Freud’s attention was drawn to paranoia by the publication of another remarkable book. In 1903, Daniel Paul Schreber, a former presiding judge of the appellate court in Dresden, Germany, published his autobiographical book, Memoirs of a Neurotic. Freud, not being an institutional psychiatrist, had little access to patients suffering from “dementia paranoids,” the term then used. Freud had certainly treated patients that by today’s standards would be diagnosed as schizophrenics, but he tended to consider them as suffering from “hysteria” or “obsessional disorders.” None of these patients had classical paranoid delusions; therefore, Freud based his pioneering and brilliant study of paranoia on Schreber’s memoir.40
The parallels between the suffering of Schreber and that of Nash, separated by almost a century, reveal the power of good clinical observation and the ability of the paranoid mechanism to bridge time and culture. The differing details are reflections of the differing cultures from which the two men came. In general, nineteenth-century delusions like Schreber’s were likely to stress God, spirits, and religion. The twentieth century substituted the powers of the state for that of religion, and invasive forces were less likely to come from Hell than from outer space. Whereas it was the CIA that was informing Nash, God, himself, directed Schreber.
Freud placed conflicts over what would later be defined as latent homosexual impulses at the heart of Schreber’s psychosis. The illness, he postulated, was an attempt to control impulses that, in those days, and in this manner of man, would have been frighteningly humiliating. From this rather brief case, Freud illuminated the paranoid process and the relations and connecting links among (1) unconscious fears, humiliation, feelings of impotence; (2) ascribing these feelings to some identified enemies through projection; (3) delusions of persecution by those enemies; and finally (4) formation of delusions of grandeur. In this process weakness is converted into strength, degeneracy into honor, and shame into glory.
Many people today, examining Schreber’s account, might choose to reject Freud’s dynamic interpretation—the struggle against latent homosexual desires—ascribing quite different meanings to the same symptom. But Freud’s description of the psychic maneuvers—the defense mechanisms—whereby the paranoid manages to salvage self-respect out of humiliation became a blueprint that guided generations of psychiatrists to an understanding of the seemingly grotesque and self-defeating ideations of their paranoid patients. These defensive maneuvers mirror the kind of cultural paranoia that has gripped many modern states. By insisting that symptoms have meanings, Freud encouraged taking seriously the rants and seeming gibberish of the psychotic patient.
It is significant that Schreber suffered his breakdowns in anticipation of elevation to a higher office. Classically, the stress of increased expectations or honors perceived as undeserved triggers episodes of decline. It is the anticipated humiliation, the public disclosure of inadequacy, that is dreaded. These days, the role of public humiliation is perceived as the common factor binding one paranoid fantasy to another.
Schreber went on to recover from his first illness rather quickly, but his second illness, some eight years later, became the subject of his extended autobiographical sketch. His earlier symptoms were “hypochondriacal ideas.” But they were of such severity that we are likely these days to see them as delusional: He believed that he was dead and decomposing. Almost simultaneously, a paranoid shift occurred, and he saw these effects as something being done to him by his enemies rather than something happening to him through the unfortunate, but disinterested, course of disease. His physician from his first illness, a Dr. Flechsig, was responsible for this disease. Flechsig, as his tormentor, had now become a part of a more grandiose religious formulation, involving a struggle between God and the devil.
To transform one’s daily miseries and humiliation into a symbol of a universal battle of the forces of good versus evil is only too reminiscent of the patriotic cry, “God is with us,” that seems to accompany all wars. It is particularly prominent in the holy jihads pursued by the Muslim world today. Part of the human coping mechanism is an attempt to find purpose in the seemingly meaningless, and therefore unbearable, tragedies that befall us. Those who have a religious bent might comfort themselves over the loss of a child by viewing it as God’s will and, as such, part of an inexplicable—since we are not delusional—grand design. However, religion itself would come to be viewed by Freud as a self-serving “illusion.” Religious ideas were born from human needs to make an awareness of our fragile existential state seem less hopeless. That could be accomplished by converting life’s inevitable end to a mere transition to a better world. Mortal creatures can become immortal by “discovering” an afterlife.
Schreber, after feeling maligned and persecuted, went on to the next step. He transformed his persecutory delusions into delusions of grandeur. The humiliating attempt to convert him into a woman, to emasculate him, was only an intermediary step to his becoming the redeemer of the human race. Rather than a humiliation, Schreber concluded that it was a sign that he had been chosen to be God’s companion. He was no longer “the play-thing of the devils” but an instrument of God’s will. “He believed,” Freud stated, “that he had a mission to redeem the world and to restore it to its lost state of bliss. This, however, he could only bring about if he were first transformed from a man into a woman.” The physician then in charge of his case, a Dr. Weber, stated:It is not to be supposed that he wishes to be transformed into a woman; it is rather a question of a “must” based upon the order of things, which there is no possibility of his evading, much as he would personally prefer to remain in his own honorable and masculine station in life. But neither he nor the rest of mankind can win back their immortality except by his being transformed into a woman . . . by means of divine miracles. He himself . . . is the only object upon which divine miracles are worked, and he is thus the most remarkable man who has ever lived upon earth.
