Rebel Without a Cause (2 page)

Finally, the reader is reminded that all opinions expressed herein are the responsibility of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Service to which he is attached.

R
OBERT
M. L
INDNER

Lewisburg, Pa.

January 1944

Man has always sought to understand himself and his universe by the simple mechanics of sorting. The nicety of this operation, its precision and incisiveness, its sterility and keenness, is best understood by modern man who, even in his confusion about himself and his destiny, has invented a myriad of categories, rubrics, classification schemes, statistical techniques and pigeonholes to lend order to the chaos about him. This modern proclivity for sorting is nowhere better demonstrated than in those sciences in which man deals with man—psychology, psychiatry, sociology—where with consummate artistry stiffly parading as diagnostics, the species is dissected and labelled, named and branded, tagged and stamped.

Among those categories by which man describes his fellow-man is one that has served as a miscellany for many decades. It is only half-understood and less than half-appreciated. It is a Pandora’s box, brimful with the makings for a malignant social and political scourge. The name of this category is
psychopathic personality.
Its half-understood nature, evidenced by the multitude of terms by which it has been and is called—constitutional psychopathic inferiority, moral imbecility, semantic dementia, moral insanity, sociopathy, anethopathy, moral mania, egopathy, tropopathy, etc.—is further attested to by the contradictory multiplicity of its signs and symptoms. All those characteristics which, by any count, may be considered the negative of qualities suitable for current civilized communal living, have at one time or another been assigned to the individual called ‘psychopath.’ And, in truth, there is no other way in which he can be described except by reference to the social order in which he happens to exist. Those searchers of the soul—psychiatrists and psychologists—have wasted much fine paper in vain attempts to attach a single group of signs to the disorder, unfortunately neglecting to extend their scientific objectivity to the proposition that psychopathic behavior is relative to the culture in which it flourishes and can be measured by no other rule than that of the prevailing ethic and morality. So in a society where total abstinence is mandatory—as among the Brahmins of India—a sign of psychopathy would be inebriation: and, among the prostitute priestesses of Astarte, the
persistent continence of a beauteous devotee consecrated to the distribution of erotic favors would indicate a psychopathic trend. In short, psychopathy is a disorder of behavior which affects the relationship of an individual to the social setting.

Symptomatologically, then, the description of psychopathy derives from the consideration of the culture in which it appears and to which it is relative. Considered in this light, the psychopath, like Johnstone’s rogue-elephant, is a rebel, a religious dis-obeyer of prevailing codes and standards. Moreover, clinical experience with such individuals makes it appear that the psychopath is a rebel without a cause, an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program: in other words, his rebelliousness is aimed to achieve goals satisfactory to himself alone; he is incapable of exertions for the sake of others. All his efforts, hidden under no matter what guise, represent investments designed to satisfy his immediate wishes and desires.

Now the wish for immediate satisfaction is an infantile characteristic. Unlike more or less matured adults, the child cannot wait upon suitable circumstances for the fulfillment of its needs. Where the adult can postpone luncheon for a few hours, the infant expresses hunger-frustration by crying or other perhaps more aggressive techniques. In the early stages of development, when a need of the organism is apprehended it is followed instantly by the type of behavior expressive of the need. The psychopath, like the child, cannot delay the pleasures of gratification; and this trait is one of his underlying, universal characteristics. He cannot wait upon erotic gratification which convention demands should be preceded by the chase before the kill: he must rape. He cannot wait upon the development of prestige in society: his egoistic ambitions lead him to leap into headlines by daring performances. Like a red thread the predominance of this mechanism for immediate satisfaction runs through the history of every psychopath. It explains not only his behavior but also the violent nature of his acts.

