Fatal Vision (71 page)

"Now, the point about this story is there's nothing strikingly

aberrant about it. He doesn't say that the boy is going to take the violin and set it on fire or anything like that. It's not wildly abnormal, but it does reveal certain things about his personality adjustment.

"He clearly attempts to present himself as a strong, competent man, but his underlying dependency needs require him to gain the approval of those in authority over him, an approval that he gains by conformity.

"So, on the one hand you've got a guy who wants to be strong, competent, and independent, but on the other he wants everybody to approve of what he does. Basically, he is this passive guy with doubts about his adequacy. But he wants to be seen as strong and competent. He is really worried about what people are going to think.

"In other words, despite his assertions of well-being and independence, these mutually contradictory needs of being independent and autonomous on one hand and gaining approval on the other can't lead him to any real independence. As long as he is caught in that bind he's never really going to become a completely mature individual.

"Now there are probably a lot of people in the world that, by this definition, are not completely mature individuals. So I don't mean to say that this constitutes some markedly abnormal feature. But the crux—the irony—of his situation is that to the extent that he gains this approval from authority that he needs by conforming, to the same extent he loses his sense of adequacy and strong masculine identity.

"In other words, if you've got any insight, you know that every time you submit and go along with what authorities are saying, you're losing that much of your own independence and integrity.

"How do you handle that? Well, he handles it by not having insight. Other people might handle it differently. Some people might develop tics or stomach pains: the key thing about Captain MacDonald is that he handles his conflicts by denying that they exist. He puts a little part of himself over here and a little part of himself over there and he never puts it all together. And as long as he doesn't put it together, it doesn't upset him.

"So, you or I might look at Captain MacDonald in a brief conversation and think, how can he hide from his feelings like that? Well, I'll tell you how. If he didn't hide from his feelings like that, he would be every day confronted with the fact that on one hand he's saying he's a strong, successful male and on the other hand he is bowing down to authority and giving in to people, and he wouldn't be able to handle it.

"As a result, he handles it by completely hiding from his feelings. He is a guy who is simply not in touch with his feelings. It's a crucial part of his personality adjustment that he does not understand what's going on in him: he has no insight.

"In his interview with me, he said, 'You know, what bugs me about all this, people keep phoning and wanting to give me sympathy about what's happened, like they want me to cry on their shoulder. I'm not going to cry on anybody's shoulder.'

"Now, if you are going to be charged with a crime, you probably shouldn't have this kind of adjustment because it doesn't look good when people come around and you don't look upset. But there is no way in the world that a person with Captain MacDonald's personality adjustment is going to look upset in the presence of people. Because that would indicate that he has some feelings, it would indicate that he can understand what is going on inside himself, and that would open up all sorts of problems for a person with his adjustment.

"Now, another thing is, I think, really, as you begin to spend time with Captain MacDonald, you begin to see that he's got a nostalgic longing for his early childhood. All of this that we're talking about, of course, is pretty much pushed under consciousness, but when you hear him talk about his boyhood, he clearly seems to regret the loss of his early, dependent, conforming role.

"Then, he knew how to win approval and respect. He was a bright, good student. He was athletic. He knew how to do all kinds of things that would win approval and attention. You know, the glowing schoolboy. Perfect. That was it for him.

"Well, what do you do when you're this bright, accepting schoolboy? You conform. You do all the right things to win the adulation of your parents and teachers. But what do you do when you grow up? How does a person with this image of himself as a young, successful, bright, student athlete handle becoming an adult?

"Let's look at another picture. It's a picture of a man climbing a rope. He says, 'A gymnast showing off, climbing the rope in gym to the delight of others. Jesus! How do you make a story out of this? He feels silly that he has to show off to amuse his friends.'

"You see, if you're a good, young, bright, athletic kid, you don't feel silly. But when you get to be an adult, other feelings start to creep in.

"He says, 'He'd rather have th
e attention in another way, but
he is the center of the party and continues to do it to keep his large number of friends nearby laughing. Afterwards, he always feels foolish, but the next time the occasion arises he does the same thing again. He will continue to entertain people, each time feeling it really isn't him doing it. He'd rather sit down and talk to a friend than perform, but he will continue because of his fear of losing friends.'

"So he's stuck. The only way Captain MacDonald can handle it is not to consciously recognize this conformity and need for approval as a subjection of himself. And as long as he can do that, he can continue to view himself—particularly in regard to his professional competence as a doctor, as an incipient surgeon, and the esteem and approval that he gains by that, as an indication of his adequacy as a man."

"How would that affect his family situation so far as his wife and two children are concerned?" Victor Woerheide asked.

"He would be a guy who would lose himself in his work. His contact with any potentially intimate human relationships— particularly his wife and children—would be marked with reserve and handicapped by his conflicts about independence and dependence.

"This is a guy, for example, who would be appalled at the thought of woman's lib, because the authority—if so many people start questioning his authority, that's going to be a problem for him. That isn't unusual. There are a lot of people like that. But this is the way he is, too.

"He would probably be able to be most intimate with people where the lines of authority and structure are most clear. And of course that's only true in a marriage if your wife willingly subjugates herself to you.

