Some Kinds of Maladaptive Behaviour

We can use this analysis to make inferences about people and the sectors of society that they hate. When a white person hates someone because of that person’s colour or ethnic origin or gender, then the hater is focusing on difference. He hates people who are different. Why is this? I suggest that it implies the hater is finding it difficult to be valued in mainstream society: he subconsciously feels excluded in some way from the mainstream. To avoid blaming himself, he projects the feeling of exclusion onto other people who are different, that is, he wants them excluded from mainstream society rather than himself. The hater somehow feels different in some way, but he does not want to be different, and so he hates people who are different or who want to be different.

Sexuality and Authority

I can be humiliated in two main ways: through sexual relationships and through authoritarian relationships, since these are the two main ways in which society is structured. By this I mean that society is structured by power, and power is expressed through sexual and authoritarian mores [³]. Even in the kind of economic system denoted by capitalism, which appears to be based on choice, a poor person actually has no choice: he has to find work in order to live. Often he has little or no choice about the kind of work that he would like to do – he just has to accept whatever work is available. Hence capitalism is an authoritarian structure.

I cannot avoid relationships (unless I find some means to live in solitude). When I am feeling vulnerable and fragile, this signifies that my relationship skills are inadequate. So I need to focus on psychological survival, and then I find that my relationship responses are usually exaggerated – they are either over-the-top or excessively cautious. I only feel confident if I am in control of the situation.

The effects of humiliation can be described in the following ways. In sexual issues my hatred of the other person leads to the fascination with rough sex. Considerate sex is a two-way dialogue and I lack the social skills to engage in it. I use violence in order to refute and discredit the appeal of the other person. I may even reduce him or her to a sex object if my hatred is really intense. In issues of authoritarianism, my hatred of the bully and of the authoritarian person makes me daydream of physical violence, of inflicting violence on such people.

Interestingly, when I first discovered pornography websites around 2002, they were run by Americans and were quite different from such sites today. The home page was usually given over to a description of women in the most degrading sense imaginable. Just about every derogatory word that can be thrown at women was usually found on these sites. It indicates the profound level of hatred against women by many American males.

This style of vilification was copied by some early websites run either from India or by Indians using Western web servers, indicating that woman-hating is not just a Western phenomenon. This level of hatred towards women is not unusual around the world, and is common in many traditional religious and right-wing groups based on patriarchal or authoritarian structures. In religious tribal areas and in fundamentalist regions of a country, the macho culture breeds fear and hatred of women. This is not admitted in such societies.

My view is that the person’s responses to his difficulties with sexuality and authority may take two forms, either moderate or severe, depending on how stressful he finds the situation he is in.

The person lacks self-confidence. He needs to find a way to gain self-confidence. His hatred of the other person leads to the need to control that person. He achieves this by humiliating the person. In sexual matters this leads to rough sex or even rape.

The person lacks self-respect. He needs to find a way to gain self-respect. He does this by finding a way to repudiate the person’s sexual or authority power (or by standing up to the bully). His fear of the other person makes him gravitate to the use of physical violence as a way of intimidating and inducing fear in his opponent.

Poor Self-Image and Resentment

Trauma in childhood corrodes the child’s self-image [4]. Normally the child uses its self-image to build a wholesome sense of identity. However, the trauma undermines this process, with the result that the child can only develop a poor self-image. The effect is that the child’s sense of identity becomes based on negative emotions such as fear and guilt, and states of mind like depression.

As a reaction to this negativity, resentment becomes a regular experience for the child. It is not unusual to see a child become sullen and resentful when a parent shouts out his orders, expecting to be obeyed without question.

Resentment normally arises as a reaction to guilt and depression. However, a serious problem occurs when the resentment is generated to overcome deep fear. The resentment becomes intense, especially when anger is in the background too. The resentment can surge up till it becomes a simmering fury. When this happens, violence is kept restrained only by the person’s social conditioning or by his ethical ideals; if the conditioning or the ethics is too weak, then violence explodes and is acted out in the current situation.

I recount a particular state of mind I experienced in the early 1990s when I was under extreme stress. On my way home from work I had to pass near to where a youth lived. He, with some of his friends to cheer him on, sometimes gave me verbal abuse. One night after a stressful day at work, I was boiling over with resentment and fear. By the time I approached the area where the youth lived I felt like a volcano of incipient violence, ready to erupt. I was not prepared to tolerate any more abuse. If I met him and he gave me abuse, I was just going to smash his head in. No half measures. I did not care about any consequences. I was going to make sure he never tried to give me any more abuse in the future. I experienced this state of mind about three or four times. I thought of myself as a walking volcano. A volcano of resentment waiting to explode. I was lucky – on these occasions I never met anyone who antagonised me. Fortunately my level of stress soon decreased for a while to ensure that my internal volcano subsided.

The deep fear is responsible for the extreme violence, since the person has to make a supreme effort to overcome his fear. This is why the resentment is intense, in order to overcome the intense fear. The resentment is not directed at anyone specific, but just to anyone who upsets the person. The resentment is responsible for the lack of care about the consequences. I suggest that this state of mind is responsible for unpremeditated incidents like “road rage”. When this mood is present in a crowd, then riots easily and spontaneously occur.

