Who Pulls The Trigger

When S.B. was fifteen he invited his friend to go with him to the woods to look for rabbits and birds. He threw his friend on the ground, slit his throat with a knife and pulled out his Adam's apple. He stabbed him several times afterwards. About ten years later he stabbed his wife 17 times in the chest. He said that that was his revenge because she had walked out on him while he was serving one of 6 terms in prison (one of which was because he raped a young girl). The woman got married to someone else, while he, at the age of 24, was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

He described his childhood with three words, ``bad, bad, bad.'' When asked what it was that usually happens to people like himself, he replied, ``They shoot and get shot at.'' He comes from a family where crime was a kind of trade, so that as a young boy he was given instructions as what to do and a `program' how to carry it out.

A drunk, whose mother was chronic alcoholic (and died when got drunk, set the bed on fire and choked in the smoke), killed his wife out of jealousy. Immediately afterwards he attempted a suicide by drinking sulphuric acid.

He says that his childhood was awful, that he had no love, either from his mother or anyone else. Most prominent memory of his mother is that she hated him, but he also remembers hating his parents. He explained his murder with a wish to get into ``the prison's madhouse.'' Later on, when he ended up in the socalled closed type mental asylum, he told a psychologist, ``I definitely wanted to come here. Both my mother and grandmother used to tell me that one day I'll find myself in a house, where there will be no master and no order, where one won't be able to tell who's healthy and who's not. The prophesy has come true.''

A drunken wimp? One might say so. But much closer to the truth is a statement by a psychologist who interviewed the man who longed for a lunatic asylum: he talks and behaves as a classic protagonist of a tragic scenario where a curse ultimately leads to a catastrophe.

One cannot escape his destinythis is what ancient writers of tragedies said. King Aedipus behaves according to the prophesy and the curse, doesn't he? ``Like Greek heroes, heroes of modern tragedies live according to the will of their prophetparents, whose prohibitions limit their options and whose curses lead them to a tragic possibility of selfdestruction, which often times bears that horrible and unrepairable stamp of Cain.'' This is what Leposava Kron wrote in the book ``Cain's Sin: Psychological Typology of Murderers,'' still hot out of the press by ``Prometej'' and the Institute for Criminological and Sociological Research in Belgrade.

The book is based on the results of the research of 142 murderers who were in the penal institutions in Nis, Pozarevac, Sremska Mitrovica, and in the prison hospital in Belgrade. A minimum requirement for a sampling was that the examinees spoke Serbian and were literate.

It has been confirmed by numerous studies that mental patients are not more homicidal that the general population. Accordingly, a thesis that murderers are prone to uncontrolled behavior is also disputable. ``Some mental patients perfectly control their aggressiveness,'' Kron said. She also added, ``They tend not to respond to frustrations with aggressiveness. However, when their ``reservoirs'' get full, a ``trigger'' may be most trivial, for example a ``provocation'' of a child, a spouse, a neighbor... Unlike a stereotypical perception that murderers are destructive and violent, empirical research has proved that many murderers are gentle persons with refined manners. Many murderers do not have a record with violent behavior and are less prone to recidivism that other types of offenders. A number of studies suggest that over 50 per cent of murderers are not the kind of persons who commit crimes constantly. In other words, they committed only one offencethey killed. They do not have a career of a criminal, nor are structured as delinquents. At one moment they resorted to violence as a means of solving an intense interpsychological conflict, or some other chronic interpersonal or social conflict...''

VREME: Would that mean that we don't really know who might kill us?

KRON: That's right. We don't really know it.

* I feel better now as I no longer have to fear darkhaired guys with a prominent jaw and bloodshot eyes. But, is there any way of telling where potential murderers can be found?

Most of the research already done, as well as mine, shows that murderers do not represent a homogenous group as far as their character traits, behavioral patterns or family histories are concerned. However, it has been proved that the majority of murderers come from chaotic, disorganized, broken, alcoholic or mentally problematic families. Psychological cruelty and physical brutality of parents appear not only to be a generator of children's aggressiveness but also offer a model and a basis for their behavior later on. There are claims that the children who had been severely abused are programmed to murder. Catastrophic feelings of fear, horror and hatred are impressed on their psyche. Making an effort to survive in that nightmare, a child rages inside and makes a decision: ``If I were as big as you are I would kill you.'' Later on, if still under a considerable pressure, he/she may rewind the ``tape'' and actually do it. However, the person may ``pull a trigger'' on anyone who treats them the same way as their parents did. That is how a basic psychopathological or criminal attitude is being created, ``I'm OKyou aren't OK.''

* 71.8 % of your examinees were unwanted children!

