling gaily. ‘He hates to let me out of his sight for a moment.’
‘Is that because you’re jealous?’ I asked Hartley.
‘No,’ he said dully.
‘Then why?’
‘I’m scared.’
‘Scared of what?’ I inquired.
‘I don’t know. I’m just scared.’
‘I think it’s because of his thoughts, Doctor,’ Sarah interrupted. ‘Go on, Hartley, you can tell him about your thoughts,’ she instructed. Hartley said nothing.
‘What thoughts is she talking about?’ I asked.
‘My thoughts about kill,’ Hartley replied in his monotone.
‘Kill?’ I repeated. ‘You mean you have thoughts about killing?’
‘No. Just kill.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand,’ I said lamely.
‘It’s just a word thought,’ Hartley explained without emotion. ‘The word “kill” comes into my mind. Like someone had said it. It can come any time. But most of the time it’s in the morning. When I get up and start shaving and start looking at myself in the mirror, it’s just there. “Kill”. Almost every morning.’
‘You mean like a hallucination?’ I queried. ‘You hear a voice telling you to kill?’
‘No,’ Hartley answered. ‘No voice. Just the word in my mind.’
‘When you’re shaving?’
‘Yes. I always feel worst in the morning.’
‘Do you shave with a straightedge razor?’ I asked with sudden intuition. Hartley nodded. ‘It sounds as if you want to kill someone with your razor,’ I continued.
Hartley looked frightened. It was the first sign of emotion I had seen on his face. ‘No,’ he said emphatically. ‘I don’t want to kill anyone. It’s not a feeling—just a word.’
‘Well, you apparently wanted to kill yourself,’ I commented. ‘Why was that?’
‘I feel so horrible. I’m no good to anyone. I’m nothing but a burden to Sarah.’ The heaviness of his voice weighed on me. He certainly would not be a joy to be around.
‘Is he a burden to you?’ I asked Sarah.
‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ she replied cheerfully. ‘I would like to be able to have a little time to myself. And of course we don’t have enough money.’
‘So he is a burden, you feel?’
‘The Lord supports me,’ Sarah answered.
‘Why is it you don’t have enough money?’ I asked.
‘Hartley hasn’t worked for eight years, he’s been so depressed, the poor dear. But we get by on what I make at the telephone company.’
‘I used to be a salesman,’ Hartley interjected plaintively.
‘He did manage to work the first ten years we were married,’ Sarah agreed. ‘But he was never really very aggressive—were you, dear?’
‘I made over twenty thousand dollars in commissions alone the year we got married,’ Hartley objected.
‘Yes, but that was in ’fifty-six. That was a boom year for electrical switches,’ Sarah explained patiently. ‘Anyone who happened to be selling switches in ’fifty-six would have made that kind of money.’
Hartley was silent.
‘Why did you stop working?’ I asked him.
‘My depression. I felt so awful in the mornings. I just couldn’t go to work anymore.’
‘What was making you so depressed?’
Hartley looked puzzled, as if unable to remember something. ‘It must have been my words,’ he said finally.
‘You mean the words in your mind, like “kill”?’
He nodded.
‘You said words—plural. Are there other words as well?’ I asked.
Hartley was silent.
‘Go on, dear,’ Sarah said. ‘Tell the doctor about the other words.’
‘Well, sometimes there are other words,’ he acknowledged reluctantly. ‘Like “cut” or “hammer”.’
‘Any others?’
‘Sometimes “blood”.’
‘Those are all angry words,’ I commented. ‘I don’t think they would come into your head unless you were very angry.’
‘I’m not angry,’ Hartley insisted dully.
‘What do you think?’ I asked, turning to Sarah. ‘Do you think he’s angry?’
‘Oh, I think Hartley hates me,’ she answered with her gay little smile, as if she were talking about a cute prank played by a neighbour’s child.
I stared at her in amazement. I had begun to suspect the truth of this, but I hardly expected her to be so calmly aware of it. ‘Aren’t you worried that he might hurt you?’ I asked.
‘Oh, no. Hartley wouldn’t hurt a fly—would you, dear?’
Hartley did not respond.
‘Seriously,’ I said to Sarah, ‘he thinks of kill and blood and hammer. It seems to me that if I were you, I’d be quite frightened living with a husband who hates you and thinks of such things.’
‘But you don’t understand, Doctor,’ Sarah explained placidly. ‘He couldn’t hurt me. He’s such a weakling.’
I quickly glanced at Hartley. There was absolutely no expression on his face. I sat there for almost a minute in stunned silence trying to focus on how to proceed. Finally I asked him, ‘How does it make you feel to hear your wife call you a weakling?’
‘She’s right. I am weak,’ he mumbled.
‘If she’s right,’ I said, ‘how does that make you feel?’
‘I’d like to be stronger,’ he responded without enthusiasm.
‘Hartley can’t even drive a car,’ Sarah interjected. ‘He can’t go out of the house alone without me. He can’t go into a supermarket or any crowded place—can you, dear?’
Hartley nodded in dumb assent.
‘You seem to agree with your wife about everything,’ I pointed out.
‘She’s right. I can’t go anywhere without her.’
‘Why can’t you?’
‘I’m scared.’
‘Scared of what, damn it?’ I asked, trying to push him.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied abjectly. ‘All I can tell you is I get scared whenever I have to do anything by myself. I get scared when Sarah isn’t around to help me.’
‘You sound like you’re a very young child,’ I commented.
Sarah smiled complacently. ‘Hartley is a child in some ways,’ she said. ‘You aren’t very grown up, are you, dear?’
‘Maybe you don’t want him to grow up,’ I said quickly, turning to her.
Sarah flashed me a look of sudden hatred. ‘Want?’ she snapped. ‘When have my wants ever been considered? My wants don’t matter. My wants have never mattered to anyone. It isn’t a question of what I want or don’t want. I only do what I have to do, what the Lord wants me to do. Oh, there’s no telling what I would want. Who cares that Hartley’s a burden? Who cares that I do all the work, that I do all the driving, that I do all the shopping? But I don’t complain. No. What right do I have? No, Sarah doesn’t have rights. Sarah doesn’t complain. Hartley’s depressed. It’s not for me to complain. Hartley’s a worm of a man. But no one cares about Sarah. I just shoulder the burdens the Lord has given me. Sarah does what she has to do.’
I was taken aback by this diatribe and not sure that I wanted to tangle with her again. But I proceeded, more out of curiosity than a sense that there was any way I could help the situation. ‘I gather the two of you have no children,’ I said. ‘Was that a choice you made?’
‘Hartley’s incapable of producing children,’ Sarah announced.
‘Oh? How do you know that?’
Sarah gave me a look suggesting I was ignorant of the facts of life. ‘Because I’ve been examined by the gynaecologist,’ she explained. ‘He said I was perfectly all right. There’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘Have you also been examined?’ I asked Hartley.
He shook his head.
‘Why not?’
‘Why should I?’ Hartley countered, as if I were unable to see the obvious. ‘There’s nothing wrong with Sarah, so it must be my fault.’
‘Hartley, you’re just about the most passive man I’ve ever met,’ I said. ‘You passively assume your wife is telling the truth about her examination. You passively assume that because her examination was normal, yours would be abnormal. There are lots of cases in which both the husband and wife are normal but still don’t have children. You may well be perfectly okay. Why don’t you check it out?’
‘There would be no point to that, Doctor,’ Sarah answered for him. ‘We’re too old to have children. And we don’t have the money for any more tests. You forget that I’m the only one who makes the money. Besides,’ she said, smiling, ‘can you imagine Hartley being a father? He can’t even make a living.’
‘But wouldn’t it be worth it for Hartley just to know that he’s not physically incapable of being a father?’
‘Sarah’s right,’ Hartley said, actually coming to the defence of his wife’s assumption of his inadequacy. ‘There’d be no point to it.’
By now I was feeling very tired. I had twenty minutes left before my next patient, but I was strongly tempted to terminate the interview. There was no hope for change. There was no possibility of help for Hartley. He was too far gone. But why? Why and how in the name of God did such misery come about, I wondered. ‘Tell me about your childhood,’ I directed him.
‘There’s nothing to tell,’ Hartley mumbled.
‘Well, how far did you go in school?’ I asked.
‘Hartley went to Yale,’ Sarah answered for him again. ‘But then you flunked out, didn’t you, dear?’
Hartley nodded.
I felt ill thinking that this worm of a man, as Sarah accurately and callously called him, had once been a bright-eyed college youth. ‘How did you happen to go to Yale?’ I asked.
‘My family was wealthy.’
‘But you also must have been quite bright,’ I commented.
‘It’s no good being bright if you don’t work,’ Sarah interjected once more. ‘Handsome is as handsome does, I always say.’
I turned to her. ‘Are you aware that every single time I try to focus on whatever assets your husband might have, you jump in and castrate him?’
She screeched at me, ‘Castrate him? Castrate him, do I? All you doctors are alike. Maybe you castrate him, they say. It’s all my fault, isn’t it? Oh, yes, it’s always Sarah’s fault. He doesn’t work, he doesn’t drive, he doesn’t do anything, but it’s all Sarah’s fault. Well, let me tell you, he was castrated before I ever met him. His mother was an alcoholic slob. His father was as weak as he is. He couldn’t even make it through college. And then they accused me of marrying him for his money. Hah, what money? His slut of a mother had spent all the money slopping up her booze. I haven’t seen any money. Nobody’s ever helped me out. Nobody helps Sarah. Sarah does it all. But she castrates him, they accuse. But do you think any of them are ever interested in me? No. No one. They just accuse me.’
