Buried Dreams

by Tim Cahill

  The medical records, Rappaport testified, were “significant in understanding his overall personality. I think that they were all what is commonly called hysterical or conversion symptoms. That means that somebody can psychologically induce a condition which appears to be medical. This is to be differentiated from malingering, which is a conscious attempt to produce an illness . . . for example, somebody who is afraid of something—let’s say blood—might faint. Well, fainting is a hysterical symptom. Passes out, causes themself to avoid that situation.”

  Rappaport diagnosed Gacy as “a borderline personality, or personality organization with a subtype of psychopathic personality also manifesting instances of psychotic or paranoid schizophrenic behavior.” It was essentially Freedman’s diagnosis—pseudoneurotic paranoid schizophrenia—under a newer name.

  The borderline personality organization, Rappaport said, is considered to be a serious mental illness, falling some-where between the neurotic and psychotic diagnoses.

  Gacy, Rappaport said, had been cooperative during the interviews. The man was, in fact, a self-confessed “motor-mouth.” In analyzing Gacy’s effusive and bewildering stream of talk, Rappaport noticed that “almost invariably, everything he said he would present both sides.” The psychiatrist found this significant and thought John “was unable to really feel one way at any time about anything. . . . He was unable to relax in a sense with the existence of any one thought.”

  Like Freedman, Rappaport found John’s relationship to his father to be of seminal importance. “His father,” Rappaport said, “would come home from work and be in a good mood and go down in the basement . . . and when he would come up, he would be drunk . . . harsh, punitive, critical, and sometimes in a rage . . . any little incident could be a source of anger.” Rappaport mentioned the fishing trip where John was blamed for two weeks of rain, the running enamel on the first window John ever tried to paint. The basement, Rappaport said, “struck me as very important . . . it was always locked up . . . a very prohibited area, and the mystery around the basement seemed to pervade his thinking . . . the mystery was enhanced by the fact that the father changed his personality . . . from the time he . . . went down into the basement and the time he came up. . . . I think the idea of something prohibitive was crucial in that he was not allowed access to this.”

  Simultaneously, Gacy’s medical problems “affected his ability to participate in sports and to be a part of the gang, part of the peer group and affected his feelings about himself in relationships to other kids and adequacy. . . . I think he felt he was defective.”

  Gacy, Rappaport said, practiced myriad perversions that the psychiatrist defined as repetitive and persistent forms of behavior that take the place of a normal sexual relationship with a mature adult. Perversions are “representations of a block due to fear of castration . . . and the fear is allayed . . . by adoption . . . of the . . . perversions.”

  Rappaport said the first source of castration fear in the male arises out of the Oedipal situation, the familiar romance in which a young boy may fall in love with his mother. These Oedipal feelings “are usually diminished after the age of six until puberty. . . .”

  Another source of castration fear, the doctor said, arises out of homicidal impulses. “The little boy, in wanting to possess his mother, wants to do away with his father. . . . However, in John Gacy, because of the abuse that he received . . . he developed heightened feelings of wanting to get rid of his father, tremendous homicidal feelings with rage.”

  The third source of “expectation of punishment,” Rappaport said, arose out of Gacy’s desire to please his father. “He became a very hardworking, very ambitious, industrious individual. He tried intensely to get his father’s favor. . . . So he was, in a sense, selling himself . . . and he felt very angry about doing that.” It was a form of prostitution that had “something to do with his depreciation of the victims. . . .”

  The first of Gacy’s psychosexual disorders or perversions to appear during his development was fetishism, which Rappaport said was the “use of an inanimate object to heighten sexual pleasure and take the place of the actual sexual object. . . . The fetish is usually a symbol for the penis which helps the individual deny the expectation of castration. He sees that as an object symbolizing a penis and then can, in his mind, deny the fact that this castration might take place.”

