Rebel Without a Cause (47 page)

It is a curious psychological phenomenon that Harold so readily and unquestioningly accepted the guilt for his abortive attempt to utilize a primitive mechanism to resolve his basic conflict.

Through hypnoanalysis we have been able to obtain meaningful insights into the psychogenesis of the criminal psychopathic state. For the first time, we have been privileged to penetrate beneath the armor which persons of such classification present to the world, and to view in all their sinister automaticity the operationism of the responsible mechanisms. With but little effort we can reconstruct the peculiar constellation of events which formed the attitudes that influenced Harold’s later behavior. We have observed the introjective process at work as it split off from the environment and absorbed all those singular and crucial events which later crystallized into habits of response and particular ways of viewing the setting against which subsequent behavior was enacted. The case of Harold supports the tentative speculations regarding the precipitation of psychopathy which have already been advanced in this volume. It testifies to the dynamic centralism of such motivants as the unresolved Oedipus situation or castration anxiety. In a word, it verifies the major but until now unproven hypotheses of the traditional psychoanalytic view of this entity.

The prepotency of hypnoanalysis could have been demonstrated with no greater forcefulness than it has been through its success with psychopathic personality, a condition which has resisted other investigative and therapeutic techniques. It is quite likely that the resistant nature of this disorder derives from the fact that it engulfs the
whole
personality, somewhat in the manner of a psychosis, from the very earliest age, and that one of its peculiar symptoms is an inability to come into rapport with anyone. At any rate, it wanted an instrument capable of making a frontal as well as a flanking assault upon the organism. It needed a technique of sufficiently active incisiveness to plunge into the farthest reaches of awareness and extract from therein,
in toto,
the historic scenes that were too painful to be faced without preparation.

If these sentences about hypnoanalysis ring with a note of confidence that seems unjustified with only a single case in evidence, the reader is reminded that the technique herein offered was utilized in
other instances of psychopathic personality and a miscellany of other diagnositic entities.
In each case of psychopathy, essentially the same dynamisms were exposed as in Harold’s case.
Of a series of six (including Harold’s) the only discoverable differences were in the
dramatis personae
and—in all the others—a lack of the particular optic defect. One of the remaining five showed a biological anomaly; the other four were free of physical taint. Again, two of the six were products of the orphanage, one was brought up in a foster home and the others, like Harold, were reared by their own parents. In every case, not only were the precipitating events patently similar, but the broad outlines of individual history resolved into the unmistakable pattern shown by Harold’s case. And, finally, each of the six cases has demonstrated by subsequent behavior and all those other signs on which a clinical evaluation of therapeutic success is based, the persistence at least to the time of this writing of the benefits of treatment.

The hypnoanalytic technique has been refined continually through direct employment either in an investigative or therapeutic way in a variety of cases. During the past five years, in addition to the six psychopaths already mentioned, the following variants were also studied: one male hysterical somnambulist, one sexually frigid woman, one feebleminded psychotic boy, two male anxiety neurotics, one male bronchial asthmatic, three male homosexuals, one male alcoholic, and one male kleptomaniac. None of the analyses exceeded four months and all of the subjects (with the exception of the frigid woman who was forced to abandon treatment) are today better off in every way for having gone through with it. Each case served as a crucible wherein our instrument of research and treatment was further shaped and hardened, enhancing particularly those aspects of the art of its application which cannot ever be communicated by the written word.

In strict fairness to psychoanalysis as an explanatory way of approach to the personality, it must be said that nothing new in the way of interpretation of behavior results from hypnoanalysis: that it tends rather to verify and substantiate the insights into behavior-dynamics which the psychoanalytic approach affords. For example, in the case where it was employed with an hysterical somnambulist, it exposed the primitive phantasy basic to the hysterical reaction and dissected out its components of latent homosexuality, sadism and castration-anxiety composed pre-Oedipally and transformed into the
somnambulistic symptom. Apart from the unique concatenation observed with this patient, nothing appeared which either was not already known about hysteria or could not have become known from a psychoanalysis. The method of hypnoanalysis, however, made these items known more rapidly, provided more adequately for complete abreaction and so for a ‘cure’ for the condition. Furthermore, the ‘fresh’ insights into hysterical somnambulism which are claimed as regards symptom-formation and symptom-function were achieved by hypnoanalysis, it is true, but were the result of psychoanalytical regard and stemmed from propositions basic to psychoanalysis.