‘I could be interested in you, Sarah,’ I said gently, adding, ‘if you’d let me. Why don’t you tell me something about your family and your growing up?’
‘Oh, so now I’m the patient, am I?’ she asked bitterly. ‘Well, I’m sorry. I’m not going to be your guinea pig. I don’t need your help. There’s nothing wrong with me. I can get all the help I need from my minister. He understands me. He knows what I go through. God gives me all the strength I require. I brought Hartley here for help. He’s the one who needs it. You help him—that is, if you can.’
‘I’m quite serious, Sarah,’ I said. ‘You’re quite right that Hartley needs help, and we’ll give him whatever help we can. But I think you need help as well. It’s a terribly difficult situation that you’re in, and I can see you get upset by it. I think you might feel much better if you get upset by it. I think you might feel much better if you had someone to talk to or if you let me give you a mild tranquillizer.’
But Sarah had pulled herself together. She sat back in her chair and smiled at me as if I were a nice but misguided young man. ‘Thank you, Doctor, you’re very kind,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid I don’t get upset. There’s very little that upsets me in this world.’
‘I beg to differ,’ I countered. ‘I think you just were upset. Quite upset.’
‘Perhaps you’re right, Doctor,’ Sarah replied, not about to be shaken again. ‘Hartley’s illness has been a terrible burden on me. It would be much easier for me if he didn’t exist.’
I winced inwardly. Hartley seemed unaffected; he was already so depressed and downtrodden that he was beyond being affected any further. ‘Why don’t you leave him, then?’ I asked. ‘I think you would be better off without the burden. And in the long run it might also be better for Hartley if he were forced to stand on his own two feet.’
‘Oh, I’m afraid Hartley needs me too much for that, Doctor,’ Sarah responded, smiling maternally. She turned to her husband. ‘You wouldn’t be able to make it if I left you, would you, dear?’
Hartley looked terrified.
‘It would certainly be very difficult for him,’ I acknowledged. ‘But it could perhaps be arranged for Hartley to go into the hospital for an extended period of time. You would know that he’d been well taken care of, and he could be supported there as long as necessary to make the adjustment.’
‘Do you think you would like that, dear?’ Sarah asked him. ‘Would you like to go back to the hospital and have me leave you?’
‘Please,’ Hartley whined, ‘please don’t.’
‘Tell the doctor why you don’t want me to leave you, dear,’ Sarah commanded.
‘I love you,’ Hartley whimpered.
‘See, Doctor,’ Sarah explained victoriously. ‘I couldn’t leave him when he loves me.’
‘But do you love him?’ I asked.
‘Love?’ Sarah asked, almost with amusement. ‘What is there to love? No, I think you might best call it duty, Doctor. I have a duty to take care of him.’
‘I’m not sure how much it’s duty and how much it’s need,’ I said, confronting her. ‘From where I sit it looks as if you have a deep-seated need for the burden that Hartley represents. Perhaps it’s because you never had a child of your own. Perhaps you’re trying to make Hartley the infant you couldn’t have. I don’t know. But I do know that for some reason or other you have an overpowering need to dominate Hartley, just as he has an overpowering need to depend on you. Your needs are being fulfilled by this strange marriage just as much as his are.’
Sarah laughed oddly, a weird, hollow giggle. ‘Apples and oranges, Doctor,’ she said. ‘Yes, apples and oranges. You can’t compare them. You can’t compare Hartley and me; we’re like apples and oranges. But you don’t know which is which, do you? Am I the apple or am I the orange? Am I crinkly-skinned or smooth-skinned? Or am I thick-skinned?’ She gave her odd giggle again. ‘Yes, I guess I’m thick-skinned. We have to be thick-skinned against those who persecute us. You’re the pseudoscience persecutors. But it’s all right. I know how to handle the orange peelers and apple slicers. The Lord loves me. We have power in heaven. You can think what you think, say what you say. But it’s garbage,’ she spat. ‘That’s where they end up, isn’t it? The orange peels and the apple slices? In the garbage. And that’s where all you pseudoscience persecutors will end up. In the garbage. With all the other fruits,’ she ended triumphantly.
I became frightened that I had made a mistake in confronting Sarah as I listened to her lose her control. Hartley, with his misery, his suicide attempts, and his pathetic existence, was bad enough; what could be served with both of them ending up in the hospital? She probably felt cornered. I had better give her plenty of exit space so that she might pull herself together again. ‘We’ve almost come to the end of our time,’ I said, ‘and we’ve got to decide on a plan of treatment. I gather you don’t feel yourself in need of any treatment at this time, Sarah, and certainly you seem to be functioning well. But Hartley definitely seems to require some assistance, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, poor Hartley is not doing well,’ Sarah agreed, acting as if the past few minutes had never happened. ‘We should do whatever we can to help him.’
I breathed a silent sigh of relief. My meddling in the marriage, although accomplishing nothing, had apparently done no additional harm. ‘Do you think you need to stay on your medicine?’ I asked Hartley.
He nodded mutely. ‘Your thoughts get worse when you don’t take your pills, don’t they, dear?’ Sarah said. He nodded again.
‘I suspect that’s the case,’ I commented. ‘How about psychotherapy? Do you think you’d like to spend time with someone talking about yourself in depth?’
Hartley shook his head. ‘It makes me feel bad,’ he mumbled.
‘His last suicide attempt before this one occurred when they tried to give him psychotherapy,’ Sarah confirmed.
I wrote out prescriptions for the same medicine Hartley had been on in the hospital at the same dosage and said I would like to see them again in three weeks to determine whether the medication needed adjusting. ‘But that appointment won’t be a long one like this,’ I explained, ‘In fact, it will be very brief.’
‘Of course, Doctor,’ Sarah said as the three of us stood up. ‘You’ve already done so much for Hartley. We can’t thank you enough.’
Two minutes later, having written a brief note on the chart, I went out for a cup of coffee. Hartley and Sarah had just finished paying the secretary for the visit, and as they were going out the door I overheard Sarah say, ‘This doctor’s so much nicer than the one at the other clinic, don’t you think? At least he’s American. We couldn’t even understand what that other one was saying, could we, dear?’
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this case is not Sarah’s evil but Hartley’s relationship to it. Hartley was in thrall to Sarah. The theme of thralldom is not infrequent in fairy tales and myths in which princes and princesses and other beings have become captive to the evil power of some wicked witch or demon. Like other myths concerning evil, these need further study. But unlike the hero in such myths, I was not able to rescue Hartley from his slavery. For it was a willing thralldom. He had voluntarily sold his soul into Sarah’s keeping. Why?
At one point during the session I had told Hartley that he was ‘just about the most passive man I’ve ever met.’ A passive person means an inactive person—a taker instead of a giver, a follower instead of a leader, a receiver instead of a doer. I could have used a number of other words: ‘dependent’, ‘infantile’, ‘lazy’.4 Hartley was monumentally lazy. His relationship with Sarah was that of an infant clinging to its mother. He would not even come into my office alone, much less take the risk or exert the energy to think independently for himself.
Why Hartley was so extremely lazy we do not know for certain. Sarah’s comments that his mother was an alcoholic and his father as weak as he suggest that he came from a family in which his parents probably served as lazy role models and he probably failed to receive adequate fulfillment of his infantile needs. We can postulate that by the time he met Sarah he was already a profoundly lazy person, a child in adult’s clothing who was unconsciously seeking the strong mother he had never had to take care of him. Sarah filled the bill perfectly, just as he undoubtedly met her requirements for a potential slave. Once the relationship was established, it became a vicious circle, naturally intensifying the sickness of each. Her domination further encouraged his submissiveness, and his weakness further nourished her desire for power over someone.
So Hartley was not simply an unwilling victim of Sarah’s evil. This is important, because the case exemplifies a general rule: We do not become partners to evil by accident. As adults we are not forced by fate to become trapped by an evil power; we set the trap ourselves. We shall see this principle in action once again in the next-to-last chapter when we consider the phenomenon of group evil and how vast numbers may so easily participate with each other in the most atrocious behaviour.
For the moment, however, we are concerned with the smallest of groups—the single couple—and how two people participate in evil. The case of Hartley and Sarah was introduced, in part, by the observation that it seemed impossible to tell which partner of an evil couple was the evil one. Both of Bobby’s parents seemed evil. Both Mr and Mrs R. seemed equally involved in destroying Roger’s spirit. But by the very nature of their evil I was unable to get close enough to them to know them well. My purely speculative suspicion is that they were not as equally evil as they seemed. I doubt that it is possible for two utterly evil people to live together in the close quarters of a sustained marriage. They would be too destructive for the necessary cooperation. I suspect, therefore, that one or the other of Bobby’s parents was the more dominant in their mutual evil, and I believe the same was true of Mr and Mrs R. In every evil couple, if we could examine them closely enough, I imagine we would find one partner at least slightly in thrall to the other, in the same manner as Hartley was to thrall to Sarah, albeit hardly to the same degree.
