I found the most interesting and enlightening bit of this book on page 76 where Malcolm interviews the Psychiatrist Dr. Stone about Jeff MacDonald the 'murderer'.
"Stone's eagerness to talk to me was preceded by his eagerness to testify for the defense. At the trial, under Bostwick's cross-examination, he had had to concede that in his first telephone conversation with Kornstein - before he had seen any of the transcripts on which he based his testimony - he had all but agreed to testify. In reply to a question about his fee as an expert witness, he told Bostwick he had not yet determined the fee, because 'I have spent upwards of nineteen hundred hours, and I feel that some of that time has been out of a special interest on my part," and that "no one asked me to make a concordance of six hundred pages of material. I did that myself to help orient things in my own mind, and I feel that I will charge a lower amount as a result." Now, in his office, Stone said, "I had read Fatal Vision years before, and it was pretty clear to me that Jeff MacDonald was a very pathological person."
"You thought that from reading the book?" I asked/ "Oh sure. The man was at the very least a pathological liar, and since he was also a killer, that made him a very ugly and obnoxious person - a threat to the body social, and clearly a very sick personality. However, I had not paid too much attention to this when I read the book - it was just another interesting book. By the time they asked me to look into the matter as a personality-disorder expert, I had become a - if you will - muderologist, as a hobby. I had amassed a large collection of psychobiographies of murderers, and I was much more familiar with the famous killers of the past twenty or thirty years than I had been when I read the book. The whole subject had become very intriguing to me, so I was very enthusiastic about participating in the trial. They sent me a transcription of the thirty tapes of Jeff MacDonald talking whist in jail - his pseudo-autobiography. It was all fake."
"Fake?"
"Well, the whole thing was a tissue of hyperbole and outright lies and deceit. I made an index of the examples of lying, self-aggrandizement, boastings, et cetera, page by page, so I would be better prepared at the trial to cite chapter and verse for anything they might ask me. It is a remarkable exercise in lying. Now, knowing full well that I couldn't admit this into evidence - the law is adversarial in structure and thus antithetical to scientific method - I nevertheless conducted a little experiment, just to see if I was on the right track. After reading the hundreds of pages of the transcript, I took four pages at random and had my secretary Xerox a dozen copies, which I gave to the class at Cornell that I teach on personality disorders. The students are Ph.D. psychologists and young psychiatrists. I didn't tell them anything except "Here are four pages from a tape recording that somebody made about his life. Here is a list of the DSM-III standard diagnostic personality disorders. Please scribble down whether you think the person's words convey any evidence pertaining to the presence of one or several of these disorders.' And everyone picked up that he was narcissistic, and most that he was anti-social- just from the four pages! And my wife picked it up from one page, because I had the stuff lying on the bed one evening, and she glanced at it and said: "My God, who is this narcissitic son of a bitch?' Ha ha! Just like that! Of course, at the trial they asked me, 'How can you diagnose a person you haven't examined?' Often you can't, but with personality disorders you can sometimes do a better job when you haven't examined the person than when you have, because the subject is going to lie through his teeth. Kerberg's concept of pathological narcissism is nothing more than a confluence of narcissitic traits - poor empathy, self aggrandizement, manipulative and exploitive use of others - with anti-social qualities like ruthlessness, conning people, hurting others, taking liberties with the rules by which society regulates itself. So it was not surprising that my wife and about a dozen students could make the diagnosis at a snap of a finger. However, I couldn't introduce my experiment into evidence, because it was hearsay. It bothered the hell out of me. Here was a man who by the best scientific standards was exactly what Joe McGinnis said he was, and yet I couldn't introduce the evidence into court."
I said that it seemed to me his experiment was hardly up to the best - or any - scientific standards, since it had no controls.
"Yes," Stone said, "I could have gone about it in that scrambled way, using several normal people - somebody with a different personality disorder, some other convicted person - along with Jeff MacDonald. But none of that could have been admitted into evidence unless the other side had overseen the experiment, and they would never have agreed to do that because they knew bloody well that inside he's exactly the way the book says he is."
"This is your belief, but you haven't established it.""No. But I suspect strongly that Bostwick knew he wasn't dealing with Lord Fauntelroy."
"You don't feel that there is any possibility that MacDonald is innocent?" "No. In fact - and this, too, was something I wasn't able to say in court, since Bostwick cleverly ate up all the time with a bunch of silly questions and I had to catch a plane - the four intruders who MacDonald claimed were responsible for the murders represented the only truth, psychologically speaking, that he told. There really were four people who intruded on the hedonistic lifestyle and whoring around of Jeff MacDonald: the four people who intruded on his disinclination to be a responsible husband and father; namely Colette, Kristen, Kimberly, and the unborn son. Three white and one black - the hidden one."