High intensities of resentment, fear and guilt denote a poor self-image. The poorer the self-image that a person has, the greater is the level of violence that he can be capable of.

These ideas are important when debating issues of punishment for criminals. In my view, the use of prison as a means of retribution and harsh deprivation will usually be counter-productive to a person who is not a career criminal. If prison degrades even more the self-image of the person then he may become capable of even greater violence than before. Whereas, when prison is used as a means of rehabilitation, so that the regime is not harsh, a different possibility arises. Such a programme of treatment is likely to improve the person’s self-image.

Whether a soft prison regime makes a person into a better social product is debatable,
but at the very least it should reduce his tendencies to violence.

Repeated Re-enactment of Negative Phantasies

If we have experienced difficult situations in our past (often in our childhood), then these may occasionally haunt us in our adult years. These situations may give rise to negative phantasies, by which I mean that the phantasies feature violence, either directly or indirectly. In the latter case, we first portray ourself as a victim, and then the violence is our response to that. We may find that we regularly and repeatedly re-enact these difficult situations in our phantasies.

For example, suppose that the person has suffered physical abuse (when he was a child) from his father (or some other significant adult male). The father appears to him to be a bully. The child feels victimised; if he feels hatred towards the aggressor, he may harbour desires for revenge. He may feel like shaking his fist in defiance at that aggressor, but such desires have to be repressed.

Then when the child has become an adult, he may phantasise on being bullied by a male figure of importance – but now he can be defiant and shake his fist at the aggressor. He dreams of retaliating against that bully. The retaliation is always “over the top” as he daydreams of annihilating the bully. The retaliation is always greatly excessive because the adult has to overcome his childhood fear of the aggressor; the greater the fear that he felt as a child, the greater has to become the defiance and violence in the phantasy of retaliation. Because his desires for revenge were repressed when he was a child, he does not have the awareness that his adult phantasies of retaliation are a response to his childhood feeling of victimisation by the father or other adult male.

A notable feature of such repeated phantasies is that the person has a deep need to portray himself as an innocent victim and the aggressor as a bully of the worst kind. The nastiness of the aggressor may be grossly exaggerated, though the person is not aware of engaging in such exaggeration. This stance can be viewed as the opposite polarity to the religious need for a saviour. Here the virtues of the saviour are exaggerated so that he becomes the personification of purity, in perhaps the same way that the nastiness of the aggressor is exaggerated so that he becomes the epitome of darkness. For example, these extreme themes of good and evil play out in the media in America through the obsession with superheroes and supervillians.

So during our adult life we may appear to be stuck in a routine of regularly re-living such phantasies and cannot seem to break free of them. We may feel that we are trapped in endless cycles of dreary fixations on negativity. Why is this? The reason for the seemingly-endless cycles is that we are not learning from them. We need to extract what is useful from such dreariness. When we finally get fed up with dreariness, we decide to change. This is when we begin to learn. So long as each experience, whether good or bad, still has something to teach us, then we regularly repeat such experience in our phantasies. When a particular experience has exhausted its usefulness to us, then we feel a strong urge to change. We change in some way: it may be a positive change or a negative change. We may be able to resolve the negativity, or we may fail. Each success has something to teach us, and each failure also has something to teach us. To resolve a failure means that we have to dig deeper into the mind.

The core idea about the influence of repetitive phantasies is that when a person is confused in some ways, it is not possible to act in a “balanced” way. Whatever he does, it is either an under-response (if fear is currently dominant in the subconscious mind) or an over-response (if anger is currently dominant in the subconscious mind).

What happens when such phantasies become extreme? The need to see a bully as the devil incarnate is binary, or complementary, to the need to see a teacher as the perfect redeemer. This binary need explains why religious fanatics and militarists go on jihads and crusades in order to exterminate those who threaten them (threatening them = bullying them).

On a more local setting, a teenager may go to his school with a gun and shoot teachers and fellow pupils. This scenario is only a vastly-smaller example of what America did in Vietnam, when it tried to bomb Vietnam back into the Stone Age. School shootings, crusades, saturation bombing – these all represent different gradations to ideas of what constitutes gross bullying, what constitutes extreme personal threats.

Hatred of Women

When a man hates a woman, there are two very different ways that this can come about. First of all, consider a mature man whose childhood was pleasant and non-abusive. He is self-confident and is quite sociable. If he now marries a woman who turns out to be verbally abusive, he may eventually learn to hate her and file for divorce. The emotional abuse he received will not turn him into a woman-hater because he became a target for abuse after his personality had become fully formed on a sound basis. His hatred is restricted to his wife.

Now consider a boy who is the target of emotional abuse by his mother or another significant woman. His personality is still being formed under the influence of bonding attachments. Now when he learns to hate the mother, his hatred becomes a strong component of his maturing personality. His hatred of his mother becomes generalised to hatred of all mature women. This is a feature of absolute thinking, according to stage theory as propounded by Jean Piaget. Absolute thinking at this time of life means that the child expects all men to be like its father and all women to be like its mother. More particularly, it expects that men who get angry will treat it in the same way that its father does, and that women who get angry will likewise treat it in the same way as its mother does.