If the reader feels Hartley and Sarah’s relationship was a bizarre one, I agree. I chose it precisely because they were the ‘sickest’ couple of this type I have seen in the years of my practice of psychiatry. Bizarre though it was, the type of relationship it illustrates is quite common. The phenomenon of thralldom in marriage is not rare. Those readers who are psychiatrists will have seen in their everyday practice dozens of such cases. And I suspect that general readers will, on reflection, also be able to recognize this type of marriage among at least some of their acquaintances.
Evil was defined as the use of power to destroy the spiritual growth of others for the purpose of defending and preserving the integrity of our own sick selves. In short, it is scapegoating. We scapegoat not the strong but the weak. For the evil to so misuse their power, they must have the power to use in the first place. They must have some kind of dominion over their victims. The most common relationship of dominion is that of parent over child. Children are weak, defenceless, and trapped in relation to their parents. They are born in thrall to their parents. It is no wonder, then, that the majority of the victims of evil, such as Bobby and Roger, are children. They are simply not free or powerful enough to escape.
For adults to be the victims of evil, they too must be powerless to escape. They may be powerless when a gun is held to their head, as when the Jews were herded into the gas chambers or when the inhabitants of MyLai were lined up to be shot. Or they may be powerless by virtue of their own failure of courage. Unlike the Jews or the inhabitants of MyLai and unlike children, Hartley was physically free to escape. Theoretically he could have just walked away from Sarah. But he had bound himself to her by chains of laziness and dependency, and though titularly an adult, he had settled for the child’s impotence. Whenever adults not at gunpoint become victims of evil it is because they have—one way or another—made Hartley’s bargain.
The issue of naming is a theme of this work. It has already been touched on in diverse instances: science has failed to name evil as a subject for its scrutiny; the name of evil does not occur in the psychiatric lexicon; we have been reluctant to label specific individuals with the name of evil; in their presence, therefore, we may experience a nameless dread or revulsion; yet the naming of evil is not without danger.
To name something correctly gives us a certain amount of power over it. Through its name we identify it. We are powerless over a disease until we can accurately name it as ‘pneumococcal pneumonia’ or ‘pulmonary embolism’. Without such identification we are at a loss as to how to treat it. It makes a great deal of difference from the standpoint of both therapy and prognosis whether we label a person’s disorder as ‘schizophrenia’ or ‘psychoneurosis’. Even when we do not have an effective treatment, it is good to have a name. Pityriasis rosea is an ugly and occasionally uncomfortable skin affliction for which there is no adequate therapy. But the patient is happy to pay the dermatologist’s fee when told, ‘All it is is pityriasis rosea. It is not leprosy. We don’t have any treatment for it, but don’t worry, it won’t hurt you and it will go away by itself in two to three months.’
We cannot even begin to deal with a disease until we identify it by its proper name. The treatment of an illness begins with its diagnosis. But is evil an illness? Many would not consider it so. There are a number of reasons why one might be reluctant to classify evil as a disease. Some are emotional. For instance, we are accustomed to feel pity and sympathy for those who are ill, but the emotions that the evil invoke in us are anger and disgust, if not actual hate. Are we to feel pity and sympathy for parents who give their younger son his older brother’s suicide weapon for Christmas? Are we to look kindly on any murderer, except possibly those few so visibly insane as to be obviously ‘out of their minds’? The people labelled here as evil were not crazy as we ordinarily think of the word. They were not babbling and demented. They were coherent and self-possessed, holding down responsible jobs, making money, apparently functioning smoothly in the social system, and hardly identifiable on superficial inspection as the least bit deranged. But the fact that we are not likely to feel a shred of sympathy for those who are evil speaks only of our own emotional response and not of the reality of whether evil is or is not an illness. Even when we still felt frightened and disgusted by lepers, we recognized leprosy to be a disease.
Beyond our emotional reactions, there are three rational reasons that make us hesitate to regard evil as an illness. Although each of the three reasons is cogent in its own way, I shall nonetheless take the position that evil should indeed be regarded as a mental illness. I will do so in the context of examining the fallacy inherent in each of three arguments.
The first holds that people should not be considered ill unless they are suffering pain or disability—that there is no such thing as an illness without suffering. This is a very old argument, but as bitterly contested today as ever. Even the very word ‘disease’ means suffering. A person is diseased when he or she is experiencing dis-ease—that is, an absence of ease and the presence of discomfort. We most likely define ourselves as ill, of course, precisely because we are suffering in a way that is unwanted and unnecessary.
The ‘evil’ people we have described certainly did not define themselves as ill, nor did they appear to be suffering. They would certainly not have identified themselves as patients. Indeed, as I have said, it is characteristic of the evil that, in their narcissism, they believe that there is nothing wrong with them, that they are psychologically perfect human specimens. If overt suffering and self-definition are the criteria for illness, then the evil are the last ones to be considered mentally ill.
But there are vast problems with this argument. There are a host of physical diseases that are wholly asymptomatic in their early stages. An executive discovered on a routine physical exam to have a blood pressure of 200/120 may be feeling perfectly fit. Are we not to prescribe medicine to bring his blood pressure down (medicine that is indeed likely to make him feel less fit)? Or are we to wait until he has a fatal or crippling stroke before we consider his hypertension a disease? The Pap test has become a routine part of the regular medical care of women because it detects cancer of the cervix at a time when the cancer is curable but years before it causes the woman any discomfort or disability. Are we to defer our painful surgical treatment until she actually feels bad—which will likely be when her ureters are blocked by tumour and she is irrecoverably dying of kidney failure? If we define diseases only in terms of the suffering they currently produce, then we must state that most cases of high blood pressure and cancer, among others, are not, in fact, diseases. This seems absurd.
Of course, much of the time when physicians tell us that there is something seriously wrong with us, we take them at their word whether we are in actual pain or not. Their definition that we are ill is acceptable to us, and therefore we begin to define ourselves as ill, even when we are not actually feeling ill.
But not always. Consider the case of a farmer who suffers a serious heart attack that results in his losing consciousness and being brought to the hospital. The next day when he is fully alert in the intensive care unit, he struggles to get out of bed and to rip the cardiac monitor off his chest. The nurses tell him to lie back and relax because he has had a heart attack, is seriously ill, and needs to be quiet lest he have another attack. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ the farmer screams, struggling even harder. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me. My heart’s as sound as a dollar. I don’t know how you tricked me here, but I’ve got to get home to milk my cows.’ When the doctor is called in and several more attempts at reassurance fail, are we to let him get dressed and go home to work his farm? Or are we to restrain him as necessary, rapidly sedate him, and under these conditions continue to give him the true information and the time to come to terms with it?
Or consider an alcoholic in DT’s who has not slept for three days, who is shaking like a leaf, whose temperature is 103 degrees and pulse 145, and who is severely dehydrated. He is convinced that the hospital is a Japanese extermination camp and that he must at all costs escape immediately to save his life. Are we to let him dash out of the hospital and run wildly down the streets, hiding behind cars until he drops dead from exhaustion, convulsions, or dehydration? Or are we to restrain him against his will and give him massive doses of Librium until he finally falls into a desperately needed sleep and begins to recover?
Obviously, in each case we would follow the latter alternative because we know that both these men are seriously ill despite the fact that they neither define themselves that way nor accept our definition. For we realize that their inability to define themselves as ill in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is actually a part of the illness itself. Is it not also this way for those who are evil? I am not suggesting that the evil need to be physically restrained or deprived of their civil liberties in the ordinary course of their lives. But I am saying, as I have already said, that the failure of the evil to define themselves as disordered is an essential, integral component of their condition. And I am also saying that disease, whether it be evil or delirium or psychosis or diabetes or hypertension, is an objective reality and is not to be defined by subjective acknowledgment or lack of acknowledgment.
The use of the concept of emotional suffering to define disease is also faulty in several other respects. As I noted in The Road Less Travelled,5 it is often the most spiritually healthy and advanced among us who are called on to suffer in ways more agonizing than anything experienced by the more ordinary. Great leaders, when wise and well, are likely to endure degrees of anguish unknown to the common man. Conversely, it is the unwillingness to suffer emotional pain that usually lies at the very root of emotional illness. Those who fully experience depression, doubt, confusion, and despair may be infinitely more healthy than those who are generally certain, complacent, and self-satisfied. The denial of suffering is, in fact, a better definition of illness than its acceptance.
The evil deny the suffering of their guilt—the painful awareness of their sin, inadequacy, and imperfection—by casting their pain onto others through projection and scapegoating. They themselves may not suffer, but those around them do. They cause suffering. The evil create for those under their dominion a miniature sick society.
In reality, we exist not merely as individuals but as social creatures who are integral component parts of a larger organism called society. Even if we were to insist upon suffering in the definition of illness, it is neither necessary nor wise to conceive of illness solely in terms of the individual. It may be that the parents described were not themselves suffering, but their families were. And the symptoms of family disorder—depression, suicide, failing grades, and theft—were attributable to their leadership. In terms of ‘systems theory’, the suffering of the children was symptomatic not of their own sickness but of that of their parents. Are we to consider individuals healthy simply because they are not in pain—no matter how much havoc and harm they bring to their fellow human beings?
