Jesse Bering
Image:
-
The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
Read More »
One late summer day in 1970 in Brighton, Massachusetts, Katherine Ann Power, an articulate, starry-eyed sociology major from nearby Brandeis University and also a fervent Vietnam War protester, sat behind the wheel of an idling getaway car as her heavily armed partners in crime liberated a bank of its “warmongering” funds. (To properly overthrow the federal government, the group oddly believed, one must first pilfer then cleanse its dirty loot by reinvesting in antiwar causes.) Unbeknownst to Power, one of her peace-loving compatriots shot a police officer in the back as they fled, which was the making of a widow and nine fatherless children. Reportedly shocked by this botched robbery, Power assumed the identity of an infant who’d died a year before she was born and reinvented herself as “Alice Louise Metzinger.” She went underground in the small northwest Oregon town of Lebanon where, reminiscent of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, she dedicated herself to a life of contrition. Power became a doting mother to a young son and a loving wife to the local meat cutter; she bought into a popular restaurant, became an active volunteer, taught a class at the community college and even gave her car away to a neighbor.
Yet this former high school valedictorian, Catholic Girl Scout and one-time winner of the Betty Crocker Cooking award was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list for fourteen of her twenty-three years on the lam. Hounded relentlessly by feelings of shame, guilt and paranoia, Power often tried tempting a vengeful fate. In her earlier years on the run, she even returned to her natural hair color so that she’d more closely resemble her own image in the “Wanted” posters hanging in her favorite bar. But nobody ever recognized her; the few people she confided her dark secret in were understanding and loyal, and there was only continued good kismet in her new life. By 1984, the few leads that once trickled in had all dried up and the FBI removed her from their “Most Wanted” list. For Power, it began to feel as though her punishment was the excruciating sense of undeserved normalcy and “happiness” she’d achieved. It was so insufferable, in fact, that in 1993, honoring, as she called it, her “contract with God,” she turned herself in to puzzled Boston authorities and served six years of an eight-year sentence.
For Janet Landman, a psychologist at Babson College, Power’s dramatic tale is the prototypical case study of regret and redemption. In an edited volume called Turns in the Road: Narrative Studies of Lives in Transition, a quickly forgotten book published eight years ago by the American Psychological Association, Landman describes some of her discussions with Power while the latter was incarcerated in prison for the infamous and disturbing crime that shattered the lives of so many people, including her own. “Narrative psychologists” such as Landman believe that such dramatic life stories allow us to glimpse universal aspects of human psychology not easily captured by experimental methods.
Not all of us have such literal skeletons hanging in our closets. But, like Power, many people have regrettably done things in the past that can’t be undone, surprising themselves with their own sins. Many of us also can’t help but mentally replay events that continually nip at our emotional heels, and have experienced life-changing episodes that—at least in our heads—represent a sort of sharp psychological dividing line between everything that was before and everything that came after. According to some social psychologists, the sort of subjective “spin” that we put on these nightmarish events, and particularly how we see them as having shaped our current and future selves, reveals much about our personality and can even be used to predict our tendencies to help others.
For one of Landman’s colleagues, Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams, investigating the way in which people cobble together their own life stories is just as fundamental to scientists’ understanding of personality as are the more conventionally studied dispositional traits (which are those textbook global, stable, comparative dimensions of personality such as “extraversion” or “conscientiousness”). For example, “some people construct life stories that are modelled on classical tragedy,” says McAdams, “whereas others convey their identities as television sitcoms.”
See what we're tweeting about
6 Comments
Add CommentInteresting story but the phrase is "on the lam", not "on the lamb". http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/on+the+lam
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think this is way too simplistic. What about transformative events that are neither bad nor good, but mark a change in your perception all the same? I myself have had several of those, none of which were constructed around physical events, but which have had far-reaching and profound impacts on the way in which I interact with the world. I see no evidence of such a scenario in the writing here.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI suspect these results are colored by our culteral inclination to experience or witness dramatic changes in character alignment (ie, a selfish criminal becomes a patron saint, or a beloved pastor devolves into a vicious fiend). We as a society seem to have little regard for events that, while influential, do not completely rearrange our lifestyle. I think if one agrees they will see how this can be a problem when approaching research of this kind.
Fascinating. I agree with galaxy_man to some extent, it would be great to hear more about how cultural expectations influence the way we construct identities, especially the more subtle aspects than just positive or negative interpretations. I feel like much of my identity, values and world-view came from TV shows and literature I saw as a kid, but I've seen hardly any research on this beyond semi-mystical Jungian interpretations.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJesse, your writing gets better and better. Can't wait to read your book!
Life stories in a fatalistic culture will all have destiny as a theme, where in others, the same sequence of events might be seen as happy or perhaps unhappy accidents. I would imagine "generativity" would be a bit less predictable in the fatalistic culture, although I may have that backwards. In any case, these differences need to be looked at as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust a couple of thoughts:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1/ I have been wondering what EvoPsy would say about Eric Berne's life-script concept. And the following occurred to me: In a hunter-gatherer society would it not make sense that children would be programmable into playing specific roles as adults in the tribe's ecology , if I can say so? Destiny would be some kind of social position/path the child unconsciously learns he has been assigned (from social cues from parents and peers: Berne's injunctions and drivers ). If so, perhaps people who view life-altering experiences as contaminative episodes just feel that these episodes fit into what they deeply believe is a negative life-script; likewise, perhaps people who get to bounce back stronger and more generous actually just take the opportunity to actualize a positive life-script.
2/ From my experience guilt is very context-dependent (like hypochondry). I mean, I am amazed at my ability to forget some things I am not particularly proud of when I am happy and to let them torment me when I am not... In fact guilt and depression often go hand in hand. I came to explain it to myself the following way. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were neurologically driven to confess "sins" when they were about to get cornered; the cue here would have been being socially "stuck". So when we feel solitary, I think we feel the same ancient urge to confess to the community. Our brain picks up a reason why we may not deserve happiness and torments us into surrendering...
Do you agree?
Best regards,
Jean-Baptiste
I am a therapist and researcher and you could say that all the work that I do has some element of helping people to tell their life stories - to themselves and others - in more helpful ways. I would add that, if you have learned to tell a story unhelpfully, you can also learn to tell it a different way, from a different perspective, perhaps even from another character's point of view, and this may help you to gain new insights into your life and your self.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe that this kind of self-storying is fundamental to the way that we experience our lives. For example, cognitive linguists such as Mark Turner write about the way that our brains appear to shape our experience in story, parable and metaphor (see his book 'The Literary Mind').
In my own work with clients I find that, when people get stuck in unhelpful stories, they suffer distress and sadness, or their lives may be limited in some way. It's good to see this being investigated here.
My own research looks at the process of writing and what happens when people are encouraged to write their stories down, to remake them on the page, often gaining a helpful kind of distance from them or discovering some new meaning. This can be a very useful way of re-storying or remaking our sense of our lives.