The Psychology of Theft and Loss

Stolen and Fleeced

Robert Tyminski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317700449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychanalyse

Why do we steal?

This question has confounded everyone from parents to judges, teachers to psychologists, economists to more than a few moral thinkers. Stealing can be a result of deprivation, of envy, or of a desire for power and influence. An act of theft can also bring forth someone's hidden traits – paradoxically proving beneficial to their personal development.

Robert Tyminski explores the many dimensions of stealing, and in particular how they relate to a subtle balance of loss versus gain that operates in all of us. Our natural aversion to loss can lead to extreme actions as a means to acquire what we may not be able to obtain through time, work or money. Tyminski uses the myth of Jason, Medea and the Golden Fleece to explore the dilemmas involved in such situations and demonstrate the timelessness of theft as fundamentally human. The Psychology of Theft and Loss incorporates Jungian and psychoanalytic theories as well as more recent cognitive research findings to deepen our appreciation for the complexity of human motivations when it comes to stealing, culminating in consideration of the idea of a perpetually present 'inner thief'.

Combining case studies, Jungian theory and analysis of many different types of stealing including robbery, kidnapping, plagiarism and technotheft, The Psychology of Theft and Loss is a fascinating study which will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, family therapists and students.

1

ASPECTS OF THEFT

Why do we steal and take what does not belong to us? Theft ranges from a child’s pilfering candy all the way to Ponzi schemes in the billions of dollars, such as the recent one associated with Bernie Madoff. The Madoff swindle cost investors over $17 billion in actual losses and ranks as the largest such crime in U.S. history.¹ Retail store theft amounted to almost $40 billion in 2010 or about 1.5 percent of total sales.² Two newer forms of stealing are identity theft, in which a person’s assets are wiped out and his or her credit record is destroyed, typically as a result of Internet scams such as phishing,³ and piracy of intellectual property, in which content is stolen for mass distribution at prices far below market value. When such crimes occur, they aggregate into huge financial losses that devour time and work, and lead to drawn-out involvement with the criminal justice system. These costs do not include the psychological pain inflicted on the victims in the form of stress, anxiety, and depression. It might be easy to attribute the bulk of this illegal activity to bad morals and sociopathy, along the lines of “there will always be rotten apples.” That attitude clearly indicates that the crime of theft is something we are accustomed to and take for granted, seeing it as part of the human condition and believing it both a bit inevitable and beyond deeper comprehension. Frequently, superficial explanations suffice—for example, calling theft a crime of circumstance, of opportunity, of deprivation, or of greed. But what motivates people to steal, especially considering it is such a widespread activity and one that assumes various guises? Although there are appropriate legal and ethical responses to theft, when viewed psychologically, it is a tricky topic because theft often persists in the face of far better options. How many times do we hear about a theft that appears foolish, self-destructive, and completely unnecessary? How frequently is theft not a question of need?

When I was in training more than 25 years ago in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco, I met a woman whom I will call Sally. Sally became my patient for a period of time, and she was what we might refer to as “a handful.” She phoned me often and in desperately suicidal states of mind. She was single, in her late thirties, overweight, and looked much older than her stated age. She cried easily and was often overwhelmed with emotions. I learned to be careful what I asked her, because even a simple question like “what makes you think that?” could cause her to dissolve into sobbing. I remember telling my supervisor that I felt my well-intended questions hurt Sally as if she were being stung.

Sally came for therapy at the university clinic after being fired from her job when she was caught stealing office supplies. She admitted this was wrong and she deserved to be fired. Telling me about her life, she described making three suicide attempts in her late adolescence and during her early twenties. These involved swallowing sleeping pills on two occasions and slitting her wrists on the third. The oldest of four, Sally’s childhood was full of disturbing events such as being flashed by an exhibitionist when she was only 6 years old. Her mother and father had an abusive relationship that Sally thought was caused by their religious differences because her mother was Catholic and her father Protestant. The “religious war,” as she called it, played out for years, and the children were forced to attend two Sunday church services, one for each religious denomination.

Sally’s father was an alcoholic, and he physically abused Sally and her siblings. He beat Sally, pushed her down stairs, and frequently slapped her face for “speaking out of turn.” Sally felt, however, that the physical abuse was actually easier to take than her father’s verbal abuse. He would call her “bitch,” “lame ass,” “dumb fuck,” and later, when she started dating in her adolescence, “a whore.” Her mother would not intervene and often stood by impassively as Sally’s father lambasted her with vulgar insults. And when he hit their children, her mother would merely cry, leave the room, and do nothing to stop it.

During the year that I saw Sally, she often lied to me. At first, these were stories about why she might be late or canceled an appointment. Later, they were fabrications about jobs she had held or was applying for. I noticed her evident anxiety early on—she had a definite “tell,” as a poker player might, when trying to deceive me. Her eyes would twitch, and she would rub them harshly, as if she were hoping to blot out that she or I would see through what she was trying to pull over on me. At these times, I just noted her anxiety and reflected to her that she seemed herself unsure about what she was telling me.

