Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior (46 page)

Paraphilia almost never originates after adolescence, and psychopathy never does. No sprinkling of images, however deviant, can render an otherwise normal man either paraphilic or criminal. The leap from fantasy to action has much to do with character and the vicissitudes of life, and little or nothing to do with the objects of desire.

Perhaps Heraclitus had it right when he stated that character is destiny. The serial sexual killer’s character is one so firmly formed that it fashions his destiny. We who live with a few of these killers in our midst can only hope that our destinies do not cross. But we cannot escape our human destiny. There is a bit of the sadist, the psychopath, the killer in all of us. The basic difference is that the character-driven destiny of bad men is to consciously do what good men are destined to unconsciously dream.

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Character and Destiny

The Making of Good Men and Women

A man’s character is his fate.
—
Heraclitus

R
ecently, one of my colleagues, an innovative thinker, posed to me the following question: Why do good men and women not act on their destructive dreams and fantasies? As is his habit, my colleague inverted the theme of my book and challenged me to examine the issue from a diametrically opposite position. The question is provocative, but I think it presumes too much—that we don’t act at all on our darker impulses. Actually, good men and women manage to keep their dreams and their dark impulses under reasonable control, though not under perfect control. As I have said earlier in this book, there are no saints among us.

Based on my experience as a psychiatrist, I have found that in our lives we live out complex and powerful fantasies about ourselves and the world. Our choice of partners, the work we do, the friends we seek, the possessions we acquire, the way we dress, the cars we drive, all reflect both conscious and unconscious fantasies that we have about ourselves. One of my patients would destroy in a rage possessions of his that he felt were not perfect. He could not abide any aspersions being cast on the image of himself as perfect.

Why good men dream what bad men do is governed by environmental, biological, and genetic factors that carve our character early in life and drive our destiny. We are just beginning to appreciate the

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importance of the genetic determinants of behavior. Lionel Dahmer’s account of his own murderous dreams provides a chilling hunch that genetics played a significant part in his son Jeffrey’s killings. Although we have learned a great deal, our understanding of human behavior is still limited. Much remains shrouded in mystery. A goal of this book is to stimulate a deeper interest in our good and bad behaviors.

As I have observed in earlier chapters, serial sexual killers are relentlessly and compulsively driven to kill by intense sadistic sexual fantasies. Their victims are only the means to a thrilling orgasm. In contrast, the mainstream fantasies of good women and men are lifeaffirming and generally enabling of others, no matter how dark the tributaries and side streams of their fantasies. Gary Ridgway, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and other serial sexual killers took the lives of people for their own psychopathically selfish ends. Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa dedicated their lives to improve the lot of others— but even Mother Teresa, we now know from her diary and letters, was tormented by doubts and dark thoughts.

Most people who are considered “good” live their lives at various points along a broad spectrum between the extremes of good and bad. All of us, if we remained unsocialized, would act as bad men do—in antisocial ways. Feral children, those who have grown up in the wild, bereft of human warmth and care, behave more like animals than like human beings. That our nature is unregenerate is a tenet of many religions, reflected, for instance, in the concept of original sin. As Job sat on his dung heap, he observed, “Yet man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward.”

As a psychiatrist who has sat and listened to patients for more than 45 years, I have been unable to answer the question, “What do people really want?” Beyond the easy generalizations—money, sex, power, and the need to love and be loved—I have discovered that people are immensely complex in ways that have been unforeseeable to me as well as to themselves. What do people really want? I have found in patients the most unimaginable desires, and patients have uncovered needs and conflicts they never imagined.

One could conclude from such discoveries that bad behavior is a fundamental part of our nature. But the ability to dream about bad actions and
not
to act on them is a mental capacity that can be highly developed, although it must be acquired. The achievements of civilization, hard won over the course of centuries, can be destroyed in a relative instant by a “bad” act, as the world saw with Hitler. Destruction may be truer to our basic nature than “good” acts—a state of affairs recognized by all developed societies, which always need to pass laws and maintain police forces to ensure order.

A benefit of bringing a psychological and medical perspective to the question of why bad men do what good men dream is that this perspective, though narrow in some ways, avoids the pitfall of construing men and women in terms of good and bad and instead refers to mental conditions as psychologically healthy or ill. But even after leaving the analysis of good and evil to philosophy and religion, the psychiatrist must still admit that the concept of mental health itself is elusive. Various professionals in the mental health field define that concept according to their training and theoretical bent. Nevertheless, there is substantial agreement among professionals as to the general aspects of what constitutes good mental health. From my perspective as a psychiatrist, why good men dream but do not translate their antisocial impulses into action, as bad men do, is, in large measure, a function of psychological health.

Sound mental health is inextricably bound to character. As I define
character,
it is a highly individual personality structure that expresses deeply held values and beliefs about oneself, others, and the world. It involves the typical enduring patterns of a person’s functions. We know a person’s character by his or her habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and speaking.

Serious character flaws invariably create psychological problems. Impaired mental health can adversely influence character development. Perfect character, like perfect mental health, is a fiction. “Good enough” character is a more realistic approximation. One’s character is always on display, especially in the little things that we do, or do not do.

Mental Health—What Is It?

