– A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales
There is no better place to study and observe the psychopath than
in a prison.
I met Anton in the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg,
Pennsylvania. For some years previous to our meeting I had been hearing of him,
had seen his name and picture in the newspapers.
The earliest word I had of Anton’s arrival in Lewisburg came by
“grapevine” – that curious, almost mystical channel of communication which
often makes the interoffice telephone system of institutions an anachronism.
Within an hour after he had been admitted I knew enough about him, his
behavior, his manner and appearance, to have picked him out from the crowd.
When he appeared for routine examination in my clinic the
following weeks, I recognized him at once.
He had remarkably black hair, which he had obviously tried to
train so that it would fall across his forehead in emulation of his idol. His
face was of a somewhat Slavic cast, with high cheekbones and wide-set eyes. One
eye was a little off center, it gave his gaze a quality of thoughtful
abstraction, useful in the pose he adopted. His body was large framed, but his
hips narrowed athletically, making a fine swivel above thickly muscled legs and
calves. His entire appearance was catlike, lithe, despite what at first glance
seemed to be an unwieldy torso.
Homosexuality was a topic from which Anton wished to take full
flight. But if he was to continue with his treatment, he knew that he must
eventually come to grip with it.
Actually, the inclination he had towards his own sex was merely part of
the psychopathic character structure he possessed.
Persons like Anton are neither homosexual nor heterosexual, but
bisexual – attracted equally to both sexes. This lack of a clear orientation
toward either sex is founded upon a failure of selectivity or discrimination
between the sexes. It is due to their never having gone beyond the phallic
stage in psychic development. They become, as it were, mired down in the
Oedipus conflict and remain there throughout their entire lives, or at least—as
a clever colleague once put it to me –“until their gonads stop sizzling.”
Hence it is that psychopaths feel the need of sexual release in
the most primitive terms, and use for purpose of relief any object, male or
female, that presents itself. The greatest reason for failure in therapy with
such characters is that this factor is not ordinarily taken into account, the
Oedipal drama not re-evoked. When Anton was forced to face it, the homosexual
component in his personality came to light.
There followed, in succeeding weeks, the
tale of Anton’s sexual adventures. It was made up of the usual stuff and marked
only by the transient, inconclusive nature of all of his contacts.
At four he had been seduced into
performing fellatio on an older boy, was shamed and embittered by the
experience and resolved to turn the tables when he got bigger and stronger. By
the time he was twelve, his greatest delight was in forcing smaller boys into
his former position.
He achieved much satisfaction from being
the dominant one in these situations, and rarely hesitated to behave brutally
with other in pay for his earlier submission and shame.
His contacts with women, too, were
fleeting, savage, and lacking even the pretense of tenderness. There was the
prostitute who initiated him when he was eleven, and then a whole string of
casual “lays,” some bought with money, some with blows, the rest overborne in
their defenses—if they had any—with a false ardor he assumed for the occasion.
Every one of his sexual adventures was marked by the same set of circumstances
and took the same course.
No matter where Anton happened to be,
nor under what conditions, the affair began with an acutely felt physiological
need. He then set about finding an object on which (never with
which) to satisfy the need.
Anything that happened to come his way
was welcome and usable—male or female, old or young, willing or unwilling.
After the object had been used by Anton, it was summarily discarded. And this
was the pattern of his sexual life, a stencil for the sex lives of all
psychopaths, a consequence of the disrupted developmental course and its
literal cessation, in psychic terms, in the phallic stage before the Oedipus
conflict has been resolved.
Shortly after the conclusion of his analysis he was given a parole
into the Army. I had a couple of letters from him, one from a P.O.E. on the
West Coast, another from an undisclosed Pacific island. Two years later I
learned he had been killed in action during the recovery of the Philippines.
HUMANIST REVIEWER’S COMMENT: All people have an innate
capacity for bisexual behavior – for developing romantic feelings for
members of both sexes and for experiencing homoerotic arousal as a result of
casual bodily contact. That is normal. That is human. However, because the
Jewish, Judeo-Christian and Muslim religions and psychiatry have traditionally
condemned and even criminalized the homosexual dimension that comprises the
psyche of every individual, people are thus made to feel self-conscious
and guilty over their romantic-erotic experiential feelings for those of
the same sex, the underlying reason for many so-called psychotic or
schizophrenic and neurotic behaviors. There is, of course, a world of
difference between consensually or mutually expressed romantic or sexual
feelings between two people and sexual violation of one individual by another
individual or individuals through force or coercion. Drugs, including
psychiatric drugs and alcoholic beverages, are often used by a sexual predator
to place another individual at a disadvantage.
Food for thought: The so-called psychopath is merely reacting to
the dominant values and institutions of an inhumane society – institutions that
tend to view normal sexual feelings as abnormal. The dominant institutions of
Jewish, Christian and Muslim societies also tend to justify human exploitation
(including slavery and capitalism) via scriptural teachings (The Torah and the
Old Testament) that justify the right of the Jews or the Chosen People, to
exploit Non-Jews (Gentiles or others): Leviticus 25:40-45. The Koran also
justifies similar forms of exploitation by Muslims – especially by Muslim men.
All three religions are sexist, in that women are expected to be submissive to
men. Boys are expected to be submissive to both men and women.
Thus, disadvantaged people are typically imprisoned and
disenfranchised and stigmatized as ‘criminal’ or as ‘psychopathic’ or as
‘psychotic’ merely for rebelling against the unfair laws of Judeo-Christian and
Muslim societies, laws that justify inequality and human exploitation.
Psychiatry is typically a tool of a fascist state. Thus, it is the psychiatrist,
not the patient, that is, in effect, the psychopath, the one who has a
disregard for the feelings of others – especially of the disenfranchised. It is
interesting how psychiatrists typically twist everything upside down to make
what is normal appear to be abnormal or psychopathic and what is psychopathic
to be normal.
T. Shepherd, Humanist, Reviewer.
One may purchase The Fifty-Minute Hour by Robert
Linder from Amazon.com books. The 216-page book, published by Delta, contains
five case histories.