Theory platform #2: Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter

I wondered if I had anything new to say about the Las Vegas shooter. I do feel it’s too soon to try to generate an authoritative diagnostic opinion, as more facts continue to come out. (Just today, some tv profiler said that Paddock liked to tie up prostitutes and ‘make them scream,’ that he was a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, and that he ‘liked to take credit’ for his father’s crimes, whatever that means.) And facts – more and more and detailed ones – are critical in actual, as opposed to DSM-5 Manual, diagnosis.

So for now I’d just like to say that it’s fine if the shooter didn’t state a reason for his atrocity, didn’t leave a manifesto, hadn’t joined one of the ideological hate clubs. Because any explanation of those sorts would be no different from what any troubled person in therapy offers as his understanding of his problem or behavior: It would be a rationalization, an intellectualization, a cognitive escape or cover over the real motivation.

Which is a feeling. A complex feeling that either finds its right causes or cleaves to the wrong ones.

A client says, “I don’t like people. You can’t trust anyone.” Though he’ll pay lip service to making an exception for the therapist, he really does feel a general angry frightened alienation. But he is wrong. He dislikes people because he was, forty years earlier, an inconvenience to his partying mom, a complete nothing to his absent father. No one ever gave him reparative love, and he had to close the wound by killing hope. He won’t know this without therapy – and honesty.

A “white supremacist” speaks of his own superiority when it’s crystal clear in therapy that he has never had a good feeling about himself in his life. Maybe a grandfather gave him some time, the only non-punitive attention he got. But a baseline pain lived beneath that. Why couldn’t grandpa’s attention heal that? Because it didn’t address it. Later, he needed his mere existence, not his accomplishments, to be important – his whiteness – just as a child actually does need his value to be a given to his parents: They love him simply because he exists. But the client won’t know he’s just a child wanting to be loved for who he is.

Paddock does seem somewhat Asperger’s-like with his adolescent-stage lack of social harmony, his penchant for numbers and detail. He seems Schizoid: the glassy eyes and isolative affect in his junior high school photo, his apparent lack of a need for affiliation. He may have been born a psychopath, one of those “callous and unemotional” children* like the “bad seed” in the 1956 movie.** All these “types” can be understood to be based in loss of emotional connection, needful connection whose starvation causes pain.

Look at pain. It has different natures in different early environments. If it came in hellish birth trauma – being born in crack cocaine withdrawal and screaming for six months*** – any capacity for bond will be burned away. If it was less deadly, was succored soon after birth by a loving, not-solipsistic mother, it may flow deep beneath a bountiful land and emerge only during moments of quiet or loss later in life. If pain strikes and accumulates in childhood, we will have so many of our clients who try, then sabotage themselves; need love, fall into unloving relationships; feel hopes and dreams, and watch them evaporate before their eyes; be caring, but then coarse and rejecting.

I suspect the shooter’s end-of-life script was his birth template: some trauma that killed his heart but drove him on, like Janov’s “sympath”**** character. He was “soul murdered”***** at the starting gate. With no strand of bond, or maybe a vagrant molecule of it, he would not see people as hearts but as bodies that are both impertinences and appurtenances. And as he drifted into old age, that necessary quiet, he’d feel the worst possible pain: what he never had but which other people do: love and humanity.

Kill it, before you die from it.

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* http://healthland.time.com/2013/05/07/psychopaths-callous-children-show-dysfunctional-brain-responses-to-people-in-pain/, and other links and youtube videos.

** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bad_Seed_(1956_film).

*** The history of an eleven-year-old psychopath I treated.

**** http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/search?q=sympath. Excerpt from "Janov's Reflections on the Human Condition" blog:

“What we have found is that very early events in life determine the settings of our nervous systems. What sways the two key nervous systems – both under the aegis of the hypothalamus – is the kind of biologic and neurologic reaction that is forced on us and our brains while under specific kinds of threats very early in life, during gestation and birth. There is the struggle-and-succeed syndrome, the sympath, and the struggle-and-fail syndrome, the parasympath. This latter gives up easily and smells failure. Not so the sympath who tries and tries and does not give up. And when a new patient struggles to feel even when he is not ready, we generally have a sympath on our hands. The parasympath comes in listless, down regulated, worn out, unmotivated and depressed. He sees no point in anything. This is where the therapist needs his full capacity to meet the challenge. Should he be encouraged? These are the questions we take up constantly in our staff meetings. We often bring the patient in and ask him what works. He sometimes knows and sometimes does not. With long-time patients I ask them if I made a mistake and what was it? I get good answers and I learn.”

***** There are two or more books with this title. I’ve read Shengold’s -- https://books.google.com/books/about/Soul_Murder.html?id=pBRBAQAAIAAJ.