Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

Take a look at < www.mcsweeneys.net > for an excerpt from Gary Greenberg's
amazing article on the Unabomber.

Gary is a psychologist and teacher in rural Connecticut.  His experiences in
dealing with Ted Kaczynski, which I've been hearing about in personal
communications, have inspired some great ruminations on many subjects.  I
can't wait to read the rest of the article!
  

    
Gary, granted that both the media and the justice system played
heavily on easy to accept stereotypes of the "mad bomber" and "genius
gone insane". Still, what about the tremendous contradiction between
the considerate and clear-spoken man who wrote back to you, and the guy
who no one seems to argue spent almost two decades trying to kill
people he didn't know in cold blood? Doesn't that very contradiction
point to a likely pathology?

You tell me. I'm just another layperson who first bought into the
media portrayal.
  

    
Killing people is only a pathology if you have already decided that murder
is a criterion of mental illness, that anyone who kills is sick. The
problem with this formulation is that it folds an essentially moral
problem  -- murder -- into a medical discourse. Noyt to mention that it is
entirely circular in reasoning.

I thikn reasonable people can agree that in most cases (certainly
including the Unabomber's), people who murder
arebad, that they are doing something very wrong and should be stopped and
punished when they are caught. But do we really want to condemn by
diagnosis?

I'd also point out  that Kaczynski was diagnosed as paranoid
schizophrenic. The reasoning for this was that he wasx delusional, and his
delusions were that he believed that his dysfunciontal family life caused
his later difficulty in relationships with women, and that technology
controlled his life. A delusion, according to the Diagnostic and
Sttatistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, is a belief
held in the presence of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Neither
of Kaczynski's delusions, in my view, can possibly be delusional.

The first "delusion" is created in therapist's offices every day. go toa
shrink (including me) and tell him about your problems, and dollars to
donuts he's gonna "help" you to see how your fucked up family helped to
cause them.  Call your mom and dad into the shrink's office and they're
probably gonna disagree, not just about the meaining of the facts of the
client's life, but about the facts themselves. Family dysfunction is an
epistemological nightmare. Certainly people can exaggerate or otherwise
distort their histories.  Butincontrovertible evidence? Very rarely, if
ever, are you going to find that, and certtainly TK's evlauators did not.
The family disagree. That's noto evidence of a delusion.

The second delusion is more complex and troubling. TK's beliefs anout
technology are well known and not original to him. They're your basic
anti-modern lamnentation, found in dissenters from the LUddites through
Thoreau to Foucault, Heidegger, and Kifkpatrick Sale.  They are radcially
at odds with the assumption from which the mainstream flows. And TK took
them to a religious extreme: living a life consistent with his beliefs.
The specific form of delusion he was accused of having was the idee fixe,
an unswerving adherence to ideology, again in the face of evidence to the
contrary.  The evaluating psyciatrist does not say what incontrovertible
evidence whe presented him with to show that his objectiosn to technology
were founded on delusion. She just notes that Tk insists that his position
is correct, and that this is proof that he is nuts. 

To be fair to her, what she is really working with here is the faxct that
TK's life was organized by the premise that technology is a bad thing.  So
when an airplane flew overhead and disturbed his peace, it didn't just
register as a small unpleasnatness; it stood as a symbol of all that was
wrong with the world. This is a hallmark of paranoid vschizophrenic
thikning: to see your initial (delusional) opremise in all events. But
usually the initial premise is something like "my neighbor's dog speaks
witht he voice of God and tells me what to do," or "I am really a CIA
agent, being given instructions through a brain implant," as opposed to a
fairly well thought out and not uncommon ideology. And by the
psychiatrist's reasoining, it's really impossible to distinguish between
pathology and strong belief, between illness and dissent. In my article, I
note that by her reasoining there's no difference between TK and a woman
who believes that she is married to God, believes it so strongly that she
wears a wedding ring and lives a life of obedience to her "husbanbd,"
basing all her actions and utterances on this belief.

Of course, most nuns aren't murderers, but that just gets back to my
oriignal point: that the diagnosis is problematic. Surely, thbere is a
better way to condemn someone like Kaczynski than the one that calls
living by principle and refusing to accept the psychiatrist's verdict
(TK's diagnosis was based in part on his refusal to listen when the
shrimnks told him he was sick; this is called anosognosia, which is Greek
for "disagreeing with your psychiatrist") "paranoid schizophrenia."  
  

