Freud straddled both camps but ended up on the side of a norm for decency. He was aware of the bizarre extended helplessness of the human child and the biological mandate for adult care and sympathy. Since the fate of the species could not depend on some learned control patterns on the part of parents, he had to assume that care for the helpless child must be guaranteed by nature, not simply learned. Caring is not like chemistry or piano playing, something that must be taught. Caring must be part of the genetic mandate of our species. A tender and protective attitude to the newbornâand by extension to the innocent and the helplessâis innate.
If we accept this premise, one can not suspend moral judgment of certain behavior by attributing it to cultural diversity. There are at least some norms and values that cross political and cultural boundaries. There are some absolute criteria of good and evil. Encouraging innocent children to destroy other innocent children for political purposes is evil. How can we cope with such evil? Only by confronting and understanding it. Only by seeing the links that tie pathological to normal behavior. Therefore we need to examine the decidedly strange conduct of “normal” people before analyzing the pathological aspects of behavior.
We do not conduct our lives like the ants, in a predictable pattern designed to support our survival. We are capable of being unpredictable to the point of self-destructiveness. The fact that we are animals endowed with rationality unfortunately does not
mean that we are rational animals. The possession of reason does not ensure reasonableness. At least not all the time. One has only to look at the crazy pace and pursuits of life in our times to know that something besides survival is at stake and that something other than reason is driving us to our goals. Think of the tobacco industry, where executives spend their lives encouraging people to kill themselves by utilizing their products. And think of the people who buy these products in the face of the clearest evidence that lung cancer is an elected option, the one malignant disease we are all free to escape.
Many of us, bankers and brokers, hucksters and peddlers, devote seventy to eighty hours each week to grinding and unrewarding work, waiting for the opportunity to retire. Is there anything that money can buy that is worth the time spent earning it in often deadening and sometimes immoral pursuitsâin dissipation of energy and self-respect? And here we are talking about presumably normal behavior, as distinguished from the pathological actions of terrorists.
Human conduct is obviously not analogous to the practice of engineering. We do not take the best available evidence and apply it to the problem at hand. We do not design our lives the way we design bridges. But before we can deal with something so irrational as paranoia and psychopathic conduct, we must deal with the “irrational” elements of normal people in their everyday lifeâif only to be able to draw a moral distinction between them and the crazy and aberrant.
Normal human beings operate in what had for years seemed mysterious ways, best explained elliptically through the creative insights of our great writers. With the birth of modern psychology in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the study of normal behaviorâperception, memory, learning, and motivationâwas put on scientific footing. This was quickly followed by a systematic attempt to understand pathological behavior. Out of
that crush of insight and genius emerged one towering figure who attempted to fuse the two, Sigmund Freud.
Oh, how this mighty figure who dominated intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century has fallen in recent decades! The oversell and overkill of psychoanalytic theory promised an explanation for all behavior and relief from all mental illness. No theory could ever fulfill the expectations of all this hype. But the disillusionment with what it failed to achieveâa cure for mental illnessâmust not obscure what it did accomplish; it supplied us with one of the most comprehensive and usable theories of normal human motivation. Certain Freudian insights can help us in understanding the variety of normal experience and also the limits of normalcy. By establishing the boundaries of even so irrational an animal as the human being, we will be able to understand the neurotic and psychotic extensions that lead to hatred and terror.
The contributions of Freud that have stood the test of timeâand have been absorbed into commonsense understanding of how we behaveâcan be grouped into the following:
1. We are not all as rational as we like to think. Freud assaulted the cockiness and arrogance of the technological optimists at the birth of the twentieth century by pointing out the limits of reason. He focused on the emotions that are often the hidden drivers of our actions, the sexual instinct and our aggressive needs. Admittedly he overemphasized the role of the sexual drive, but in the process he forced us to attend to the passions. He insisted that the rationale we offer for our behavior is often only “rationalization” (a word to which he gave its modern meaning) after the fact, disguising the emotionally driven intent of the behavior.
2. We are not as free as we like to think. Many present-day actions are a product of our treatment in the past. This explains why seemingly like individuals will behave differently in the face of the same crisis. It explains why one person, when faced with
an assailant, will run with fear, another attempt to appease or negotiate, and a third recklessly attack. This is a developmental point of view. When one says that we do “this” because of how we were treated by our parents in the past, there is the suggestion that “this” is not that freely selected an action. Such dynamic explanations have been labeled psychic determinism and have been viewed by many as a direct assault on free will. Most psychoanalysts “believe” in free will, but they are forced to struggle with a theory that drives one to conceding profound limits to human autonomy.
3. We are not as insightful or self-knowing as we pretend. Nothing we do is caused by a simple stimulus-response mechanism. We do not make a decision at the moment, even though we may perceive it as happening that way. All behavior is a complex result of a number of forces and counterforces operating on us at that moment. Some of these influences arise from the past, some emerge out of the immediate present; some of our motives are operating consciously, others unconsciously and without our knowledge. All of these forces and counterforces act in concert, and their balance determines the specific action: Do we stop to help the elderly woman who fell in the street or do we walk on? Will we go on a diet or simply rationalize about it? Will we uncomfortably tell the truth or will we tell the convenient white lie? Will we act courageously or cowardly in the face of a crisis? This balancing of forces and counterforces driving us one way or the other constitutes a dynamic view of behaviorâhence the term “psychodynamics.” This conception also threatens the view of our own autonomy and rationality to which we cling so dearly.
4. We are less individual than we like to think. Actually, we are obligate social animals; we live in groups because we must. Other people are as essential to our survival as food, water, and oxygen. Therefore, exclusion from the group is a terrifying concept. The threat of ostracism becomes a potent means for forcing individuals
to conform their behavior to the dictates of the community or its leaders.