Shallow men believe in luck. —
Ralph Waldo Emerson

What constitutes the state of mental health of the hypothetically good man and woman? Over the years, psychiatry has deduced some answers to that question. To begin with, psychologically healthy persons like and accept themselves. They do not depend excessively on others for approval, nor are they severely wounded by others’ criticism. Admiral James Stockdale, the highest-ranking military officer to be held captive during the Vietnam War, observed that many of the American prisoners who survived did not need or seek the approval of their captors. Moreover, a solid, integrated sense of self exists with relatively continuous, reasonably pleasant memories of the past. In psychologically healthy people, the “Who am I?” question arises only infrequently. Neither a grandiose nor a despised self is present. A healthy person does not have to diminish other people to maintain a positive self-view. This person acknowledges and accepts personal shortcomings, and seeks help from others when it is needed. The psychologically healthy person knows that one does not have to be perfect to find self-acceptance.

The healthy person has internalized loving, nurturing parental figures that provide sustenance during times of crisis and inner support at times of failure. This person intrinsically rejects suicide as a solution to life’s vicissitudes. In the examples cited in this book, many physically and sexually abused children internalize hostile, sadistic parents and repeat the cycle of abuse with their own children. In both the adults and the children who suffer abuse, memories of the past are painful and often discontinuous.

Another measure of psychological health is the presence of values and standards that throughout life provide the mentally healthy person with a moral rudder. The conscience of the healthy person is firm but fair and adaptive, not harsh and punitive. Absent is any cruel, unbending righteousness; present is a clear but reasonably flexible sense of right and wrong. In the face of human suffering, the healthy person does not insist on compliance with trivial formalities. He or she accepts guilt when it is appropriate without experiencing panic or immobilizing depression. The healthy person’s conscience works in harmony with other aspects of the personality. It is not a conscience full of holes that permits the acting out of destructive behaviors that are inconsistent with the person’s consciously held value system.

The reader can assess the true nature of his or her own conscience by answering the following question: If you had at your command a genie who could grant you any wish without personal consequences, what would you request? Would your wishes benefit or harm others? Would antisocial wishes emerge? The point of the question is to help discover to what extent are we guided by inner principles of right and wrong that function relatively independently of external constraints, or to what extent do we need a policeman at our elbow? The true measure of a person’s integrity is tested by what he or she would do or not do if there were no possibility of getting caught or punished. At the extremes, we come full circle when we realize that both truly good men and truly bad men are indifferent to external constraints.

The healthy individual’s value system emphasizes becoming proficient at one’s work while aiming at realistic goals. The healthy person is willing to work hard to achieve success, to learn from failure, and to forge ahead. Debilitating perfectionist standards that guarantee failure are absent. The perfect is the enemy of the good. I have worked with patients who have felt psychologically deprived and hungry because they have pursued pie-in-the-sky goals, unaware of the sumptuous meal present before them. Many of the disturbed individuals described in this book had a deviant, utopian vision, one that required the relentless pursuit of money, possessions, power, sex, and love.

The healthy person values cooperation and collaboration with others, enjoying competition, though not at the expense of humiliating one’s competitors or deriving satisfaction if bad things happen to them. As Schopenhauer pointed out, “the worst trait in human nature is
Schadenfreude
[taking pleasure in another’s misfortune], for it is closely related to cruelty.” Although almost all of us have glimmers of such feelings now and then, for mentally healthy people they usually pass quickly. A mentally healthy person views life not as a dogeat-dog struggle but as a positive challenge. By contrast, the psychopath has no moral core and acts at all times in accordance with maximizing his or her pleasure. To the psychopath, the damaging of others is of no consequence.

Healthy and nonhealthy people can be determined by their relationships. Psychologically healthy people enjoy their relationships with others. They place appropriate trust in others as well as themselves acting in a trustworthy manner. They are empathetic toward others, accepting those who manifest conflicts and problems similar to their own. Support and empowerment of friends and acquaintances is their hallmark. They curb feelings of envy and jealousy in deference to the importance of maintaining relationships. They do not desire domination of others. By contrast, most rapists and all serial killers are power-mad in the extreme. They use people as objects for their selfish purposes; the serial sexual killer, for instance, kills for the sole purpose of having a thrilling orgasm. The healthy person esteems other individuals in their own right and appreciates that we all must bear the vicissitudes of the human condition. He or she seeks no personal advantage. Indeed, while healthy people pursue their own self-interests, they do so with empathetic regard to the consequences that these actions might have on others.

The psychologically healthy person maintains good personal boundaries, knowing where he or she stops and another individual begins. The erotomanic stalker has lost personal boundaries, fusing with the object of his or her erotic delusion. A total self-absorption and disregard for others is the sign of the psychopath, and, in my opinion, the origin of what much of the world calls evil. Pathological self-centeredness is roughly equivalent to Christianity’s pride, one of humankind’s chief sins and greatest evils. In the chapter on sexual misconduct of professionals, persons in positions of power and trust can abuse their standing to exploit others for their own gratification. The healthy person does not do this. He or she feels regret or guilt if others are unnecessarily harmed by his or her own actions, and if they are, the healthy person makes efforts at reparation. The ability to feel remorse, sadness, regret, and guilt in appropriate measure is based on toleration and acknowledgment of our own failings. The healthy person does not shift blame to others, as we find with some of the workplace killers. The person with good character makes liberal use of two phrases in nurturing her or his relationships: “I am sorry” and “Thank you.” It is amazing how difficult it is for some people to apologize and to express appreciation.

Psychologically healthy persons are able to accept the darker side of their humanness—their conflicts, their unbridled desires, and even their antisocial impulses—without undue emotional distress. An essential quality of being human is the ability to fantasize. Animals do not have this capacity. Good men and women are able to contain antisocial impulses within fantasy, exercising the option to act or to continue dreaming. Bad men and women, like young children, live in the present and act for the moment. The mature person can enjoy childish pleasures, but at the appropriate time and within measure.