    
This morning on NPR there was a report about a Russian city with an
unusually high number of serial killers, and a therapist who works with
them for free, whether or not they've already been identified by the
police.

Unfortunately I caught neither the name of the city nor the name of the
therapist.
  

    
hang on -- "whether or not they have been identified by the police?" You
mean some of them come to him in the intervals of serially killing?
  

    
why not... It's a free country!  :-)
  

    
Gary, I'm a little confused. Are you contending that TK was
mis-diagnosed? If so, how would you diagnose him, or perhaps do you
feel he does not in fact have a mental disorder? Are you arguing
against the nosology generally, or the particular application of it? I
haven't seen either test results or a report, were they published
someplace? Maybe you could point us toward them? 

In my experience over the last 30 years working with people with this
diagnosis very few exhibit the kind of thinking you describe above ("my
neighbor's dog speaks with the voice of god...")but in fact have a
more organized interlocking and rigid system of beliefs, feelings, and
perceptions that help maintain and give coherence to chaotic and
painful experiences of their psychotic process. They fail to meet basic
criterion for living as functioning members of their families and
communities.

The media tends to grab onto the the most exagerated view of paranoid
schizophrenia, painting people with this disorder as something less
than human. In that regard, I think the media failed him as a human
being.  At the same time, he has functioned as if he were above the
rules others live by, ascribing to himself a set of rules that gives
him god-like powers over others. I think that is a sign of deep
alienation, not only from others, but from his own humanity.

Serious mental illness is always (or should be anyway) diagnosed
within the context of ones' culture, or subculture. In that context, a
nun's belief about her marriage is not seen as pathological, although
many nuns are referred for treatment by their superiors when they fail
to distinguish between a symbolic and spiritual marriage and a
delusional one. Subcultures that share beliefs outside mainstream
culture are well aware of a line that is crossed over by ill members of
their community. I think most people, regardless of their sub-culture,
would feel TK crossed that line.
  

    
Hi Gary, long time no talk-to!  I am wondering how you chose McSweeney's
(or vice versa).  I have never heard of it even though I scan the
magazine racks pretty thoroughly (though not, I admit, the ranks upon
ranks of literary magazines; after Grand Street and a few others like
that the map is pretty unknown to me).  On the other hand, you have
to give credit to someone who runs a review of "The Fountainhead"
made up of excerpts from amazon.com reviews:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/1999/03/01fountain.html
  

    
  Gary, I'm a little confused. Are you contending that TK was
 mis-diagnosed? If so, how would you diagnose him, or perhaps do you
 feel he does not in fact have a mental disorder? Are you arguing
 against the nosology generally, or the particular application of it? I
 haven't seen either test results or a report, were they published
 someplace? Maybe you could point us toward them?


TK was at least misdiagnosed, I think. Of course, it is impossible to
prove a negation ("TK is not paranoid schizophrenic), and it is
presumptuous to diagnose someone you haven't met (although one of the
experts did exactly that),l but two convergin lines of evidence cast great
doubt on his diagnosis.

The first is the psychiatric evaluations themwselves. They are available,
by the way, at unabombertrial.com.  The evals done by the defense experts
are based almost entirely on TK's refusal to cooperate with them. They
interpret this as "paranoia about psychiatrists," even though 1) TK's
objections were very clearly ideological, based on a line of reasoning
that can be found in many places and that argues that psychiatry is a form
of policing and 2)in at least two cases, the psychiatrists had been
provided to him with the express promise that they *weren't* evaluating
him and his objections arose after he realized the deception. Now, it is
possible for a paranoid schizophrenic (PS) to avoid psychiatrists out of a
fear consisten with his or  her delusion. But it is also possible for a
person to have a principled objection to psychiatry, insanity defenses,
etc., and the burden is on the evaluator to prove that the latter  is not
the case, or that the subject's claim is just psychosis dressed in
ideology's clothing.

The same problem haunts the government's own report, written by Sally
Johnson, a prominent fnrensic psychiatrist. Of courwse, it is possible
that TK's beliefs about technology are delusional, and it is possible that
they are not. And her report fails to prove that they are. She simply
observes that he believes very strongly that tehcnology is deeply
problematic and takes for granted that anyone who would believe such a
thing so much that he would live off the grid, leave a Berkeley
professsorship, cut off contact with the world tjhat he thought was fucked
beyond redemption -- that anyone who does this must be nuts.  That's not
true, and it's not fair. It's also not psychiatry. It's politics.


