Prologue to Violence

Child Abuse, Dissociation, and Crime

Abby Stein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136812149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Despite mounting references to the "transgenerational transmission of violence, " we still lack a compelling understanding of the linkage between the interpersonal violence of early life and the criminal violence of adulthood. In Prologue to Violence, Abby Stein draws on the gripping narratives of 65 incarcerated subjects and extensive material from law enforcement files to remedy this lacuna in both the forensic and psychodynamic literature. In the process, she calls into question prevailing beliefs about criminal character and motivation. For Stein the early trauma to which adult criminals are subjected remains unformulated and, as such, unavailable for reflection. Contrary to common belief, these criminals, especially sex murderers, do not commit their crimes in a rational or fully conscious way. They are not driven by deviant fantasy, their psychopathy is not inborn, and they rarely commit acts of violence "without conscience."

Stein's interdisciplinary analysis of her data infuses contemporary relational psychoanalysis with the insights of neuroscience, traumatology, criminology, and cognitive and narrative psychology. A powerful challenge to offender treatment programs to address the shaping impact of childhood trauma rather than merely to "correct" the cognitions of violent offenders, Prologue to Violence will be equally compelling to researchers and academics investigating child abuse and adult violence. Its mental health readership will be broad and deep, ranging beyond clinicians who work with offender populations to all therapists who wrestle with experiences of dissociation and aggressive enactment in everyday life.

1

Who, me? Locating Agency in Violent Narratives

Matias Reyes, now designated as the “real” attacker in the Central Park jogger case, capped a career of muggings and serial sexual assaults by raping and stabbing a pregnant woman to death as her children listened from the next room. A short time later, he left the jogger, Trisha Meili, for dead in the park, the victim of a rampage so brutal that NYPD detectives still have trouble accepting that a single offender perpetrated the crime. Yet Reyes steadfastly rejects portrayals of himself as aggressive. “I always say no to violence,” he is quoted as saying. As if to punctuate the assertion, Reyes shared with his defense team’s psychologist that he once surreptitiously called 911 to get help for a victim of his own sexual sadism. Such seemingly contradictory behavior is not incompatible with reports that Reyes was known to take showers with his rape victims, apparently so that he could imagine their intimacies as consensual (Flynn, K. 2002).

Revitch and Schlesinger (1989) report the case of a 15-year-old boy charged with the unprovoked stabbing of a 63-year-old woman. The boy seems divorced from the consciousness of his own vicious intentions, as he apathetically describes his actions: “I just started stabbing her. I really did not think about it. I really did not want to stab anybody. It was just bad luck” (p. 14).

A once-aspiring law student and dedicated suicide hotline volunteer told a psychiatrist to whom he had earlier confessed the grisly details of myriad murders, “The man sitting before you never killed anyone.” The convict’s name was Theodore Robert Bundy, a prolific serial murderer executed in Florida’s electric chair in 1989 (Lewis, 1998 p. 3).

A man in Brainerd, Minnesota was questioned about the disappearance of a woman with whom he had left a bar at closing time. “I don’t know if something happened. I hope it didn’t,” he told police, before leading them to the pit where her body was buried (Haga, C. 2003). Although not charged at the time of her disappearance, William G. Myears eventually pleaded guilty to the killing of Erika Dalquist, and was sentenced to 21 years behind bars (McKinney, M. 2005).

That crime note was emailed to me by a Midwestern writer friend who knew that I was embarking on an analysis of criminal narratives, some elicited during depth interviews and others culled from law enforcement files. The Brainerd perpetrator’s dissociated account, nervy and darkly laughable to uninitiated eyes, seemed routine to me.

INITIAL RESEARCH

In the 1990s, as part of a project on memory, I interviewed 64 men awaiting medical evaluation on a hospital prison ward. The inmates’ crimes ranged from petty larceny to double murder. Eighty percent reported having been physically assaulted during childhood. Almost half of that 80 percent had endured truly grisly episodes of maltreatment at the hands of caregivers: many had suffered severe burns, broken bones, loss of consciousness, ongoing sexual molestation, and threatened, as well as actual, attempts on their lives by parents or parental surrogates.

