Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior

by Robert I. Simon

  Alexander Pichuskin, dubbed the Chessboard Killer, worked as a grocery store clerk in Moscow for a dozen years before being arrested and charged with 49 murders in 2007. He had been planning, he told a court, to commit a total of 64 murders, one for each square on an imaginary chessboard.

  John Wayne Gacy was a building construction contractor, twice married, active in community projects, and a member of civic organizations. In 1967, he was voted the Jaycees’ Outstanding Member. Joining the Jolly Joker Club, he created the character of Pogo the Clown and, costumed as Pogo, went into hospitals to cheer up sick children. In 1978, Gacy was director of the Polish Constitution Day Parade in Chicago, and during the festivities was photographed with First Lady Rosalynn Carter. But as Gacy once said, “A clown can get away with murder,” and he did—raping, sodomizing, torturing, and strangling to death 33 young men over the course of more than a decade.

  Theodore Robert “Ted” Bundy’s mother considered him an ideal son. His political friends were convinced he was on the fast track in the legal profession and would one day be a governor or a senator. Dashingly handsome, intelligent, and witty, Bundy was a romantic dream come true for many women. Some described him as an attentive, tender lover who sent flowers and penned love poems. A photo shows Bundy immersed in happy domesticity, opening a bottle of wine as he sits with a girlfriend. At the moment the photo was taken, Bundy had already abducted and murdered 24 women and committed necrophilia with their bodies.

  How is it possible for someone who appears to be the guy next door to commit multiple horrific murders? And why are we so fascinated with those who commit such crimes? People have always been gripped by the dark side of human behavior. Our minds follow an inescapable syllogism: “I am human. Serial killers are human. Am I, like them, capable of monstrous deeds?” Most people, having posed this question to themselves, conclude that the answer is “No, I am not even capable of thinking about such evil.”

  The Rope of Evil

  As with pornography, most people recognize evil when they see it. Reaching a universal definition of evil, however, is impossible. Evil is a complicated concept, akin to a thick rope of many strands in which philosophers and theologians become entangled. Evil is in the eye of the beholder, influenced by social, political, religious, philosophical, psychological, and other factors. For example, combatants frequently demonize their enemies as evil, even while each side is certain that God is on its side. The 9/11 terrorists believed that murdering thousands of innocent people would ensure their entrance into Paradise. Antiabortionists who kill doctors or other abortion clinic personnel contend that they are killing murderers. As a psychiatrist and forensic psychiatrist, I will tug at just one strand of the rope of evil, the psychological strand.

  Here, in psychological terms, is a working and admittedly imperfect definition: Evil is the intentional, gratuitous, or, on occasion, unintentional infliction of harm by individuals, committed against other individuals, groups, or entire societies. I include unintended acts in the definition because heedless self-indulgence may lead to negligent deeds that produce unintended harm, as when drunken drivers cause deadly accidents. I exclude wars in which millions of people are killed, and which are declared “just” or “unjust” by participants on one side or the other, both praying for victory and convinced that God is with them and not with their enemies. My purpose is to isolate and focus on the inner psychological mechanisms that play essential roles when humans harm each other.

  Evil is interpersonal. If you doubt that, read the Ten Commandments: their admonishments and strictures apply to the evils that beset our relationships with man and with God, but mostly with man. Evil is the exclusive province of human beings; it does not take place among animals. Harm directed at inanimate objects is not considered evil unless there is a concurrent element of human suffering. Thoughts that are considered evil invariably deal with doing harm to other human beings.

  Psychiatrists are medically trained in and wedded to the use of the scientific method, so they avoid applying the term evil to the aberrant or horrible acts they are sometimes called upon to understand and explain. Psychiatrists observe causes and effects in human behavior and try not to be judgmental about them. The determination that a particular behavior is or is not evil is a moral judgment, and what society may label as evil behavior the psychiatrist tries to understand within the framework of mental illness and the psychology of daily life.

  Nonetheless, the insight that evil involves acts of interpersonal harm opens the door to analysis of the psychological interaction between perpetrator and victim. That analysis depends on the concept of empathy. The presence or absence of empathy is key to determining an individual’s capacity to maintain constructive, collaborative relationships with others; empathy is the ability to put oneself in another’s psychological shoes, to sense what the other may be thinking and feeling. But empathy without caring is empty. Psychopaths (remorseless predators) are very skilled at divining what other people feel and think, but they do so in order to manipulate them. They do not care one whit about other people, whom they regard as morsels to be consumed, with the remnants to be thrown away as trash. Serial sexual killers will unblinkingly take a life in order to have an orgasm.

  Edmund Edward Kemper I II was a necrophilic serial killer who treated his victims as totally discardable objects. After being imprisoned, he was quite clear about his intentions toward his victims: “I’m sorry I sound so cold about this, but what I needed to have was a particular experience with a person, and to possess them in the way I had to, I had to evict them from their bodies.”

  Suspension of empathy is necessary in order to intentionally harm other people, and it is usually accompanied by the psychological mechanisms of devaluation and projection. Individuals intent on committing harm first dehumanize others and then project onto these others—their victims—their own disavowed, unacceptable traits and inner conflicts. These same mechanisms are involved in prejudice and scapegoating.