The second line of evidence is my experience of Kaczynski. He's a very
difficult man, strangely tone deaf to the music of human interaction,
sometimes a prick, and capable of turning people into pure abstraction. In
shrot, not the guy you'd want to have as your best friend. But he is
either very good at concealing his craziness over a very long period (from
someone who is a trained clinician and a pretty astute reader to boot, if
I do say so myself)  that included some very stressful times. I've dealt
with PS's before, and most of them are capable of carrying on a
conversation, can be coherent and polite and helpful and stable
(particularly if they stay on their meds), but you gotta believe me when I
say that TK is coherenet like a sane person and not coherent like a PS.
Read my article (which, by the way, includes a 5-page letter from TK to
me, photocopied so you can see his handwriting), then tell me waht you
think about this question.

AS far as how I would diagnose him, I wouldn't. Not unless he was a client
and his insurance company insisted on it and I genuinely believed he
qualified for a diagnsois and needed to use his insurance to pay me.
He's a public figure. More to the point, great questios about the nature
of life in the modern age are etched int TK's character like fault lines
in a stone, and I think diagnosis is probably the least interesting way to
talk about him. Its major virtue is that it erases the political dimension
of his terrorism, and reassures us all that he's just another nut.

I think it's safe to say that I hae a beef about nosology. It makes it
much too easy to reduce the political to the personal, to erase the public
realm.  


I think your questions are very astute, and I hope this begins to answer
them. I'll finish tomorrow, but I'm beat, having spent too mcuh energy and
time today straightening ouit some Salon.com reporter who managed to get
every fact he reported about my article wrong (no surprise, since he never
talked to me about it), then defended himself by saying, "It's only up for
a day," as if the ephemerality of the medium excused him from being
somewhere in the neighorhood of accurate.
  

    
AS for how I chose McSwy's, which you can get, so I hear, at Barnes &
Noble and BOrders, as well as on the website mcsweeneys.net -- I think
it's a great little magazine, full of good writing. It also seems to focus
on some of the themes of my article -- in addition to TK and the questions
of mental illness, the nature of the publishing business, journalistic
ethics, and the way the news media tell storeis. And, I would add, bein
ggiven carte blanche for 25,000 words is really unusual and attractive.
  

    
> You mean some of them come to him in the intervals of serially killing?

That's the way it sounded -- apparently he has some hope of getting them
to quit, or maybe just to refrain, one day at a time.

Part of the spot was given over to the ethics of having such knowledge
without taking it to the authorities.
  

    

Anybody who thinks that an online feature is "only up for a day" is
displaying a lack of understanding so fundamental that one questions
their basic competence to be writing journalism at all, let alone of
the online variety.
  

    
#10
Theat is one of the mjost astonishing post-communist stories I have ever
heard, and makes me think the Orthodox churches are in far deeper trouble
than I had realised. To go to a shrink rather than a priest for that sort
of confession is one of the defining marks of a post-religious state.

I know that the commuinists spent years and years trying to stamp out
religion, and spilt much blood when doing so. I know that the orthodox
church was nearly as thoroughly corrupted by the state as the psychiatric
profession. But I am astonished that medecine should have recovered more
prestige than religion in Russia, if it has.
  

    
What is astonishing about that? Medicine's prestige derives from its
claimt to scientific authority. It's much harder to tarnish, and it's very
appealing in cynical times.

But the overall point -- that psychiatry and religion fill the same need
in some important way -- is just right, and the story is a good example.
My office is a confessional as much as anything else. Freud, not unlike
Catholic priests, favored a seating arrangment that obscured his face.

There is a movie, "I Confess," about a priest to whom a confession of
murder is made. I think the priest is played by Montogmery Clift. It's the
only movie I'eve ever seen that takes place in Quebec City.
  

    
AS for the competence of the reporter -- one Craig Offman by name -- the
whole story is a case study in journalistic incompetence. For brevity's
sake, I'll just reproduce the letter I emailed to Salon.

To the Editor:  

Craig Offman's article about, among other things, my article in
McSweeney's, In the Kingdom of the Unabomber, is mistaken about what I
said in my piece.  To wit: 

In an excerpt on the McSweeney's Web site, Greenberg includes  a letter he
wrote to Kaczynski suggesting that the two men  collaborate on a biography
of the convicted killer.  