Beyond the wish for instantaneous gratification, psychopathic behavior may be compared with infancy in other ways. As a matter of fact, psychopathy is, in essence, a prolongation of infantile patterns and habits into the stage of physiological adultism. The random behavior betrayed in typically psychopathic nomadism, the inability to marshal the requisite determination for the achievement of specific
goals of a socially acceptable order—these reflect to a startling degree the loose, undetermined, easily-detoured and almost purposeless conduct of the very young child.

One of the foundation-stones of living rests upon the ability of the psychologically balanced adult to point his behavior toward an object or event and then to attain to this ‘goal’ by regulated, planned, orderly, logical procedures. No matter what the attractions on display in the peep-shows off the midway; no matter what the barriers to be side-stepped, a sequential, sometimes unclear but always relatively pertinent path marks the average adult’s progress toward an accepted goal. Some investigators have, indeed, given this phenomenon prominence in the hierarchy of psychological activities. The fact that the dynamics are often interfered with by influences not under the control of the performing organism, or that the goal changes and surrogates are found to be equally acceptable, alters not one whit the importance of this deterministic attribute of adult life. Actually, this peculiar glue-like perseveration is one of the most amazing of all human capabilities. Into its functional channel flow the streams of memory and thinking, of anticipating and doing. Is it no less remarkable because it is so common that, when I have a letter to mail, I may stop to chat with friends on the way to the post-office, notice an interesting bill-board and decide to attend the evening’s performance, purchase a newspaper and discuss the weather with the news-vendor, window-shop, and then all unconcernedly and without effort deposit my letter in the post-box on my way home? But with the psychopath as with the infant, determined progress toward a goal—unless it is a selfish one capable of immediate realization by a sharply accented spurt of activity—, the dynamic binding together of actional strands, is lacking. As a consequence he is characteristically aimless, choosing ambitions only within the range of the horizon or impossible of attainment, assuming one task merely to put it aside for another, mistaking each attractive by-path for the promised land. He does not develop skills suited to the farm or office or factory although he may, by nature, be endowed amply with manipulative abilities. In this, again, there is a strong suggestion of the child. Like the play-pattern of the very young, he shows an intensiveness, even a brilliance, at the outset of work; but the performance rapidly falls apart into a fitful type of behavior; and what was once interesting and fascinating
now disintegrates into repetitious drabness. The limen of satiety is low with the psychopath as with the playing child, and boredom follows rapidly after but a few possibilities of the task or job have been exhausted. A perpetual need for the renewal of energy-outlets is a hall-mark of the disorder.

It follows naturally that those goals which are realized by the psychopath—if they are not such as are directed upon the immediate satisfaction of infantile needs—are initially anti-social in the sense that ‘normal’ objectives, requiring as they do the preliminaries demanded by conventional community life,
i.e.
gradualness, perseveration, and the flavoring of increasing anticipation, cannot be abided because they must so long be prepared for and awaited. The psychopath, however, must live in a world and in a society where those very qualities are held as desirable virtues. For this reason the common consequence is frustration, sharply apprehended and deeply nourished; so that the psychopathic way of life is characterized by its effects—aggressive behavior, the expression and actional counterpart of a belligerent social attitude, the forceful surmounting of frustration-provoking barriers by acts of voluntary wilfulness, as well as by techniques of escape and avoidance the exercise of which removes the psychopath from the frustrating situation. He becomes, then, a wanderer and a nomad, always frantically searching out an avenue of escape: or, if he cannot so easily manipulate his physical presence to quit the scene of his frustration, he resorts to those psychological highways frequently bordering on, if not actually, madness—pathological lying, ideas of reference, delusional systematization of thought into grandiose or persecutory patterns. Where any variety of escape is not ready to hand, aggressiveness remains the keynote, providing as it does not only relief from and an outlet for frustration, but an ever-renewing source of infantile sadistic satisfaction.

