Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior Read Online Free PDF Page A

point at which lethal selfcenteredness overrides any tendency to be decent to others? Psychiatric concepts fail us miserably here.
    On a more personal scale, can we figure out whether, when, why, and how an element of destructive self-centeredness enters into our everyday social intercourse and causes hurt, misunderstanding, and psychological harm to others? The Golden Rule is an intuitive recognition of the connection between self-centeredness and evil. In adjuring us to do unto others as we would have others do unto us, it exhorts us to sublimate our natural selfishness into empathy for others.
    The Hitlers, Stalins, and other mass murderers and torturers are on the extreme end of the continuum of violence and sadism that is common to all of mankind. They know what they are doing. But their counterparts, the most deranged, violently mentally ill criminals, do not conceive and perpetrate horrible crimes while in other regards maintaining “normal” lives. Many are incarcerated in institutions for the criminally insane. Over a million other prisoners populate American jails. The majority of them are not considered mentally ill by current diagnostic standards, though many of them have committed violent acts. Yet there is a surfeit of violence in our society; it may not hold the headlines of history in the way that Hitler’s atrocities do, but terrible things go on daily, such as the psychological and physical maiming and murder of children.
    To think that these events have nothing to do with people considered to be normal is to refuse to look at the evidence for my basic thesis: we are all human beings and capable of a grand spectrum of behaviors, both that which is considered good, and that which we know very well to be bad. Although most people are able to curb their sadistic, destructive dark side, that side continues to be present and operative to varying degrees by day and by night. Primitive humans thought that when the moon waned, part of it ceased to exist. Today, we know that the dark part of the moon, though not visible, is still there. We are made up of many goods and bads, and we had better face that fact. Indeed, it is one of the aims of this book to help us do so.
    As I review in my mind the experience of treating and evaluating literally thousands of people, I find that I cannot generalize about them. Rather than containing two strands, one good and the other bad, each individual is like a rope with intertwining psychological strands of immense complexity. For the patient, the difficult but often rewarding work of psychotherapy is unraveling some of the more troublesome strands. It is far better to grab hold of one’s rope than be hung by it. To attempt to cast out violence by attributing it to “them” and not to “us” will only enslave us to a greater and more psychologically damaging myth of safety. We must stare our demons in the eye and learn to control them, so that our darkest dreams will never be translated into terrible actions.
    The Dalai Lama articulates with beautiful simplicity a major theme of this book: “Many people today agree that we need to reduce violence in our society. If we are truly serious about this, we must deal with the roots of violence, particularly those that exist within each of us. We need to embrace ‘inner disarmament,’ reducing our own emotions of suspicion, hatred and hostility toward our brothers and sisters.”
    That all men and women must struggle with their dark side is not reason to despair. Love and kindness are also fundamental parts of ourselves and find expression every second, everywhere on earth. The grand catastrophes of humankind, such as the Holocaust, and the evils of our everyday lives, reveal that the greatest danger comes from denying that there is a beastly part of our humanity. If we can acknowledge the beast and attempt to control it, the beast is less likely to leap out when we least expect it.
    “A Light Unto My Path”
    A few years ago I