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New Quotations/Comments760-746760 A. The Family of the Schizophrenic The reader must be aware that all the studies of the family of schizophrenics were made after the patient became obviously sick and in most cases had grown to be an adult. The assumption is made that the study of how the family is at the time of the illness and the eliciting of past history give an adequate picture of the family environment during the time preceding the psychosis. Moreover, often the appraisal of the family was in many studies strongly influenced by the personal account of it given by the patient himself. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that one of the first vivid impressions that we get in dealing with patients and their relatives is that the family of the patient is not a happy one, or at least was not so in the formative years of the patient. The unhappiness, although aggravated at times by realistic situations such as poverty and physical illness, was as a rule determined by psychological factors, predominantly by the unhappy marriage of the parents. The marriage was unhappy not only because of the character incompatibility and personality difficulties of the parents but also because such difficulties, instead of being compensated for or countered by less destructive defenses, were enormously aggravated by the process of living together. This atmosphere of unhappiness and tension, although all-pervading and pronounced, in many cases is not apparent to the casual observer, as an attempt is made by all concerned to conceal it not only from the external world but also from themselves. At times, it is almost totally repressed and replaced by psychological insensitivity. B. Many authors have described special family constellations in schizophrenics. In the first edition of Interpretation of Schizophrenia,[4] I described one which I have encountered frequently. A domineering, nagging, and hostile mother who gives the child no chance to assert himself, is married to a dependent, weak man, too weak to help the child. The father does not dare to protect the child because of fear of losing his wife's sexual favors, or simply because he is not able to oppose her strong personality. By default more than by his direct doing he becomes as crippling to the child as the mother is. C. Even before the family of the patient was studied as a unity, the various members, and especially the parents, were studied individually, although, as already mentioned, often by relying greatly on how the patient experienced them. Some authors have followed [Frieda] Fromm-Reichmann in referring to the mother as "schizophrenogenic." They have described her as overprotective, hostile, overtly or subtly rejecting, overanxious, cold, distant. etc. Because of these characteristics, she was unable to give herself to the child and was unfit for motherhood. Rosen[76] referred to her perverse sense of motherhood. [ Schizophrenia: The Psychodynamic Mechanisms and the Psychostructural Forms (Chapter 24), by Silvano Arieti, in Volume III, American Handbook of Psychiatry - Second Edition, Revised and Expanded, Basic Books, Inc., New York, 1974, pp. 552-54. ]
The so-called "marital skew," or "marital schism," explored by Dr. Silvano Arieti and colleagues in Quotations A, B, and C above, is the breeding ground for producing not only future schizophrenics, but also for producing future homosexuals - schizophrenia and homosexuality being the opposite sides of the same "coin." When the developing homosexuality is repressed or denied, then schizophrenic symptomatology begins. The father of a schizophrenic patient once told the patient's therapist that "When I married I was only half a man, and could only marry half a woman." The sex of the schizophrenic patient in this particular case was not noted, but is inconsequential because the above equation, so simply but powerfully elucidated by the father, describes perfectly the emotional "petri dish" from which grow all the schizophrenic, as well as the homosexual, offspring of such severely bisexually conflicted and gender confused parents. All of these parents' psychic difficulties - as outlined so clearly and emphatically in the above quotations - and which have such deleterious and toxic effects upon the emotional and sexual development of their children, have their root, as we can see, in the parents' own "skewed," or "schismatic," basic sexual orientation. Instead of having just two parents, one masculine and the other feminine, the children have, in psychic reality, four parents - the masculine father and the feminine father; the feminine mother and the masculine mother. Figuring out and properly identifying with four such parents, instead of the one of each sex, proves to be such an insurmountable task for the great majority of such children exposed to such confounding parental emotional and sexual signals, that consequentially they fall prey, during the early pubertal course of their emotional and sexual development, to severe schizophrenic and/or homosexual difficulties. "When I married I was only half a man, and could only marry half a woman." Within that simple, heartfelt quotation, is contained the answer to the source of all future functional mental illness in the children of such parents - as well as that of their homosexuality - since schizophrenia is invariably the end result of their homosexuality denied and repressed.