Coexistent with the patterning already described is a variety of intelligence that, at least to this writer, seems both unique and specific for psychopathy. In the literature on the subject frequent mention is made of the ‘high’ intelligence of psychopaths. Sometimes these statements are based on evidence from supposedly dependable psychometric examinations; sometimes they rest with the casual observations of clinicians. However derived, these notions are misleading or at
least insufficient to serve either as diagnostic aids or explanatory propositions. In the first place, our present day concept of intelligence is, at best, ill-defined and crudely instrumented: in the second place, there is no logic in ascribing symptomatic significance to such an all-inclusive and panoramic item.

So far as intelligence
per se
is concerned, however, what is outstanding about psychopathy is not its arithmetic proportions but its peculiar variety and design. The frozen statistics, accumulated ream upon ream in endless filing cabinets, reflect not at all the particular features of the psychopathic intelligence; and numbers, for all their imposing array in graphs supplemented by mathematical hieroglyphs, are unsuited to its portrayal.

The intelligence of the psychopath can be described only adjectivally and in terms of the whole personality. Perfectly adapted to his needs in the same way as protective coloring is suited to the preservation of the life of an animal, all those psychological functions (thinking, understanding, imagining, remembering, etc.) which are held to be components of ‘intelligence’ have in the psychopath superimposed on them an aura of shrewdness and secretive cunning, of calculating canniness. These elements not only serve psychopathic ends but effectively distort and divert all known measuring instruments, the rigid designs of which prevent their divinatory use with such individuals.

In the widely accepted sense it is held to be a social as well as a scientific truism that intelligence acts generally in the manner of a regulatory device for action, as a ‘brake’ upon behavior, as a guide-rule for adjustment. The psychopath, literally an excommunicant in the matter of socially acceptable goals, and fettered with this specialized and peculiar quality of intelligence, cannot avail himself of the restraining tools of so-called normal living. Consequently all his activities, in addition to the other psychopathic trade-marks they bear, are restraint-free, sometimes strikingly bizarre, always unappreciative of consequences. For this reason, even when absolute measurements disclose a ‘high’ intelligence, so far as its applicability to the routine tasks of life and the special activities of the moment are concerned, its function as mediator and regulator is absent.

A further striking feature of the intelligence of the psychopath, and one which appears only after long-time acquaintance with such individuals,
is concerned with the amazing excess-cargo of uncoordinated and useless information they possess. Frequently one is misled by their typically encyclopaedic range into considering them persons of high intellect, even of culture. Penetration with time, however, discloses that like the veneer of mahogany applied to inferior wood, this mass of ‘knowledge’ is superficial and undigested; that it is free-floating, lacking the requisite elements of cohesiveness and relativity. The design of psychometric examinations is unsuited to plumb such depths.

Much of the literature on the disorder so unfortunately called psychopathic state or personality treats of the immaturity of such individuals in the sexual sphere. It is undeniable that the universal sexual aims regarded as normal have little place in their style of life. Where there is a sympathetic attachment toward another human it is frequently homoerotic or perverse in some other sense. It is, as well, neither lasting nor firmly set upon a community of desires. Finally, it is always self-aggrandizing. This fact has been ascribed to various conditions of psychopathic life. Basically, it would appear to be initiated and maintained as a result of the fixation of sexuality (libido) at an infantile level of development: the overlay of convention and its rigid rules and commands are as yet unapprehended, and the dynamic concentration is upon the self as the sole recipient of all kinds of gratification. It is a thesis of the present work that the psychopath has never got beyond the pre-genital level of sexual development to the stage of object-love; that the socialized mode of sex, the reaching out and sharing, is wholly absent. As will be shown in a later section, the mechanics involved are analytic: precipitation by environmental factors causing an abrupt cessation of psychosexual development
before
the successful resolution of the Oedipus situation. The fixation of libido or sexual energy at or before the genital level, coupled with the need for instant satisfaction, leads to the chaos and immaturity of the psychopath’s sexual life. It accounts for his numerous offenses of bastardy and fornication wherein the partner, haphazardly chosen, is immediately deserted, and for the primitive and frequently violent methods by which his ends are sought.