A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

So saying, I seized her by the hair and jerked her to her feet. Wrapping
one arm around her waist and urging her hips forward, I jammed the
pistol barrel into her vagina. ‘Goodbye, bitch,’ I said softly. ‘Here’s a
fucking you’ll never forget.’ Whereupon, pulling the trigger, I sent her
spinning off into eternity.
The first excerpt is from T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the second from de Sade’s
novel Juliette (here slightly abbreviated, since de Sade enjoys spinning out the woman’s pleas for
mercy). It is one of de Sade’s milder inventions. The difference in the quality of the cruelty is
immediately apparent. De Sade makes it clear that his Juliette is experiencing intense sexual
excitement at the thought of committing murder. It is doubtful whether Enver Pasha experienced
anything at all except a kind of savage amusement. Enver’s cruelty is a form of stupidity, springing
out of complete lack of imagination. De Sade’s cruelty is totally conscious; in fact, it was the result
of too much imagination, of years spent in prison with nothing to do but indulge in erotic
daydreams. Yet the essence of the sadism, in both cases, is an inflated ego. The sadist derives from
his act the same feeling of power that the Right Man experiences when he gets his own way by
shouting and bullying.
This, clearly, is the very essence of crime: the self-absorption and lack of imagination. A delinquent
who mugs an old lady or wrecks a telephone kiosk is as absorbed in his own needs as a baby crying
to be fed. Freud revealed his own insight into crime when he remarked that a baby would destroy
the world if it had the power.
In 1961, two psychiatrists, Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Samenow, began to study the mentality
of criminals at St Elizabeth’s Hospital in New York. Their initial premise was that men become
criminals because of ‘deep-seated psychologic problems’. They became popular with their patients
because their attitude was permissive and compassionate. They believed that most criminals are the
product of poor social conditions or problems in early childhood, and that with enough insight and
understanding they could be ‘cured’. Gradually, they became disillusioned. They noticed that no
matter how much ‘insight’ they achieved into the behaviour of a murderer, rapist or child-molester,
it made no difference to his actual conduct; as soon as he left the doctor’s office, he went straight
back to his previous criminal pattern. He didn’t want to change. Yochelson and Samenow also
became increasingly sceptical about the stories told by criminals to justify themselves. They found
them amazingly skilful in self-justification - suppressing any material that might lose them
sympathy - but the real problem lay in the criminal character. They lied as automatically as
breathing. They had a strong desire to make an impression on other people - they were what David
Reisman calls ‘other directed’ - and a great deal of their criminal activity sprang from this desire to
show off, to ‘look big’. They were also skilful in lying to themselves. Particularly striking is
Yochelson’s observation that most criminals - like Bruner’s cat - have developed a psychological
‘shut-off mechanism’, an ability to push inconvenient thoughts out of consciousness - even to
forget that they had made certain damaging admissions about themselves at a previous meeting.
‘This,’ as Yochelson observes, ‘meant that responsibility, too, could be shut off.’ In short, the
central traits of the criminal personality were weakness, immaturity and self-deception. In the case
of the child-molester who was finally ‘cured’, they observed that psychological insight ‘was not
responsible for the success, but rather the fact that he applied choice, will and deterrence to a
pattern that offended him’ (i.e., got him into trouble). He stopped because he wanted to stop; and
most criminals went on being criminals because they could see no reason not to.