  Serial sexual killers demonstrate spectacular failures in empathy and equally egregious use of devaluation and projection to rationalize their terrible crimes. In interviews with John Wayne Gacy, it was learned that during his childhood and adolescence, his father voiced contempt for Gacy’s illness (psychomotor epilepsy) and for the pampering by Gacy’s mother. The father also warned Gacy’s mother that John was “going to be a queer,” and heaped scorn on John by calling him a “he-she.” Years later, after Gacy’s killing spree, Gacy referred to his victims as “worthless little queers and punks.” It is not difficult to perceive in Gacy’s attitude toward his victims echoes of the contempt and verbal abuse his father inflicted on him.

  Ted Bundy expressed contempt toward victims. He professed surprise that society was making a fuss over “these girls” that he had murdered, and that their families so deeply mourned their losses. “What’s one less person on the face of the earth?” Bundy asked, and referred to his victims as “cargo” and “damaged goods.” Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, referred to his victims as “trash.”

  Rader, Ridgway, Gacy, Bundy, and Kemper are all serial sexual killers, a distinct subcategory of serial killers. Not all serial murderers are serial sexual killers. Some kill for reasons other than sex, such as money, jealousy, revenge, power, or dominance. Serial sexual killers enjoy torturing their victims (sadism) for one reason only: to obtain a maximal orgasm that they are unable to achieve in any other way. Most serial killers, regardless of type, are not psychotic; that is, they have not lost their grip on reality.

  We consider entire societies that act like serial killers to be evil. But were all the members of the Nazi party during World War II psychopathic? —Yes and no. Some leaders and chief sadists undoubtedly were, but most of the compliant members who took part in the killings were ordinary non-psychopathic citizens who rationalized the atrocities they were committing by the mechanisms of empathic failure, devaluation, and projection. Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who directed th
e deportation and extermination of millions of Jews and other peoples, used these mechanisms as well. Interestingly, Eichmann was certified as normal by a half-dozen psychiatrists, even though he had perpetrated monstrous, unconscionable evil. The psychiatrists’ diagnosis was reinforced by an odd incident that took place at his trial. A former concentration camp inmate had been waiting for years to testify against him, yet when he stood before Eichmann at the tribunal, the former inmate unexpectedly passed out. Upon being revived, the would-be witness explained his fainting at such a crucial moment by saying, “Eichmann looked so normal.”

  The first deliberate, systematic genocide of the twentieth century occurred with the extermination of an estimated 1.5 million Armenian men, women, and children by the Ottoman Turks. On the “killing fields” of the Khmer Rouge, in Cambodia, between 1.7 and 2.3 million people died in just a few years. In 1994, 800,000 people were murdered in three months in Rwanda. More recently, tens of thousands have been murdered in Darfur.

  Were the perpetrators of such horrific acts sadistic psychopaths? Assuredly some were, but it is also certain that their acts were facilitated and condoned by an infrastructure of compliant supporters, whom psychiatric evaluation would in all likelihood have diagnosed as normal. For every paid killer or torturer in these mass murders, there were “administrators” who participated in the killings by answering telephones, keeping records, driving cars, and performing other day-to-day tasks so that the business of torture and murder could go on—just a regular part of an administrator’s ordinary day at the office.

  The point is that in all cases of mass killings and sadistic acts, dramatic failures of empathy and caring must take place, and enormous excesses of projection of unacceptable thoughts and feelings must occur, to permit the perpetrators to perceive their victims as detestable human rubbish.

  Us, More or Less

  What about us, the more or less law-abiding, responsible, respectable folks? Qualification is necessary because we are human beings; nature has built into us the instinct to survive, and in order to do so we are (and must be) adaptively self-centered. To overempathize with others would make us inattentive to our basic needs and expose us to danger. The nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “If we were not so excessively interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.” Perfect empathy is the province of saints, and as George Orwell observed, “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent.” For the rest of us, more or less ordinary human goodness is good enough.

  We are all self-referential. But there is a fundamental difference between adaptive and maladaptive self-reference. Healthy self-esteem is the foundation stone for the positive regard and empathy we are able to feel toward others. People who do not like themselves are often critical of others and reject them. As a psychiatrist, I have found that it is individuals unable to accept themselves who make vehement criticisms of others, and that these are often self-criticisms. Serial sexual killers have extremely low self-regard, which they project onto their victims. The serial killer, in his perverse empathy, corrupted by selfloathing and cruelty, puts his hated self in the shoes of his victim, then tortures and kills the victim.

  Most of us live between the extremes of serial killer and saint. We all participate in what I call the evils of everyday life; feeling our lives and needs to be the most important of all. In our cravings and strivings to accomplish our personal goals, we inevitably bump up against others who are similarly striving, and we may intentionally or unintentionally harm them.

  Underlying some of these trivial evils of everyday life are the same failures in empathy, devaluation of others, and projection of the dark side onto others that can be observed at full throttle in serial killers. To forget a spouse’s birthday or anniversary causes hurt and is a reflection of a failure of empathy, and perhaps even a measure of devaluation and projection.