Stone went on to speak of having seen MacDonald in the courtroom. "I was highly nervous about being in the presence of this man." he said."I had the feeling that his eyes could bore holes through a tank. The steely stare of this hostile man! I made a point of finding out when he would be paroled, and when I learned that it was after the time I would no longer be on earth I felt bolder."
"You talk about him as if you really knew him, as if he were a real person," I said. "But actually he's a character in a book. Everything we know about him, we know from McGinniss's text."
Stone said nothing for a moment, and I wondered whether my remark had been imprudent. In asking a character in one text to comment on the ontological status of a character in another text, was I alerting Stone too soon - as I had alerted McGinniss too soon - to the dangers of subjecthood? Stone wavered, but - obviously made of hardier metal than McGinniss - resolutely went on with his mission of self-disclosure. "He's not a Dickens character," he finally said, correctly, if irrelevantly.
"You really don't like him," I said
"No. Its hard to like a man who stabs his pregnant wife to death. It takes more-what shall I say? - Love of mankind than I possess. I'm more of the school of 'You get what you earn, and you have to earn what you get.' "
Stone had spoken earlier of the chain of abuse and brutalization that links generations of violent people. I asked him, "Isn't it possible that bad things were done to MacDonald in his early years? That his childhood wasn't all that idyllic, and that he repressed what happened?"
"Yes."
"If you knew that to be so, would you feel more benign towards him?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because he's a liar. Because he's not man enough to say, 'I committed those murders because I was under the influence of amphetamines. I didn't know what I was doing. Colette was taking a course in psychology, she was going to wear the pants in the family. This was threatening to me; I felt left out. I was beginning to fondle the older girl too much, and she caught me'- this is Colette's stepfather's theory; he told me about it during the trial - 'so in a moment of frenzied feeling that ruined my whole life I just killed the whole lot of them.' If he could say all that, I'd still want him put away for the rest of his life, but at least I'd have some respect for the fact that he could be honest about what happened. No way. He can't do that. He's not built to do that."
"You take a very harsh view, which is unusual for a psychotherapist in our culture."
"Unfortunately, it is unusual. I am at odds with many of my colleagues as a result of that. I feel that the profession has too much of this: 'Tout comprendre, tout pardonner' attitude. And there is also the 'We can fix it' attitude - the notion that if we can send a man to the moon sure we can make a psychopath go straight. But a person who has a propensity to murder is beyond the pale of psychotherapy. It is folly to think that a person like that could be corrected through the process of one-to-one therapy. He is a lost soul."
I think I like this passage more than any other in the book because Stone is so sure of what he thinks and feels and has the methodology to prove it without even meeting MacDonald, even as everyone who has met MacDonald cannot be entirely sure of his guilt.
Dr. Stone is assured, and that in itself is reassuring. It turns on its head the idea that the DSM III is of no use, and he points out so neatly how pathological liars can pull the wool over people's eyes one-to-one, yet on paper (or in this case on tape) can exhibit their pathological personalities so obviously that you'd be a fool to miss it.
This part comes a little earlier in the book: just before we're introduced to Dr. Stone, but I found it very adroit;
(about 'The mask of Sanity'...)
"... the books thesis, which is buried among masses of the sort of thing s cited above is that there is a kind of evil doer called a 'psychopath', who does not seem in any way abnormal or different from other people but in fact suffers from "a grave psychiatric disorder," whose chief symptom is the very appearance of normality by which the horror of his condition is obscured. For behind "the mask of sanity" there is not a real human being, but a mere simulacrum of one. Cleckley writes:
"We are dealing here not with a complete man at all but with something that suggests a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly. This smoothly operating psychic apparatus not only reproduces consistently specimens of good human reasoning but also appropriate simulations of normal human emotion in response to nearly all the varied stimuli of life. So perfect is this reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him can point out in scientific or objective terms why he is not real. And yet one knows or feels he knows that reality, in the sense of full, healthy experiencing of life, is not here. "
Cleckley's 'Grave psychiatric disorder" is, of course, the same disorder that afflicted Count Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, and a host of other wonderful literary creations.
The attempt to solve the problem of evil and perpetuate the Romantic myth of the innate goodness of man through a fanciful notion that the people who commit evil acts are lacking in the usual human equipment - and not "real" human beings at all but soulless monsters- is a familiar topos of Victorian Romantic literature. That Cleckley's book remains to this day a serious psychiatric text is a testament to the strength of this fantasy among psychiatrists.