  Women’s underwear, in particular, Rappaport said, “helps the individual to deny the nakedness of the female: the naked female . . . just appears to somebody in this situation as a castrated individual. So rather than being able to view that naked female, he only is willing to view the underwear and to deny to himself that this is a castrated individual. This is one of the reasons he collected the underwear, and I think that it even has something to do with his . . . stuffing them in the victims’ mouths.”

  In collecting these articles, Rappaport said, Gacy was “able to see a representation of a fetish, a penis, and thereafter in his mind” he may have believed that he himself was “not going to be castrated for the things that he has done. He carried it to such an extent that eventually he was able to replace in his mind the female. . . . He is afraid of the female because it reminds him of the fear of castration, so he went so far as to eliminate from his sexual life the female” and to “adopt the role of homosexuality.”

  Rappaport pointed out that the newest literature from the American Psychiatric Association did not define homosexuality as a perversion or psychosexual dysfunction. The category is now called “ego-dystonic homosexuality” and “just considers those homosexuals who feel uncomfortable with that tendency. Ego-dystonic means it does not feel good or compatible with your self-image.” Rappaport thought Gacy’s homosexuality was of the ego-dystonic type.

  In the male homosexual, the doctor said, “there is the obvious elimination of the castration fear because . . . the sexual partner has a fetish, and you are not threatened by the idea of a penisless object. . . .” In addition, Gacy fit the profile of a “narcissism homosexual,” one who is “able to see in the other partner . . . someone like himself . . . to tender, in some way, tenderness to this other individual and then enjoy . . . the tenderness he is imparting. He is able to imagine the person given the tenderness is him. . . .”

  Gacy didn’t want “to participate with women because :hey required something of him. . . . Males, as far as he was concerned, he only got from them. And what he was getting . . . was this feeling of admiration. He played the role of father, and he was able to be tender and give them advice . . . point out to them how . . . dumb it was to go with a stranger and to go into somebody’s car. . . . In a sense he was crying to do this at first as a father figure . . . and he was identifying with them as though he was the son getting this advice” that “he was unable to get . . . from his father. So he was able to play several roles.”

  Gacy also practiced sexual sadism, which Rappaport defined as “the persistent use of psychological or physical means of degrading and punishing and humiliating the sexual object or another person for the purpose of sexual pleasure.” In reality, the doctor said, “it is an expression of aggression . . . rather than the sexual drive.”

  The sadist, Rappaport testified, “identifies with the aggressor. In this particular case, Gacy was identifying with “his father, the person who inflicted all of the pain on him . . . the humiliation. . . . He was able to take out his hostility on helpless victims who were either tied up, who were in some way degraded, humiliated, and this gave him a great deal of relief in feeling this control.”

  The last of the perversions practiced by John Gacy was necrophilia, which Rappaport said has two forms. Sexual necrophilia “refers to the male having sexual relations with a corpse,” while “nonsexual necrophilia is the idea of looking at, being near, gazing at a corpse . . . the idea is again to have a completely helpless victim and to enhance the feelings of power and control to allay the fear of castration.”

  The necrophiliac “tends to collect corpses
as a fetishism expression of necrophilia and as a way of assuring himself of the fact that people love him. He has . . . all these bodies, people who supposedly loved him and cared for him and then he feels better . . . because he has . . . representations of a lot of people that care for him.”

  Necrophilia, Rappaport said, “is not an isolated perversion” but “a culmination of a series of perversion acts.” Taken together, the fetishism, ego-dystonic homosexuality, sadism, and necrophilia constitute “polymorphous perversions” that, Rappaport said, “[are] chief characteristic[s] of the borderline. . . .”

  The borderline personality organization, according to Dr. Rappaport, can encompass the narcissistic personality disorder. The narcissistic person, Rappaport said, has an over-weening sense of grandiosity: “He is all that exists, everything exists around him, for him.” Another characteristic “is a pervasive sense of power and brilliance” combined with an exhibitionistic tendency “to display himself,” to “want to be in the limelight . . . have people looking at him and admiring him. . . .” In Gacy’s case, the narcissism could also take “subtle form . . . he would march in parades, would be a clown . . . a politician. . . .”