"He was able to express what warmth he was able to express much more easily with his children than he was with his wife. And occasionally in the tests a sort of nostalgic quality would come out in regard to his children, as at one point he saw in the Rorschach—on Card Five—he saw the upper details as the head of a bunny rabbit.

" 'I see a bunny rabbit,' he said. 'We gave one to Kimmy about a month before this occurred.'

"The whole idea of the bunny rabbit: this is sort of the softest, pleasantest type of response he gives on the tests. And even then he didn't make it as soft and pleasant as he could because he emphasized, 'It looks like the bunny rabbit because of the form, the ears coming up, the feet coming down.'

"He might have said, for example, it looked like a bunny rabbit because it looked soft and furry, which would be sort of a warmer, more affectionate type of response, but he didn't do that.

"So even at that level he can't let his defenses down that much. He instead sort of emphasized the hard line, the edge, the form that creates the perception of the bunny rabbit.

"You see, on the Rorschach, we show people a series of these inkblots and the person tries to say what they are. And one of the ways we score the test is to go back over it once we've gone through all the cards and say, 'What about the blot made you see it that way?'

"People see different things for different reasons. Some will say, 'Well, it was just shaped like that,' or, 'Well, it has sort of a soft, textury quality that makes it look like that,' or, 'Well, it seemed like they were moving,' or, 'Well, the color made it look like that.'

"When you pull all these things together and add up the totals, one of the things we look at in scoring the Rorschach is the extent to which a person tends to use one or another determinant: color, texture, movement, shape, form, all of these things.

"And there is a tendency for certain sorts of mental states to be associated with the tendency to use certain sorts of determinants.

"For example, people who are intellectualizers will tend to use human movement often as a determinant of what they see. People who are very emotion-laden often tend to be much more responsive to the colors.

"Now, Dr. MacDonald showed a much greater tendency to respond to things like movement and form than he did to color. So this is another way we might get from the tests support for the hypothesis that he really doesn't utilize his emotional responses very effectively. Another thing we score is the tendency to look at whole concepts as opposed to relatively small, detailed aspects of the blot. Captain MacDonald was much more inclined to look at small, teeny details. On some of the blots he gave about ten responses, and almost none paid any attention to the blot as a whole: instead, he went around interpreting this little piece, that piece, a little piece here, a little piece there—a much more compulsive, detailed, precise, careful approach to things instead of a more global approach.

"So he comes across as a person who is quite organized and compulsive. He tends to avoid emotion, to deny and repress his feelings. He's quite organized and quite compulsive in his approach to problems, very systematic and detailed, and that helps a lot if you're the sort of person who wants to compartmentalize everything and put one feeling here and one feeling there. He can do it in a very efficient, organized, systematic way.

As a result, things don't overwhelm him. They don't interfere with his function. He's able to function, really, quite effectively. Particularly by choosing a profession that enables him to be a strong authority figure and that helps him escape from emotional responsibilities.

"He becomes a physician. Better yet, he becomes a surgeon, because a surgeon doesn't have to interact emotionally with people. He's God. He is the authority. Nobody questions him. In fact, he doesn't even have to talk to patients because they're under anesthesia during the whole procedure.

"I suspect if you brought in and examined a whole slew of surgeons, you would find most of them having emotional adjustments very much like Captain MacDonald's.

"What I'm trying to get across is that these characteristics in his personality are neither uncommon nor maladaptive for many purposes. They just don't make him into a very affectionate, warm, loving spouse. But there are a lot of people out in the world that are not affectionate, warm, loving spouses.

"In terms of his life history, however, and in keeping with his need to conform, as well as his need to be emotionally dependent on people—even though outwardly he doesn't acknowledge this—he married quite young and he married under circumstances where it wasn't altogether clear that many people would have married.

"He married young and set up a family and went through, in a way, still carrying on with the image of the golden boy. But his marriage was not a combination of two terribly mature or adequate individuals. It was, rather, a relationship where he would have the support and approval of his wife while he failed to become involved with her in an emotionally close or mutually cooperative relationship.

"In many ways, he resented and avoided the demands and responsibilities of being a father. And he was able to use his academic and professional career as a reasonably acceptable excuse to avoid involvement.

"You know, how can a wife complain that he's not spending enough time around the house when he's getting a medical degree, working hard to support the family, and buying presents and giving things to everybody.

"So what does the wife say? Well, the wife is saying things like, you know, 'Couldn't you just be around the house a little more, give us a little more love and affection, a little more of your time?'

"It's hard to just say
no. Instead, what you say is, ‘I’
ve got to work.' You know, Tve got to do all these
things. I'm doing this for you,
So he chose a profession that took care of his time and in a sense took care of his responsibilities because it limited the extent to which he would have to emotionally and maturely communicate more effectively in the family situation.

"I hope there aren't too many doctors in the audience here. It works quite nicely, I might add.

"But in those situations—such as with the family—where there was less structure, he ran into problems. Where he couldn't clearly be either the one on the bottom or the one on the top, there he gets into difficulty.

"Wanting the approval of society, and not wanting to do anything to disrupt a situation that was, in the outside world's eyes, very successful—a doctor, married, settled, children—he was caught in a dilemma.

"He was caught up in something that on his own he was not strong and assertive and aggressive enough to find his way out of, either by achieving a closer relationship with his wife or by getting a divorce.