Thus, that which started as a humiliation—his homosexual impulses—became a source of glory, a device to permit him to serve as the redeemer of the human race. The psychotic can, thus, be seen as confirming the rule that even the most outlandish and bizarre of symptoms must be understood as an example of misguided repair. He can live with his delusion better than he can with the constant torment that results from overwhelming anxiety from unrecognized sources.
In the earlier days of his illness, Schreber was “tortured to such a degree that he longed for death. He made repeated attempts at drowning himself in his bath, and asked to be given the ‘cyanide of potassium that was intended for him.’ ” But as Weber noted, the “ingenious delusional structure” saved him from “insanity.” By that he meant that the full-blown delusional system that ended in the redeemer fantasies freed Schreber and permitted him to return to “normalcy”:The fact was that, on the one hand, he had developed an ingenious delusional structure . . . on the other hand, his personality had been reconstructed and now showed itself, except for a few isolated disturbances, capable of meeting the demands of everyday life.
Dr. Schreber shows no signs of confusion or of psychical inhibition, nor is his intelligence noticeably impaired. His mind is collected, his memory is excellent, he has at his disposal a very considerable store of knowledge. And he is able to reproduce it in a connected train of thought. He takes an interest in following events in the world of politics, of science, and of art. . . . In spite of all this, however, the patient is full of ideas of pathological origin, which have formed themselves into a complete system, now more or less fixed and inaccessible to correction.41
During his second admission to a mental hospital, Schreber petitioned the courts to regain his liberty. “Such, indeed, were his acumen and the cogency of his logic that finally, and in spite of his being an acknowledged paranoiac, his efforts were crowned with success. In July 1902 Dr. Schreber’s civil rights were restored.”42 Schreber, like Nash, continued his life outside an institution, clinging to his delusional system, and as far as
the record shows, representing a threat to no one.
In the United States, bombers of innocent people are few in number and have tended to be psychotic. The most famous case in recent years was the previously mentioned Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.
Kaczynski’s career as a bomber dated back to May 25, 1978, when he was known as the Junkyard Bomber because of the crudeness of his weapons. In a portent of what was to follow, the first bomb—while addressed to an academic scientist, a professor of engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute—was actually placed in the parking lot of the University of Chicago School of Engineering. A pattern of targeting research scientists was to emerge. This cycle of bombings ended in 1987 but was renewed with new intensity and more sophisticated bombs in a cycle that began on June 18, 1993.
Kaczynski that day mailed two such parcels in what had become his signature trademark, a wooden box enclosed in a mailing envelope. One was addressed to University of California geneticist Charles Epstein. It exploded with such force that shrapnel was driven into Epstein’s body and face, breaking an arm and obliterating three of his fingers. The second bomb was delivered to David Gelernter, a professor of computer sciences at Yale University. Gelernter barely survived and was severely crippled, losing most of his right hand.
Gelernter’s brother was also a geneticist, which may be one reason David Gelernter was targeted. Certainly the focus for Luddite hysteria these days tends to be on genetics, partly because genetic research invokes the wrath associated with the issue of abortion, partly because molecular genetics operates at a level not easily understood by the layman, but mostly because genetics seems closest to the kind of “tampering” with nature that has traditionally (think of Dr. Frankenstein) frightened many with the fear of someone’s “playing God.”
What eventually emerged, when Kaczynski was finally apprehended through the courageous intervention of his brother, was the picture of a classic withdrawn and delusional schizophrenic living a hermit’s life. In his delusional system, he perceived modern science as a force for evil, which justified his assault on its agents. The fact that he was schizophrenic meant that his assaults were disorganized, illogical, and irrationally executed. He seemed to attack at random those who were remotely connected to the offending sciences that endangered his barely articulated principles. He operated alone, as is characteristic of schizophrenics, who have a profound inability to relate to almost anyone. Like Schreber, he was primarily influenced by his own inner demons.
The psychotic individual may interpret events in life in a totally idiosyncratic manner—driven by his inner need to see things in a particular way—but he still will take his stimulus from the world around him. Except for the deteriorated schizophrenics of the back mental wards, most schizophrenics are not totally out of touch with reality. They are thus susceptible to the same influences as the rest of us. John Nash did work for the CIA, but in a mundane manner. Still he built his fantasies around his mathematical abilities and a romanticized need to be involved in the battle against evil represented by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Kaczynski was most likely aware of the battles over the possibility of human cloning, and for that reason for him genetics became the area of research in which the debate over the limits of scientific intervention in the human condition would be centered. He was, in addition, obsessed with computers. Methods of communicating have always been great source material for the delusional, particularly those that use invisible sources of energy with capacity to penetrate and influence—like radiation. Kaczynski, in his focus on computers, was in direct line with dozens of patients I saw in my early training who believed that “radio waves,” “X rays,” “television waves beamed from outer space” were means of either sending messages to them or taking control of them.