Eventually Sally said, “I lie all the time. It’s just easier than the truth. Look at how shitty my life has been. Doesn’t it make sense that I would lie about it?” I commented that there were various kinds of lies and that she was perhaps most worried about the ways she lied to herself. My unsympathetic remark made her angry (although, as a then relatively inexperienced therapist, I thought this comment reflected how one was supposed to call attention to a borderline patient’s manipulations and evasions—Otto Kernberg’s work was popular at that time⁴). Sally threatened to quit in reaction to what I had said. I replied that was her choice to make, but I also wondered, now that she had told me about her lying, if there might be an opportunity for us to think about what purposes the lying served.

Over many sessions after this exchange, Sally continued to be angry with me. She listed for me all her complaints about me: I was too young, too remote, too preppy in how I dressed, too soft spoken, and too “hard assed” about her being late, canceling and calling the clinic after hours and on weekends demanding that I be paged to speak with her. After patiently hearing her out, I commented that she felt badly treated by me, so now she was also dishing out a bit of mistreatment to me. I said that I thought this pattern was a near constant problem for her in her relationships.

Surprisingly, she agreed. She said, “I can be harsh. Everyone tells me that. It’s like I only know how to be two ways, either a softy like my mother or a hard ass like my father.” It was at this point that Sally told me, “I have a secret to tell you,” but she worried about what I might have to report to the police. I said that what she discussed was confidential, the exceptions being if she or someone else were in danger from her actions. She asked, “What if it’s about a crime, but a crime that didn’t involve anyone getting physically hurt or injured?” This made me feel unsure, and I could not help but wonder what sort of crime she had committed.

She did not immediately tell me. I suspected she noticed my uncertainty and held back as a result. Several weeks passed, and then one day Sally came in late for a session and stated, “The car ran out of gas, and I took the bus because I figured you’d never believe me about the car if I just didn’t show up.” I mentioned that she was anxious that I harbored doubts about her trustworthiness. She agreed and then said, “I haven’t forgot about what I brought up a few weeks back. I’m just not sure I’m ready to tell you.” I noted that now she was telling me that perhaps I did not feel trustworthy to her. She actually found this amusing and laughed.

Robbery

Sally soon told me about her crimes. She had worked at a bank for five years, was good with numbers, and eventually was promoted to branch manager. At this time, she was dating a man who belonged to a notorious motorcycle club that was known for criminality, drugs, and brutal tactics. Her boyfriend persuaded her it would be relatively easy in her current position to rob the bank. She realized that he was right because she was in charge of balancing the ledger at the end of the day, which was usually when any shortfalls were caught and reconciled.

On one particular Friday, she forged an entry of $X (a low four-figure amount). She removed an equal amount from one of the cash drawers. The forged entry appeared to be a cash transaction with a customer of the bank. She took the money home, saying she felt “exhilarated and scared shitless at the same time.” The ledger report went to the head office of the bank where the discrepancy was discovered only weeks later. A bank officer came to Sally’s branch to interview her and the cashier from whose drawer the missing amount apparently came. Sally told me she felt “rotten” watching how nervous her employee became. When she was interviewed, “I was cool and told him that I didn’t know of the error until the head office phoned me.” This explanation worked, and the bank closed its investigation without anyone being accused of wrongdoing. Sally said that her boyfriend was proud of her. They used the money to go on a trip, where they gambled much of it away.

I asked which bank she had worked at, and she told me it was the XYZ Bank, a bank that I was familiar with. We spent some time discussing her feelings about telling me of the robbery, and she said she was “ashamed” and anxious she could still be turned in. I thought to ask whether this was the only time she had stolen money from the bank. She blushed dramatically and said no.

A year after the first robbery, Sally’s boyfriend convinced her that stealing from the bank was far too easy not to try it again. This time, she repeated the same steps as before, only shorting the cash drawer $Y (a low five-figure amount). That the money was missing in exactly the same way aroused much suspicion. The bank’s head office called in the police, which they had not done after the earlier episode. The authorities now launched an investigation that included interviews with everyone at the branch. They questioned Sally on several different occasions and also wanted to question her boyfriend, but Sally lied and told them that he was away visiting relatives in Canada, thus providing him with an alibi. She said that her own anxiety grew. “I could really feel the heat,” and she feared she would be arrested or lose her job. Neither happened, and the police finished their investigation with a report finding that the incident was unsolved and possibly due to bank error.

