James Phillips Introduction For those of you not famil

More documents

Recommendations

Info

$Anorexia: um fracasso do trabalho da melancolia Ana Paula ...$

16carried out by government psychiatrist, Dr. Sally Johnson, who examined the available recordsand interviewed Kaczynski for about 22 hours in January 1998. (Much of the material in thispresentation concerning Kaczynski’s personal history comes from her published report.) Herdiagnosis was paranoid schizophrenia and paranoid personality disorder, with avoidant andantisocial features. Nevertheless, she found that he was competent to stand trial. AlthoughKaczynski now had the constitutional right to represent himself, Judge Burrell refused to allowhim to do so and ruled that Kaczynski would have to live with the defense team and the prospectof having the mental health testimony paraded before the public. Kaczynski responded to thejudge's decision rather quickly by accepting a plea agreement that ended the case - no deathpenalty but life imprisonment without parole. Kaczynski has said that he would have preferredthe death sentence to life imprisonment, but that would have involved taking his case to trial andhaving his mental health status subjected to public scrutiny.PsychopathologyBefore engaging the issue of psychopathology and political extremism in the case of TedKaczynski, let me first review the question of psychiatric diagnosis. In attempting a psychiatricevaluation of Ted Kaczynski we draw on a number of sources. We have the 22,000 pages ofjournals written during his 25 years in the Montana cabin that trace his progression over timefrom the loner child to the isolated adult of the cabin. We have the court materials, and we havelimited interview material following the court process. The interviews are of particular interest,since at this point the legal issues were (mostly) settled, and Kaczynski was relaxed in a waythat could not have been possible in the pre-sentence setting.The four defense experts and the competency evaluator all felt that the combination ofKaczynski’s writings and their direct interviews warranted a diagnosis of paranoid
17schizophrenia. Dr. Johnson, the competency evaluator, concurred with the schizophreniadiagnosis and concluded that Kaczynski suffered from two delusions, one of being controlled bymodern technology, the other of having been so psychologically abused by his parents that it haddestroyed the possibility of having normal relationships with women. The two prosecutionexperts, who did not have the opportunity to evaluate Kaczynski directly and based theirconclusions on his writings, did not find evidence of delusional thinking and did not support theschizophrenic diagnosis. They favored a diagnosis of schizoid or schizotypal personalitydisorder. All the evaluators agreed about the other diagnosis: that of a paranoid personalitydisorder with antisocial and avoidant features.Let us begin with the schizophrenia diagnosis, introduced by the defense experts and thecompetency evaluator, and disputed by the prosecution experts. Given the strength andcoherence of Kaczynski’s analysis of technology, Dr Johnson’s finding that Kaczynski sufferedfrom a delusion of being controlled by modern technology seems particularly silly - andcertainly suggests that Kaczynski has a more sophisticated understanding of technology than hisevaluator. In the interviews Kaczynski doesn’t come through like the paranoid schizophrenicdepicted by the defense psychiatrists. One interviewer describes him as “for the most part,affable, polite and sincere. It would almost be easy to forget that he mailed or delivered at least16 package bombs and then logged the results with the glee of a little boy tearing the wings off afly.” For his part Kaczynski remains determined in this interview to assert his sanity. “I’mconfident that I’m sane, personally,” he tells the interviewer, “I don’t get delusions and so on andso forth...I mean, I had very serious problems with social adjustment in adolescence, and a lot ofpeople would call this a sickness. But it would have to be distinguished between an organicillness, like schizophrenia or something like that.”
Page 1 and 2: 11Ideology, Violence, and Psychopat
Page 3 and 4: 3but these conditions do not actual
Page 5 and 6: 5large organizations is necessary f
Page 7 and 8: 7In the 1971 essay, Kaczynski ackno
Page 9 and 10: 9From Harvard, he went on to the Un
Page 11 and 12: 11resigned, and for the next two ye
Page 13 and 14: 131971. During the later 1970s, he
Page 15: 15at all costs to avoid being label
Page 19 and 20: 19and I said to myself that I reall
Page 21 and 22: 21produced it. Indeed, from a psych
Page 23 and 24: 23follow them. As we know, for Kant

James Phillips Introduction For those of you not famil

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?