Abstract
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” So wrote Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms, a line quoted by President Bill Clinton, who was deeply affected by the Columbine tragedy.
With the generous new funding by President Barak Obama of preventive medicine through the Affordable Care Act, there seems to be a revival, of a limited sort surely, of the community psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s; there is at least the hope that the phoenix will rise from the ashes and yield a more fruitful outcome this time. The truth is that, with rare exceptions, our community mental health centers are doing poorly and that those that do well are lucky enough to have a good grant writer. That said, what is of continuing interest to psychoanalysts is whether there is a useful role for the psychoanalyst in community psychiatry, as there was at its inception. Since that time, the nation has experienced the effects of international terrorism, as well as massive public tragedies such as the Columbine school shootings in 1999. In that incident, two boys, in a matter of twenty minutes, killed twelve students and a teacher. At the height of the turnout, 750 police officers were present, and yet it took several hours for them and a SWAT team to settle things down, by which time the two boys had turned their guns on themselves. At least one student had suffered extremely serious injuries, due in part to a delay in his rescue as he hung out of a window shot in the brain. He later recovered many skills by virtue of his extraordinary resilience and intellectual capacities and a near-miraculous set of medical convergences. The extraordinary fact is that the perpetrators knew almost nothing about bombs, had little experience with the weapons they used, and were walking around bored amid the very havoc they wreaked. More than a year ago I was asked to write a review of a book published to mark the tenth anniversary of the Columbine shootings—that is, if I found the book psychoanalytically interesting. That book is David Cullen’s Columbine, from the interesting new imprint Twelve Hatchet Books, dedicated to publishing benchmark works in fields of social significance—this being one of the first. Two other books, one by Peter Langmam, Why Kids Kill, which I had read at the author’s request, the other Jeff Kass’s Columbine: A True Crime Story, are also the subjects of this review essay. None of the three books are particularly psychoanalytic in emphasis. Langman is a clinical psychologist with a great deal of experience, much of it in the public eye, around children in crisis. He does apply psychiatric and psychoanalytic ideas in approaching the vast e-mail collection of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two boys who killed in Columbine, and he covers a number of other school shootings in the U.S. The other two authors are solid investigative journalists who like to get to the bottom of things but who, for a reader like me, tend to overwhelm their audience with facts. Cullen’s book in particular is an exhausting attempt to unearth the last of what is knowable about the tragedy.
Again, I want to be perfectly frank: none of the three books are psychoanalytic in any direct sense. Of course, the main interest now with regard to tragedies like this is how to prepare for them, as I believe, as do many others, that inevitably they will occur from time to time. Finding what was wrong with the perpetrators of these tragedies and with the social context in which the shootings occurred might suggest ways to prepare ourselves.
The problem that remains for writers in this field, as well as for psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, is that the Columbine perpetrators are dead and that their writings and the testimony of those who knew them are a far from perfect way of assessing them. For psychiatrists, in fact, it is considered unethical to make any sort of diagnostic comments about people who are not personally examined. So where does this leave us? More is known about the victims of this tragedy than about their killers, and Cullen’s book in particular fleshes this out in considerable detail. Both of the perpetrators’ families were highly defensive in the tragedy’s aftermath and understandably remain so to this day. They are described in general as certainly not brutal and indeed caring parents, even if some of their parenting methods might be questioned. They were certainly not the typical parents of mass murderers, nor were they sexual or physical abusers as far as we know. If anything, they seemed scared of doing the wrong thing or, as with Harris’s parents, were stuck on the idea that behavior contracts and predictable discipline are the single most important parenting technique.
In his book, Cullen expresses an interest in religious movements and emphasizes a cult-like social movement promoted by an evangelical minister who fabricated a total lie about one of the girls who died at Columbine; his book became a best-seller, and the girl became literally a candidate for sainthood! She was supposed to have affirmed a deep belief in God while facing her killer’s gun. It turned out that her profession of faith was in fact the dying words of a girl already fatally shot.