Finally, who is to say what the evil suffer? It is consistently true that the evil do not appear to suffer deeply. Because they cannot admit to weakness or imperfection in themselves, they must appear this way. They must appear to themselves to be continually on top of things, continually in command. Their narcissism demands it. Yet we know they are not truly on top of things. No matter how competent the parents described thought themselves, we know that in fact they were incompetent in their parental role. Their appearance of competence was just that: an appearance. A pretence. Rather than being in command of themselves, it was their narcissism that was in command, always demanding, whipping them into maintaining their pretence of health and wholeness.
Think of the psychic energy required for the continued maintenance of the pretence so characteristic of the evil! They perhaps direct at least as much energy into their devious rationalizations and destructive compensations as the healthiest do into loving behaviour. Why? What possesses them, drives them? Basically, it is fear. They are terrified that the pretence will break down and they will be exposed to the world and to themselves. They are continually frightened that they will come face-to-face with their own evil. Of all emotions, fear is the most painful. Regardless of how well they attempt to appear calm and collected in their daily dealings, the evil live their lives in fear. It is a terror—and a suffering—so chronic, so interwoven into the fabric of their being, that they may not even feel it as such. And if they could, their omnipresent narcissism will prohibit them from ever acknowledging it. Even if we cannot pity the evil for their inevitably ghastly old age or for the state of their souls after death, we can surely pity them for the lives they live of almost unremitting apprehension.
Whether the evil suffer or not, the experience of suffering is so subjective, and the meaning of suffering so complex, I think it best not to define illness and disease in its terms. Instead, I believe that illness and disease should be defined as any defect in the structure of our bodies or our personalities that prevents us from fulfilling our potential as human beings.
Admittedly, we may have some differences of opinion as to what exactly constitutes the human potential. Nonetheless, there are a sufficient number of men and women in all cultures and at all times who have achieved in their full adulthood a kind of gracefulness of existence so that we can generally say of them: ‘They have become truly human.’ By which we mean their lives seem almost to touch on the divine. And we can study these people and examine their characteristics.6 Briefly, they are wise and aware; they enjoy life with gusto, yet face and accept death; they not only work productively but creatively, and they obviously love their fellow human beings, whom they lead with a benignity of both intent and result.
Most people, however, are so crippled in body and spirit that they cannot possibly ever attain such a lofty condition even through their best efforts without massive therapeutic assistance. Among these crippled legions—the mass of suffering humanity—the evil reside, perhaps the most pitiable of all.
I said there were two other reasons one might hesitate to label evil an illness. They can be countered more briefly. One is the notion that someone who is ill must be a victim. We tend to think of illness as something that befalls us, a circumstance over which we have no control, an unfortunate accident visited on us by meaningless fate, a curse in the creation of which we did not participate.
Certainly many illnesses seem like this. But many others—perhaps the majority—do not conform to such a pattern at all. Is the child who runs out on the street, when he has been told not to, and gets hit by a car, a victim? How about the driver of a car who gets in an ‘accident’ when he is racing well above the speed limit to meet an appointment for which he is late? Or let us examine the enormous variety of psychosomatic illnesses and diseases of stress. Are people who suffer tension headaches because they don’t like their jobs victims? Of what? A woman has an asthmatic attack every time she is in a situation in which she feels ignored, isolated, and uncared for. Is she a victim? One way or another, to some extent, all these people and a host of others victimize themselves. Their motives, failures, and choices are deeply and intimately involved in the creation of their injuries and diseases. Although they all have a certain degree of responsibility for their condition, we still consider them ill.
Most recently this issue has been debated in reference to alcoholism—some vigorously insisting that it is a disease and others insisting that because it appears to be self-inflicted, it is not. Not only physicians but courts and legislatures have been involved in this debate, and have reached the conclusion that alcoholism is indeed a disease, despite the fact that the alcoholic may sometimes seem nobody’s victim except his or her own.
The issue of evil is similar. An individual’s evil can almost always be traced to some extent to his or her childhood circumstances, the sins of the parents and the nature of their heredity. Yet evil is always also a choice one has made — indeed, a whole series of choices. The fact that we are all responsible for the state of health of our souls does not mean that a poor state of health is something other than disease. Once again, I believe we are on safest and soundest ground when we do not define disease in terms of victimization or responsibility but instead hold onto the definition already offered: An illness or disease is any defect in the structure of our bodies or personalities that prevents us from fulfilling our potential as human beings.
The final argument against labelling evil an illness is the belief that evil is a seemingly untreatable condition. Why designate as a disease a condition for which there is neither known treatment nor cure? Had we an elixir of youth in our doctor’s black bag, it might make good sense to consider old age a disease, but we do not generally or currently think of it so. We accept old age as an inevitable part of the human condition, a natural process that is our lot and against which we are fools to rage.
This argument, however, ignores the fact that there are a whole host of disorders, from multiple sclerosis to mental deficiency, for which there is no treatment or cure but which we don’t hesitate to call diseases. Perhaps we call them diseases because we hope to find the means to combat them. But is this not the case with evil? It is true that we do not currently possess any generally feasible or effective form of treatment to heal the thoroughly evil of their hatred and destructiveness. Indeed, the analysis of evil presented thus far reveals several reasons just why it is an extraordinarily difficult condition to approach, much less cure. But is a cure impossible? Are we to simply throw up our hands in the face of this difficulty and sigh, ‘It’s beyond us’? Even when it is the greatest problem of mankind?
Rather than being an effective argument against it, the fact that we currently do not know know how to treat evil in the human individual is the best reason to designate it a disease. For the label of disease implies that the disorder is not inevitable, that healing should be possible, that it should be studied scientifically and methods of treatment should be sought. If evil is an illness, it should then become an object for research like any other mental illness, be it schizophrenia or neurasthenia. It is the central proposition of this book that the phenomenon of evil can and should be subjected to scientific scrutiny. We can and should move from our present state of ignorance and helplessness toward a true psychology of evil.
The designation of evil as a disease also obligates us to approach the evil with compassion. By their nature the evil inspire in us more of a desire to destroy than to heal, to hate than to pity. While these natural reactions serve to protect the uninitiated, they otherwise prevent any possible solution. I do not think we shall come any closer than we are today to understanding and, I hope, curing human evil until the healing professions name evil as an illness within the domain of their professional responsibility.
There is a wise old priest retired to the mountains of North Carolina who has long done battle with the forces of darkness. After he had done me the favour of reviewing a draft of this book he commented: ‘I am glad that you have labelled evil an illness. It is not only a disease; it is the ultimate disease.’
If evil is to be named a psychiatric disorder, is it sufficiently unique to stand in a category all by itself or does it fit into one of the already existing categories? Surprisingly, in view of the degree to which it has been neglected, the present system of classification of psychiatric illness seems quite adequate for the simple addition of evil as a subcategory. The existing broad category of personality disorders currently covers those psychiatric conditions in which the denial of personal responsibility is the predominant feature. By virtue of their unwillingness to tolerate the sense of personal sin and the denial of their imperfection, the evil easily fit into this broad diagnostic category. There is even within this class a subcategory entitled ‘narcissistic personality disorder.’ It would, I believe, be quite appropriate to classify evil people as constituting a specific variant of the narcissistic personality disorder.
One related issue, however, must be addressed. It will be recalled that when I confronted Sarah with her responsibility for the nature of her marriage she went off ‘into left field’. In her diatribe about ‘apples and oranges’ and ‘pseudoscience persecutors’ she not only lost her composure, she seemed to lose the thread of her thoughts as well. Her logic disintegrated. Such disorganization in thinking is far more characteristic of schizophrenia than it is of a personality disorder. Could Sarah have been schizophrenic?
Among themselves psychiatrists often refer to something called ‘ambulatory schizophrenia’. By this name we mean people like Sarah, who generally function well in the world, who never develop a full-blown schizophrenic illness or require hospitalization but who demonstrate a disorganization in their thinking—particularly at times of stress—which resembles that of more obvious ‘classical’ schizophrenia. It is not, however, a formal diagnostic category for the very good reason that we do not know enough about the condition to be definite about it. We do not, in fact, know whether it has any real relationship to true schizophrenia.7
Despite its lack of clarity, however, the issue must be raised, because many of the evil people seen by psychiatrists are diagnosed as having ambulatory schizophrenia. Conversely, many we call ambulatory schizophrenics are evil people. Although not identical, there seems to be a large overlap of the two categories. It is also realistic to introduce this element of diagnostic confusion. The reality of the matter is that the naming of evil is still in a primitive stage.
Be that as it may, the time is right, I believe, for psychiatry to recognize a distinct new type of personality disorder to encompass those I have named evil. In addition to the abrogation of responsibility that characterizes all personality disorders, this one would specifically be distinguished by:
(a) consistent destructive, scapegoating behaviour, which may often be quite subtle.
(b) excessive, albeit usually covert, intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury.
(c) pronounced concern with a public image and self-image of respectability, contributing to a stability of life-style but also to pretentiousness and denial of hateful feelings or vengeful motives.
(d) intellectual deviousness, with an increased likelihood of a mild schizophreniclike disturbance of thinking at times of stress.
