Psychology of Murder

By Virginia Adams

FOR all its sinister drama, the Mafia's bloodletting accounts for only an insignificant fraction of the killings that occur every year in the U.S. The rising toll sometimes seems to validate H. Rap Brown's mordant dictum: "Violence is as American as cherry pie." In 1970 there were 16,000 criminal homicides in the nation--one every 33 minutes. With the carnage mounting--up 8% from the previous year and 76% over the decade--the U.S. is maintaining its long-held, unhappy distinction of leading advanced Western nations in the rate at which its citizens destroy one another. Philadelphia, for example, with a population of 2,000,000, has the same number of homicides annually as all of England, Scotland and Wales (pop. 54 million).

This murderous preeminence, fostered by the nation's longstanding habit of violence, occurs against a background of street crime, political assassination and an almost obsessive violence in movies and television. It has led many behavioral scientists to begin talking about a national "crisis of violence." In the U.S., warns Psychiatrist Thomas Bittker, "violence is practiced as if it were productive." It may have been so for the Stone Age hunter of mammoths, but in the era of H-bombs it is not only non-productive but distinctly suicidal. Man has become so dangerous to himself that his continued existence has been called into doubt.

Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler reflected gloomily that killing is "one of the luxuries. No wonder that princes had so long reserved the right to murder with impunity." Yet there has always been a democracy of homicide. Ever since Cain slew Abel, murder has been a classless crime. The East Harlem father who hurls his children from the roof is paralleled across the Hudson in the affluent New Jersey suburbs: a Westfield insurance salesman named John List was indicted last winter on a charge of shooting his wife, mother and three children and ranging four of the bodies side by side in his mansion's empty ballroom.

Although murder is part of the fabric of history, it has assumed an alarming quality in America today. It is a new truism that violence has become what sex used to be, the object of morbid fascination. A sort of blind Mansonism hangs in the air--an incomprehensible glorification of death and destruction.

However common it has become, murder is still the crime committed by others: men and women dissociate themselves from murderers by assuming that all killers are psychotic. But most are not. Psychiatrists do not know precisely how those who have killed are different from those who have not. In contrast to the Mafia's business killing, for example, murder among laymen is generally a very personal matter. In three out of four cases, the murderer and victim know each other; in one out of four, they are related by blood or marriage. An estimated five out of six killers are men, and 60% of murderers are blacks--as are 55% of victims. In 1970, 43% of the suspects arrested for homicide were under 25; 10% were younger than 18. Nearly half (45%) of all killings occurred in the South, which has about 30% of the nation's population. But the murder rate was highest in big cities: 17.5 murders for every 100,000 inhabitants, compared with 6.4 in rural areas and only 3.8 in the suburbs.

The sheer availability of firearms is undoubtedly a stimulus to murder. There are perhaps 115 million privately owned guns in the U.S., almost one for every male between 14 and 65. Indeed, guns are used in 65% of all U.S. killings. Twenty percent of the victims are dispatched by knife, while poison is rarely used. In Manhattan, there have been two recent cases of murder by bow and arrow, and some years ago another New Yorker attempted murder by rattlesnake. As Princess Sita observed in Ramayana, the ancient Indian epic of nonviolence: "The very bearing of weapons changeth the mind of those that carry them."

Most nonprofessional killings are impulsive--done in a flash of anger triggered by a minor insult or a quarrel over money, love or sex. Many are committed by people who, Sociologist Stuart Palmer says, "tend to be overconforming most of the time"--which may help to explain their extreme violence when their rebellious impulses finally break out. Often the killer does not intend to kill; in at least 20% of the cases, he is acting in self-defense.

Sometimes murder can be indirect, an act that Psychoanalyst Joost Meerloo calls psychic homicide: consciously or unconsciously, the murderer pushes someone into suicide. Meerloo cites an engineer who had struggled "all his life with a harsh, domineering and alcoholic father." On a final visit, he took along a bottle of barbiturates, suggesting that they could "cure" his father's addiction. In combination with alcohol, the prescription was fatal.

The impulse to murder seems to be universal, but the reasons that men and women yield to it are as varied and mysterious as human history. To most psychiatrists, murder usually implies a defect in the killer's ego. Sometimes, of course, the motive appears to be nothing more complicated than the desire for material gain. In family murders, a frequent motive is the killer's conviction that no one, not even his wife, understands him. Says Psychiatrist Frederick Melges: "He may expect empathy without communicating his feelings. Paradoxically, attempts at communication may lead to the discovery that the partner does not understand." If that happens, he may feel embittered, deserted and alone, and may strike out in sudden rage at the thwarting of his expectations. A number of criminals, Psychiatrist George Solomon believes, "feel that the only attention they can evoke is punishment," and for them "murder may be a way to be killed." Long before being convicted of murdering his landlady, whom he liked, a New York sculptor named Robert Irwin told a psychiatrist: "I was going to kill somebody so that I would be hung."

Even this crime is less terrifying than what Poet Robert Penn Warren calls "blank, anonymous murder," the motiveless, gratuitous atrocity. In Warren's words: "An old man on a park bench reading his papers, smoking his morning cigar, is dead suddenly because some kid decided to kill him." These days, says Theodore Solotaroff, editor of New American Review, "a kind of anarchic murder is in the air."