The extraordinary media blitz about this whole tragedy is also worth reading about in Cullen’s book. It is extraordinary the extent to which people in high places, dazed and inflated by intense media attention, appear to have stated absolute contradictions about what went on during the tragedy and what had been learned about the perpetrators. (Later in the book, Cullen dissects in painful fashion how these misstatements led eventually to the destruction of several law enforcement careers.) This kind of attention seems to appeal to the deepest and most primitive omnipotence and need for exhibitionism present in many of us. Some people loathe publicity, while others thrive on it and appear to be “fed” by media frenzy. As for the effects of this media coverage on those who watch it, work I have done (Twemlow and Bennett 2008) suggests that vulnerability to media violence changes constantly and is entirely dynamic. An individual might at one moment be damaged by it and at another, if the mix of factors changes, remain unscathed. There is no predictability.
Cullen’s and Kass’s books have some points of major disagreement. Cullen discounts the idea that Harris and Klebold were outcasts or were bullied. He describes them as having had an extremely active and involved social life and, if anything, as having themselves been bullies, rather than being at the bottom of the social ladder. Kass describes the boys very differently, as being on the lowest rung of that ladder; many of their personal writings commented on feeling left out, alienated, and alone. Kass believes that Harris and Klebold were blinded by their mental illness to the friends they actually had.
I have read some of the writings of Harris and Klebold and agree with Kass that their sense of alienation, aloneness, and being left out is pervasive. What seems to be clear is that these boys led double lives. Harris had a life in which he was enraged, hypervigilant, narcissistically focused, and grandiose; one could almost say he was a “narcissopath,” a terrifying combination of narcissism and a callous failure to feel. And yet his writings were not atypical of the extremist, blustering writings of a teenage boy riding a wave of testosterone, a boy from a family for whom he had little respect because they were so easily fooled by what he said. As the victims (Harris’s parents missing his double life) surrender, the victimizer’s grandiosity grows (Twemlow 2005). Cullen is able to show that for several years before the Columbine massacre, Harris and Klebold planned and executed a number of criminal activities that involved heavy drinking and included collecting firearms and making bombs (though without expert information). Harris seemed especially enamored of the video game Doom Two and its handbook “Hell on Earth” as his source of “expertise,” once again suggesting that their whole plan was a teenage fantasy. He clearly had little if any knowledge of how to make bombs and certainly not how to detonate them. Thus, the boys’ massive collection of diaries, other writings, and videotapes may be seen from a psychodynamic perspective as teenage fantasies, of a kind I have seen many times in other adolescent boys.
The other side of this story is the case of Klebold, a very different sort of personality. Cullen and Langman agree that Klebold tended to be depressed, nihilistic, self-centered, and rather lazy, but, in contrast with Harris, immensely full of feelings. He wrote little of killing people until the final days before the massacre, but a great deal about his existential angst. He could be said to be, according to Kazdin’s classification (2003, p. 255), an internalizer, directing his anger toward himself in the form of suicidal thoughts, which were very common in his diaries, as they were not in those of Harris, an externalizer. Thus, the two enraged boys, one inwardly and the other outwardly focused, formed a perfect folie à deux, expressing immense unworked-through rage. Each fed the other’s wishes and needs: Life is not worth living for us (rage inward) and all fuckheads need to be eliminated (rage out). Harris was the active one, more intelligent and more motivated to kill than Klebold. He’s also the one who made the money, bought the weapons, and did almost all the work until the last day or so. Klebold spent much of his time in an existential agony, failing at school while Harris excelled. Klebold’s grades steadily declined and he ended up with F’s, despite his A-grade potential. He followed the pattern of a depressed child preoccupied with internally directed rage. This is quite explicit in his writings and is detailed in Cullen’s account. Harris, by contrast, wrote spine-chilling diatribes that at times reach almost humorous proportions; the extraordinary list of people he hated seems to leave out nobody on the planet. Couched in the language of teenage boys, liberally sprinkled with the f-word, these writings are primitive in literary structure and marked by the deafening affective intensity of Harris’s homicidal rage and by Klebold’s maudlin and stereotypical maunderings about life and meaning. As a psychiatrist, what is clear to me is that none of this would have attracted much attention except from someone interested in the inner life of adolescents had not these killings occurred. Why they did is to me the central question.