Thus far I have been speaking of the necessity for the accurate naming of evil from the standpoint of the evil themselves: that we might better appreciate the nature of their affliction, come to know how to contain it, and, I hope, eventually even cure it. But there is another vital reason to correctly name evil: the healing of its victims.
If evil were easy to recognize, identify, and manage, there would be no need for this book. But the fact of the matter is that it is the most difficult of all things with which to cope. If we, as objectively detached, mature adults, have great difficulty coming to terms with evil, think of what it must be like for the child living in its midst. The child can emotionally survive only by virtue of a massive fortification of its psyche. While such fortifications or psychological defences are essential to its survival through childhood, they inevitably distort or compromise its life as an adult.
It happens, then, that the children of evil parents enter adulthood with very significant psychiatric disturbances. We have been working with such victims, often very successfully, for many years without ever having to employ the word ‘evil’. But it is doubtful that some can be wholly healed of their scars from having had to live in close quarters with evil without correctly naming the source of their problems.
To come to terms with evil in one’s parentage is perhaps the most difficult and painful psychological task a human being can be called on to face. Most fail and so remain its victims. Those who fully succeed in developing the necessary searing vision are those who are able to name it. For to ‘come to terms’ means to ‘arrive at the name’. As therapists, it is our duty to do what is in our power to assist evil’s victims to arrive at the true name of their affliction. Two case vignettes follow in which it would have been impossible to render such assistance had the therapist not first recognized the face and spoken the name of evil.
Angela could not speak.
She entered therapy at the age of thirty because she had grave difficulty relating with anyone intimately. She was a competent teacher who could lecture her students with smooth eloquence. But from the moment she started to relate with me, Angela became tongue-tied. Long periods of silence were occasionally interspersed with brief spasms of almost unintelligible speech. When she attempted to talk she would often break into gasping sobs after only a few words. Initially I felt these sobs reflected overwhelming sadness, but gradually I realized they were a mechanism designed to prevent her from being articulate. They reminded me of a child tearfully trying to protest against unfair treatment by its parents, only to be ordered not to talk back. Angela acknowledged she had similar difficulty speaking in all her intimate relationships, but the problem was clearly at its worst with me. It was also clear I represented an authority figure—a parental figure—for her.
Angela’s father had deserted the family when she was five. She could only remember being raised by her mother. Her mother was an odd woman. When Angela, who was Italian, was a dark-haired little girl of eleven, her mother made her dye her hair blond. Angela had not wanted her hair dyed. She liked her black hair. But for some reason her mother wanted to have a blond child, so a blond child she had.
The incident was typical. Her mother seemed to have little capacity or desire to recognize Angela as a separate human being in her own right. Angela had, for instance, no privacy. Although she had her own room, her mother strictly forbade her to close her door. Angela never understood the reason for this prohibition, but it was useless to argue against it. Once at the age of fourteen, she tried; her mother went into a depression that lasted over a month, during which time Angela had to do all the cooking and take care of her baby brother. The first term we developed for Angela’s mother was ‘intrusive’. She was unredeemably intrusive. She had no hesitation about intruding on Angela’s person or privacy, and would tolerate no interference with her intrusiveness.
In the second year of Angela’s therapy we were able to relate her difficulty in talking to her mother’s intrusiveness. Angela’s silence was a moat that her mother could not cross. No matter how much her mother desired to intrude on Angela’s thoughts as well as her person, Angela could preserve the privacy of her mind through silence. Whenever her mother attempted to invade this privacy, Angela became tongue-tied. We also discovered that this moat of silence not only served to keep her mother out but also to keep Angela’s anger in. Angela had learned it was folly ever to attempt to contradict her mother; the punishment for this crime was devastating. Consequently she also became tongue-tied whenever she was in danger of expressing her resentment.
Psychotherapy is, of course, a highly intrusive process, and the therapist is invariably an authority figure. Given the facts that I was in a parental role to her and that I desired to penetrate into the innermost recesses of her mind, it is no wonder that Angela dramatically reactivated with me the moat of silence that she had dug during her childhood. Only after she learned there was an essential difference between me and her mother was she able to dispense with this moat. Although I sought to know her thoughts and even to influence them, Angela gradually came to realize that, unlike her mother, I had a consistent and genuine respect for her identity and the unique individuality of her soul. It was two years before she could speak freely with me.
But she was still not free from her mother. Having married a man who, like her father, had then deserted her, Angela—with a child to support—had to rely on her mother for occasional financial assistance. More important, she still clung to the hope that somehow, someday, her mother would change and would appreciate her for who she was. It was at this point, in the beginning of the third year of therapy, that Angela recounted to me the following dream.
‘I was in a building. Some kind of occult group of people came in wearing white robes. Somehow I was supposed to be part of an occult, scary ritual. Simultaneously I had occult powers. I could take myself up to the ceiling and float. But I was also part of the ritual. It was not something I was willingly doing. I was captive in the situation. It was very unpleasant.’
‘What ideas do you have about the dream?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I know perfectly well where it came from,’ Angela responded. ‘Last week at a party there was a couple who had been to Haiti. They were describing their visit to a voodoo place. It was a clearing in the woods. There were stones with bloodstains on them and there were chicken feathers all around. I felt horrified listening to them talk about the scene. I’m sure that’s why I had the dream. It was sort of like a voodoo ritual, and it was like I was going to be forced to kill something. Yet, somehow, I was also going to be the victim. Ugh, it was ugly—I don’t want to talk about it anymore.’
‘What else do you think the dream’s related to?’ I inquired.
Angela seemed annoyed. ‘Nothing. The only reason I had it was because I heard those people talking of voodoo.’
‘But that alone doesn’t explain the dream,’ I insisted. ‘Out of all your experiences the past couple of weeks, you chose that one to dream about. There must be some reason for your choice. There must be some particular reason that voodoo rituals are of concern to you.’
‘Voodoo rituals don’t interest me at all,’ Angela declared. ‘I don’t even like to think about the dream. It was gory, ugly.’
‘What is it about the dream that disturbs you the most?’ I asked.
‘There was something evil there. That’s why I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Perhaps there’s something evil going on in your life at the present time,’ I commented.
‘No, no,’ Angela protested. ‘It’s just that stupid dream—and I wish we could get off the subject.’
‘Do you think there’s anything evil about your mother?’ I wondered.
‘Sick, not evil,’ Angela replied.
‘What’s the difference?’
Angela did not answer this question directly. ‘Actually, I am angry at my mother,’ she said instead, ‘for the ten-millionth time.’
‘Oh? Tell me about it.’
‘Well, you know my car died on me last month. I was able to borrow enough from the bank to make a down payment on my new one, but I don’t have enough money to make the interest payments. So I called up my mother and asked if she could make me a thousand-dollar interest-free loan. She was really nice about it at the time. ‘Of course,’ she said. But then the money didn’t come. So after a couple of weeks I called her again. She gave me some story about how she couldn’t give it to me for another two weeks or she would lose bank interest. I really didn’t understand what the problem was, and I began to realize she probably didn’t want to lend me the money, although she wasn’t going to say so. Then last week I got a phone call from my brother. We’ve talked about how she always uses him to give me messages she doesn’t want to give me herself. Anyway, he just wanted to let me know that my mother maybe had a lump in her breast and maybe would have to have surgery. He said Mother was worried she wouldn’t have enough money to take care of her medical needs in her old age. By this time the picture was becoming clear. Finally, three days ago, I received a formal promissory note from my mother for me to sign for the loan. I know she didn’t expect me to sign it. A year or so ago I wouldn’t have. But fuck her. I need the money and I have no other way to get it. So I signed it. But I still feel guilty.’
‘You say a year ago you wouldn’t have signed it?’ I asked.
‘I would have felt too guilty. But all the talking I’ve done about my mother in therapy has made me realize this is just a typical game she plays. She’s always about to go into the hospital. She’s always about to have surgery. She always offers me something with the right hand and pulls it away with the left.’
‘How many times would you say your mother’s played this sort of game with you?’
‘I don’t know. Hundreds. Maybe even thousands.’
‘It’s really a kind of ritual, then, isn’t it?’
‘It sure is.’
‘So you have been engaged in an evil ritual lately, haven’t you?’ I commented.
Angela looked at me with dawning recognition. ‘You think that’s what the dream’s all about?’
‘I think so,’ I replied. ‘Even though you’ve been through this sort of ritual hundreds of times, even though you know she wants you to feel guilty, she still manages to succeed, doesn’t she? You still feel guilty.’
‘Yes. I mean, how do I know she really doesn’t have a lump in a her breast this time? Maybe I really am being cruel to her.’
‘So you’re never really sure whether you’re the victim or the victimizer in this ritual, just as in the dream.’
‘You’re right,’ Angela agreed. ‘I always feel guilty.’
‘The key element in the dream seems to be the evil nature of the ritual,’ I commented. ‘What do you think it is about this ritual interaction you have with your mother that makes it evil?’
Angela looked pained. ‘I don’t know. That I’m being cruel to my mother?’
‘Angela, how much money does your mother have?’ I asked.
‘I don’t really have any idea.’
‘I’m not asking you down to the last cent,’ I said. ‘But you do know she owns three apartment buildings in Chicago, right?’
‘Well, they’re not very large,’ Angela protested.
