When the former editor of TAP invited me to write something about how the American psychoanalyst relates himself to the event in Tucson (“This is a magazine, not a journal,” he added, which would make the task easier.), my first reaction was to say, “No thanks, we don't, or cannot, look into that: There is no room for anything psychoanalytic in this wanton act.” But on second thought, the shootings that day came from the mind of a person, and psychoanalysis is to me the essence of the science of the human mind. Nothing in the latter can be omitted; there is an explanation for the mental landscape in its totality or of any part.
Tucson was in fact one in a series, which there is no reason to believe will not continue. Before that, there were Columbine, Oklahoma, Virginia Tech, and Fort Hood. Behind each, there was a human mind gone rampant, acting under the power of distorted beliefs. Yes, psychoanalysis is quite relevant. But just where does the psychoanalyst fit in? I told the editor that I would try.
Every such exploration in the past has led to an opinion, usually an increased conviction, of the validity and applicability of the psychoanalytic theory discovered more than a century ago. A closer view of this series of events, each instance of which bursts upon the scene seemingly anew, to the shock and dismay of the surrounding environment, cannot fail to be without some benefit.
To pursue the thought, I would like to have us look first at some historical accounts relative to the subject as I have lived through it during my three-quarters of a century as a psychoanalyst. During the early decades of my psychoanalytic career, I was imbued with the feeling that psychoanalysis stops here, that psychopathy in any of its forms spells the limiting factor in applying analytic insights. Psychoanalysis was for the neurotic, not the psychopath.
Leo Rangell
Fellow Members of APsaA,
With profound regret I inform you that one of the most forceful voices for psychoanalysis has been silenced. Leo Rangell, the first man to be named honorary president of APsaA, passed away on May 28 at the age of 97. Leo had been a major, and constant, contributor to our scientific literature for eight decades, including the present one.
His oeuvre constituted over 450 publications, many of them seminal. He served as president of both APsaA and of the IPA, each on two occasions. in recent years he had also been a presence on the Huffington Post as well as on NPR. in addition I counted him as my personal friend and mentor. Leo was, in a word, extraordinary.
I extend my sympathies to the Rangell family and to his special friend and companion, Beth Kalish-weiss.
He will be missed, but not forgotten.
When it came to behavior acted out against society, where it was the values, mores, and ethics of the group that were impinged upon, analysis was to lay down its arms.
At the time of the first active definitions of analysis and discussions of its range and scope, roughly around 1954, besides internal refinement, its border in relation to the outside world was being drawn. While Leo Stone was writing his well-known “Widening Scope” paper, extending the reach of the analytic instrument to include psychosomatic states and a good deal of borderline phenomena, Anna Freud, in the same round of discussions, was writing about “the narrow scope” as well. The goal and motivation of her approach was to be ever vigilant to the danger of overextension of the applicability of analysis, leading ultimately to subsequent disappointment and disillusion. If the criteria were strict enough to begin with and analysts did not stray too far, such negative effects could possibly be forestalled.
The one exception during this historical period that kept a window open to antisocial behavior was the respected work of August Aichhorn, who early established the field of adolescent delinquency as within the purview of psychoanalysis. Interestingly, Anna Freud is said to have been particularly close to Aichhorn, in a personal way. Since the target area was seen as within the spectrum of early development, this interest may have been borrowed from an empathic attitude toward child analysis. For whatever reason, only an adolescent turning to an antisocial sphere continued to draw the interests and formulations of the psychoanalyst.
This remained that way for me until a series of events and experiences led me to enter this behavioral area with the full force of psychoanalytic theory and application. While the mainstream had always remained aloof and even overtly opposed to shifting its interest to the mental behavior of the psychopath or even criminal, my own life positions had kept me struggling against such automatic distancing and separation. Although I had gravitated toward being at the center of the classical segment of analysts, I have described elsewhere the conflicts I had from the start of becoming an analyst in accepting a definitive cleavage between psychological and sociopolitical life.
My years as president of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), as well as previously of APsaA and even more local levels, had always presented to me observable phenomena which counteracted such divisions, impressing me more with the overlap between the two, particularly in behavior within a group, which was the case in each of these milieus. Administrative life in our field pressed upon my consciousness an awareness of combined behavior, the individual psychological admixed with conflicting forces within the social group.