I documented intense episodes of depersonalization, derealization, and amnesia in almost a quarter of the men with whom I spoke. Dissociative signs and symptoms were most frequently recorded for those inmates prone to extreme violence. Of note, the 11 most pathologically dissociative offenders had committed the most vicious crimes: kidnapping, attempted matricide, murder, arson, serial rape, aggravated assault, and armed robbery. Five of these men professed amnesia for their offenses, although none claimed to be innocent of the crimes with which they were charged. Thus, in stark contrast to their nondissociating counterparts, who often denied their offenses, dissociative men were abundantly willing to assume guilt even when they were unaware of what they had done. And, although these perpetrators claimed not to remember committing their crimes, they had no difficulty confessing to them or presenting investigators with incontrovertible evidence of their guilt (Stein, 2000). My observations dovetailed with the findings of numerous forensic clinicians and researchers who have recognized pathological levels of dissociation among offenders, particularly those incarcerated for violent crimes (Allison, 1981; Bliss, 1986; Lewis & Band, 1991; Lewis et al., 1997,1998; Snow, Beckman, & Brack, 1996).

As my research agenda expanded to cover archival data in police case files, I made it a point to note information that might be relevant to the study of links among childhood trauma, dissociation, and adult violence. I was surprised to find that, even in a database collected without this purpose in mind (no specific questions regarding child abuse or dissociative signs and symptoms had been uniformly asked), there was much to read about both maltreatment and dissociation.

Since the completion of that initial research project in 2000, at least five quantitative studies, highlighting the link between dissociation and crime, found extremely high levels of dissociation among a variety of offender populations. Moskowitz (2004a, b) in his reviews of these and earlier studies, found that 25% of jail and prison inmates assessed had scored over 30 on Carlson & Putnam’s (1986) Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES), with between 7.0 and 9.5% scoring above 50, a total that often indicates the presence of severe dissociative pathology. While preferring more open-ended and dialogic methods to self-administered survey instruments like the DES¹, I have to admit that Moskowitz’s tallies are quite provocative and closely align with my own observations regarding the dissociative capacities of incarcerated persons.

CHILD MALTREATMENT AND DISSOCIATION

Clinicians and researchers have fairly well-grounded suspicions that the more serious dissociative illnesses are closely related to chronic physical, sexual, or psychological abuse (or a combination of types of abuse) during childhood, although such abuse may not be the only determinants of dissociative illness (Zelikovsky & Lynn, 1994). Tillman, Nash, and Lerner (1994), for example, caution that the failure of researchers to control for other pathogenic influences in the abusive environment leaves us ignorant of the true nature of the maltreatment-dissociation connection. Clearly, these researchers are correct in assuming that the association is not simply linear. Violent, sexually inappropriate, or negligent families are usually dysfunctional in a variety of ways; it is difficult, if not impossible, to tell which particular combination of conditions contributes most to members’ specific psychopathologies (p. 407).

Research concerns aside, having spoken with many victims of domestic violence, I am convinced that in the thick of a beating, a rape, or a vicious psychological attack by an intimate the most archaic of defenses are called forward. In such straits, a brain in overdrive will boomerang incoming information: deny it, disavow it, depersonalize it, derealize it—turn away from what is happening even before it is translated by the nervous system into something readable as experience. That is the core of dissociative process, and it is the most primitive, essential way of dealing with the world, particularly those events or interpersonal engagements that seem potentially disintegrating.

Of course, we all dissociate defensively at times as a way of attenuating anxiety. But people growing up in extremely neglectful or abusive homes habitually resort to dissociation—not only defensively, but preemptively too. It becomes a way of hosting aggression without acknowledging its toll.

CHILD MALTREATMENT, DISSOCIATION AND ADULT VIOLENCE

According to the most recent National Institute of Justice studies, experiencing early abuse and neglect increases the likelihood of juvenile arrest close to five-fold, doubles the rate of arrest for adults, and makes it 3.1 times more likely that the victim will go on to commit a violent crime, as compared with matched controls (English, Widom, & Brandford, 2001). Indeed, almost anyone I have known who works in the courts, the prisons, or the treatment facilities that oversee violent offenders admits informally to being acutely aware of the degree to which violence is a transgenerational phenomenon. The fact that familial violence so often antecedes stranger violence, although borne out by research (Widom, 1989), is largely ignored in the highly politicized arena of criminal justice policy, despite its centrality to both prevention and rehabilitation.