Anarchic murder is not new. It occurred during the European plague epidemics of the 16th century, when hooligans plundered at will, sometimes cutting the throats of the sick. It was common during the Thirty Years War in the 17th century, when troops ravaged the countryside indiscriminately. New or old, wanton slaughter recalls the question posed by Nietzsche's red judge: "Why did this criminal murder?" Nietzsche's reply: "His soul wanted blood; he thirsted after the bliss of the knife."

Not many contemporary thinkers would accept this view of man as essentially savage. True, Freud once believed that human beings are born with an aggressive instinct and that "the aim of all life is death," but he later abandoned the idea. Currently, Ethologist Konrad Lorenz insists that aggression and violence are inevitable because they were bred into man by natural selection during prehistoric times. But there is widespread disagreement with this theory. Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, for example, considers the Lorenz view "nonsense," calling it "not explanation but rationalization."

Frustration frequently touches off aggressive behavior. It can take many forms, and often arises from a feeling of physical, social or intellectual inferiority. It can also result from physical and psychological brutality inflicted during childhood. Describing one parental attack, a mother told Sociologist Palmer, "I thought the boy was done for. His father knocked him from one end of the house to another like a man gone insane." Observes Palmer: "Perhaps it was coincidence, perhaps it was not. But when he was 24, that same boy beat to death a man 30 years older than himself."

Sometimes the frustration that fires aggression is highly impersonal. Yale Psychoanalyst Robert Jay Lifton links at least some violence to general frustration, anger and anxiety over countless "little deaths"--the failure of national morality, the breakdown of family life and feelings of alienation in a mobile population. Boredom, too, drives people to look for meaning in nihilistic violence, to accept the philosophy "I kill, therefore I am."

Most behavioral scientists believe that aggressive behavior is learned, often by observation, and some are convinced that violence on TV fosters violent behavior in both children and adults. Along with eleven other researchers who carried out studies for the U.S. Surgeon General, Psychologist Robert Liebert asserts that, for healthy as well as disturbed children, "a clear and important link has been shown between TV violence and aggressive behavior." As for the theory that watching TV violence drains off the viewer's own savage impulses, Political Scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool maintains that "if there is any kind of cathartic effect, it is swamped by the incitement effect." A few experts consider the TV-violence controversy something of a red herring. "Even if we did away with all the violence on TV we would have solved nothing," says Psychoanalyst Ner Littner. "There is no such thing as a single simple cause or a single simple solution. Searching for scapegoats allows us to avoid facing the problem of why we are violent, and also postpones the solution."

In the opinion of many behavioral scientists, historians and philosophers, the Viet Nam War, more than any previous conflict, has helped to foster violence at home. One evidence of the war's impact is indicated by a recent national survey of attitudes toward the Calley case. According to Harvard Psychologist Herbert Kelman, many Americans regard Lieut. Calley's behavior at My Lai as normal. That suggests, Kelman concludes, that an alarmingly large segment of the population might be willing to employ extreme violence if ordered to do so.

Even more ominous is the trend toward the philosophical and artistic glorification of violence and death. Following Sartre, many young people believe that "violence is man re-creating himself," and that savagery is a kind of purifying force bearing, as Historian Richard Hofstadter puts it, "the promise of redemption." Murder has always been a central theme in the arts. There were killings (off stage) in the Greek theater. The Shakespearean stage was often littered with bodies by the fifth act. As early as the 19th century, American writers like Melville and Poe were beginning to show what Historian David Davis had called "un disguised sympathy for sublime murders and amoral supermen moved by demonic urges." That sympathy seems to have deepened recently, especially among movie directors. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. speaks of "a pornography of violence," and Critic Pauline Kael complains that "at the movies, they are desensitizing us." She objects to a film like Straw Dogs because it equates violence and masculinity. Few psychiatrists would argue with her. Nor would they disagree with critics who object that filmed violence has become the ultimate trip, the stimulus for mind-blowing sensations wilder than any induced by LSD.

Some behavioral scientists, philosophers and aestheticists believe that violence in the arts is not bad per se and that it may, in fact, be the best means of inspiring a horror of violence. Brutality in films, asserts Robert Lifton, "can illuminate and teach us about our relationship to violence." The Godfather, he believes, provides that kind of illumination by brilliantly contrasting the Corleone family's sunny private life and its brutally dark professional life. Critic Robert Hatch rejects that view, calling the movie a "chronicle of corruption, savage death and malignant sentimentality" that wreaks harm by forcing the viewer "to take sides in a situation that is totally without moral substance." It was chilling, he says, "to hear an audience roar its approval when a young gangster on 'our' side blew the brains out of two gangsters on 'their' side."

That easy empathy with cinema slayings, together with a growing tolerance of real-life brutality, suggests a dismaying conclusion: beneath the surface, Americans may be less alarmed by murder--and more attracted to it--than they care to admit. Just as an individual must become aware of his problems before they can be solved, the nation, too, will have to acknowledge its unhealthy fascination with murder as the first step toward coming to terms with it. . Virginia Adams

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