Still, I doubt that this switch of focus would have come about without a one-of-a-kind, compelling event. That came in the form of the most disturbing scandal at the top level of government seen by the existing public in many a decade, which was the news of the Watergate incident. The event itself was not the worst that ever happened; in fact it is referred to as “a two-bit burglary,” but it broke into news reports with relentlessly increasing intensity—the Senate Investigating Committee under the crusty Senator Sam Ervin was just beginning to meet in Washington, concomitant with my second outgoing presidential address to the IPA in 1973.
And it came to one psychically prepared, or well groomed, as to the Nixon character. I had begun to be “a Nixon watcher” 25 years before, when he and I arrived in California in 1946 after World War II. In his early political campaigns and skirmishes, for Congress against Jerry Voorhees and for the Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas, which introduced him to the public domain, Richard Nixon was said not to have defeated his opponents but to have killed them. At least both their political careers were over—in neither case for valid reason. Nixon waved accusatory documents in front of the TV audience without any attempt at proof (that one was a Communist, the other pink to her underwear), ruthlessly and recklessly riding the passion of the times.
My book, The Mind of Watergate, published a few years later was not about Nixon but about the American people. The American populace elected a man as president by the second largest landslide in history whose nickname for over a quarter-century had been “Tricky Dick,” and who had been linked to the Watergate robbery for some six months prior to the election. The subtitle of my work was An Exploration of the Syndrome of the Compromise of Integrity.
The sociopolitical experience was incorporated into the psychoanalytic lexicon. As a widespread psychological phenomenon, by this time in the unfolding of the psychoanalytic century, the paradigmatic neurotic syndrome initiated at the previous turn of the century had been replaced by another syndrome, of equal frequency and intensity. Hysteria and its parallels had given way to the syndrome of the compromise of integrity. This was as ubiquitous as were the former neuroses, as built-in to the human psyche and, above all, as capable of being absorbed and explained under the umbrella of total psychoanalytic theory.
C of I is to crime as neurosis is to psychosis—both are at the crowded, central, more “normal” segments of the population curve.
The new, as the old, was subsumed under the supremacy of the structural view and the metapsychological formulations described by Freud. I did not share in the widespread practice of giving up these central formulations, as had some of their previously strongest advocates. “C of I,” as I abbreviated the new syndrome, could be seen everywhere, and was completely explainable under the tripartite psychology of Freudian theory. The places to look and what is seen are different, but these are only some of the variations that are possible. In one case it was an overactive id, in this new syndrome a deficient or corruptible superego. In neither case are we speaking of extremes but the center. C of I is to crime as neurosis is to psychosis—both are at the crowded, central, more “normal” segments of the population curve.
From the top layers of government or corporate life to everyday man, from the deceit handed the American public through five presidents about the Vietnam War, to tax evasion and other ego-syntonic, corrupt behavior in ordinary people, trust was deserved in very few places. It is the diagnostic task of the analyst to pinpoint psychopathology and to attempt to discover the nature of its etiology. Every source of information can be valuable in leading to insight, and therefore to control and eventually master. And it is important to keep visible and examine both ends of the etiologic spectrum, at the pole of society as much as at the pole of the individual.
Empirically, while audiences, to either the spoken or written forms of these messages, unanimously agreed as to the premise, any reference to action which seemed to be called for was met with apathy or an inner silence. Clearly, the task or the consequences which would be expected to follow insight meet the strongest resistance. And in this case, I am moved to comment, “As it well should”; the obstacles to action are obvious and not to be minimized or skipped over lightly. While the press, when it attends to the issue, writes emotionally about the breakdown of the mental health system, it is difficult to counter with any rational program that holds out much promise. It is—and this should be admitted—hardly possible or expectable to monitor, let alone check, an impulsive act by one misguided individual, prepared to execute an act with the aid of modern weaponry that can wipe out multitudes in seconds.