  The narcissistic person is also characterized by his inability “to feel empathy for other people. He has no idea what others are experiencing when they suffer . . . he only knows his own feelings.”

  A final characteristic of the narcissistic personality, Rappaport said, is “entitlement, which means he feels he is entitled to have everything. People are to serve him and do for him.”

  A second personality disorder that fits into the category of the borderline personality organization, Rappaport said, is the antisocial or psychopathic personality. That, Rappaport explained, is “someone who has all of the characteristics of the narcissistic, plus . . . a deep problem with the superego,” which, Rappaport said, was one of “three parts of the psychic structure: the id, the ego, and the superego. Everyone has heard these terms. The id represents the drives that the newborn child has at birth. The superego represents the value of the parents and society,” which “is a controlling mechanism over the drives of the id. And the ego is the personality or culmination of this inner action between the id and superego. . . .”

  Rappaport said that “the word ‘conscience’ is a common term which refers to the superego . . . you can say . . . there is a defect in conscience. . . . They have gaps, spaces in the conscience. Sometimes they can do what is right . . . and sometimes they don’t.”

  The inconsistency “comes from the fact that the parental values were inconsistent. On the one hand, the father might tell him not to behave badly, but then he himself would behave badly . . . he himself is violent and disparaging and humiliating and degrading, so that the child has the conflict in understanding what is right and wrong . . .” and “develops a conscience or superego [that] is inconsistent,” that has “holes,” “gaps.”

  As a result, the antisocial personality has “repeated conflicts with the law and with society.”

  In addition, Rappaport said, “the psychopath or antisocial person seems to have the quality of remorse, sensitivity, feelings, empathy, sadness . . . but underneath he is cold and ruthless. He does not have these characteristics. They only seem to be there, and that is why, in many cases, people who came in contact with Gacy thought he was a normal guy . . . he pretends to be someone who has all the characteristics of a normal individual, but underneath they don’t really exist.”

  Rappaport thought that the narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders “didn’t explain many of the other aspects” of Gacy’s behavior, however. A diagnosis of borderline personality organization, however, would encompass these aspects.

  The borderline, Rappaport said, is characterized by over-whelming feelings—"intense affect"—of “hostility or depression, and the depression in the borderline” results out of a sense of “loneliness.” The borderline “cannot tolerate being alone, tends to seek out crowds . . . he might have parties at his house with four hundred of his closest friends or surround himself with these bodies.” Or go cruising at two in the morning.

  A second characteristic of the borderline “is the presence of impulsive behavior. . . . It is either . . . episodic in the form of self-mutilation or drug overdoses or otherwise chronic in the form of alcoholism or promiscuity,” such as Gacy’s “polymorphous perversion sexuality.”

  The borderline, Dr. Rappaport said, experiences “episodes of psychoses. These are transient in nature, and they often occur as a result of rage. They are sometimes different than the full-blown psychotic paranoid schizophrenia, but there is a great deal of similarity. The chief difference is that they are short. They may last only hours, and at the end of this time, the person reintegrates to a degree.” The psychotic experiences can happen as a result of drug and alcohol abuse, or “they come about from stress, fatigue, and internal stress.”

  Finally, Rappaport said, the borderline will use “three primitive ego defenses: splitting, projective identification, and gross denial.” The first of these, splitting, begins in the first few days of life, in the “oceanic feeling” of the newborn who “cannot differentiate himself, his body boundaries . . . where he begins, where his mother begins. After a few days or a few weeks . . . he begins to see . . . that there is a mother or a person out there. He recognizes . . . when he cries that someone either comes or doesn’t come. . . . A person brings a bottle or changes his diaper. . . .