If one wants a healthy, happy and productive life it is crucial that the birth of a child is wanted, i.e. expected. If frustrations and anxieties over its birth accumulate even before the child is born, that certainly cannot provide for a favorable basis for his/her future life. Such people are losers from the very beginning. One of my examineesa fortyyearold who shot his mother with a fowlingpiececomes from a broken home and never had a good quality emotional relationship with his mother. She was rejecting him from the moment he was born. When he was little, she used to tell him that he had an irregularly shaped head just because she didn't want him.

* There is not one woman among 142 murders with whom you worked. Does that mean that Serb women do not kill?

Serb women do kill, but those murders are ``boring,'' they are less interesting for psychology. Women murders have a following stereotype: they live in a horribly conflicting murder for 20, 30 or 40 years; a husband, who is usually an alcoholic, abuses his wife in a million ways, she is illiterate and has a very primitive psychological structure. So... one night she pulls out an axe and puts an end to her misery...

* The local women would then be tomahawkmurderers, while the men, on the other hand, use brute strength: in 48.6 % of the cases they used their handsbeating, strangling, and the like.

These are the men who at a critical moment were not able to use another, ``real'' weapon. On the same token, had not the weapon been at hand at a critical moment some dramatic situations may have been resolved through an argument or possibly a fight. For example, it took an airforce captain ten seconds to kill his wife, a yearold son and a fatherinlaw and to try to kill his motherinlaw with a gun, he had because he was in service.

* Some believe that a gun is a neutral thing, a kind of an instrument like a knife one can use to cut bread or slit throats. Unlike this theory, according to which it is not the gun which shoots, but the man who pulls the trigger, another school of thought says that a weapon is obtained in order to be used sooner or later, in other words, that it's waiting to be used.

When one finds himself in an intensely conflicting situation, a weapon at hand may be used as a destructive way out of the situation. If there is no weapon, a way out of that tense situation may be less tragic. This specially applies on the people who have a problem controlling their aggressiveness. The weapon is not a neutral thing, but a kind of a constant temptation, i.e. danger. The captain, a triple murderer I mentioned, has said, ``I could never understand why a man who loses his mind for 12 seconds is sentenced to 20 years in prison for those 12 seconds.'' If he hadn't had his gun on him...

* In war times even those prone to suicide have an opportunity to direct their aggressiveness towards someone else rather than themselves.

There is a theory which says that a homicide and a suicide are psychological equivalents. Some empirical data support the thesis that a homicide is a indirect suicide! Suicide epidemics which raged in Denmark and Norway in 17th and 18th centuries support this theory. Namely, depressives resorted to homicide. Their religion, where a suicide was considered one of the greatest sins, which could not be repented, strictly forbade a suicide, so they killed in order to be sentenced to death. This phenomenon became so frequent that it was necessary to pass special laws which in such cases ruled out a death penalty, for which depressives longed...

It is realistic to assume that the persons who would commit suicide in stable circumstances do resort to homicide in a situation of collective violence. A murder as a taboo, along with an incest as a taboo which is another universal prohibition, has for centuries helped maintain the stability of human communities, thus guarding a practical and moral interest of humankind.

However, a murder stops being a taboo in some extraordinary circumstances. For example, religious and political opponents, who are always called an enemy when there is a war on, no longer are encompassed by a taboo. Once this civilizational barrier is broken, the whole system of values falls apart and one finds an alibi to destroy everything, even human lives. Therefore, the circumstances created by war may serve as a ``trigger'' releasing destruction which is no longer directed at oneself or family members, but on unknown people. In that case, one's aggressiveness passes unpunished.

* What kind of psychological problems do people have in war times? When is a homicide allowed, even desirable in large numbers?

Not everybody kills even in war. It is not so simple to kill not even on the front, even though a ``Don't kill'' taboo has become relative, more specifically even though there is a socially accepted excuse for whatever is done in the given circumstances. Although there is no feeling of guilt on the social level, it remains on the individual, interpsychological level. The fact that there is such a thing as war neurosis or psychosis tells us that even if there is a social alibi for a murder, there are fine mechanisms on the interpsychological plane which cancel a social excuse for reducing the feeling of guilt. Simply speaking, collective rationalization is an insufficient argument for annulling a taboo inside an individual! In some situations people turn to, speaking conditionally, madness. Whatever they may have done is thus attributed to some ill part of themselves. Why? Well, if there is no feeling of responsibility for a committed act, there is no need for the feeling of guilt. Therefore, a defense mechanism is a rationalization process of a type, ``I have not done it. I was something ill inside me.'' And if a mechanism of paranoid projection is at work, then aggressive people, which may groups of people as well, perceive the world around them as hostile, and feel haunted and threatened.