Nevertheless, I will answer the quest of the editor to examine the role that psychoanalysis might play by turning to Otto Fenichel's pithy aphorism about the multiplicity of psychoanalytic technique, “You can do anything as long as you understand it,” which I would supplement with “Understanding helps, whether or not you can cure; perhaps that will come.” It is still desirable to understand acts against society, establishing a platform upon which to view and study the occurrences, while the ability to master, or better prevent, such situations must await future developments.
In seeking such help, we can neither dismiss the endemic ranting and rhetoric of a whole political party nor the selective incorporation of the pathological ideas by a single individual, be it a Jared Lee Loughner, or Major Nidal Hasan, Sirhan Sirhan, or John Hinckley or the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, or the Virginia Tech shooter Seung Hui Cho, or going further back in history, to a John Wilkes Booth. Each can supply us with unexpected findings, ideas, and leads.
Not to be overlooked is the study of “ordinary” group behavior, that results in the election and backing of a Bush the second, who is not above taking the country to war on what turned out to be a pretense, or other presidents similarly inclined, or the retention and adulation of a Kissinger, who comes away from dark and unreliable behavior with a clean slate, or a disgraced governor rewarded with further important and visible public functions, corporate executives at the center of scandal, religious and moral leaders who disappoint with clay feet—or disastrous financial advisers who destroy peoples' economic lives. There is no end to the list. Political leadership and unbridled aggression are routinely coupled.
Yet in the meantime, there was also an important change on the psychological landscape which was clarified but conspicuously resisted. That has to do with the subject of unconscious volition, from which emanate the issues of responsibility and accountability for one's actions, unconsciously as well as consciously initiated or motivated. In the middle years of this psychoanalytic century, Heinz Hartmann, David Rapaport, and Kurt Lewin all have held that a psychology of action has been absent from the psychoanalytic body of theory. Following decades in which I described the process of unconscious decision making, I wrote “A Psychoanalytic Theory of Action” filling this gap in theory.
In this description, I wrote that all action has its origins in unconscious motivation, yet no external behavior has a valid claim to freedom from responsibility. As Freud stated about the dreamer being responsible for his dreams—who else?—so does it follow that the individual is responsible and accountable for the gamut of his acts, not just those overtly conscious. Man is more responsible for what he does than he thought—while at the same time also being less so. Ambivalences and contradictions have always resided side by side in analytic thinking.
Political leadership and unbridled aggression are routinely coupled.
Analysts have known this without knowing it (viz., Christopher Bollas). While expressing the view, since the historic Leopold and Loeb case in the '20s, that man is not responsible for his unconscious, have they not automatically required some degree of retribution for crimes committed under unconscious influence? Has Sirhan or Hinckley been allowed to go scot-free? The area has always been under a theoretical cloud. In spite of new reasoning, it cannot be denied that psychotic acts are under less control than neurotic or normal ones, and that some judgment as to the quality and relative degree of mastery needs to be exercised.
This subject was recently energetically joined by William Meissner , in a lengthy paper on unconscious volition shortly before his death in 2010. My related writing on hypocrisy in 2000 was followed by Anton Kris in 2005 on the subject, who also joined my papers on unconscious choice conflicts by emphasizing either-or dilemmas in 1977. The matrix behind this cluster of subjects, the interstices that bind them together—unconscious decisions, actions chosen after unconscious volition, hypocrisy, coherence, and consistency—have to do with the status of superego functioning.
While emphasis on the id occupied the early years, and ego psychology was well entrenched during the middle period, we have not even begun to plumb the variations and vicissitudes of superego development, within psychoanalysis or out. The superordinacy of superego pathology in today's world needs hardly to be argued, as citizens worldwide watch events unfold in the powder kegs of the human map, the Middle East, North Africa, as previously in the dictatorships of South America. There is a whole world waiting here for what we can say, as we bear witness to a Mubarak or a Kadafi, as previously to General Pinochet in Chile.
All this goes on while the field itself engages in a global lament that the day for psychoanalysis is over. It is of course to be kept in mind that, as with psychosis, antisocial behavior needs to first be converted to neurosis, to ego-dystonic suffering, en route to self-amelioration. Adaptations need to be understood and utilized.
Hopefully I find that a change is occurring on the couch, which is where we should continue to look for trends. All of my remaining patients speak frequently of living a life of integrity. That is what would be warming today.