Fatal Vision (72 page)

"And he couldn't communicate openly about these feelings, either with himself or with his wife because he was so caught up in this stern, authoritarian image of himself.

"Look at this picture: it's sort of a 1930-ish picture of a man and a woman, and the man is sort of turned off to the side looking away, and the woman has her arms around him. People often see that the woman is pleading with the man in some way. Okay, now here's his story:

" I
'm trying to make out the expression on his face. This is a husband and wife. The husband feels strongly about something, and the wife is obviously showing pride and concern over her husband's anger and is trying to console him.'

"I mean, the husband is an angry, striving, aggressive, assertive beast and that makes the woman feel good. He goes on: 'He enjoys that she is responding so nicely to his show of co
ncern. He'll be able to control
his feelings through her urgings. They'll both feel fine. She showed her concern and love, and he gave in to her wishes in calming down. I suspect the inciting cause was an advance made to her by the milkman, or a slight to her by her boss. So he was going to protect her or keep other people away. She's calming him, but she really appreciates a show of affection.'

"So he is the sort of stern, taciturn, demanding, authoritarian figure, and she is pleading, don't do it, I know you're protecting me, but calm yourself—urging him to be happy and successful as a husband.

"But there's no real communication about his feelings or thoughts or ideas going on here. People are behaving according to images.

"In many ways, a person of his conformity might achieve a great deal through close relationships with older male figures. But he fears emotional closeness with males due to his fears of homosexual impulses in himself.

"Now, actually, he doesn't have any real, strong homosexual impulses, but he's afraid that he might. He has a fear of the possibility that these things might exist, and thus he's turned off from close relationships with males.

"Let me give you another example from the TAT. In this picture, one person is lying down and another is standing over them, bent, with the hand out. The person standing is usually seen as male. The person lying down—it's really sort of obscure, but probably it's more commonly seen as male.

He says: This is an old man and a boy. They're both hobo types traveling together. The old man has been traveling with the young man as a friend for the last two days, through Texas. The old man looks at the boy and thinks of his own son, and on this night he felt a sudden urge of affection and fatherly-type feeling for the boy while he's sleeping. He wanted to reach over and touch the boy—his shoulder or his hair. The boy is going to wake up and misunderstand and run away and break up a nice friendship. His misunderstanding prevented a lasting friendship from developing, the old man being much more hurt than the boy.'

"Now," said the psychologist, having no awareness of Jeffrey MacDonald's sudden departure for Texas at the age of fifteen and his automobile trip from New York in the company of Jack Andrews, Sr., "in a sense, here, I think that Captain MacDonald is identifying with both figures. He's the young boy who is afraid of the relationship with the older figure, but he's also the older figure who can't communicate his feelings to the boy.

"And there is really sort of a bittersweet quality about these feelings, that he simply doesn't know how to express or accept. He has in himself a longing and a need for these things, but no idea of how to get at them or how to communicate about them, so he stays isolated.

"An important element, you see, in his concept of the masculine role is that a man does not show emotion or weakness. To ask for help or understanding is a sign of inadequacy.

"Thus, his confident manner which initially gives the impression of strength, is, in fact, a rather rigid defense which doesn't permit him to become close to other people and doesn't allow him to ask for support even when it would be appropriate.

"If he were to bring his feelings out more consciously and openly, then all his conflicts about adequacy versus need for support would come out in the open, too, and make him much more anxious and upset and depressed.

"He can't tolerate that. So all these things are kept sealed over. I'm bringing them out from some of the test results but that doesn't mean he's consciously aware of them.

"Now when a person is concerned about their adequacy, about how successful they are, and that person happens to be an American man, one of the ways that this gets expressed is in terms of heterosexual behavior. How do they make it with women. And obviously this is going to come up with Captain MacDonald.

"But the problem is, he is confronted with not only his image of himself as a very adequate male, but his need to be socially conforming and get acceptance and approval.

"So what does he do? He has a whole series of affairs with women but never with a lot of satisfaction or success. And he is always overcome afterwards not by any deep internalized sense of guilt, but a sort of a feeling of shame. The difference that you might see in a young kid who has done something wrong and is caught by their parent and feels ashamed and blushes and turns red as opposed to the idea of guilt, where somebody does something wrong—they know it is wrong and internally they're bothered by it. It doesn't matter that nobody knows about it. Internally, they've got a sense of guilt.

"His behavior was more motivated out of this sort of shame because he was concerned about the approval of others.

"So, although to listen to him, he might present himself as sort of a stud—a very successful male in having sexual encounters, in fact he really is not. He is not comfortable with himself in this image. So he's not free to go out and be consistently, sexually aggressive.

"You know, a person who is completely liberated in this sense—although he might not approve of it—a person who is completely liberated in this sense might perfectly well be able to go out and have affairs and if the wife brought up any objection, you'd just say, 'If you don't like it, leave me.' You know, 'This is your problem. This is the way I run my life.'

"Okay. He couldn't do that at all. Another person might be so bothered by guilt over having an affair that he might stop and not have any more. That would be another way of handling it. Instead, he had affairs but was never completely happy in having them and yet he couldn't completely stop them.

"So there was this sort of continually wanting the approval and affection and love of the women but also wanting the approval and affection and love of society.