To McGinnis, the concept of the psychopath did not so much offer a solution to his literary problem of making MacDonald a believable murderer as give him permission to evade the problem it purports to solve. To say that people who do bad things don't seem bad is to say something we already know: no one flaunts bad behaviour, everyone tries to hide it, every villain wears a mask of goodness. The concept of the psychopath is, in fact, an admission of failure to solve the mystery of evil - it is merely restating the problem and only offers an escape valve for the frustration felt by psychiatrists, social workers, and police officers, who daily encounter it's force.
"You really don't like him," I said
"No. Its hard to like a man who stabs his pregnant wife to death. It takes more-what shall I say? - Love of mankind than I possess. I'm more of the school of 'You get what you earn, and you have to earn what you get.' "
Stone had spoken earlier of the chain of abuse and brutalization that links generations of violent people. I asked him, "Isn't it possible that bad things were done to MacDonald in his early years? That his childhood wasn't all that idyllic, and that he repressed what happened?"
"Yes."
"If you knew that to be so, would you feel more benign towards him?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because he's a liar. Because he's not man enough to say, 'I committed those murders because I was under the influence of amphetamines. I didn't know what I was doing. Colette was taking a course in psychology, she was going to wear the pants in the family. This was threatening to me; I felt left out. I was beginning to fondle the older girl too much, and she caught me'- this is Colette's stepfather's theory; he told me about it during the trial - 'so in a moment of frenzied feeling that ruined my whole life I just killed the whole lot of them.' If he could say all that, I'd still want him put away for the rest of his life, but at least I'd have some respect for the fact that he could be honest about what happened. No way. He can't do that. He's not built to do that."
"You take a very harsh view, which is unusual for a psychotherapist in our culture."
"Unfortunately, it is unusual. I am at odds with many of my colleagues as a result of that. I feel that the profession has too much of this: 'Tout comprendre, tout pardonner' attitude. And there is also the 'We can fix it' attitude - the notion that if we can send a man to the moon sure we can make a psychopath go straight. But a person who has a propensity to murder is beyond the pale of psychotherapy. It is folly to think that a person like that could be corrected through the process of one-to-one therapy. He is a lost soul."
I think I like this passage more than any other in the book because Stone is so sure of what he thinks and feels and has the methodology to prove it without even meeting MacDonald, even as everyone who has met MacDonald cannot be entirely sure of his guilt.
Dr. Stone is assured, and that in itself is reassuring. It turns on its head the idea that the DSM III is of no use, and he points out so neatly how pathological liars can pull the wool over people's eyes one-to-one, yet on paper (or in this case on tape) can exhibit their pathological personalities so obviously that you'd be a fool to miss it.
This part comes a little earlier in the book: just before we're introduced to Dr. Stone, but I found it very adroit;
(about 'The mask of Sanity'...)
"... the books thesis, which is buried among masses of the sort of thing s cited above is that there is a kind of evil doer called a 'psychopath', who does not seem in any way abnormal or different from other people but in fact suffers from "a grave psychiatric disorder," whose chief symptom is the very appearance of normality by which the horror of his condition is obscured. For behind "the mask of sanity" there is not a real human being, but a mere simulacrum of one. Cleckley writes:
"We are dealing here not with a complete man at all but with something that suggests a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly. This smoothly operating psychic apparatus not only reproduces consistently specimens of good human reasoning but also appropriate simulations of normal human emotion in response to nearly all the varied stimuli of life. So perfect is this reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him can point out in scientific or objective terms why he is not real. And yet one knows or feels he knows that reality, in the sense of full, healthy experiencing of life, is not here. "
Cleckley's 'Grave psychiatric disorder" is, of course, the same disorder that afflicted Count Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, and a host of other wonderful literary creations.
The attempt to solve the problem of evil and perpetuate the Romantic myth of the innate goodness of man through a fanciful notion that the people who commit evil acts are lacking in the usual human equipment - and not "real" human beings at all but soulless monsters- is a familiar topos of Victorian Romantic literature. That Cleckley's book remains to this day a serious psychiatric text is a testament to the strength of this fantasy among psychiatrists.
To McGinnis, the concept of the psychopath did not so much offer a solution to his literary problem of making MacDonald a believable murderer as give him permission to evade the problem it purports to solve. To say that people who do bad things don't seem bad is to say something we already know: no one flaunts bad behaviour, everyone tries to hide it, every villain wears a mask of goodness. The concept of the psychopath is, in fact, an admission of failure to solve the mystery of evil - it is merely restating the problem and only offers an escape valve for the frustration felt by psychiatrists, social workers, and police officers, who daily encounter it's force.