‘No,’ I said, ‘they’re not skyscrapers. If I remember rightly, they have about ten apartments each. And they’re in a good neighbourhood. And your mother owns them free and clear. Correct?’
Angela nodded.
‘So what do you think these three buildings alone are worth—forget whatever she might have in the bank—do you think they’re worth at least half a million dollars?’
‘I suppose so,’ Angela responded grudgingly. ‘But you know I don’t think about money very clearly.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘I think that’s one way you avoid seeing the obvious. Do you think maybe the apartment buildings might be worth even a million dollars?’
‘Well, I guess it’s possible.’
‘So you know that your mother has at least between half a million and a million dollars to her name,’ I continued, with mathematical logic. ‘Yet your mother acts as if it were a great burden to loan you a thousand dollars so that you and her grandchild can have a car to get around in. She’s really quite a wealthy woman, but she talks poverty. And when she talks poverty, she’s talking a lie, isn’t she?’
‘Yes. I guess that’s why I get so angry at her,’ Angela acknowledged.
‘Angela, wherever there is evil, there’s a lie around,’ I remarked. ‘Evil always has something to do with lies. What makes this ritual interaction between you and your mother evil is that it’s based on a lie. Not your lie. Your mother’s lie.’
‘But my mother’s not evil,’ Angela exclaimed.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because she just … she just isn’t, that’s why. I mean, she’s my mother; I know she’s sick, but she can’t be evil.’
We had returned to the issue. ‘What’s the difference between sick and evil?’ I asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ Angela answered, looking not the least bit happy.
‘I’m not sure either, Angela,’ I said. ‘In fact, I think that evil probably is a kind of sickness. But it’s a particular kind of sickness. And calling it a sickness doesn’t make it not evil. Whether it’s a sickness or not, I think that evil’s very real. And I think you have to come to terms with that reality. Your dream suggests that in relating with your mother you are relating with evil. And since you’re not able to stop relating with your mother, you had best know as much as you can about what you’re doing. I think that, together, you and I must squarely face the issue of whether or not your mother is evil and just what that means—what it has meant for you in the past and what it will mean for you in the future.’
To fully appreciate the forces acting on Angela and, even more, on the young woman in the next case vignette, it is necessary that we turn our attention once again to the phenomenon of narcissism. We all of us tend to be more or less self-centred in our dealings with others. We usually view any given situation first and foremost from the standpoint of how it affects us personally, and only as an afterthought do we bother to consider how the same situation might affect someone else involved. Nonetheless, particularly if we care for the other person, we usually can and eventually do think about his or her viewpoint, which may well be different from ours.
Not so those who are evil. Theirs is a brand of narcissism so total that they seem to lack, in whole or in part, this capacity for empathy. Angela’s mother apparently did not stop to think that Angela might not want her hair dyed blond. Any more than Bobby’s parents stopped to think how he would feel being given his brother’s suicide weapon for Christmas. Any more than Hitler, one would suppose, stopped to think about how the Jews felt as they were being pushed into the gas chambers.
We can see, then, that their narcissism makes the evil dangerous not only because it motivates them to scapegoat others but also because it deprives them of the restraint that results from empathy and respect for others. In addition to the fact that the evil need victims to sacrifice to their narcissism, their narcissism permits them to ignore the humanity of their victims as well. As it gives them the motive for murder, so it also renders them insensitive to the act of killing. The blindness of the narcissist to others can extend evey beyond a lack of empathy; narcissists may not ‘see’ others at all.
Each of us is unique. Except in the mystical frame of reference, we are all separate entities. Our uniqueness makes of each of us an ‘I-entity’, provides each of us with a separate identity. There are boundaries to the individual soul. And in our dealings with each other we generally respect these boundaries. It is characteristic of—and prerequisite for—mental health both that our own ego boundaries should be clear and that we should clearly recognize the boundaries of others. We must know where we end and others begin.
Angela’s mother obviously lacked this knowledge. When she dyed Angela’s hair she was behaving as if Angela did not even exist. Angela as a distinct, unique individual with a will and tastes of her own had not reality for her mother. She did not see Angela as Angela. She did not accept the validity of Angela’s boundaries. Indeed, the very existence of these boundaries was anathema to her—as was symbolized by her refusal to allow Angela to close her bedroom door. She would have engulfed the entirety of Angela’s self into her narcissistic ego had Angela not been able to retreat behind a moat of silence. Growing up, Angela was able to develop and preserve her ego boundaries only through this defence against her mother’s narcissistic and assaultive intrusiveness. In a sense she was able to preserve her boundaries only by making them excessive, but then had to pay the price of isolation from others as a result.
Another form of devastation that narcissistic intrusiveness can create is the symbiotic relationship. ‘Symbiosis’—as we use the term in psychiatry—is not a mutually beneficial state of interdependency. Instead it refers to a mutually parasitic and destructive coupling. In the symbiotic relationship neither partner will separate from the other even though it would obviously be beneficial to each if they could.
Hartley and Sarah clearly had such a relationship. Hartley, the weak one, could not have survived in his infantile state without Sarah to make his every decision for him. But Sarah also could not have survived psychologically without Hartley’s weakness to feed her narcissistic need for domination and superiority. They functioned not as two separate individuals but as a single unit. Sarah had engulfed Hartley by mutual consent to the point where he had no will or identity of his own except that small little bit remaining that was reflected in his feeble suicide attempts. He had largely forsaken his ego boundaries, and she had incorporated them into her own.
Since Hartley and Sarah, two middle-aged adults, had ‘succeeded’ in effecting a symbiotic relationship, it is hardly surprising that certain evil and narcissistic parents can succeed in cultivating such a relationship with a child destined to come under their domination. The case vignette that follows describes the lengthy healing, and hence the weaning away, of one such child from a symbiotic relationship with her mother.
To this day I cannot understand how it was that Billie remained in therapy. The fact that she did remain is an enormous tribute to both the genius of her therapist and the genius of Billie herself. It was a sort of miracle.
Billie was taken to a colleague of mine by her mother because of academic underachievement. Sixteen at the time and very bright, she was doing poorly in school. After six months of therapy Billie’s grades had improved slightly. She had also clearly developed a certain attachment to her therapist, a mature and kindly man of infinite patience. At this point her mother stated that the problem was solved. Billie wanted to continue in therapy. Her mother refused to pay for it. Her therapist reduced the already minimum fee to five dollars a session. Billie, whose allowance was five dollars a week and who had two hundred dollars saved, began paying him out of her own money. Soon her mother stopped her allowance. Billie got her first job during her senior year of high school in order to continue to pay for her therapy. That was seven years ago. Billie is still in therapy, but the end is beginning to be in sight.
One of the reasons it is so remarkable that Billie stayed in therapy, paying for it out of her allowance and then out of her meagre salary, is that for the first three years Billie did not feel that there was anything the matter with her. On some unconscious level she must have known that something was radically wrong. But consciously she was utterly cool about her ‘problems’. She vaguely wished she could get better grades, yet she was perfectly ready to acknowledge she almost never did her homework. This she blandly attributed to ‘laziness’, and after all, ‘Aren’t many high school kids lazy?’ The only thing that could possibly be identified as a symptom was her fear of spiders. Billie hated spiders. Any spider. Whenever she saw a spider she literally ran away in panic. If she noticed a spider in the house—no matter how minuscule or harmless-appearing—she wouldn’t stay in the house unless someone killed and removed it. But this phobia was ego-symptonic. While she recognized that almost everybody was much less afraid of spiders than she, Billie concluded that this was because others were insensitive. If they appreciated how really horrible spiders were, then they would be just as afraid as she was.
Since she consciously felt nothing was wrong with her, it is hardly surprising that Billie broke at least as many appointments as she kept. But somehow her therapist ‘hung in there’ over the first three years, and somehow Billie did also. During these years Billie passionately hated her father and adored her mother. A lifelong bank clerk, her father was a shy and taciturn man who seemed to Billie as cold and distant as her mother was warm and close. Billie, the only child, and her mother were companions. They confided in each other their closest secrets. Her mother always had at least several lovers, and throughout her adolescence Billie liked nothing better than to listen to her mother’s tales of the ins and outs and ups and downs of her extramarital affairs. There seemed to be nothing wrong in this. Billie’s mother blamed her affairs on her husband’s isolated, unaffectionate personality. They seemed a natural response to his lack of interest, and Billie and her mother were united in their hatred of him. Against him they felt almost like gleeful coconspirators.
Her mother was as eager to listen to all the sexual and romantic details of Billie’s life as Billie was to listen to hers. Billie considered herself very fortunate to have such a loving and interested mother. She was not able to explain why her mother refused to pay for her therapy, but she was hardly able or willing to criticize her mother in this regard. Whenever the issue was raised by her therapist, Billie sidestepped vigorously.
When Billie told her mother about her own boyfriends, there was a lot to tell. Billie was frankly promiscuous. Her mother never criticized this; after all, she had many lovers, too. It was not, however, that Billie wanted to be promiscuous. On the contrary, she yearned painfully for a deep and lasting relationship with a man. But it never seemed to work out. She would fall head over heels in love with a man, almost immediately move into his apartment, but within a few days or a few weeks the relationship invariably soured and Billie was back at home with her parents. Beautiful, intelligent, and charming, Billie never had difficulty finding new lovers. Within a week she would be in love again. But, as always, within a few more weeks, the relationship would be dead. Billie faintly began to wonder if somehow she killed these relationships.
