A Psychologist's Blog
Author's Introductory Note: I cannot emphasize enough that people who do evil, which obviously means genociders and those who plan to commit genocide, MUST be contained and punished by our legal, law enforcement and military systems. Yet this does not mean that the psychological/mental health professions do not have to take a stand about their behaviors. If definitions of normal and abnormal behavior also are signposts of our culture as to what behavior is healthy and desirable and what behavior is undesirable, we better identify the violents and killers as unhealthy and abnormal. This does NOT mean that genociders are to be treated with the sympathy we give the ill, nor that they may plead for the privileges of the ill to escape punishment. I will clarify this philosophical-semantic conundrum in a more learned article in the future. Right now, we have the immediacy of facing a mad leader calling for the mass destruction of another people. He can not be honored as anything but mad.
"Madness and insanity," I was told in my training as a clinical psychologist at an excellent American university and at first-rate government and university psychiatric hospitals, "are characterized by delusional statements and florid distortions of known reality." In my time people making bizarre statements – I think one example in one of my textbooks read something like, "The Jews control the world and they are trying to poison the water in this city"—were sent to a "Bellevue" or psychiatric hospital Emergency Room. They usually ended up with bona fide diagnoses like "paranoid schizophrenia" (granted, an overused diagnosis that was proven to be dispensed promiscuously but that's another matter, and there really are plenty of correctly diagnosed paranoid schizophrenics).
The exception seems to be that if you have an identity as a political leader, you can pretty well get away with saying anything. Not so if you are a general, director of an engineering project, a medical professional, or the head of a stock exchange. But if you're a political leader you can say pretty much what you want about whomever—blacks, whites, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Indians, Orientals—you name them. And you can say whatever terrible things you want to say about other countries and nations and political movements and ideologies. In fact you can even express the opinion that so and so deserve to be wiped out, you can predict that they will be, and you can even barely hint that you are going to be the one who ensures their fate.
Note that all of the above refers to what is getting said before any actions are taken --how the world reacts to actual mass murder and genocide is a further subject in its own right.
The fact that a political leader ostensibly can say anything also spills over into a degree of allowance of nutty statements by lesser persons so long as they contextualize their mad distortions of reality in motifs and formats that are political-like. Thus, "There was no Holocaust," or "The Jews were entertained by music in Auschwitz," or "There were no gas chambers and/or no mass crematoria"; or "There never was a genocide of the Amenians," or "The Ottoman Turks protected and provided for the Armenians who were expelled into the desert"; or "The Serbs did not commit genocide of the Bosnian Muslims." It's pretty much OK to say any of these things so long as you are making a good wholesome statement of bigotry and racism, and not just shouting off that the world is flat for your own evident personal craziness.
So was I trained correctly in psychology and psychiatry? Do politics really transcend differentiating between the sane and insane? Do the intense political positions many of us take, where in our passions we call leaders whom we hate but who are perfectly sane "mad" and other such names, inadvertently create an impenetrable camouflage for the quite real madness of anointed leaders?
Should we allow political position and power to exempt leaders – many of them dangerous to the nth-- from judgments of very real failures of their basic reality testing?
Or is it possible that good old common sense and good old down to earth medical science and psychological science, know that if even a president or a king or a prime minister say things like, 'Everyone knows that 9/11 was done by the USA to itself in order to generate support for the Zionist state,' the person saying so is mad. Very mad. And dangerous.
He will not be the first head of state who is crazy dangerous with a serious potential for mass murder and genocide.
The same leader, flushed with one of his triumphal successes of addressing the UN in New York – a sad contemporary substitute for once intoxicating rallies in Nuremberg, I wonder -- reported elatedly that "the aura of the Hidden Imam enveloped him during his speech." That kind of statement too was clearly noted in my clinical training. Doesn't it count with national leaders?
I have never thought that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and many others of their ilk, for all that they functioned quite successfully and even brilliantly, were models of mental health. They were, obviously, evil twisted people with a distinctly sick compulsion to torture and kill masses of people. And it is entirely clear that such leaders can build up with them a complex web of many other leaders as well as many ordinary people who will execute any and all evil with them, but it is also clear that their strong and charismatic mad leadership is a key to much of the ensuing pageantry of mass murder by all of those who get into the ugly tragedy of murdering millions.
It is our so-called cultures and civilization that have been too timid and paralyzed with political correctness and over-subservience to anointed leaders' authority and power so that we miss the diagnosis until it is tragically and wrongfully much too late.
For those who worry that I am giving evil people an out of being "sick" and deserving of sympathy, forget it. The first clearcut treatment of evil is to contain it and punish the evildoers.
- Israel W Charny
The author, Israel W Charny who is the Editor of GPN, is otherwise also a clinical psychologist who devotes half of each day to a practice of psychotherapy – which he defines as "existential-psychoanalytic-systemic—with the hyphens the most important part of the description." He is a retired Professor of Psychology and Family Therapy, from Tel Aviv University where he founded and directed graduate and postgraduate programs in Family Therapy, and then the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he was invited to found and direct a postgraduate Program for Advanced Studies in Integrative Psychotherapy.