The young child eventually grows out of absolute thinking. However, it does not grow out of its absolute beliefs that were formed by bonding. Bonding influences, for good or for bad, remain part of its personality for life, unless it learns psychology and engages in counselling or psycho-analysis.

A man may not be willing to accept that he hates women. So how can he explore his subconscious negativity without engaging in a long psycho-analysis? The easiest way is to explore pornography. The usefulness of pornography is that a person can analyse his subconscious sexual ties with his parents by analysing what kinds of porn he likes and what kinds he dislikes. If he hates his mother, then he will be drawn to images that degrade and humiliate women. If he has a love-hate relationship to his mother, then sometimes he will be disgusted by degrading images of women, and at other times he will delight in them.

Killer or Rapist

We sometimes have to defend ourself by engaging in aggressive behaviour. This is usually socially acceptable. And much of the anti-social behaviour of aggressive youths may be considered “normal”. However, sometimes a person will engage in extreme forms of aggression that is beyond being just anti-social and becomes deviant. Why is this? A common reason is that the person has attempted to play by the existing social rules, and yet has been humiliated or victimised. This plunges him into deep depression. He pulls himself out of his depression by deciding to play by anti-social rules. He begins to immerse himself in deviant behaviour. He becomes attracted to what is socially forbidden. The forbidden becomes attractive when the conventional has yielded only disappointment. What aspect of the forbidden is found to be attractive relates to what aspect of life has been a disappointment.

The experience of deep humiliation is always likely to be the cause of a person’s behaviour changing from being socially acceptable to being socially unacceptable, especially if the change happens over a short period of time. The experience of being humiliated or victimised will lead to resentment and bitterness. The intensity of these emotions will depend on the person’s levels of sensitivity and vulnerability. The more sensitive and vulnerable the person feels, the greater will be the effect of being humiliated, and so the greater will be the subsequent episodes of resentment and bitterness. The greater these effects are, the greater is the immersion into deviancy.

Some men kill women, and some men rape them. What is the difference in motivation? I offer a suggestion based on the differences towards sexuality that is felt during the influences of bitterness and resentment. Perhaps, when a deep response to past humiliations is one of resentment, then this may turn a person into a rapist. It is possible for the man to have an orgasm even if he resents the woman he is having sex with. Whereas, when a deep response to humiliation is one of bitterness, then this may produce a serial killer. Bitterness cannot lead to a sexual orgasm with a participating partner or a live victim.

Sometimes the man will first rape women and then gravitate to murdering them. This is powered by the desire for revenge against all women (especially if the killer is intelligent). The desire for revenge is established subconsciously during childhood, as the consequence of being abused. When the boy has become an adult, he projects his subconscious desire onto suitable targets (which represent the parent or significant adult who was the abuser). The intensity of the desire for revenge will depend on circumstances and the intensity of psychological pressure that the man is experiencing.

Unfortunately the desire for revenge can never be assuaged by the act of murder because the victims are merely projections of the parent or abuser.

In my view, there are three steps to murder. The first step for the woman-hater is the denigration of women. He admits his hatred, and likes to vilify women: for example, the text on early American pornography sites reflected the deep hatred of women. Or else he may be a traditionalist who upholds an archaic puritan morality that denigrates the status of women, or, at best, keeps them relegated to bringing up the babies and cooking the dinner. The next step is the degradation of women. Now the person begins to rape women or subject them to other forms of sexual violence and degradation. And then the third step is when he begins to murder them.

However, if the man is consumed by bitterness, he may appear to miss out step two. This is deceptive. He will probably live through step two in his phantasies.

The kinds of maladaptive, deviant behaviour that interest me centre on the following issues:

[³]. I have three articles on power and its limitations, beginning with the article Power. [3]

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Ian Heath
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.	Projections of Myself Much violence, perhaps even most violence, is the long-term result of feeling humiliated or crushed in some way when in a sensitive or vulnerable condition (for example, by being abused or by being rejected). This is especially true of childhood. The humiliation engenders emotions like guilt, shame, self-pity, resentment [¹]. The effect of being crushed generates fear and anger. The person’s self-esteem collapses and he may become psychologically fragile. If he blames himself for his weakness, he begins to hate himself. He learns to be wary of situations and relationships that mirror the initial trauma. He begins to hate the people responsible for making him hate himself. My psychological analysis of myself showed me that the intensity with which I hate others is the same intensity with which I hate myself. This implies that I have some similar characteristics to the people that I hate. Or, perhaps, I am the same as the people I hate, especially where ambiguous love-hate relations are involved (sometimes you love the other person, and sometimes you hate him or her) [²]. Usually I repress the awareness of my self-hatred, so that I can deny I feel this way. But the hatred needs to find expression, and hence I project it onto other people that I can despise.
Sub - Headings
Sexuality and Authority
Poor Self-Image and Resentment
Repeated Re-enactment of Negative Phantasies
Hatred of Women
Killer or Rapist
References