It was this bit of wonder and her pain at being unable to hold onto her lovers that caused Billie to begin working more seriously in therapy. Very gradually the basis of the pattern emerged. Billie couldn’t tolerate being alone. Having fallen in love with a man, she would want to go with him wherever he went. She would always sleep with him, whether or not she felt sexual, because that would guarantee that he would stay with her—at least for the night. When they awoke in the morning she would plead with him not to go to work. He would have to tear himself away from her. Inevitably the man would feel suffocated. He would start to break dates. She would redouble her efforts to cling to him. He would feel more suffocated. Finally, on some excuse, he would terminate the relationship. Billie then picked up the first man she could find, even though his intelligence and character were often less than desirable. Unable to tolerate being alone, she was unable to wait long enough for a more deserving lover to appear on the scene. She would fall in love with whoever was closest at hand, cling to him immediately—and the vicious cycle would repeat itself.
Once her fear of being alone was uncovered, it also became clear why Billie had been an underachiever in school. To read a book or write a paper requires solitude. Billie had been unable to do her homework because she had been unwilling to tear herself away from people—particularly from her mother, who was always ready for a chat—long enough to carry out an assignment.
Although it was now identified as a problem, Billie felt helpless to do anything about it. She recognized that her terror of aloneness limited her in certain ways, but what could be done? It was a part of her nature. Self-destructive though the pattern might be, it was just the way she was. She could not even imagine being any other way. So nothing changed except that her phobia of spiders became worse. She would no longer walk with her boyfrends through the woods or even down a shaded street at night, lest she inadvertently brush against a spider.
At this point her therapist took a bold step. He insisted that Billie, who hitherto had always lived either with her lovers or her parents, get an apartment of her own. She refused. It was a ridiculous expense. Oh, of course, it had advantages: she could bring lovers home with her, she could play her stereo whenever she wanted, she could feel more independent. But how could she possibly afford it? Now that she was working steadily, the therapist had raised her fee from five dollars a session to his standard rate of twenty-five. That was more than a hundred dollars a month she was paying him—a quarter of her salary. He offered to reduce his fee again to five dollars an hour. Billie was touched but still couldn’t afford it, she claimed. Besides, what would happen if she found a spider in her apartment one night and she was all alone? What would she do then? No, an apartment of her own was out of the question.
My colleague pointed out to her that she was doing absolutely nothing to deal with her fear of being alone. Unless she took some step to actually choose aloneness, he said, he saw no hope for her therapy. There must be some other step, she argued. He asked her to think of one. She could not, but insisted he was being too demanding and would just have to drop the idea. He told her he would refuse to see her anymore unless she got an apartment. She raved at his cruelty. He remained adamant. So finally, in the fourth year of her therapy, Billie rented her own apartment.
Three things immediately happened. One was that Billie became more aware of just what a compelling force her fear of aloneness was. On nights when she was not with a lover she became extremely anxious in her empty apartment. By nine in the evening she could no longer tolerate it and would drive back to her mother’s house to chat and then sleep there. On weekends when she had nothing to do she spent the entire time with her parents. During the first six months of renting her apartment she slept there alone on no more than half a dozen occasions. She was paying for an apartment that she was too frightened to use. It was absurd. She became annoyed with herself. She began to think that maybe, just maybe, this fear of aloneness was really sick.
The second thing that happened was that a change seemed to come over her father. When she reluctantly announced she was going to get her own apartment, he suggested that perhaps she would like to have some furniture he had inherited which was sitting unused in a barn. Then, on her moving day, he borrowed a truck from one of his friends and helped her load and unload the furniture. He gave her a bottle of champagne for her house-warming. Once she was settled in, he began a pattern of making her a present of some small object for the apartment every month or so—a new lamp, a print to hang on the wall, a bath mat, a fruit bowl, a set of kitchen knives. These gifts were given unostentatiously, wrapped in plain brown paper and quietly dropped off for her at her place of work. But Billie realized they were chosen with care. They were all in good taste. She had not thought of her father before as having good taste. And she knew he had little extra money to spare for such things. Although he remained shy and withdrawn and difficult to talk to, for the first time she could remember Billie was quite touched by his interest in her. She wondered if the interest, subtle though it was, might not have been there all along.
In relation to the apartment. Billie’s mother was as unhelpful as her father was generous. Several times she asked her mother for little odds and ends that had been tucked away in corners of the family house, but suddenly her mother seemed to have developed a use for them. Her mother never asked her about the new apartment. In fact, Billie began to notice that whenever she mentioned the apartment her mother seemed to be annoyed, even cutting. ‘Don’t you think you’re being just a bit self-centered talking about your apartment this and your apartment that all the time?’ she said on one occasion. Slowly it dawned on Billie that her mother did not want her to move out of the family home. This was the third thing that happened.
It was a thing that snowballed. At first Billie rather enjoyed the fact that her mother was upset about her moving out. Didn’t that show how much her mother loved her? And wasn’t it nice to always be welcome back at the family home, to have her mother to chat with late into the night, to have her old bedroom always ready for her—not to have to return to her lonely apartment with the possibility of spiders in the dark? But the magic began to go out of this, bit by bit. For one thing, she and her mother no longer had Billie’s father to talk against. When her mother railed against him as usual Billie began to say, ‘Come on, Mom, he’s not really that bad. Sometimes I think he’s even kind of sweet.’ This sort of response seemed to inflame her mother. Immediately her mother’s remarks about her father would become positively vicious or else she would turn around and start attacking Billie for not being sympathetic. These moments became distinctly unpleasant. Finally Billie had to ask her mother not to talk against her father when they were together, since it invariably ended in a quarrel. Her mother grudgingly complied. But without their mutual enemy, Billie and her mother had much less to talk about. Then there was the matter of Wednesday evenings.
Billie was an office manager for a small publishing company. Every Thursday morning it made a single large weekly shipment to other parts of the country. The nature of Billie’s responsibilities required her to be in the office by six o’clock on those mornings. Whenever she spent the night at her parents’ house, it somehow seemed impossible, chatting away with her mother, to get to bed before midnight. The result was that on Thursday mornings Billie invariably felt wretched from lack of sleep. With the help of her therapist, she made a vow that on Wednesday night—on just that one night, if on no other night of the week—she would sleep alone in her apartment, and would be back there no later than nine o’clock in the evening.
For the first ten weeks Billie was unable to keep her vow. She was never able to be back in her apartment before midnight. Each week her therapist would ask her how well she had fulfilled her vow, and each week Billie had to confess failure. First she was furious at her therapist. Then she was furious with herself for not being able to stick to her resolution. She began to look seriously at her weakness. For several sessions she talked of her ambivalence about the vow, her fear of the loneliness of her apartment, her desire to remain in the warmth of the family home. At this point her therapist asked Billie if she thought there was any way her mother might be able to help her keep her vow.
Billie was delighted with the idea. She immediately told her mother about the vow and requested her encouragement to leave the house by eight-thirty on Wednesday evenings. Her mother refused. ‘What you and that therapist of yours do is your business, not mine,’ she said. Billie felt there was a certain amount of truth in this, but she also began to suspect that her mother might have reasons of her own for not wanting Billie to keep the vow. The suspicion grew. And as it grew, Billie began observe her mother’s behaviour on Wednesday nights. She noticed that invariably around eight-thirty her mother would bring up some particularly provocative topic for discussion. Once she recognized this pattern, Billie tried to interrupt it. At eight forty-five, in the middle of one such topic, Billie stood up and announced that she had to leave. ‘Don’t you think you’re being rude?’ her mother asked. She reminded her mother of her vow and suggested that even if it wasn’t her mother’s responsibility to help her keep it, perhaps it was her responsibility at least to respect it. They got into a heated argument. Her mother cried. It was after midnight when Billie got back to her apartment.
Thereafter Billie observed that if her mother’s genius for bringing up a provocative topic at eight-thirty failed to have an effect, she would then demonstrate an equal genius for starting an argument. By the fourteenth week of her still unkept vow, this pattern too had become clear to Billie. That Wednesday night at eight-thirty her mother started a story. Billie stood up, saying she was sorry she didn’t have time to hear it. Her mother began to argue. Billie announced she didn’t have time to argue either. She moved to the door. Her mother literally clutched at her sleeve. Billie tore herself away. She was in her apartment at the stroke of nine. Five minutes later the phone rang. It was her mother. Billie had left in such a hurry, she said, she hadn’t had time to tell her that the doctor thought maybe she had gallstones.
Billie’s fear of spiders became even worse.
At this point Billie still adored her mother. In therapy she had become able to criticize her mother quite freely and accurately, yet she was never actually angry, and she continued to take every possible opportunity to be in her mother’s company. It was as if she had developed two brains—a new one that could look at her mother objectively coexisting with the old one that remained utterly unchanged.