759 He managed to avoid the death penalty though when the Supreme Court changed its ruling on capital punishment. He was re-sentenced to 50-100 years in prison but died on December 5, 1991 from a massive heart attack. His autopsy showed that he had an enlarged heart and occluded arteries, having blown up to 220 pounds at the time of his death. No one claimed his body and he was cremated. His ashes were disposed of in an undisclosed location. But unfortunately, in 1996, Speck was back. In May of that year, television journalist Bill Kurtis went behind the wall of Stateville prison and came back with a secret videotape that showed a bizarre Richard Speck with women's breasts - apparently from hormone treatments - wearing blue panties and having sex with another inmate. Segments of the video, which also showed sex and drug orgies, were shown on the program American Justice and plunged the Illinois Department of Corrections into a major scandal. The video had been shot in the middle 1980's and viewers were as repulsed to see what had become of Speck as they were by his bloody crimes. Even after death, he was still raising hell. [ Born To Raise Hell, The Life and Crimes of Richard Speck, Troy Tayor, 2003 - http://www.prairieghosts.com/speck.html ] Note: See also - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i725FCBJIxA
This is yet another of countless horrendous examples of a person running amok and slaughtering innocent persons - as the direct result of their being afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease. In this case a young man named Richard Speck, 25, on July 13, 1966, broke into a townhouse in Chicago which housed student nurses who were in training at the South Chicago Community Hospital, and cold-bloodedly proceeded to murder, either by stabbing or strangling - or both - eight of these young women, one after the other, for no apparent reason. All were total strangers to him. But of course there was a reason behind this lethal rampage, the same reason which is the core element behind all such instances of insane persons suddenly running amok and wreaking deadly havoc on unsuspecting victims. In all such cases, the killer is in the deadly grip of a classic, paranoid schizophrenic "homosexual panic", one which has unhinged his mind and caused him to erupt into a frenzied and delusional psychotic state which too often tragically culminates in horrific and lethal consequences for all those in his immediate vicinity, or for others whom his now floridly paranoid and delusional mind has chosen to target. Later in prison, Richard Speck's primary "bearded lady" characteristics finally asserted themselves (see above quotation) after a lifetime of rigid repression, and he became, in essence, the woman he had always unconsciously yearned to be - most likely ever since early adolescence due to his severely emotionally-warped childhood experiences. His tremendous envy and hatred of women, developed as a consequence of his frustrated, repressed wish to be one himself, led directly to his murderous lashing-out at the innocent young student nurses he killed. His entire life leading up to this tragic episode had consisted of ceaseless and frantic efforts to over-compensate for his unconscious, feminine, homosexual nature by obsessively behaving in exactly the opposite way - "Born To Raise Hell." Speck's childhood background of having had a father who died when he was six-years-old, thereby depriving him of a potentially admired or beloved masculine figure with whom to identify himself as a male - which lack was further exacerbated by his later having a step-father who was alleged to have been a drunkard who beat him savagely, and a mother said to have been an extremely strict and pious Baptist - all these factors combined were a toxic mix which left Speck with an emotionally-scarred childhood which seeded his unconscious desire to be a female rather than a male, undoubtedly on the "childish" assumption that he would have been more beloved and cherished had he been a member of the opposite sex. And since he was the seventh of eight children, which included several sisters, he may certainly have perceived, or felt, that his sisters were favored over him. In fact, later in prison, following the brutal slaying of the eight young nurses, he finally did achieve that previously repressed and persistently longed-for goal of becoming the "female" he had always wished to be, thereby experiencing, as one of the "queens" among the men imprisoned with him, the "perverse" love and caring he had always searched for. The great tragedy in this case, as in all similar "running amok" cases, is that its ghastly consequences could have been avoided if only the perpetrator had been recognized as a severely disturbed individual at an earlier stage of his [or her] illness, and at that critical juncture had received the necessary psychological counseling to encourage him [or her] to address the severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion which invariably lies at the root of the paranoid schizophrenic, "bearded lady" illness.