My letter only told Kaczynski that I would like to write his biography
and that I wanted to know what he thought. Implicit here is a request for
his cooperation, but I stopped well short of suggesting a collaboration. I
never intended to write an as-told-to book. Nothing in my article or the
website excerpt Offman is quoting from suggests otherwise. 

Ok, so maybe that's picky.  You say collaborate, I say cooperate, why
can't we all just get along?  But how about this: 

After a delicate negotiation involving lawyers and agents, the  Unabomber
responded to Greenberg's proposal. "The first letter  itself wasn't much:
a four-page, single-spaced document,  handwritten with a pencil,"
Greenberg observed. "[It] conveyed a  sharp rationality, a sharp
intellect, and a distinct courtliness."  

What negotiations?  What lawyers and agents? I wrote: "Kaczynski was
interested enougth in the project to ask, through his lawyer for more
information about me. So, during the spring, I wrote [him] a short
autobiography. I told him about my therapy practice and my teaching,  even
a little about my personal life, and I sent him some of my academic
writings -- two articles and a book. I heard nothing directly, and in
mind- May, 1998 ... I sent him a gentle reminder of my existence. His
first  letter came in response."  I wrote him, he wrote me back. A lawyer
got  involved because Kaczynski was incommunicado prior to his sentencing.
It wasn't the Disney-CapCities merger. 

Really, I promise, I'm almost done. 

(For copyright reasons, Greenberg is not permitted to quote from
Kaczynski's letters.) 

In fact, lawyers advised me that I could make a good case for publishing
Kaczynski's letters without his permission. I decided not to do so for a
number of reasons, but mostly because I had strongly implied to  Kaczynski
that I would not publish his words without asking first, and I  didn't
want to ask.  People who decide to read the article before they  come to a
conclusion about what it says will discover that while I do not  quote
from any letters, I have reproduced one five-page letter in its  entirety. 

It is a comment on something that little McSweeney's, with its wing-and-
a-prayer budget, its volunteer staff and unpaid writer (that's me)
managed to check every fact (and re-report many of them) in a 23,000- word
piece from which they will derive little if any money while big
Salon.com, with its banner ads and paid staff, couldn't even bother to
check facts that were a click away or to call the author of a piece they
were writing about (and whose phone number and email address they  have
had since last Friday). I leave you to figure out what that something  is. 

Gary Greenberg
  

    

Gary, please post the URL for the Offman piece.
  

    
Back to the diagnostic question. 

I suppose it's too glib to say that I wouldn't diagnose TK, even though
it's true. No question he qualifies for a diagnosis of a personality
disorder, either antisocial or schizoid. But what is a p-ersonality
disorder? It's merely a description of a set of traits and behaviors that
are not uncommonly found in a certain set of people. Attaching a clinical
name  to that description may *seem* to provide explanation or otherwise
shed lifht on the subject, but it doesn't really do that. There's an
implicit acknowledgement of this in the DSM -- personality disorders are
diagnosed on a separate "axis," i.e., they're qualitatively different from
other mental disorders like deepression or phobias or paranoid
schizophrenia. One could say, i suppose, that pd's are just chronic mental
disorders, but that still begs the question: in what sense are these
medical entities, rather than mere descripitions of problematic
functioning?

 
 
 >Serious mental illness is always (or should be anyway) diagnosed
 >within the context of ones' culture, or subculture. In that context, a
 >nun's belief about her marriage is not seen as pathological, although
 >many nuns are referred for treatment by their superiors when they fail
 >to distinguish between a symbolic and spiritual marriage and a
 >delusional one. Subcultures that share beliefs outside mainstream
 >culture are well aware of a line that is crossed over by ill members of
 >their community. I think most people, regardless of their sub-culture,
 >would feel TK crossed that line.

This is a good example of the unremitting nature of the problem of
psychiatric diagnosis. AT first glance, it seems that saying thatdiagnosis
must always take culture into account ought to solve many of the
objections I'm raising here. This new-found cultural sensitivity means.,
for instance, that a conditio like ataque de nervios, which looks to Anglo
eyes like a pathological condition, will not come under the psychiatrist's
gaze because in certain Latino cultures it is normal, or at least not
pathological. 

But you can begin to see the problem if you consider that someone has to
decide what constitutes a valid culture or subculture. Let's say I take
all the paranoid schizophrenics who believe that thoughts are being
implanted in their heads and I gather them in one community. Is their
belief no longer delusional? In order to say that it is, you have to point
out that this isn't really a subculture. And who is going to make that
determination?  The person making the diagnosis. The psychiatrist.


