Churchill's Black Dog and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind

by Anthony Storr

  Gradually they were introduced to torture; first by witnessing it, then by participating in beating prisoners. Any reluctance to take part was dismissed as “sissy”; and any attempt to help prisoners was severely punished. At the same time, recruits were given special uniforms and many privileges. They learned to think of themselves as part of a powerful military police corps which was both feared and esteemed by the ordinary public. The evidence is that recruits trained in this way come to regard torture as a duty; a job which has to be done, and which they are proud of doing as well as possible. There is no evidence that such men gained any especial pleasure from torture; that is, they cannot be regarded as sadists. Twenty-five Greek torturers who were interviewed after the fall of the junta were all leading perfectly normal lives. After periods of observation varying between six and ten years, only one of the torturers showed evidence of guilt and depression.

  A fourth factor which makes violence more likely is the interposition of distance between perpetrator and victim. Distance can be either physical or psychological or a mixture of both. If all human fights were confined to fisticuffs, there would not only be fewer deaths, but fewer instances of cruelty. A pilot who drops napalm upon people he cannot see may do so without a qualm. If he were asked to pour petrol over a child and then ignite it, he might well recoil in horror. Yet the injuries inflicted would be closely similar. Konrad Lorenz has argued that human beings possess inhibitory mechanisms against injuring their own kind which are not well developed and which are easily overcome because they are not armed with dangerous natural weapons like tusks or claws.9 Animals which possess such weapons habitually ritualize conflicts in such ways that serious injury and death are comparatively rare. Natural selection has not allowed for the invention of weapons which kill at a distance. The destruction and death which can be inflicted upon large populations by nuclear weapons is inconceivably great. In spite of the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the effects are so horrible that our imaginations cannot encompass them. Yet there are people who state publicly that they would not flinch from pressing the button if they thought that the situation required it.

  By psychological distance I mean the human capacity for treating other human beings as less than human. Erik Erikson introduced the inelegant but useful term “pseudo-speciation” for the psychological tendency to maintain one’s own superiority by supposing that other groups of men are inferior.10 It is easy to persuade ordinary human beings to regard those who profess a different religion, or who have a different skin color, or who belong to a different part of society, as alien. Many societies maintain out-groups which are treated with contempt and often with actual cruelty. In Japan, for example, the descendants of a pariah caste, the Burakumin, are still discriminated against, both socially and economically. They used to be referred to as filthy, four-legged, nonhuman. Pariah castes provide a group of people to whom even the humblest member of the legitimate society can feel superior, and are often regarded as disgusting and potentially polluting. Pariah castes, act as scapegoats for tensions within a society, just as individuals sometimes act as scapegoats for tensions within a family. Harshly authoritarian and insecure societies have a particular need for scapegoats, just as do authoritarian and insecure individuals. Political leaders have not been slow to discover that blaming the troubles of a society upon a particular out-group has the effect of uniting the other members of the society by providing them with a common enemy.

  The more easily human beings are relegated to a subhuman category, or perceived as alien, the easier it becomes to inflict violence upon them. In Nazi Germany, the S.S. deliberately degraded concentration camp prisoners, forcing them to live in filth, often covered with their own excrement. When the commandant of Treblinka was asked why such humiliation and cruelty was practiced, since the prisoners were going to be killed in any case, Franz Stangl replied, “To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies, to make it possible for them to do what they did.”11

  Although pariah castes are deprived of both status and power, they are nevertheless regarded as possessing sinister, underhand potential for damaging the society which has rejected them. As I have already suggested, there is good reason to suppose that the insulted and injured do resent their position and harbor impulses toward revenge; but pariah castes are habitually supposed to engage in malicious activities which can only be the product of paranoid fantasy. Paradoxically, the very people to whom the legitimate society has denied the possibility of conventional power are supposed to possess magical powers which they may use maliciously. They are thus both despised and feared at the same time.

  This brings me to the fifth factor which I consider important in the genesis of violence and cruelty, which is that of fear. Fear is closely related to pseudo-speciation, and pseudo-speciation is related to myth, since out-groups have attributed to them qualities which can only be called mythological. Fear of being helpless in the hands of malignant persecutors is, unfortunately, realistic in authoritarian regimes which practice torture as part of a campaign of terror. However, there are certainly a large number of persons in our culture who produce evidence of having felt, as young children, that they were helplessly at the mercy of adults who were perceived as threatening. We have only to look at myths and fairy tales to discover many instances of violence emanating from dragons, giants, and other figures who are immensely powerful compared with human beings and who may be supposed to reflect something of the infant’s experience of the world. It is very easy to persuade human beings that particular groups of other human beings are malignant, evil, and bent upon harm.