758 A. KILLEEN, Tex. - It was still dark on Thursday when Major Nidal Malik Hasan [39-years-old] left his aging apartment complex to attend 6 a.m. prayers at the brick mosque neat Fort Hood. Afterward, he said goodbye to his friends there and asked forgiveness from one man for any past offenses. During his years in Washington, Major Hasan turned increasingly toward Islam, relatives and classmates said. In part, he was seeking solace after the death of his parents, in 1998 and 2001. The tenants generally saw him leave early and come home late in the afternoon, usually in his fatigues. He never had visitors, they said, but he was friendly with his neighbors. [......] Then in late October, Major Hasan told the iman, Syed Ahmed Ali, that he was leaving Texas for Virginia to live with his family there. He said, "Pray for me," Mr. Ali said. [ After Years of Growing Tensions, 7 Minutes of Bloodshed, by James C. McKinley Jr. and James Dao, The New York Times, Monday, November 9, 2009, pp. A1 and A16. ] B. Hasan was a walking contradiction; the counselor who himself needed counseling; the proud soldier who did not want to fight, at least not against fellow Muslims; the man who could not find a sufficiently modest and pious wife through his mosque's matchmaking machinery but who frequented the local strip club. A man supposedly so afraid of deployment that he launched a war of his own from which he clearly did not expect to return alive. "Everyone is asking why this happened," said Hasan's family in a formal statement, "and the answer is we simply do not know." [......] "We've known for the last five years that [deployment to Afghanistan]
was probably his worst nightmare," cousin Nader Hasan told Fox News. "He
would tell us how he hears horrific things...That was probably affecting him
psychologically." "It was a systemic problem," the officer says. "The same thing was happening at Walter Reed." The vital question for the military and our own security is whether political correctness - or the desire to promote diversity - prevented the Army from recognizing and dealing with a problem in its midst, a problem in plain sight. According to a co-worker, Hasan would not even allow his photo to be taken with female colleagues. "People are afraid to come forward and challenge somebody's ideology," explains Hasan's classmate, "because they're afraid of getting an equal-opportunity complaint that can end careers." NPR reported that top officials at Walter Reed held meetings in the spring of 2008 in which they debated whether Hasan was "psychotic." "Put it this way," an official told NPR." "Everybody felt that if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not want Nidal Hasan in your foxhole." [......] A top Pentagon official admits there may be some truth to the charge. "We're wondering why some of these strange encounters didn't trigger something more formal," he says. "I think people were overly sensitive about Muslims in the military, and that led to a reluctance to say, 'This guy is nuts.' The Army is going to have to review their procedures to make sure someone can raise issues like this." [ Terrified... Or Terrorist?, by Nancy Gibbs, Time (magazine), November 23, 2009, pp. 28-31. ] C. More than thirty years of intensive investigation of these problems permits me to make the general statement that in man [and woman] every case of emotional neurosis or psychosis is the result of more or less conflict and confusion involving bisexual differentiation. ...Dementing schizophrenia is essentially a regression to the cloacal level of hermaphrodism. I am quite sure that it would be easy to demonstrate these factors in any case and often within an hour of investigation. [ Bisexual Factors in Curable Schizophrenia, Edward J. Kempf, M.D., (presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, May 18, 1948), Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology, Vol. 44, 1949, pp. 514-419. Note: See this article in its entirety on a separate link on this website. ] D. We must recognize that the sexual affections are still the greatest constructve forces of the personality if properly conditioned and adjusted, but also that they may become the most insidiously, irresistibly destructive if perverted or unconditionally repressed. [ Edward J. Kempf, M.D., Psychopathology, C.V. Mosby and Company, St. Louis, MO, 1920. ] E. In any case, the appearance within awareness of the homoerotic interest stirs such violent self-reproach that a dissociation or a vigorous defensive process results. If the self is able to dissociate the abhorrent system, the personality continues to be in grave danger of panic with succeeding schizophrenia, unless the sexual tensions are being drained of by some collateral procedure such as frequent masturbation or more or less auto-sexual intercourse with women [with men in the case of females/jmm]. Moreover, under cover of the dissociation, experience in any case continues to be integrated into the dissociated system and its partition in the personality to grow. [ Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., Personal Psychopathology, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1972, 1965, p. 212. ]