5. We live in a world of our own perception, to which actuality, that is, the real world, takes a secondary role. Once we go beyond the struggle for food and shelter, the basic struggle for survival, we enter into the world of our own imagination. Pride and shame, joy and despair, security or terror, will be fixed by our
perception
of what is happening, which only accidentally in rare moments will correspond with what is
actually
going on. This locates Freud in the tradition of German philosophical idealism, which dominated his education and milieu.
The emphasis on the perceived world as the arena for human operations was not an original construct of Freud's. It can be traced back to classic times. Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher, is quoted as saying: “What disturbs and alarms man are not the things, but his opinions and fancies about the things.” What Freud did was take ideas that were common currency in the philosophical world of the academy and apply them to the scientific study of human behavior then emerging from the psychological laboratories and the psychiatric clinics of Europe. But who could have predicted what followed from that? Freudian psychology, flowing out of its original clinical environs, saturated the entire intellectual community and, in the process, transformed our very view of ourselves.
There was no area of creative activity that was untouched by Freudian influence, from surrealist paintings to plays, biography, literary criticism, and poetry. Nothing was immune, not movies, not haute couture. Dream sequences became de rigeur even in Broadway musicals, the former venue of double takes, pratfalls, showgirls, and chorus lines.
People began to think and talk about their lives in terms of their unconscious desires, hidden motives, projections, idealizations, rationalizations, sublimations, repressions, self-delusions,
and ego trips. And these were the most grounded and least fanciful concepts. Then there were the exotics: penis envy, castration anxiety, Oedipal and Electra complexes, Eros and Thanatos.
The Freudian insights launched a democratic assault on the ramparts of Victorian society: its morality, its scientific optimism, its class distinctions, its rationalism. Freud leveled old distinctions and upset the traditional standards for human conduct established during the Victorian age. He introduced a wild card into the deck. He proclaimed everything as either directly or indirectly sexual, which of course was idiotic, but in the process it legitimated libidinal drives and started the sexual revolution, which would continue through the twentieth century. Freudian theory openly proclaimed that sexual appetite was ubiquitous, universal, and respectable. Everyone did it or thought about doing it. This proved liberating. Sex was no longer vulgar but the repository of the life force. We all acted under the influence of our libidos: aristocrat and commoner, man and woman, the elderly and the infant. Perversity was not just for the perverted. We all carried such impulses deep within our ids. Freud ushered in an electrifying and creative era.
What was not so sanguine, however, was the unintended effect of what became known as the Freudian revolution on the basic principle of responsibility. The revolution made a tragic and profound contribution to the moral relativism that has fudged the concept of evil, leading to a substitution of understanding for justice.
Without a clear sense of responsibility, there is no morality. Without the same sense of responsibility, the law cannot function. Psychic determinism shredded to tatters our sense of human autonomy. Courts of law became courts of nonculpability, with itinerant psychologists acting as court jesters.
On December 7, 1993, Colin Ferguson boarded the 5:33 P.M. commuter train to Hicksville, Long Island, pumped thirty rounds
of ammunition and sprayed his fellow commuters, managing to kill six people and wound nineteen others. The mayhem was limited only because a heroic passenger overcame him before he could reload. The ever-imaginative defense lawyer, Ron Kuby, a colleague of William Kunstler, decided that his plea of not guilty could be supported by the fact that Ferguson was suffering from “black rage.” What is black rage? Well you might ask. It turns out that it is some “malignant psychological state” black people endure by dint of being raised in a white racist society.
What a blessing that most black Americans living in the United States have not developed this maddening psychological condition that drives one to mass murder. At the risk of being a spoil-sport, let me mention that Colin Ferguson was raised as an affluent member of the decidedly black culture of Jamaica. There he suffered the indignities of being chauffeured back and forth in an expensive limousine from his expensive home to his expensive private school.
Even Colin Ferguson seemed offended by this defense. He refused to use the plea, firing his lawyers instead. Still, the “black rage” defense lives on. It has been used in many courtrooms to explain and thus exculpate not only gratuitous black violence against whites but also black crimes against Hispanics, Indians, Koreans, and assorted other minority groups.
Not to be outdone, defense attorney Erik M. Sears introduced the equally compelling diagnostic category, “early Arab trauma,” in defense of his client, Rashid Baz. In March 1994, Baz had opened fire with an automatic weapon on a group of children on their way to a yeshiva. This was no impulsive maneuver. Baz planted himself on the Brooklyn Bridge, carefully timing the arrival of the bus. Because he was shooting at a moving target, he was able to kill only one student, sixteen-year-old Aaron Halberstam, but he managed to seriously wound three others.
Attorney Searsâlacking any serious defense for this premeditated
slaughter of the innocentsâemulated Kunstler and Kuby and proclaimed his client the victim. Baz had spent the first eighteen years of his life in Lebanon. He could not possibly be held responsible for this murder. He had been so psychologically scarred by the larger environment of his youth that he had no more understanding or control over his behavior “than a fire once lit understands why it's burning.” All that was necessary was to locate an expert witness to lend scientific credibility to the defense. He had no trouble locating Nuha Abuddabeh, a Ph.D. in psychology, a practicing clinician, and the hostess of her own talk show, no less. It was she who introduced the disease “early Arab trauma” into the lexicon of psychologically exculpating conditions.
Logically, this disease would seem to exculpate all people who were raised in an Arab culture for the first eighteen years of their lives from criminal charges of murder. If so, it could equally be grounds for banning this populationâpsychically incapable of controlling their murderous rageâfrom entering the country. While denigrating these defenses as ludicrous, I acknowledge both Ferguson and Baz to be “sick” people. But common people using common sense will almost inevitably convict them in a courtroom. And they should.