Studies of clinical populations have shown that proactive aggression tends to be elevated among highly dissociative people, with pathological dissociation in some studies being an even better predictor of assaultiveness than a history of childhood abuse alone (e.g., Moskowitz, 2004b). Prison and jail populations, as already noted, are home to a large number of highly dissociative men and women, some of them very violent. With all the conceptual and epidemiological overlaps that occur in child abuse, violence, and dissociation, the field is ripe for an integrative analysis of the three.

The premise of this book is that offenders, because they have with high frequency been the victims of maltreatment in childhood, are likely to have dissociated—and subsequently reenacted—those childhood traumas. Dissociation is not the only way that violent induction is translated into violent enactment: children may model the actions of their caretakers, sustain central nervous system injuries that make it difficult to moderate behavior, or, being unable to retaliate against their abusers, simply seek out weaker prey to victimize. However, it is the pathological disengagement precipitated by early, intense, and repetitive trauma that most strongly facilitates the streaming of an unprocessed violent past into the present. Because dissociative processes circumvent symbolization (Bucci, 1997), attacks cannot be reflected on or learned from (Davies & Frawley, 1994; Stern, 1997b; Bromberg, 1998). Consequently, urges toward aggressing are difficult to mediate and are frequently impossible to diffuse. Dissociated violence seems destined to be replayed in an endless loop, like the very cheapest pornography.

I hope to move away from the current medical model of dissociative disorders, which, in many ways, mimics Robert Louis Stevenson’s (1896) Manichean take on consciousness. Instead, I turn to the more nuanced understandings of dissociation and enactment available in contemporary neuroscience as well as in the relational and interpersonal schools of psychoanalysis.

THE TRAUMATIZED BRAIN

Post-Cartesian models of consciousness move beyond the idea that the mind is simply a correspondent of specific brain functions that record the objective world. Arnold Modell (2003) has said that the mind is “embodied,” in the sense that symbolic thought requires sensory-affective charging from the more primitive areas of the brain. Severely traumatized persons may undergo a kind of defensive cauterization, so that highly charged somatosensory data remain diffuse and inaccessible for higher levels of neural processing.

Bioarchitects of trauma theory, like Bessel van der Kolk and his colleagues, have lent empirical credence to clinical hunches about the way that the brain formats abusive experiences. These researchers posit that the perceptual-affective flood engendered by a traumatic encounter is configured mainly as an autonomic response to danger; people may experience lasting hormonal and neurochemical changes, as well as deformations of neuroanatomical structure, following intense or prolonged exposure to threatening stimuli (van der Kolk, 1996, p. 220). Of particular interest are regions of the brain that are implicated in the ability to reflect upon mental contents, first by attaching emotional significance to them and then by representing intentions symbolically, as a rehearsal for action. These areas have been shown to be compromised during trauma, and leading to a disabling of normal integrative function:

The experience is laid down, and later retrieved, as isolated images, bodily sensations, smells and sounds that feel alien and separate from other life experiences. Because the hippocampus has not played its usual role in helping to locate the incoming information in time and space, these fragments continue to lead an isolated existence. Traumatic memories are timeless and ego-alien (p. 295).

Alterations in mindfulness manifest as posttraumatic defenses with a distinctively dissociative flavor, including amnesias, derealizations, depersonalizations, alexithymias, and somatizations. In a healthy personality, dissociation will still assert itself defensively, but an underlying sense of psychic unity and temporal stability will prevail as the parts of the self speak to one another and assess reality; philosopher Jennifer Radden (1996) calls this kind of dissociativity “the unremarkable heterogeneity of the singular self” (p. 23). At the other end of the continuum, in dissociative disorders proper, symbolic thought—most often expressed through language—is unavailable as a referent for experience. Dissociators feel imperiled and act to diffuse the threat, which, in many of the cases detailed here, had deadly consequences. Without language, action itself announces intention.

There is an interesting convergence of clinical and experimental findings on the relationship between language and crime. Herve Cleckley (1941) the psychiatrist whose early, groundbreaking writings on both criminality and dissociation (Thigpen & Cleckley, 1957) have become classics, recognized the degree to which “the mask of sanity” worn by criminal psychopaths disguises not only atypical psychosis, but a kind of “semantic dementia” affecting receptive and expressive language. Cleckley (1941) hypothesized that language deficits impacted negatively on the processing of emotional stimuli, divorcing action from description, potentially subverting value judgments, and precluding consensual meaning-making (see Richards, 1998).