  I am convinced that there is a paranoid potential in most human beings which is easily mobilized in conditions of stress. This may be an individual experience, or the experience of a whole society. As an individual example, I will quote the case of a middle-aged man who was being treated for various phobic anxieties. The ostensible origin of his symptoms was an experience at the dentist. He was lying prone on the dentist’s couch, and at one point during the treatment found it somewhat difficult to breathe. He therefore attempted to sit up, but the dentist pushed him down, saying, “You’re bloody well not getting up!” He had previously considered the dentist to be somewhat “trendy” and unprofessional; but at this point the dentist’s face appeared to alter. He changed, as it were, into a malign persecutor, and the patient actually fainted. This same patient was an unusually courageous man. During the Second World War, he had survived three air crashes without developing symptoms of anxiety.

  When societies go through periods of stress, they also tend to develop paranoid ideas. The disintegration which followed the Black Death in Europe, or which accompanied the hyperinflation in Germany between the two world wars tended to throw up leaders who were not only pathological themselves, but who also mobilized latent feelings of paranoia in whole communities. The historian Norman Cohn has made a particular study of this phenomenon, which is contained in three books: The Pursuit of the Millennium, Warrant for Genocide, and Europe’s Inner Demons.12 Cohn demonstrates that when normal patterns of life are disrupted, millenniary movements flourish. These are led by prophets who not only promise a New Jerusalem, but who also identify an anti-Christ or other devilish enemy who must be exterminated if the millennium is to come about.

  The history of anti-Semitism is a case study of paranoia. The myth of an international Jewish conspiracy dedicated to the overthrow of the existing order in Europe and the establishment of world domination was, even between the two world wars, taken quite seriously. It can also be detected as an underlying theme in popular fiction; for instance, in the thrillers of John Buchan and Sapper. In Germany, even before the First World War, an occult tradition of so-called Ariosophists existed which advocated the establishment of a pan-German world empire, ruled by an Aryan elite which had been purged of the pollution caused by intermarriage. As Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke has shown in his book The Occult Roots of Nazism,13 the writings of such men as Guido List, born i
n 1848, and Lanz von Liebenfels, born in 1874, postulated the previous existence of a pure Ario-German culture which had later been debased by intermarriage with inferior breeds. List pictured a millennium in which inferior races would be eliminated and a monolithic state established, with a divine force possessing the unconscious of the German people. He even named the year in which the divine force would take over: 1932, the year before Hitler came to power.

  In Warrant for Genocide, Norman Cohn has examined the influence of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document fabricated in France by a Russian author some time between 1894 and 1899. This spurious document was supposed to reveal the program of an international conspiracy of Jews aimed at world conquest. It gradually spread throughout the world. On May 8, 1920, the Times devoted an article to it: “Have we been struggling these tragic years to blow up and extirpate the secret organization of German world dominion only to find beneath it another, more dangerous because more secret? Have we, by straining every fibre of our national body, escaped a ‘Pax Germanica’ only to fall into a ‘Pax Judaeica?’”14 The Germans were not the only nation to take seriously the notion of the Jewish Peril!

  In the Middle Ages Jews were seen as agents of Satan, worshippers of the Devil, and participants in diabolical rites which included erotic orgies and, more particularly, the ritual murder of Christian children, with subsequent drinking of the children’s blood and cannibalism. As late as 1913, Mendel Beiliss, a Jewish clerk of Kiev, was tried for the ritual murder of a Christian boy. Jews were also supposed to be poisoners of wells. Very similar beliefs were held about witches. Witches were supposed to be able to fly so that they could engage in conspiratorial sabbats (itself a Jewish term) in which the devil was worshipped, perverse sexual rites were indulged in, and children were cooked and eaten. They were also seen as causing the death of animals and the ruination of crops by poisoning. A later variant of the poison theme was propagated by Hitler, who affirmed that sexual intercourse with a Jew poisoned the blood. Even schemes for mass inoculation have been suspected of being Jewish plots to inject whole populations with syphilis.

  I have said enough to demonstrate that when societies create out-groups which act as scapegoats, outsiders are feared as well as hated. Fear is a potent instigator of violence and cruelty; and its presence partly accounts for the fact that, even when the members of such out-groups are helpless in the hands of their persecutors, they are both tortured and exterminated.

  Under certain adverse circumstances, paranoid feelings can be aroused in most people. In my view, this paranoid potential takes origin from the fact that human beings are born into the world in a very helpless state, and remain dependent upon, and at the mercy of, those who are older, bigger, and stronger for a greater proportion of the total life-span than occurs in any other species. The psychoanalyst Thomas Szasz begins his book of aphorisms, The Second Sin, by stating, “Childhood is a prison sentence of twenty-one years.”15 Although we may hope that the majority of children do not regard their early years in quite such a negative light, we have all experienced being picked up or left to cry at the whim of others; and fears of once again being reduced to the condition of helpless pawns whose needs and wishes are disregarded are easily rearoused.

  This brings me to a consideration of the sixth and last factor which I consider to be provocative of violence. Human beings who feel themselves to be disregarded by the society in which they live, even though they do not belong to a definable out-group, are naturally more prone to resentment and violence than those who feel themselves to be respected. The deprived, the unemployed, the unskilled, do not easily acquiesce in their status. It is not nice to be a gamma; and it is tempting to revenge oneself on the alphas whom one blames for organizing society ineffectively. And the larger the community in which such individuals live, the less likely are they to feel valued or accepted.