  What can we do to turn around our natural self-centeredness? To defeat envy, for instance, we can work at identifying and empathizing with the good fortune of others. The scenario that envy usually follows is this: You have something that I want but do not have. I feel resentfully deficient and angry. I must destroy what you have (or you). But empathic identification with the good fortune of others allows us to put ourselves in their shoes so that we share in their happiness. This is healthy self-centeredness. We more or less healthy people can do this; serial sexual killers cannot.

  Our capacity for empathy, though it may reach glory in compassion, is limited. We can only absorb so much pain from the lives of others, and certainly cannot encompass the monstrousness of genocide. We are unable to mentally put ourselves in the shoes of hundreds, thousands, or millions of people who have been tortured and murdered. Joseph Stalin, one of the worst genocidal killers of the twentieth century, knew this; he was reported to have said, “One death is a tragedy; 20 million deaths is a statistic.”

  The extreme depravity of serial sexual killers is also beyond the conscious mental life of most people. I cannot fully explain why “bad men” act out antisocial impulses while “good men” channel potentially destructive psychic forces into constructive action. But I can and must ask: Have you been mentally torturing anyone lately, perhaps subtly—maybe even yourself? Have you manipulated others for personal advantage? When you slowed down to rubberneck at an accident, what were you trying to see? Was that your dark side peeking at gore and death?

  We must no longer permit ourselves to doubt that “bad men” do what “good men” dream. All men and women struggle with their dark sides, but that is not reason to despair. One of humanity’s greatest achievements is the ability to turn the mind on itself to achieve insight and growth. If we can acknowledge and channel our demons, we are able to harness a powerful force.

  M. Sindy Felin, acclaimed for her first novel, To u c h i n g S n o w, observed, “I always thought I was destined to be either a serial killer or a mystery writer.” The serial killer, however, is incapable of transforming the basic drives that we all have into higher, life-affirming attitudes and behaviors. Theirs are failures of sublimation. Their pathological self-centeredness is in large measure the consequence of unsocialized, unchanneled sexual and aggressive impulses. Against the primitive drives that constantly demand self-gratification, the conscience of the serial killer is no match. Driven to gratify his deadly desires, the serial sexual killer has no joy in his life, only a transitory sexual release at the death of a victim, a release that soon requires the torture and death of a new victim. Instead of engaging in passionate relationships and work interests, as mentally healthy people do, this killer pursues the domination and submission of others. Instead of having the commitment to life goals and progress that characterize mentally healthy people, the serial killer is doomed to repeat a neverending cycle of compulsion, death, and more compulsion. Beyond envisioning murder and sadistic gratification, the imagination of the serial killer is blind.

  The ability to examine unacceptable antisocial thoughts and feelings without translating them into action is not just a requirement for psychiatrists or their patients. Most people are able to curb or modify feral instincts, often with the help of knowing that a policeman stands on the corner. An enormous difference exists between thinking evil and doing evil, and although some religions do not accept this distinction, the law does. If it did not, all of us who occasionally have antisocial thoughts would be in jail, perhaps on death row. As the pioneering psychoanalyst Theodore Reich observed, “If wishes were horses, they would pull the hearses of our dearest friends and nearest relatives. All men are murderers at heart.”

  Jeffrey Dahmer killed and cannibalized 17 young men. His father, Lionel Dahmer, wrote in his book that, as a youth, he himself had awakened at times with the feeling that he had committed murder. The difference was that Jeffrey had actually done what Lionel had only feared having done: “I had awakened in a panic that consciousness soon ended. Jeff had awakened into a nig
htmare that would never end.” Lionel Dahmer worried that he had passed on to his son a killer gene that had caused Lionel’s murderous dreams to burst full force into Jeffrey’s brain and actions. Various theories emphasize different combinations of environmental, biological, and genetic factors in serial killers, but no one knows why Lionel’s dreams stayed as dreams and Jeffrey’s were acted out as murders. We can only echo the prophet Jeremiah (17:9), who concluded, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?”

  We may not be able to know the heart, but we can discern that big and little evils occur when we ascribe our unacceptable thoughts and feelings to others through the processes of dehumanization and projection. If we can acknowledge the beam in our own eye, we will be less likely to stigmatize the mote in the eye of others. To have, to hold, and to recognize the universality of the darker side that we each have within ourselves can be the key to enhancing our ability to experience a shared humanity rather than yield to the impulse to persecute others for our frailties. An important element of what the world calls evil is our failure to see an aspect of ourselves in others’ behavior, especially in their bad behavior. The mote in his eye is the beam in mine, and to acknowledge that is essential to achieving ordinary human goodness.

  Understanding and insight about our psychological mechanisms, such as projection, dehumanization, and the ability (or inability) to empathize, permit us to exercise options rather than be bound by reflexive behaviors. We have the ability to learn about ourselves from multiple sources, from everyday experience, especially tragedies; from education; from arts and literature; from our relationships, whether constructive or destructive; from personal therapy; and from the myriad other ways that life can teach us. But self-knowledge and insight are not enough. Some people in this world understand themselves quite well but have neither the desire, the ability nor the character to harness their antisocial impulses.