How and Why did Thought Get Translated into Action?
My emerging opinion as I read Cullen’s book is that what we saw at Columbine was cult formation. In remarks on cults using Jonestown as an example, a collaborator and I (Twemlow and Hough 2007) have suggested that collusion between leader and victim creates a psychotic mindset, shutting out reality, creating a Shangi-la elsewhere, and imbuing the leader with omnipotent projections that control him. At Columbine, Harris and Klebold were dyad-leaders who dragged along a susceptible school.
I once had the extremely unpleasant experience of listening to a tape of the final “White Night sermon” given by Jim Jones the night before the mass suicide at Jonestown in 1976. I was also startled to hear that right after the mass suicide, Jones sat there, head in hands, desperately saying, “Mother, Mother, what did I do?” Neither Klebold nor Harris had a mother he felt comfortable calling on, and while the body count at Columbine was tiny in comparison with Jonestown, it seems the two tragedies were in most other respects little different.
I suspect that Jones had a brief moment of clarity about his actions. We do not know that about Harris and Klebold. I have, however, had the opportunity to treat a number of adolescents whose plans for similar rampages have been nipped in the bud as a result of solid tips by the Secret Service and the FBI. Strikingly, the transference with these patients is initially lackluster—polite but hopeless. It is as if they expect nothing from human relationships, which to them seem uniformly empty. As the relationship develops in the transference, however, it falls into the usual pattern of therapy. The initial theme seems to be that human relationships are of no value to them and cannot effect change in their lives; it is as if they have never had such experiences (Twemlow, Fonagy, and Sacco 2002, 2004; Twemlow 2008). These patients are reminiscent of the cult follower who in deprogramming is unresponsive and deaf to help, except after extensive specialized psychotherapy. I am suggesting that for Harris and Klebold the cult dynamic added the intensity that precipitated thought into action.
I have suggested several stages of cult formation, depending on a group finding a leader who can give them a sense of omnipotence. Here the leader was clearly Harris, who with a small cadre of followers created a cult-like clique in this “cult-ready” school.
In stage 1 the leader embodies the group fantasy, and followers both admire and denigrate him. At Columbine a cult-like atmosphere pervaded the school. Among staff and students there was an extraordinarily intense commitment to being exceptional and different. The school was academically superior, with an outstanding record in athletics, and was at one time called the “jewel of Colorado.”
In stage 2 group and leader become “pseudospeciated” (Erikson 1969, pp. 419–420). That is, the group/dyad is created to defend itself against a dangerous, unjust, and rejecting world. The group leader’s omnipotent mindset generates extreme ideas and identifies people to be ridiculed. At Columbine this phase included several students who variously defended themselves against involvement later on. In addition, a star-spangled coach at the school was having personal problems, and the competition between jocks/preppies and academics was in full bloom.
Stage 3 is a resting phase in which the idea develops that the cult will bring to the world a necessary purification. Harris’s ideal was a world clear of fuckheads.
In stage 4 the world outside becomes even more dangerous, and the cult’s extremism and paranoia increase. Harris became even more deceptive in his apparent good behavior, and was supported by remarkable accolades from his legal diversion supervisor, who felt he had done very well and would continue to do so. Cullen writes that “the boys rejected the preppy model but so did hundreds of other children at the school. . . . they ridiculed the vanilla wafers . . . and had no desire to emulate the jocks. Could there be a faster route to boredom?” (p. 147). Regardless, the preppies had the upper hand with school staff.
In stage 5 a psychotic fantasy of group death ensues. The leader becomes a revolutionary martyr too misunderstood and mistreated in the world to live within it. Suicide ensues for all, as it often does in larger group cults.