Author's Introductory Note: I cannot emphasize enough that people who do evil, which obviously means genociders and those who plan to commit genocide, MUST be contained and punished by our legal, law enforcement and military systems. Yet this does not mean that the psychological/mental health professions do not have to take a stand about their behaviors. If definitions of normal and abnormal behavior also are signposts of our culture as to what behavior is healthy and desirable and what behavior is undesirable, we better identify the violents and killers as unhealthy and abnormal. This does NOT mean that genociders are to be treated with the sympathy we give the ill, nor that they may plead for the privileges of the ill to escape punishment. I will clarify this philosophical-semantic conundrum in a more learned article in the future. Right now, we have the immediacy of facing a mad leader calling for the mass destruction of another people. He can not be honored as anything but mad.
"Madness and insanity," I was told in my training as a clinical psychologist at an excellent American university and at first-rate government and university psychiatric hospitals, "are characterized by delusional statements and florid distortions of known reality." In my time people making bizarre statements – I think one example in one of my textbooks read something like, "The Jews control the world and they are trying to poison the water in this city"—were sent to a "Bellevue" or psychiatric hospital Emergency Room. They usually ended up with bona fide diagnoses like "paranoid schizophrenia" (granted, an overused diagnosis that was proven to be dispensed promiscuously but that's another matter, and there really are plenty of correctly diagnosed paranoid schizophrenics).
The exception seems to be that if you have an identity as a political leader, you can pretty well get away with saying anything. Not so if you are a general, director of an engineering project, a medical professional, or the head of a stock exchange. But if you're a political leader you can say pretty much what you want about whomever—blacks, whites, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Indians, Orientals—you name them. And you can say whatever terrible things you want to say about other countries and nations and political movements and ideologies. In fact you can even express the opinion that so and so deserve to be wiped out, you can predict that they will be, and you can even barely hint that you are going to be the one who ensures their fate.
Note that all of the above refers to what is getting said before any actions are taken --how the world reacts to actual mass murder and genocide is a further subject in its own right.
The fact that a political leader ostensibly can say anything also spills over into a degree of allowance of nutty statements by lesser persons so long as they contextualize their mad distortions of reality in motifs and formats that are political-like. Thus, "There was no Holocaust," or "The Jews were entertained by music in Auschwitz," or "There were no gas chambers and/or no mass crematoria"; or "There never was a genocide of the Amenians," or "The Ottoman Turks protected and provided for the Armenians who were expelled into the desert"; or "The Serbs did not commit genocide of the Bosnian Muslims." It's pretty much OK to say any of these things so long as you are making a good wholesome statement of bigotry and racism, and not just shouting off that the world is flat for your own evident personal craziness.
So was I trained correctly in psychology and psychiatry? Do politics really transcend differentiating between the sane and insane? Do the intense political positions many of us take, where in our passions we call leaders whom we hate but who are perfectly sane "mad" and other such names, inadvertently create an impenetrable camouflage for the quite real madness of anointed leaders?
Should we allow political position and power to exempt leaders – many of them dangerous to the nth-- from judgments of very real failures of their basic reality testing?
Or is it possible that good old common sense and good old down to earth medical science and psychological science, know that if even a president or a king or a prime minister say things like, 'Everyone knows that 9/11 was done by the USA to itself in order to generate support for the Zionist state,' the person saying so is mad. Very mad. And dangerous.
He will not be the first head of state who is crazy dangerous with a serious potential for mass murder and genocide.
The same leader, flushed with one of his triumphal successes of addressing the UN in New York – a sad contemporary substitute for once intoxicating rallies in Nuremberg, I wonder -- reported elatedly that "the aura of the Hidden Imam enveloped him during his speech." That kind of statement too was clearly noted in my clinical training. Doesn't it count with national leaders?
I have never thought that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and many others of their ilk, for all that they functioned quite successfully and even brilliantly, were models of mental health. They were, obviously, evil twisted people with a distinctly sick compulsion to torture and kill masses of people. And it is entirely clear that such leaders can build up with them a complex web of many other leaders as well as many ordinary people who will execute any and all evil with them, but it is also clear that their strong and charismatic mad leadership is a key to much of the ensuing pageantry of mass murder by all of those who get into the ugly tragedy of murdering millions.
It is our so-called cultures and civilization that have been too timid and paralyzed with political correctness and over-subservience to anointed leaders' authority and power so that we miss the diagnosis until it is tragically and wrongfully much too late.
For those who worry that I am giving evil people an out of being "sick" and deserving of sympathy, forget it. The first clearcut treatment of evil is to contain it and punish the evildoers.
- Israel W Charny
The author, Israel W Charny who is the Editor of GPN, is otherwise also a clinical psychologist who devotes half of each day to a practice of psychotherapy – which he defines as "existential-psychoanalytic-systemic—with the hyphens the most important part of the description." He is a retired Professor of Psychology and Family Therapy, from Tel Aviv University where he founded and directed graduate and postgraduate programs in Family Therapy, and then the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he was invited to found and direct a postgraduate Program for Advanced Studies in Integrative Psychotherapy.
