The myth that psychopaths and sociopaths are out there in slums, ghettos and mental asylums stands shattered by the frequent reports of brutal torture of maids and domestic servants in middle-class homes. It turns out that the manager next door, the air hostess in the flat above or even the doctor across the road could be battering that tribal girl from Jharkhand in Central India. Dr Jagriti Singh, accused of beating her maid Rakhi to death, in all likelihood tries her best to cause least discomfort and pain to her patients while performing dental surgeries at the well known Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital in New Delhi.
A clear distinction between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, between ‘Bhagwan’ (trans. God) and ‘Shaitan’(trans. Devil) comforts us. In North India, every year the victory of Rama, the mythological hero of Ramayana, over evil is celebrated on the festival of Dushhera by the blowing up burning of the effigy of the ten-headed Demon-King Ravana accompanied by much sound and fury. The more philosophical and inward oriented interpretation that it is symbolic of the weeding out of one’s own inner demons has few takers. Kakar (1982) in the context of the healing traditions with regard to mental illness in India, writes of the Pir of Patteshah Dargah in Delhi ‘And then, like psychotherapists everywhere, he called on the clinical evidence of “thousands of patients I have treated personally” …that conclusively “proved” the role played by demons in the etiology of his patient’s illness’.
The violent perpetrator ‘out there’ can be handled rather than the acknowledgment of our murderous wishes. Freud (1915) observes, “The very emphasis laid on the commandment ‘Thou shall not kill’ makes it certain that we spring from an endless series of generations of murderers, who had the lust of killing in their blood, as, perhaps, we ourselves have today”.(p 296). Akin to the ‘Ravana’ at Dushhera, it is likely that one of the important factors in the floundering of libertarian movements for social change has been the lack of recognition of aspects of the human self and the ascribing of aggression, envy, jealousy, competitiveness, violence and other ‘demons’ to the ‘evil’ of Capitalism. Ambivalence and shades of grey are difficult to accept. The Nazi doctors who participated in the horrors in the concentration camps during World War II were affectionate fathers at home in their families. Rees writing of the Rudolph Hoss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, the site of the largest mass murder in the history of the world observes “During his working days, Höss presided over the murder of more than a million people, but once he came home he lived the life of a solid, middle-class German husband and father”.
Bönisch and Wiegrefe observe “The murderers and their assistants included Catholics and Protestants, the old and the young, people with double doctorates and poorly educated members of the working class. And the percentage of psychopaths was not higher than the average in society as a whole”. Twemlow (2008) in the context of the modern demons of ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorists’ observes “Sometimes the ‘terrorist’ is viewed as a mentally ill person; however, there is no evidence to support this diagnosis. Jerald Post, a psychiatrist with affiliations to the CIA, who has probably examined more ‘terrorists’ than any other person, did not find any sign of mental illness” Twemlow draws further links “Fear, horror and shock which transfixes are characteristics of terror. I saw a woman four years after she had escaped from her husband who used to keep her chained to a chair, and she was still terrified that he would kill her. That is domestic terrorism, and the prevalence is 18,000 out of 100,000 families in the US alone”.
It is easier to categorize Jagriti Singh, Vandana Dhir the senior executive who brutally tortured the Santhal girl in the Vasant Kunj case or Bira Thoibi, the Air India airhostess who locked up her 12-year old maid in India and pushed off to Australia, as monsters belonging to another species. It is more painful to acknowledge the human potentiality for murderous fury in each of us. Road rage is an everyday manifestation of a trivial incident leading to savage beatings resulting at times in death. Instances of husbands beating up wives triggered by trivial frustrations are another indicator of the lurking rage.
Acknowledgment is a crucial step to exploring ways to equip individuals to contain rather than ‘act out’ the raging emotions. All of us have seen babies shaking with anger going blue with rage and the expression ‘infantile rage’ offers us some clues. The psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott has described how a baby cries, and then a breast appears to nourish him, creating feelings of omnipotence. The baby feels the breast has been created by his will and perceives the mother as an extension of himself. Fury is evoked as the baby begins to understand the objective reality of the independent existence of objects/people and that he does not control them. It is crucial to equip the baby with the ability to cope with feelings of rage and frustration at the loss of omnipotence. It is such unprocessed infantile rage which in adulthood may result in volcanic eruptions of fury for which almost anything can act as a trigger. Vital to the development of the ability to cope with anger is introducing small doses of ‘optimal frustration’, which is enough to create an environment where the child learns the acceptance of limits.
In the case of Jagriti Singh, one can only surmise that the installation of twenty surveillance cameras all over the house including the bathroom to monitor every activity of the domestic servants could be a pathetic attempt to recover the heady feeling of control. However, any attempt at recovering omnipotence is bound to repeatedly crash on the hard rock of reality, leading to fury. The other side of this grandiose omnipotent controlling self are feelings of emptiness, worthlessness and being out of control. The individual oscillates between these two extremes. Therapy initiates the processing of these feelings and working towards reaching a balanced healthier middle ground between the two ends of the spectrum.
References:
Bönisch, G and Wiegrefe, K. Spiegel Online International. Retrieved 6 August 2014 from, http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/everyday-murder-nazi-atrocities-committed-by-ordinary-people-a-542245.html.
Freud, S. 1915. Thoughts for the times on war and death. Standard Edition, XIV.
Kakar, S. 1982. Shamans, mystics and doctors. Oxford University Press.
Rees, L. Last updated 17-2-2011.Rudoph Hoss – Commandant of Auschwitz. Retrieved 6 August 2014 from, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/genocide/hoss_commandant_auschwitz_01.shtml. Twemlow, S. 2008. The ‘terrorist is no fire-breathing dragon’. Himal South Asian, December 2008.
