Leo Abse on the sick minds of the violent men
When the gallows still remained in the land, I once defended a murderer who, for no substantial reason, had cut his wife up in shreds in the bathroom of their suburban home. Courteously and gently, he explained his savage .conduct to me. "It was absolutely necessary to kill her, If I had not killed her I should have had no choice but to kill myself." His mad frankness may have been somewhat unusual but his motivation for murder was sadly orthodox.
The lure of self-destruction, the attraction of death, is• often avoided only by turning outwards the aggression which threatens to destroy a potential assailant. This ultimate consummation, however, may only have been temporarily staved off, for a third of the murderers of Britain commit suicide before being brought to trial and many more make (determined attempts: sometimes indeed with a high sense of occasion, as I have found on arriving at an interview in prison with a murderer client who so timed the appointment that he was able to receive me with a freshly cut throat and slashed wrists.
These, however, were killers who fell into the largest category of Britain's slayers: they were involved in familial murders where the husbands either choked themselves with their aggression or strangled their wives. And every married man and woman can understand them: there can be no passion without ambivalence, and love must always lie down with hate. The old scores, the fantasised wounds felt by a primitive babe, can still envelop the adult and a spouse, unwittingly or provocatively, can ireplicate the primary domination, and so earn death. In our dreams all of us commit the crime passione/: and so we know that our old fashioned traditional murderers at least belong to the human species.
But now we have a new death style being acted out by the bombers in our midst, mindless, undirected and indiscriminate. The terrorists at Birmingham know no love; they are possessed by a total indifference to their victims. The opposite of love is not hate but apathy. A-pathos, the withdrawal of feeling, is a defence against the anxiety felt by those from whom love has been withheld or withdrawn: but there is a dialectical relationship between apathy and violence. Violence is the ultimate destructive substitute which surges in to fill the vacuum where there is no relatedness. Twice during the last month, in our debates on the counter-terrorist legislation and on capital punishment, a bewildered Parliament, with dignity, has sought, without debasing itself to the level of the passionless assailants, to discover means to contain this unfamiliar and awful violence.
The legislators in their attempts to define and overcome the enemy can be grateful to a scrupulous and painstaking journalist, Gerald McKnight, who, in the best tradition of his profession, has travelled the world meeting personally the assassins of the Middle East, Ireland, Japan, South America, the States and Canada. His quest was, by direct encounter, to discover the mind of the terrorist. He has been indefatigable in his efforts to meet and question them: but although he has racily recorded their declamations*, he is clearly left as perplexed at the end of his journey as when he began. Perhaps his own humanity, like that of most normal men,. is too great a barrier; it obstructs him, blocking off his over-rational approaches to these mad men. A journalist of his mettle could doubtless deal with the politics of nationalism and revolution, but what he has been meeting is the politics of schizophrenia.
Indeed, as some of McKnight's asides confirm, that is the conclusion of both psychiatrists of the East and of the West. When, in 1972, some of the members of the Japanese Red Army were brought to trial for their unspeakable atrocities, the Courts were told they were afflicted with catatonia, one of the varieties of schizophrenia, which cuts off the sufferer from all meaningful contact with others. Bando, one of the gang, lived entirely for his guns, which the psychiatrist said, ". . had almost totally replaced any sexual activity in his life." The same story emerged from Canada in the diagnoses made on the imprisoned Quebec terrorists. "For some when the bomb goes off," said the doctors, "it is like an orgasm." Then they felt liberated. "They thought nothing of those being killed or injured," the psychiatrist told McKnight. "That was not part of their fantasy at all." It is not surprising McKnight is left perplexed, for the schizophrenic is bewildering. The essence of his condition is the divorce between the intellectual and emotional function, with the ideas expressed and the emotions expressing them incompatible. Given the awesome incidence of schizophrenia in the contemporary world, and given the inconclusiveness of attempts to locate the aetiology of schizophrenia in one or another of biological' malfunctions, the cause of this grievous pathology has inevitably been sought in social factors, in the alienated family dwelling in an estranged society.
This has led some to the view that our society and our traditional family system are destroyers of the very humanity they effect to foster, and should themselves be destroyed. Worse, as Lionel Trilling has lamented, this line of thought has brought forth the view that insanity is a state of human existence which is to be esteemed for its commanding authenticity and is a direct and appropriate response to the coercive unauthenticity of society. The exponents of the counter-culture, preaching the
doctrine that madness is health and liberation, have proved to be excellent recruiting officers. Now, while theypropagandise at base, their•
front line schizophrenic storm troopers bomb Birmingham.
Alan Harrington is one of those seduced by Leary, Ginsburg, Mailer, Cooper, Laing, and some of the other unhappy gurus of the prevailing counter-culture. His Psychopaths**, commences hopefully: at first he seems aware that one of the highest aims a man of our times can have is to identify the psychopathic antagonist and to struggle against the conditions that produce him. But in the end he yields, as the tempted policeman yields to criminality, the evangelist to prostitutes and jailers to their charges. Criminologists investigating crime can light up their own deviances and, as this work reveals, investigators of psychopathy caninflame their own schizophrenia. Extravagantly and with the aid of LSD, he doubts the validity of rational liberal humanism and yearns for the establishment of a new reconciling Church, bringing salvation and rebirth where "psychopaths lie down together, and by sharing the death-birth experience learn to live together."
Despite his zeal as an investigator, he seems strangely unaware that the impress of incipient schizophrenia rests on the bed upon which he invites us to perform the rituals of his bizarre misalliance. The psychoanalyst Fenichel has taught us, 'from his clinical experience, that in schizophrenia two fantasies are discernible: in the early stages the world must come to an end, and later the patient is possessed with anticipatory feelings of salvation and rebirth. With unusual fluency, Harrington proffers us just this spurious schizophrenic 'solution': the terrorists believe salvation will come through
the bomb-delivered death, and Harrington unselfconsciously acts as thentheoretician.
Our liberal democracy will surely not overcome its most dangerous adversaries by allowing them to seduce us: nor shall we win by overdetermined reactions that reveal we have been infected by their contagions. In the House a few weeks ago, in the wake of the Birmingham atrocities, the Commons howled me down for suggesting our army must come out of Ulster. We should, however, understand that the distinction between a good lover and a good hater, like the IRA, is that the lover is faithful; but the good hater knows no fidelity. He is promiscuous and is ready to consume with his free floating aggression anyone who by his action is unwisely showing his wish to offer needless provocation. Our continued presence in Northern Ireland feeds and buttresses the paranoia of the wild men. And meantime the lost generation of Belfast grows up in hate, within a schizophrenic sub-culture graduating only in the Provos and the para-military forces. Reason, with insight and courage providing political solutions, can still isolate the sick persons and make them irrelevant. But time is indeed running out.
** Psychopaths Alan Harrington (If Books £3.50) Leo Abse is Labour MP for Pontypool. He has most receripy written Private Member, a psycho-analytical study of fellow Parliamentarians.
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