This is not yet the end of Sally’s story, but before continuing, it might be helpful to look at her pattern of theft. Diagnostically, her behaviors fit within the broad category of an impulse disorder and are consistent with a borderline personality disorder. Along these lines, Sally demonstrated great fear of abandonment in her relationships, had significant difficulty in regulating her emotional responses, and was chronically suicidal, which included her history of attempted suicide on three occasions.⁵ Less clear is whether she had an antisocial personality disorder because she was able for long periods not only to hold a job, but also to be involved in relationships, although these were often chaotic and abusive. In addition, Sally did show some signs of kleptomania, for example, her exhilaration at stealing and her inability to resist her boyfriend’s urging her to steal when she herself did not need the money. The latter, however, could also be seen as her acting to carry out his bidding because she was afraid he would otherwise leave her.

Morally, Sally was aware that what she was doing was wrong. She indicated some regret, although perhaps not exactly guilt, when discussing these incidents. She also worried that the cashier from whose drawer she had stolen the money could be falsely implicated. She argued with her boyfriend that this was a major reason not to repeat the crime after the first theft. In terms of Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, Sally showed a preconventional level of moral reasoning, which was highly self-centered and based on appeasing her boyfriend.⁶ She was not capable of acting in a more sophisticated realm of moral reasoning, which is consistent with the impairment to her psyche caused by her borderline personality structure. Her judgment was compromised by how justified she felt in placing her own needs before anything else when an opportunity arose.

Intrapsychically, Sally was acting out a primitive conflict that she faced within her family, in which the so-called “religious wars” coexisted side by side with her father’s repeated abuse, both physical and verbal, and her mother’s passivity. Confusingly, their parenting behaviors stood in stark contrast to their professed religious convictions. Sally found a disturbing way to avenge herself against the “authorities” by taking what did not belong to her. We could see this as an act of vengeance at her father’s abuse. Donald Winnicott makes the interesting point that the antisocial tendency, which occurs typically among adolescents, is often geared to redressing a felt deprivation.⁷ In other words, a person seeks to obtain from the environment something that he or she feels was not provided as a necessary part of his or her earlier development. In fact, Winnicott conceptualizes that there is some hope in this kind of acting out because the person is reaching out to call attention to the deprivation—however, his thinking is primarily about antisocial juvenile acts, not about adult behaviors. I will show in this book how, although the motivations for theft vary considerably, they often are driven by some aspect of snatching to compensate for an inability to tolerate multiple aspects of loss. This can be understood at a personal, a social-economic, and an archetypal or cultural level as well.

Returning to Sally, I asked again if she had anything else to tell me about stealing from the bank. I think, looking back, that intuitively I knew she did. She missed several appointments during this period of her treatment. She began to protest about the fee she was paying, which was quite low, basically nominal at the time. She showed up angry with me and said the hospital where I worked was “in the rip-off business, taking advantage of needy people who can’t afford to pay but have to.” She burst into tears when I said that she had been telling me a lot about how she felt ripped off and cheated within her family and also how she had later turned to ripping off the bank where she had worked.

Sally then told me that there was a final “heist,” as she called it. Several months after the second theft, her boyfriend pleaded for her help, otherwise he would have to leave the country and say goodbye to her. He had amassed a gambling debt to a loan shark for many thousands of dollars. The loan shark had told him he could not carry “dead weight,” and the implication was clear to Sally’s boyfriend: pay or be killed. She told him she was sure now that she was being watched at the bank. The head office had posted additional security staff at her branch and just installed cameras for video surveillance behind the cashiers— new equipment at that time for her bank. Sally explained to her boyfriend that she could not short the cash drawer again, as she had previously done, without surely being caught.

They consequently hatched a plan to stage an armed robbery when Sally was working at the bank. She knew Thursday afternoon would be the optimal time because that was when excess cash was transported from the safe. The boyfriend recruited two of his shady friends to assist in the staging of the robbery. One was to drive the getaway car, and the other would back him up while he gave the cashier his demand note for money. Because of new surveillance equipment, they knew to wear disguises and chose balaclavas that covered their faces except for their eyes. They set a date for the “heist.” They drove to the front of the bank in a stolen car that was missing its license plates. The boyfriend and his accomplice entered the bank, waved a gun, approached a cashier, and demanded all the money. The cashier, a young woman just out of school, got the money from her drawer and asked the other cashiers to do the same. They had been trained to act this way during a robbery.

The boyfriend, having been clued in by Sally, knew this was but a fraction of what would be at the bank that day. He demanded that the cashier remove the money from the vault. Frightened, she told him she did not have access, which was, in fact, true. He asked who did, and she told him only the branch manager did. At this point, Sally stepped forward and announced that the cashier was telling him the truth. They acted out a rehearsed exchange, the result of which was that Sally went to the vault, opened it, and gave him entry to the shelves where the money was waiting. The accomplice patrolled the lobby with a pistol in hand. Sally had intentionally failed to trigger the emergency police alarm at her desk before any of this occurred. She did so only after her boyfriend left the bank with sacks of money. He and his friends made what is known as a clean getaway.

When the police arrived, they took statements from all the employees, including Sally. When the detective pressed her about not using the alarm immed...