When he was 17*

It’s said (and probably written) that psychopaths can sometimes “burn out” – stop committing crimes, serial killing, as they age. But they don’t grow a heart in their middle or golden years, any deep wellspring of compassion or love of life. I’ve heard the same of virulent Borderlines. Maybe in their sixties, they stop ripping their hair out if their lunch date is twenty minutes late; stop slashing their arms if their therapist cancels a session; stop locking themselves in the bathroom with suicidal drama because they hate you this minute. But they do not retrofit a core of emotional stability and solid sense of self. Ash just drifts over the embers, which continue to burn. It is almost impossible to not be the person you were at 17. Your character – meaning for the most part your genetics and your holistic armor of defenses and your painful feelings that will grow flowcharts and smorgasbords of congruent ideas and belief systems – is established. This is because it got you through your childhood which, I am sorry to say, was often hell, as Bettelheim specified** (and I generalize). Your character became your survival self. Not only is it intransigent. Who would want to reverse it and become a regressed, shell-less egg, become “not-me”?

There are two serious ways to be different from that forged-in-fire self. One is to capitalize on some ingrained decent, pro-life sense or feeling – a kernel or potential from birth, let’s say – and brute-force that better self against the universe-sized undertow of the past. One can manufacture a better person. But there will now be a deeper, subversive depression, and there will be sickness, physical illness. There will be completely unpredictable urges to veer off-track, to self-medication or to annihilation. You cannot think or force away your pain and its savior character.

The other way to be different is to heal some essence, which can only mean to regress to the earliest, formative poisons, be them again, and this time let them out. A high school senior and college student who loves to drink a hundred kegs; who has such a burnt and angry part of his heart that he sees young women as pulverizable meat; who apparently sees the law as an arbitrary code he can arbitrarily manipulate; and who lies now in primitive and unbelievable ways – has pain deeper than he knows, and a defense character he does not want to change.

Brett Kavanaugh has failed the serious ways of growth. He has no business wearing the robe.

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* https://www.brownanddana.com/listen. “It Was a Very Good Year,” Brown and Dana, 1963.

** Bruno Bettelheim: “I speak here of the child’s private world . . . Each of us is implying in his way that one cannot help another in his ascent from hell unless one has first joined him there. . . .” The Empty Fortress, 1967, p. 10.