  It does not surprise me that day-to-day violence is largely an urban problem. It is principally in big cities that the individual can easily feel that he is a mere cog; an expendable element in a vast machine which can easily do without him. In a village, hostile tensions between neighbors can be extreme. Gossip, backbiting, and malice flourish as much, if not more, in small communities as in large. But individuals are recognized in small communities. They at least feel that they exist; and, even if their place is no more than that of the village idiot, it is at least better than feeling one is nothing.

  Although there has undoubtedly been an increase in urban violence in Britain during the last fifty years, the phenomenon is nothing new. The streets of London are still safer than they were at the turn of the century; while in the eighteenth century, gangs of hooligans known as Mohawks roamed the streets to the terror of the populace. The cry “Who goes home?” in Parliament dates from a time when it was not safe for a member of the House to attempt to reach his home alone. But, today, cities are bigger, population has increased, and the feeling that society is divinely ordered has disappeared.

  Authoritarian societies, in which individuals “know their place” and are kept in it by a combination of threat, moral suasion, and an appeal to the Deity, do not have such overt problems with those at the bottom of the heap as we do. I once knew a cook who attributed the rise of Hitler to his disregard for social norms. If only he had remained in his proper station as a house painter, she affirmed, we should not have had all that trouble with him.

  It has often been observed that revolutions do not occur when deprivation of those at the bottom of society is at its worst, and when no hope of improvement is visualized. It is rather when hopes have been aroused and then disappointed that violence erupts. In eighteenth-century France, conditions were actually improving, but this improvement came to an abrupt end in 1787, when a fiscal crisis, the threat of increased taxation, and a disastrous harvest combined to threaten many with starvation. The circumstances which instigate violence seem generally to be those which involve what has been called “the disappointment by illegitimate means of legitimate expectations.”16 Today, those of us who are relatively successful tend to feel guilty and less certain of our rights; while those who are unsuccessful feel ill-treated by those above them. We have not begun to solve the problem of how to make the less gifted and the less competent feel wanted or valuable. In urban, industrial societies, there are far too many people who feel humiliated, ineffective, inadequate, and of no account. It is from their ranks that the majority of those who commit acts of violence are drawn; and it is toward giving such people a sense of value and significance that more of our best efforts ought to be directed.

  NOTES

  1. S. L. Washburn, “Conflict in Primate Society,” in Conflict in Society, ed. Anthony de Reuck (London: Churchill, 1966), p. 11.

  2. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 120.

  3. Lloyd DeMause, ed., The History of Childhood: Evolution of Parent-Child Relationships as a Factor in History (London: Souvenir, 1976), p. 1.

  4. Muriel Gardiner, The Deadly Innocents: Portraits of Children Who Kill (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), pp. 95–128.

  5. Norval Morris and Gordon Hawkins, The Honest Politician’s Guide to Crime Control (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 57.

  6. Claire Russell and W. M. S. Russell, Violence, Monkeys and Man (London: Macmillan, 1968).

  7. A. H. Maslow, H. Rand, and S. Newman, “Some Parallels Between Sexual and Dominance Behaviour of Infra-human Primates and the Fantasies of Patients in Psychotherapy,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 131 (1960):202–12.

  8. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

  9. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (London: Methuen, 1966), p. 207.

  10. Erik H. Erikson, Identity (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 41.

  11. Quoted in Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 101.

  12. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Mil
lennium (London: Secker and Warburg, 1957); Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967); and Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt (New York: Basic Books, 1975).

  13. N. Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1985).

  14. Quoted in Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, p. 153.

  15. Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 1.

  16. Roger Brown and Richard J. Herrnstein, Psychology (London: Methuen, 1975), p. 274.

  14

  Psychiatric Responsibility in the Open Society

  FOR THE PURPOSE of this chapter, there is no need to define the term “open society” too closely. As Karl Popper delineates it, the open society is an ideal towards which men should strive, rather than an actuality.1 But, however imperfectly realized, the open society is one in which personal freedom is highly valued, in which individuals are, to use Popper’s phrase, “confronted with personal decisions,” and in which decisions, both personal and collective, are based upon reason rather than upon authority or tradition. What part has the psychiatrist to play in such a society; and has he anything special to contribute to it?

  A hundred years ago, the role of the psychiatrist in society was both limited and clearly defined. His job was to look after the insane; an occupation which was largely custodial, since the insane were mostly untreatable, or at any rate incurable. As cities grew in size, both in Great Britain and the United States, large institutions had to be constructed to accommodate the mentally ill from these urban populations. These institutions, at first called lunatic asylums, and only recently named mental hospitals, were, at any rate in Britain, often placed at considerable distance from the community whose needs they were designed to serve, in order that the distasteful phenomena of insanity should impinge upon the ordinary citizen as little as possible. Psychiatry was a backwater specialty in which those out of mind were as far as possible put out of sight, while those who cared for them were similarly circumstanced.