In short, hypnoanalysis is a radically abbreviated method for the investigation of the personality and the treatment of psychogenic disorders and aberrations of behavior.

So far there has been no direct mention of the curative value of hypnoanalysis. ‘Cured’ in an analytical sense carries a somewhat different meaning than ‘cured’ in a medical and lay sense: it implies rather than an amelioration of symptom or a disappearance of disease the accomplishment of an essential personality change which is the outcome of the redistribution of psychological energy formerly exploited by the pathological condition. In some cases symptoms do disappear entirely, and the medical sense of ‘cure’ can be used. The hysterical patient, for instance, has had no recurrence of the somnambulistic episodes since hypnoanalysis: the alcoholic patient is no more a slave to the bottle: the asthmatic no longer experiences intense attacks accompanied by ‘death-threat’ and panic. In other cases, what is accomplished is the cultivation of an ability on the part of the patient to
live with
his condition (so to speak), to accept it, even to “make the best of it.” Such was the outcome with two of the three homosexuals who were studied and treated hypnoanalytically. In yet other conditions—in our series the remaining homosexual, the two anxiety neurotics and psychopaths—what is done appears as an alteration, permanent and deep-seated, of the patient’s style of life.

In the case reviewed, the patient was ‘cured’ in the sense of alteration of style of life, and imbued with a real ability to live with his particular occular symptom. The alteration was based on what some psychologists call ‘insight,’ on a real understanding of the past and a reorientation of attitudes and aims. Harold today sees better, feels better, behaves better. Individuals who know him and work
with him comment on his radically altered pattern of behavior. Gone is that sneering sullenness, that arrogant aggression, that Storm-Trooper mentality, that disregard for the rights and feelings of others. He knows that he was a psychopath: he knows why he was a psychopath: he knows that he needs to be a psychopath no more.…

We have had in this volume a striking illustration of the truth of William A. White’s remark that behind every criminal deed lies a secret. But more important, we have glimpsed the utter futility, the sheer waste, of confining individuals in barred and turretted zoos for humans without attempting to recover such secrets. Harold’s case makes a mockery of current penological pretense. It points the finger of ridicule at the sterile corridors of modern prisons, the gleaming shops and factories, the bright young social workers, the custodial hierarchy—in brief, the whole hollow structure of rehabilitation that is based upon expediency, untested hypotheses, unwarranted conclusions from a pseudo-scientific empiricism.

Harold plundered and almost killed in response to those ungovernable needs which came flaring up from the deepest, remotest shafts of his being. Had he not undertaken analysis, all the trade-training, all the attentions of penal personnel would have been wasted on him; and like every other psychopath who leaves prison he would have been released again to the community as the same predatory beast who entered—with this exception: that his conflicts would have been driven more deeply and his hostility aggravated by a system that flatters itself that it is doing other than substituting psychological for physical brutality.

In spite of the self-flattery in which criminologists, penologists and the assorted professional and warder complement of the modern prison indulge, we are not today treating criminals; and, what is worse, in only a few isolated instances are we even learning anything about them. In all its bald essence, what we are actually doing today is removing a wrong-doer from the community; and while he is in a place of detention we are submitting him unmercifully to the unrequiting ministrations of an expensive officialdom. But beyond the half-hearted employment of a “shot-gun” technique which fires its charge in all directions at once,
we do nothing fundamental about crime or the criminal.

There are two approaches to crime, each as important and vital as the other: one from the side of the community, one from the side of the specialist in behavior. Criminal acts are not so simple as our legal code or our sensation-mongering newspapers would have us believe. Crime is behavior which is motivated by prime forces that are not only social but intra-individual. It is precipitated by sociological situations, perhaps, but it is an individual expression that arises from the secret motives or wishes that lie buried deep within the personality.

The need is for an extension to the very limits of the type of activity which has been demonstrated in Harold’s case; for such processing not only often changes the criminal into a useful citizen (always assuming that society will permit him to be an integral part of it when he is released), but it also teaches us lessons about crime that we can use with our and other people’s children.…