"The fact is, he has a sort of unusual combination of defenses— unusual in the sense that psychologists like to type people into nice, neat little compartments. And that's great when we write textbooks, but unfortunately when we meet with a real person, they don't fit into such nice neat compartments.

"He has this funny combination of, on one hand, an obsessive approach, an intellectualizing approach. That's a fairly unusual combination of defenses, and I think it makes him particularly difficult to understand.

"Now, what does all this have to do with the actual crime that occurred? On the basis of a psychological examination, I don't think a psychologist can determine if a person is lying or not. I think I can with relative certainty describe his adjustment, describe what he was like, account for why he is reacting to what happened the way he did, but as to whether he could be lying about a specific detail or not, I can't read his mind.

"And I think in general it's very difficult to say who, and under what circumstances, can commit a murder. Give me a group of one hundred people and let me examine the group and I might predict out of that hundred what proportion might be likely to commit violent behavior, but you give me one person and ask me to predict, and boy, I'm not going to make any money. I'd rather bet on the horses.

"So, from my understanding of Captain MacDonald's adjustment, the two questions I would want to ask myself are, one, what sort of circumstances would be maximally stressful for him and might lead him to commit a violent crime, and, two, if he committed a violent crime, how would he go about it and how would he respond to it.

"Now, on the basis of his adjustment, it is my feeling that the most stressful type of circumstance would be one where a person not in authority over him and not under him, but a person he hasn't clearly got
a structured role with
—like a wife or a peer— would say something that would directly challenge his basic area of conflict: his sense of adequacy and masculine autonomy.

"So a taunt from his wife suggesting that he lacked confidence or he lacked virility, I think, would perhaps be the most upsetting thing to him—the thing that might lead him to become most angry, most likely to commit a violent act.

"I cannot think of a basis that would provide sufficient stress for him to commit a violent act against someone who was not in this clearly unstructured role to him. In other words, people way in authority over him, he would have no trouble submitting. That was his style of life. People way in authority under him, they're clearly under him, they wouldn't provide as much stress.

"Therefore, based on my knowledge of him, I could not conceive of emotionally stressful circumstances that would be such that would lead him to kill his children. But I could think of some that might lead him to be angry enough to do something to his wife.

"I have seen murderers who were essentially cold-blooded, psychopathic killers who killed without any particular concern for what they've done and maintained a perfect calm—not because they were defending against anything but just because th
ey didn't care, and coldly and c
alculatedly went about their business and afterwards tried to handle and conceal evidence and save themselves.

"And I've seen people who have committed a murder in the midst of a psychotic episode. And I've seen people who were basically rather passive, dependent individuals that held their feelings inside of them, with adjustments like Captain MacDonald's—and like probably some of you—who have indeed committed a murder.

"Usually, the murder is of a spouse. The great majority of murders are the murders of spouses. But the way this sort of individual typically responds is immediately afterwards they break down.

"They frequently become amnesic for the whole event and pick up the phone and calmly say,
^‘
I don't know what's happened. There's a knife in my hand. I think my wife, or husband, is dead. You'd better come quick and bring the police. And you come in and the children are sitting there crying and there's just one big mess. And then you go to interview them and they say, 'I don't know what happened.' They have blocked it completely from their minds. One study done in England estimated that in approximately 60 percent of the murders they studied, the person who was accused was amnesic for the event.

"Now, Dr. MacDonald is a person who does repress and deny and compartmentalize, and it's my feeling that were he to have committed such a crime, his response afterwards would most likely be that type of response."

"Can you generalize," Victor Woerheide asked, "about how long such an
amnesic
episode might last?"

"Sometimes they last indefinitely. Most of them persist for some time. It depends on the way you handle them, and of course it's always confused because some people that are apparently amnesic are actually concealing details of the crime.

"Incidentally, I want to make clear that when I use the words
denial
and
repression,
I do not mean a conscious attempt to, like, say, 'Oh, I'm not going to tell this.' It means that it is completely blocked out of the conscious mind: that the person does not have that information available to himself.

"And I am saying that in this case it is quite likely that had Captain MacDonald committed such a violent crime, he would have completely blocked the whole episode from his mind. In other words, he would not know how it happened and he would have run around trying to be the doctor and save everybody."

"But is it also likely," Woerheide asked, "that if he did block it out, let's say temporarily, that he might some moments afterwards become aware of the fact that there were dead people in the house and he is involved in their deaths, and being aware of that and being a highly intelligent man with quick responses, and being mindful from conversations he had in the recent past concerning the Sharon Tate case in a magazine article that was in his house, that he might be capable of creating a scene that might have some semblance of a similar crime being committed in his house by certain unknown intruders?"

"No, it doesn't make sense to me that if he had blocked it out of his mind by the unconscious motives we are talking about that he would then—having blocked it out—think, 'Oh, I must have blocked it out unconsciously and really I've done it, and therefore I've got to conceal the evidence.' Usually, people's minds don't work that way. I mean, that would be pretty strange—to act upon the basis of something you're not consciously aware of and then go ahead and try to conceal it.

"Also, in regard to what had happened to him, he was by no means totally unaware of the loss that he suffered, even though he was emotionally constricted in his expression of his sense of loss. He had begun, in talking with me, to verbalize some awareness of how little he had communicated his feelings to his wife and family. And, furthermore, he began to verbalize some of the feelings that he had had of feeling trapped in marriage and caught up in responsibilities he had assumed.