Evil Deeds

What are the emotional, existential and spiritual consequences of catastrophic phenomena such as cyclones, floods, famines, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and other so-called acts of God?

Sigmund Freud's "psychoanalysis" is the seminal fount from which all modern psychotherapy more or less springs. Tomorrow, May 6, is his birthday.

At the time of her infamous crime, Andrea Yates was a devout Christian, devoted wife, and dedicated mother of five biblically named children--Mary, Luke, Paul, John and Noah-- ages 6 months to 7 years old. She had given up her career as a nurse, deciding, with her husband's support, to be a full-time mother and to home-school her children. All seemed to be going fine at first. But after the birth of her first child began her gradual descent into hell.

Last Saturday, an eighteen-year-old senior at Chesterfield High School in South Carolina was arrested with ten pounds of explosives and a venom-filled journal containing plans to bomb his school and kill himself. Ryan Schallenberger is described as a quiet but " angry young man," who writes admiringly of the two students that carried out the Columbine massacre. Perhaps not coincidentally, yesterday, April 20, was the ninth anniversary of the mass shootings at Columbine High School.

How psychopharmacology and its implicit psychology is understood and employed in psychotherapy is key: Is medication used merely to deaden metaphorical demons? Or to support confronting and coming to terms with them?

Last week marked the twelfth anniversary of the arrest of Theodore "Ted" Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. Kaczynski, as some may recall, was a mad bomber who killed three individuals and wounded twenty-three over a period of almost twenty years in a one-man terrorist attack against society. When I say Kaczynski was "mad," I mean that he was both angry and severely mentally ill. He was, evidently, also a boy genius.

Last Saturday night, forty-one-year-old Mark Castillo drowned his three children, ages 2, 4 and 6, in the bathtub of a Baltimore hotel room.