Her therapist pressed forward. It was not just on Wednesday evenings, he suggested, that her mother clung to her; perhaps her mother didn’t want Billie to leave her or develop a separate existence in any dimension. He reminded her once again that her mother had refused to pay for her therapy as soon as it had become important in Billie’s life. Could it be that her mother was jealous of Billie’s attachment to therapy because it was an attachment to something other than herself? And why had she so resented Billie’s getting her own apartment? Might she not resent Billie’s developing independence and separation? Maybe so, Billie countered, but her mother had never objected to her having boyfriends and lovers. Didn’t this indicate that her mother had no desire to hold onto her? Perhaps, her therapist acknowledged, but then it might also indicate simply that her mother wanted Billie to be a carbon copy of herself. Perhaps her mother used Billie’s promiscuity to justify her own. Besides, the more alike the two of them were, the less the chance they would ever separate. And so the struggle went on, week after week, month after month, endlessly back and forth over the same issues, with no sign of resolution in sight.
But a subtly enormous change did occur in the sixth year of her therapy. Billie began to write poetry. At first she showed her poems to her mother. Her mother was not particularly interested. But Billie was proud of her poetry. It was a new, surprising dimension of herself. It was uniquely her, something her own. She bought an elegant leather-bound volume in which to record her poems. The urge to write did not come often, but when it did, it was compelling. For the first time in her life, when she was working on a poem, Billie found herself enjoying being alone. Indeed, she had to be alone. She couldn’t concentrate in her parents’ house, with her mother’s constant interruptions. So when the urge hit her she would suddenly stand up and announce that she had to return to her apartment. ‘But it’s not Wednesday night,’ her mother would shriek. And Billie would have to tear herself away from her mother once again. It was after one such episode, when she was describing to her therapist how her mother had clutched at her as she was leaving to write, that Billie commented, ‘She was like a goddamn spider.’
‘I’ve been waiting a long time for you to say that,’ her therapist exclaimed.
‘Say what?’
‘That your mother’s like a spider.’
‘So?’
‘But you hate and fear spiders.’
‘I don’t hate my mother,’ Billie said. ‘And I don’t fear her either.’
‘Maybe you should.’
‘But I don’t want to.’
‘So you hate and fear spiders instead?’
Billie missed her next appointment. When she returned, her therapist suggested she had skipped the appointment because she was angry at him for making a connection between her mother and her spider phobia. Billie missed the next two appointments. But when she finally came back, she was ready to face it. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘so I’ve got a phobia. What is a phobia, anyway? How does it work?’
Phobias are the result of displacement, her therapist explained. They occur when a normal fear or revulsion toward something is displaced onto something else. People employ this defensive displacement because they do not want to acknowledge the original fear or revulsion. In Billie’s case, she didn’t want to acknowledge her mother’s evil. Naturally. What child would want to think of her mother as malicious or destructive? Like any child, Billie wanted to believe that her mother loved her, that her mother was safe and kind and good. But to believe this she somehow had to get rid of the fear and revulsion she instinctively felt toward her mother’s evil. She did this by directing the fear and revulsion toward the spiders. Spiders were the evil ones—not her mother.
‘But my mother is not evil,’ Billie proclaimed. It was true that her mother was not keen on her becoming independent, and that she used all manner of wiles and tricks to try to keep Billie from developing a fully separate existence. But this was not a matter of evil. It was just because her mother was lonely. And she, Billie, understood about loneliness. It was terrible to feel lonely. It was also human. Humans are social creatures; they need each other. The fact that her mother clung to her from loneliness was hardly evil, it was only human.
‘While loneliness is human,’ her therapist responded, ‘the inability to tolerate it is hardly a necessary part of the human condition.’ He went on to explain that it was the task of parents to assist their children to achieve their own independence and separateness. In order to succeed in this task it was essential for parents to tolerate their own loneliness so as to allow and even encourage their children to eventually leave them. Instead, to discourage such separation not only represented a failure in the parental task but a sacrificing of the child’s growth to the parent’s own immature self-centred desires. It was destructive. Yes, he thought, it was evil. And Billie was right to be afraid of it.
Slowly Billie came to see it. And the more she saw the more her eyes were opened. She began to notice hundreds of infinitely subtle little ways in which her mother continually attempted to retain her spirit in her clutches. In her leatherbound book Billie wrote one evening:
Ambiguity and guilt
Can really drive one crazy—
You send me my clean laundry,
Which you did.
In it you include the first turned
Leaf of fall.
Manipulation? Guilt?
… your method really works.
Yet little changed. Billie, now twenty-three, still spent most nights sleeping in her parents’ house and most of her free time with her mother. Although falling behind on her payments for therapy, she would pay a substantial portion of her week’s salary to take her mother out to lunch at the most expensive restaurant in the area. And the pattern of her relationships with men continued unaltered—the falling in love, the clinging, the suffocating, the breaking up, the frantic searching, the falling in love again—man after man, time after time. And she was just as terrified of spiders as ever. The hard part was yet to come.
‘Nothing’s happening,’ Billie complained in therapy one day.
‘That’s the way it feels to me too,’ her therapist responded.
‘Well, why not?’ Billie demanded. ‘It’s been seven years I’ve been seeing you now. What the hell more do I have to do?’
‘Figure out why you still have your spider phobia.’
‘I’ve recognized that my mother is a spider,’ Billie replied.
‘Then why do you keep dropping into her lair and web?’
‘You know. Like her, I’m lonely.’
Her therapist looked at Billie. He hoped she was ready. ‘So maybe, in part, you too are a spider,’ he said.
Billie sobbed for the remainder of the session. But the next session she was there, right on time, even eager for the painful work ahead. It was true; she felt like a spider sometimes. When men started to leave her she clutched at them—just as her mother clutched at her. She hated them for going. She didn’t care about their feelings. She didn’t care about them. She wanted them for herself. Yes, it was like something evil in her, an evil urge, an evil part of her taking over. The spider phobia had not only helped her to deny her mother’s evil, she had used it to deny the evil in herself.
It was all so connected and intertwined. She had identified with her mother. They were so much the same. How could she genuinely fight against her mother’s evil unless at the same time she fought against herself? How could she condemn her mother for holding onto her without condemning herself for refusing to tolerate her own loneliness? How could she stop trying to trap men in her own web—men who ought to stand free and tall and strong, just as she ought to stand free and tall and strong? The problem was not how to extricate herself from her mother’s web anymore, since her mother’s identity was so much hers; the problem was to extricate herself from herself. And how in God’s name do you do that?
But Billie is doing it. In the name of God or her true self she is somehow beginning to separate from her mother, to definitively break free from their symbiotic relationship. In her leatherbound book she recently wrote:
Amazing to me, how your disease
Pops up in me all the time,
Part of my very being, without me
Even knowing.
So hard to fight an enemy
One can’t see;
So scary to think you’re in me
So incorporated into my thinking and feeling
That it is indistinguishable
From me.
It is me.
I feel like a mulatto who is
Part of the Ku Klux Klan,
Hating the very essence of part of me,
Working on eradicating part of myself.
This is probably the hardest thing
That I ever will do.
Sometimes it feels so unnatural.
I often wonder how it is that I
Became different from you;
To have the will to want to be
Different than you.
It looks as if Billie is beginning to break the chain.
1 Good and Evil (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), p. 111.
2 If one wants to seek out evil people, the simplest way to do so is to trace them from their victims. The best place to look, then, is among the parents of emotionally disturbed children or adolescents. I do not mean to imply that all emotionally disturbed children are victims of evil or that all such parents are malignant persons. The configuration of evil is present only in a minority of these cases. It is, however, a substantial minority.
3 This parental unity will not be surprising to psychiatrists. When we examine cases of child battering, we find it to be the rule that both parents have been involved in the crime. Even in cases of repetitive father-daughter incest, we usually find some degree of collusion on the mother’s part. Once again, I do not wish to imply that all battering or incestuous parents are evil. I cite these phenomena only to illustrate the fact that both parents are almost always culpable in the creation of psychopathology in their children. Those who have read Sybil, by Flora Schreiber (Warner Books, 1974), will recall the truth of this principle.
4 Erich Fromm coined the term ‘incestuous symbiosis’ for one of the three components of the ‘syndrome of decay’, or evil character type. Although lacking the other components. Hartley was a fleshed-out, walking definition of incestuous symbiosis. It suggests that he entered into a submissive relationship with evil precisely because he was partially evil himself. It is true he was not entirely comfortable in his thralldom. Dimly aware that he was caught in a dreadful trap, he obsessed back and forth between the two easiest ways to extricate himself: to kill Sarah or to kill himself. But he was too lazy to even consider the one legitimate escape route open to him: the obvious, more difficult path of psychological independence.
5 Arrow Books, 1990.
6 See Abraham Maslow’s description of ‘self-actualized’ persons in his Motivation and Personality (Harper Bros., 1954).
7 The relationship between evil and schizophrenia is not only a matter for fascinating speculation but also very serious research. Many (but certainly not all) of the parents of schizophrenic children seem to be ambulatory schizophrenics or evil or both. Much has been written about the ‘schizophrenogenic’ parent, and usually an ambulatory schizophrenic or evil person is what is described. Does this mean that ambulatory schizophrenia is a variant of true schizophrenia and a simple genetic transmission is involved? Or is schizophrenia in the child the psychological product of its parents’ evil destructiveness? Might even evil itself have a genetic basis, as seems the case in most instances of schizophrenia? We do not know, nor will we know until the psychobiology of human evil has become the subject of much scientific research.