Disordered Minds

Civilization's Thin Veneer

The practice of violence changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.

Hannah Arendt

For anyone interested in psychology, a visit to the Freud Museum in Vienna is a chance to walk in the footsteps of one of the greatest explorers of the human mind. For students of history it is a reminder of some of Europe's darkest days. Sigmund Freud, a non-practising Jew, was allowed to leave Vienna in 1938 by the Nazi authorities after intense lobbying by friends in England. Four of Freud's sisters were not so fortunate. They died in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Theresienstadt. Mercifully Freud never learned their fate. He died at the age of 83, just days before Hitler's invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War Two in Europe.

W.H. Auden, in his poem In Memory of Sigmund Freud, commended Freud for inventing psychoanalysis as a means of exploring the hidden regions of the human psyche. In the poem Auden compares Freud implicitly with Jesus for relieving the suffering of the afflicted by walking among the destitute and the lowly.

Freud would have been amused by Auden's implicit comparison. In Civilisation and Its Discontents, Freud took issue with Jesus for the naivety of his commandment, 'Love thy neighbour as thyself.' In light of the events unfolding around the world in 1938, particularly the brutal anti-Semitism he was observing daily in Vienna, Freud saw such a commandment as flying directly in the face of human reality. 'Not merely is this stranger in general unworthy of my love;' Freud wrote, 'I must honestly confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred ... [I]f he can satisfy any sort of desire by it, he thinks nothing of jeering at me, insulting me, slandering me, and showing his superior power; and the more secure he feels and the more helpless I am, the more certainly I can expect him to behave like this to me.'

Later in the same essay Freud concludes, 'The time comes when each one of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.'

Decades after Freud's death, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, like Freud a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker magazine. Her articles created a storm of protest. Eichmann, a former SS Corporal in Dachau, was the man responsible for designing the system of transport that was used to carry millions to their deaths in the concentration camps. In describing Eichmann, she used the phrase 'banality of evil'. It is important to understand what she meant. 'When I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial ...' she wrote. 'Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing ...' For Eichmann it seems, sending millions of men, women, and children to their agonising deaths in the gas chambers had the same emotional impact as casting wood on a fire.

Arendt's coverage of Eichmann's trial suggests that the most horrendous acts of evil can be perpetrated by the most normal-seeming people. Her phrase 'the banality of evil' implies that we all have the potential to become monsters. This is a view with which Freud would have agreed. In Civilisation and Its Discontents he wrote, ' ... the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man ...' It is also a common view among contemporary psychologists. Philip Zimbardo, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, for example, has written, 'Those people who become perpetrators of evil deeds and those who become perpetrators of heroic deeds are basically alike, in being just ordinary, average people.'

Modern psychology, however, challenges the idea that we are all equally capable of violence and greed. While history clearly shows that ordinary people can, and do, participate in acts of atrocity, modern psychiatry is revealing that a small but significant minority have an innate and seemingly unalterable ability to treat others with brutality and disdain, of a different order to that of the majority. The presence of this minority distorts our societies and shifts the predominant values of humanity away from non-violence, compromise, and compassion, toward brutality, confrontation, and greed. In much the same way that adding a small amount of carbon to iron produces a much harder material, steel, so the presence of the small proportion of people who suffer from dangerous personality disorders fundamentally alters the timbre of humanity, at immense cost to us all.

How Early Relationships Shape Whom We Become

Since Freud's time, three core ideas have become central to psychoanalytic thought.

The first is that, as infants, we develop best in an environment of love and fun.

The second is that our internal worlds are formed in early childhood and have an enduring influence on our relationships throughout our lives.

And the third idea is that much of the suffering in the world can be traced to neglect and abuse in childhood.

Psychoanalysts since Freud have passionately believed that these ideas have the power to change our lives and reshape our world. Now neuroscience and biochemistry are showing that, on these key ideas at least, Freud was right.

Over the last few decades, neuroscientists have shown conclusively that the development of a baby's brain depends critically on the quality of the physical and emotional care it receives. As psychotherapist and author Sue Gerhardt explains, babies come into the world with a need for social interaction to develop and organize their brains. If they do not get enough empathic, attuned attention, then important parts of their brains simply do not develop as well as they should.

And the consequences of poor brain development in infancy can be severe. They can include a reduced capacity for empathy and love, difficulties in interpersonal relationships, and, in some cases, the development of dangerous personality disorders that are marked by a higher propensity for violence and greed.

So how do early relationships shape our brains? One region that plays a key role in emotional life is the orbitofrontal cortex, which is situated at the front of the brain just above our eye sockets. Our capacity to empathize and to engage in emotional communication with other people requires a developed orbitofrontal cortex. People with damage in this region cannot relate sensitively toward others. Scientists now know that the orbitofrontal cortex develops almost entirely after birth. What is more, it does not develop solely according to a predetermined genetic blueprint. Instead the way in which it develops, and the neural connections which are made within it, and...