The real world may not appear the same to psychotics as it does to us, but the real world does influence them. Since anything can play into a preformed delusional system, schizophrenics can be the instruments, unintended or otherwise, of passionate and often overwrought single-cause advocates who see the whole world as secondary to their mission. In protecting the innocent unborn, passionate right-to-lifers have been prepared to take the life of the innocent mother. Animal rightists often seem willing to sacrifice researchers for rats, certainly for dogs or monkeys. But even if the more responsible members of those causes would not engage in such violence, their rhetoric suggests that they would, or it implies that to do so would be just and honorable. This rhetoric is ready tinder, waiting to ignite the psychotic, who is looking for legitimate explanations for his inner agonies and is eager to do battle against the evil that torments him. The inflated rhetoric of the radical fringe groups in the various rights movements supplies the rationalization that the psychotic needs and locates an enemy for him. He can now project his internal conflict to those who have been identified by others as threatening innocent populations or the world itself.
In May 2002, after the FBI had issued an all-points bulletin in relation to a serial bomber, Lucas John Helder, a twenty-one-year-old college student, was arrested. Cameron Helder, the defendant’s father, said to reporters: “I really want you to know that Luke is not a dangerous person. I think he’s just trying to make a statement about the way our government is run.”43
By definition anyone who plants eighteen pipe bombs, injuring six people, is a dangerous person. If I were to ask the senior Helder, who knew of his son’s actions when he issued his statement, whether he thought delivering pipe bombs into the mailboxes of innocent Americans was a dangerous action, I am reasonably sure that he would have answered yes. The father was in the same state of denial one encounters with other parents of dangerous children. And he was not alone. Even after all the evidence was assembled and published, Helder’s friend said: “There’s no way he could be armed and dangerous. That’s just not him.” His roommate and another acquaintance, a fellow member of the golf team, offered in Helder’s defense the fact that “he never showed any emotion” even when he hit a bad golf shot, an observation that would be a red flag to any psychiatrist.
In support of a denial mechanism designed to protect us from painful realities, Cameron Helder did that which many liberal-minded individuals are wont to do: He attempted to separate the individual from his actions. He knew that the inner Lucas John Helder, his son, was a loving and decent boy. But there is no inner self that is separated from one’s actions. Like it or not, what one does, one’s behavior, is a better definition of the self than one’s inner feelings. To probe for unconscious determinants of behavior and then define the person in those terms exclusively, ignoring his overt behavior, is a greater distortion than ignoring the unconscious completely. You, the essential you, will be better represented and understood through what you do than what you think.
But did the father even know what the son was thinking? In an attempt to explain his behavior, Lucas John Helder sent the Badger Herald, the University of Wisconsin’s newspaper, a six-page letter, filled with chaotic statements about government, technology, and the environment. It included the following: “Do you wonder why you are here? Do you wonder what is out there . . . way out there? I remember those times of uncertainty, and I can’t tell you how great it is to know, to know eternally, and to be.”44
Much of his rhetoric and behavior suggests the psychotic: the sudden departure from his typical behavior; the discontinuity of actions from the stimuli that preceded them; the solitary nature of his behavior; his grandiosity and his exultation at the “great feeling” of liberation. All of this is more reminiscent of Schreber than of the organized hate groups that lynched blacks in the South, or the mobs of toughs that periodically go gay bashing, or the psychopathic teenagers that set homeless people on fire as a form of entertainment. One would not be surprised to discover that evidence of prepsychotic conditions existed in this young man. Certainly when his father and friends said that he could not be dangerous, they were drawing on a history devoid of antisocial actions. His p
recipitous shift suggests a breakdown of traditional patterns, which is typical in a psychotic break.
During this same general period, England and Australia were also having problems with “mad bombers.” These cases particularly expose the specific role of polemicists in stimulating even the most psychotic. The ultimate responsibility for crimes committed by many psychotics must be shared by those who inadvertently or directly manipulate them.
Glynn Harding, a twenty-seven-year-old patently schizophrenic man from Crewes, England,45 sent dozens of potentially lethal mail bombs filled with nails and other forms of shrapnel in his defense of the rights of animals before he was apprehended. Psychotic bombers are notoriously difficult to apprehend. Their very irrationality contributes to this difficulty.
An article by Helen Carter in the Guardian, on September 22, 2001, took note of how tenuous was the association between Harding’s animal rights beliefs and his selection of victims. Try making sense of this list—even as part of an animal rights crusade. Harding’s first bomb was mailed to a firm that manufactured identity tags for farm animals. Successive bombs were sent to an agricultural real estate agent, a British Heart Foundation charity shop, a pet and reptile store, a sheep farmer, a cancer research charity shop, a poultry breeder, and a fish and chip shop. The youngest victim was a six-year-old whose father earned his living clearing wasps’ nests.
Nothing is more indicative of the fact that the victim is primarily a vessel to receive the internally manufactured hatred of the terrorist than the arbitrariness by which these victims were selected. Bombings like these are clearly hate crimes, but they have often been directed at people who are not actually members of the hated group. With Harding, the self-acclaimed animal rights crusader, his chosen victims were in no way connected with the use of animals for experimentation. Even when his crimes were directed at an animal research laboratory, the putative source of his anger, it would still not represent that which truly generated hate in Harding’s heart. The cause selected is a convenience for internal rage evolving over a lifetime of perceived deprivations.
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