  “He also begins to recognize that he has feelings which are different. At times he feels at peace . . . and other times he feels distressed. So he’s beginning to differentiate himself from the outside world. . . .

  “In the normal individual, as he develops, he should have the ability to fuse these concepts. To recognize that mother sometimes answers his needs and sometimes doesn’t. It’s the same mother.”

  In borderlines, Rappaport said, “there is a defect at this point. . . . He’s unable to recognize and to comprehend and to allow himself to feel hate and anger toward the same person that he loved.” The person could be the mother or the father, and, in Gacy’s case, Rappaport thought “it was both” but “predominately the father.” Young John Gacy “was unable to metabolize the feelings . . . so he split them off and capsulated apart these two feelings. . . . At various times he was in touch with one or the other, but never both at the same time. It would produce too much anxiety. It would be overwhelming and could cause a full-blown psychosis, a personality state [Gacy] could not withdraw from if he had not used this particular defense mechanism.”

  Gacy, Rappaport said, “could not see himself or another individual as having a combination of qualities.” In conversation, Rappaport noticed that John would present one idea followed quickly by the opposite idea and “never put them together. [He] sees himself as a peaceful, calm, easygoing individual. At other times, he sees himself as totally rageful [and has] almost no memory or no realization of the other side of him, and that’s where the big split comes in.”

  Gacy split off “the negative qualities . . . the things he didn’t like about himself . . . the incestuous idea . . . homicidal feelings toward his father . . . embarrassment feelings he had about his homosexuality . . . rage toward his parents. These feelings he wants to get out of his self. The recognition internally that these feelings exist built up . . . tremendous rage inside him. He has a need to discharge these feelings, to get them outside himself. So he creates a scenario.”

  In the scenario, “he brings . . . young boys to his home,” where he can star in a play scripted by himself, and the play itself is an example of the second primitive ego defense common to borderlines: projective identification. “First,” Rappaport said, “he begins to act as a father to them . . . acts tenderly . . . tries to show them that he has a fatherly instinct and they are boys he can take care of. As I mentioned, these are . . . young men and boys who are at the height of the Oedipal themselves, who have the characteristics of the developed phallus . . .
they are boys . . . he can identify with, who he recognizes as having qualities that he feels. . . .

  “Now, he’d get these boys and he would begin to project onto them the qualities that he had inside himself and that he didn’t like. . . . He could say that they are selling themselves, as he sold himself to try and impress his father. He could say that they were degraded . . . dehumanized as his father made him.” He begins to feel it is not himself he is hating, but the young men.

  At first, Rappaport said, Gacy would have been at least unconsciously aware that the familiar hatred he sensed in the boys actually existed within him. But “at some point in the scenario that he goes through” Gacy would progress from simple projection to projective identification. “He then feels that these qualities . . . exist in the other person. They are no longer a part of him. They are in this other person and he feels expunged or cleansed. . . . Now he sees these persons as . . . bad . . . homicidal . . . threatening. . . .

  “He is then the father in identifying with the aggressor, and these victims, these boys, are then himself. He can . . . kill them . . . and in a way rid himself forever of these qualities that are inside of himself: the hostile threats and frightening figures that pervade his unconscious. He is so convinced that these qualities exist in this other person, he is completely out of touch with reality . . . and he has to get rid of them and save himself . . . he has to kill them.”

  Gross denial, the third of the primitive ego defenses common to borderlines, according to Rappaport, allowed Gacy to live with the horror of what he had done. “This is a way,” the doctor testified, “that the borderline has of disengaging himself from the consistency of what he does. He’s able to see the dead body there somewhat as if it were a cocoon, an empty shell from a butterfly. It’s only a representation of the bad part of him. It’s a shell. It’s flimsy. It has nothing to do with humanness. He’s able to grossly deny the fact that there is any human quality there, and basically, he has to just get it out of sight and get rid of it so that he has no more connection with that bad quality in himself.