The Harris and Klebold group (and possibly hundreds of other haters of preppies and jocks) travel the trajectory leading from an initial fantasy relationship of masochistic submission and omnipotence between the dyad-leaders and their hangers-on, and ultimately to the enactment of these fantasy relationships in group death and the dream of going on to a world free of fuckheads; after stage 3, the situation is unsalvageable.
A Note on Prevention
These tragedies can best be avoided not by simple preventive surveillance, but by a change in how school dynamics are managed. A more civilized balance must be established between reason, passions, and conscience. Surveillance should concern itself not just with bully vs. victim, since that dialectic can in fact be the symptomatic endpoint of an underlying cult. Perhaps the psychoanalytic byword would be to learn to accept and even care for the split-off, unsavory parts of ourselves that Harris and Klebold so desperately needed to hide and yet display. The key to prevention from this perspective is effective leadership in the school, which would mean acknowledging and accepting differences rather than merely managing symptoms: the oddballs of the defective social system, or the assumption that all kids are preppies and jocks and love sports and other self-displays.
A secure school down-regulates fear, with staff prepared to diagnose splits between the jocks/preppies and all others before it reaches stage 3 of our cult classification. This requires principals in particular to be aware of unconscious dynamics and group process and to use this knowledge to create an open democratic process in which students and teachers regularly communicate their needs and parents are involved on a day-to-day basis. An example is the grassroots center of the “+works” program in the Houston school system (
A Note on “Diagnosis”
The emptiness of modern descriptive diagnosis based on syndrome classification—signs and symptoms observed by experts and given diagnostic labels—bespeaks a peculiar confusion. Langman is quoted by Cullen as saying that Klebold was psychotic, whereas what he actually wrote was that Klebold was schizotypal, a personality diagnosis. At no time was the boy thought-disordered, though his writings were disturbed and became more so as he became increasingly depressed. The ease with which people slip into using categories like schizophrenic spectrum disorder, which Langman mentions as a possibility for Klebold, or psychopathy, which Cullen regards Harris as having manifested (rather than a milder antisocial personality disorder), illustrates the near-worthlessnes of such categories. They have little predictive value and almost no capacity to guide the clinician in choosing treatments, primarily because they are not etiologically based. For the psychoanalyst, as the patient becomes better known the diagnosis tends to greatly diminish in clinical importance. Kass points out that in more detailed recent works on psychopathy, the majority of psychopaths are shown to be nonviolent and do not kill anyone, let alone go on a terrorist rampage like that at Columbine. Instead of psychopathy, I have suggested cult dynamics as the intensifier precipitating such incidents.
Kass’s approach views Harris and Klebold’s actions as in the main socially determined, whether or not jocks in fact bullied them. Kass and Cullen agree that there were plenty of bullying and plenty of jocks at Columbine, but also argue, citing the support of a commission of inquiry into bullying at Columbine, that although bullying was present it did not seem to unduly influence the two boys. The issue can be argued back and forth, but what seems clear is that the boys were alienated from the jock/preppie social group, due very likely to psychiatric problems, but due also to the social environment. Cult group dynamics fueled a social nightmare in the school that antedated the massacre. I once treated a child of divorced parents who left Columbine to live with his father in another state because he couldn’t stand the atmosphere of bullying at the school. The massacre occurred about six months after this boy’s transfer. Bullying of a catastrophic degree is common in affluent high schools and often involves the social significance accorded academic and athletic performance, a concern with excellence that overshadows the quality of life of both students and staff. Certainly Cullen’s description of the lead-up to the massacre suggests that the principal and the teaching staff went way beyond the call of duty, evincing what at times seems pathological devotion to the lives of their students, especially the athletes. Columbine, well known for its excellent attendance and college placement rates, is probably little different from many other schools where a bullying/cult dynamic exists. This is of great interest to psychoanalysts since it calls for something they are most qualified to do: manage complex group dynamics in a fashion that could make schools like Columbine peaceful learning environments where children can learn unfettered by the primitive dynamics of rage, envy, and triumph. Adolescent journals of existential agony might then become part of normal identity formation rather than indications of murderous intent.