It never ceases to amaze me that Cleckley’s (1941) classic, The Mask of Sanity, revered in forensic circles for its supposed revelations about the conniving nature of criminals, is usually cited without its even more revealing subtitle: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopath. Indeed, on the publication of the first edition of his book, Cleckley “was so much impressed with the degree of maladjustment in these patients that he felt at the time, and said, they should be called psychotic.” In later editions of the book, fearing that his words would be used to absolve offenders of legal responsibility, Cleckley reworked his diagnosis. In the 1988 edition, Cleckley offered that the psychopath differed from an “integrated personality” in that the former did not enter reality in quite the same way, owing to an unconscious, “far-reaching and persistent blocking, absence, deficit, or dissociation” (p. 370–371)². Cleckley felt that one of the more robust clinical indications of criminals’ dissociation fell in the language sphere, where “so-called psychopaths” demonstrate a kind of evaluative aphasia, an inability to differentiate different kinds of feelings within themselves or decipher the emotional expressions of others.

Operationalizing and testing Cleckley’s clinical observations, researchers have abundantly documented abnormalities in semantic processing among criminals tested on a variety of psychophysiological measures, particularly as such mental activity pertains to the recognition and valuation of affectively charged words, pictures and stories (Hare & Jutai, 1988; Raine et al., 1990; Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1990; Patrick, Bradley & Lang, 1993; Patrick, Cuthbert, & Lang, 1994; Rieber & Vetter, 1994; Blair et al., 1995). Criminals’ semantic ineptitude is often mired in a general kind of physiologic under-arousal, as demonstrated by their failure to learn avoidance responses to electric shocks used to reinforce learning during experimental trials (Lykken, 1955,1957). At least one forensic psychiatrist, Dorothy Otnow Lewis (1992), has wondered if the imperviousness to pain is a result of early abuse.

Attending to chronic or extreme physical pain is an assault on sanity; the hurt is compounded when the purveyor of pain is a loved one on whom the child is dependent. Thus, children who have suffered repeated beatings may retain them simply as somatosensory intrusions, never conceptualized or articulated in an internal dialogue as “pain.” Unfortunately, when forswearing pain becomes habitual, it does not enhance survival; if a two-year-old did not experience the pain of touching a hot stove, she would simply leave her hand there to burn. (Indeed the perception of pain is so integral to existence that people born with dysautonomia, a congenital insensitivity to pain, rarely live to adulthood.) Because circumstance dictates that an abused child must leave his hand on the burning stove (sometimes quite literally), he becomes adept at not acknowledging the heat. When analgesia for pain is coupled with a loss of descriptive ability, the pain will often initiate a displaced reaction bereft of moral intention.

PUNISHMENT AND GUILT

Since it is the work of the traumatized self to dissociate victimacy (in self and other) and agency (in self and other), the part of subjectivity that might house some kind of evaluative moral scale—classically as well as colloquially known as conscience—is functionally segregated. Many offenders do not acknowledge empathic pangs or suffer conventional expiatory guilt because the emotions aroused are too potentially disintegrative to heed. As a consequence, these offenders cannot verbally express remorse in the way that the criminal justice system demands in exchange for judicial munificence.

The presence of guilt is eschewed in the many writings about violent criminals, and its absence is considered a necessary criterion for the diagnosis of sociopathy or antisocial personality disorder. Yet it is unlikely that any child, no matter how dysfunctional the parents’ child-rearing practices, has not been introduced to at least a basic notion of right and wrong (Whitman & Akutagawa, 2004). If anything, in an abusive home, ideas of right and wrong are exponentially amplified and twisted; they are seldom if ever absent. In fact, just as capricious and painful punishments in childhood inculcate anxiety and guilt (Sullivan, 1953, p. 344), many perpetrators tend to preserve guilt in the form of a sense of pervasive culpability—one that extends even past their actual crimes. For example, one man I interviewed insisted he had shot someone during an armed holdup, although he had only robbed the victim. It was relatively common for subjects either to reveal crimes for which they had not been arrested, or to question the magnitude of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Forword
• Preface
• 1 Who Me? Locating Agency in Violent Narratives
• 2 Conversing with Mutes
• 3 Criminals’ Bad Luck
• 4 Maximum Perversion
• 5 Dreaming While Awake
• 6 Conclusion: Consciousness, Culpability, and Control
• References
• Acknowledgements
• Index