Here you can see that the cultural sensitivity of the DSM is also a
subterfuge. It's another attempt to hide the inescapable and usually
repressed  fact that mental health professionals are agents of social
control. By creating this category, shrinks can make the claim that
they're not really exercising power in making diagnoses; indeed, they can
claim that they are going out of theier way to be fair. But the fact is
that they have just re-concealed their power in response to changes in the
society (in this case, the recent upsurge in cultural awareness, what some
call pollitical correctness). 

This is not the first time this has happened. Precisely the same thing
happened when homosexuality was depathologized. The sexual reevolution of
the 60's made it clear that psychiatrists had pathologized a behavior that
was in no way a disease, and gave impetus to gay people to insist on being
taken out of the DSM. Psychiatrists had simply been acting as agents of
social control by "treating" homosexuals, and now society no longer
insisted that they exercise this control. But rather than recognize what
this meant -- that the psychiatrist's claim to authority is moral and not
scientific -- and realigning their practice accordingly, the psychiatrists
claimed that science had proven that homosexuality was not a disease, and
that the real disease was ego-dystonic homosexuality, i.e., people who
couldn't accept their  being gay were the sick ones. Suddenly (and this
really happened virtually overnight), the same shrinks who had
"treated" homosexuals were supposed to start helping them overcome their
oppresssion.  

Mental health professainlas are not value-neutral. We decide all the time
what behavior is good and bad, only we tend to call it helathy and
unhealthy or appropriate and inappropriate. And no amount of fiddling
around with cultural sensitivity is going to change this. 

TK's diagnosis is just a particularly good and high-profile example of the
way this works. In his interlocking set of deeply held beliefs, it wsa
important to live off the grid, be self-sufficient, and murder people.
There is a viable subculture of such people; they're called anarchists.
They have a history and a tradition that is captured in many books and
actions., The only way a psychiatrist can use this as the basis for a
diagnosis of a delusional disorder is if she decideides that the
subculture doesn't really exist or isn't really a subculture and if she
decides that the beliefs are not valid. IN either case, she is making a
political judgment.

And you certainly don't need the language of the DSM to decide that TK
crossed some line that shouldn't be crossed. Neither do you need it to
account for his having done so. The fact that reasonable people agree that
he did something transgressive is hardly a sound basis for deciding that
he is crazy. 
  

    
url for the Salon piece:
http://www.salon.com/books/log/1999/08/31/unabomber/index.html
  

    

Gary, didn't you ublish a book about the abuses of psychology?
  

    
Not me. I'vew written a few articles about it (incluing one about TK,
which has yet to see print).

Meantime, check this out:

Date sent:              Wed, 1 Sep 1999 11:12:12 -0400
To:                     gxgre@99main.com
From:                   craig offman <coffman@salon.com>
Subject:                Re: McSweeney's article re: Ted Kaczynski

Dear Dr. Greenberg,

I have talked to my editor about your letter, and she submitted several
changes to our production department. They should appear on the site any
time now.

Thank you,

Craig



Speaking of the powers of the mental health professions, you know when
they're calling you doctor, you've got 'em.
  

    
This is deeply fascinating--thank you.
  

    
Excellent result from Offman!

So what IS that book of yours about, Gary?
  

    
Beats me.

Actually, it's about self-help books. It's a lit-crit view of them that
argues that they're training manuals for buddin g nihilists.

It's called The Self on The Shelf.  Funny, huh?
  

    
Most anarchists aren't interested in murdering people.  The ones I've known
are quite timid; the notion of the "bomb-throwing anarchist" is as loaded
as any we've got in political discourse and as unlikely to be true.

Although it must be said that given the opportunity, some fraction of
anarchists will indeed overturn a Coca Cola truck on Telegraph Avenue
(apologies for the reference to obscure Berkeley history).

Anyway, somewhat more seriously, check out this interesting little piece
in today's Willamette Week (Portland's formerly 'alternative' weekly):

http://www.wweek.com/html/healthcare.html
  

    

<anarchists will indeed overturn a Coca Cola truck>

But only for the cause that refreshes.

Sorry, I can't help it. I was born evil.
  

    
The gentlemant from Oregon is right, as usual. Not all, or evn most,
anarchists are violent. But some are. There's a subculture, or maybe a
sub-subculture of violen, antimodern, antitechnological anarchists.