As in all cases of persons who run amok and murder other innocent people, this "shooter", Major Nidal Hasan, was suffering from schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, caused by his "unconditionally repressed" [Dr. Edward J. Kempf] and overwhelmingly powerful bisexual conflict and gender confusion. Becoming noticeably stranger following the deaths of his parents in 1998 and 2001, especially that of his mother - he "became very religious after their mother died," - "..isolating himself and delving into books on Islam rather than socializing," according to various news reports. This was the beginning of his observable clinical depression, though undoubtedly he had been experiencing depressive symptoms since early childhood due to the emotional "warping" effect engendered by a very powerful and unbreakable mother-son symbiotic relationship. "In the case, however, of another boy, one for example who has been seriously warped by the continued or augmented importance of a more or less primitive attachment to the mother, and who therefore is not susceptible to any marked heterosexual drives because of attachment to the mother - with rationalizations generally contributed by her in the shape, perhaps, of advice to keep away from 'bad girls,' examples of misfortune resulting from dealings with crafty females, and the like - the outcome is quite otherwise." [Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., Personal Psychopatholgy, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1972, 1965, p. 199.] Despite professing a strong desire to get married, Major Hasan had found fault with every woman concerned friends had introduced him to - in the hope that one of them might prove to be a suitable partner for him - even though at age 39 he had never been known to have a girlfriend. This fact, alone, points to an extremely blighted heterosexual drive in an otherwise healthy adult man, thereby highlighting the homosexual side of his nature which consequently would have to be exceedingly powerful and dominant. Following the death of his mother, especially, his emotional life slowly but inexorably deteriorated until he eventually reached the point of becoming a full-fledged paranoid schizophrenic - one who was primed to explode at any time due to the buildup of the intolerable tensions caused by his dammed-up bisexual urges and cravings. As the psychologically-astute Judge Daniel Paul Schreber, the subject of Professor Sigmund's Freud's famous study on paranoia, proclaimed in his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness: "I would like to meet the man who, faced with the choice of either becoming a demented human being in male habitus or a spirited woman, would not prefer the latter. Such and only such is the issue for me." Unfortunately and tragically, Major Nidal Hasan chose, albeit unconsciously, to become a "demented human being in male habitus" rather than the "spirited woman" he truly was psychosexually, and the sudden and devastating massacre of his Army colleagues at Fort Hood was undertaken by him as the direct consequence of the paranoid insanity caused by his severe "bearded lady" conflict - which conflict is invariably the basic instigating factor in every such case of a madman running amok. It had been known, or debated, by his superiors for some time that Major Hasan showed sympoms of being "psychotic", or "nuts", but tragically nothing was done to protect his colleagues from potential harm by him, either by isolating him or discharging him from the Army. Over the course of a severely psychologically-damaged lifetime, he had finally evolved into that most-feared type of paranoid schizophrenic madman - one who has been driven insane by his "bearded lady" disease and then runs amok and kills - a tragic situation which occurs almost on a weekly basis in communities throughout the United States, and elsewhere around the world. [Please also refer to New Quotation/Comment # 757, and IMPRESSIONS items, 75-72.] As many psychotics attempt to commit "suicide by cop," so also did Major Hasan attempt to commit "suicide by soldier," but surprisingly failed in the attempt. (Suicide has accurately been described by some investigators as the most serious symptom of schizophrenia, but far too often vicious homicidal actions precede it, as occurred in this case.) In Islamic religious law, homosexuality has long been considered one of the capital offenses, along with adultery, and thus it would have been psychologically almost impossible for Major Hasan consciously to admit to any homoerotic feelings or opposite-sex strivings, especially considering how fiercely he had embraced Islamic precepts following the death of his mother. In Quotation E. above, Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan discusses how the "appearance within awareness of the homoerotic interest" causes a such a "violent" defensive reaction in the male [or female/jmm], that the afflicted person, in order to stave off a "homosexual" panic attack, tries to "drain off" these repressed homoerotic cravings and sexual excitations by engaging in what Dr. Sullivan refers to as "auto-sexual" intercourse with a member - or members (satyriasis/nymphomania) - of the opposite sex. This is exactly what Major Hasan was unknowingly attempting to do when he began frequenting the strip clubs near his base at Fort Hood and commenced, astonishingly so for an alleged fervent Muslim, to engage in "lap dances," etc. But this final, desperate self-remedy did not work, his homoerotic urges were too powerful, thus precipitating in him a classic "homosexual" panic which resulted in a total loss of his emotional and physical self-control, and launched him on his insanely murderous, and ultimately suicidally-intended, path of destruction and mayhem. As Dr. Edward J. Kempf explains, in Quotation D. above, if the individual's "sexual affections" become "perverted or unconditionally repressed," they may then become the "most insidiously, irresistibly destrucive" of forces. This is what happened in the case of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, and in the cases of all other paranoid schizophrenic, "bearded lady" victims who have suddenly "snapped" and run amok - with such lethal and tragic consequences for all concerned. "Running amok" is a psychopathologically-caused phenomenon which has always been, and tragically always will be, an ever-present danger for mankind.
757 A. Howard Unruh, who carried out one of America's most infamous mass shootings, killing 13 people, three of them children, in a 20-minute, seemingly emotionless stroll through his neighborhood in Camden, N.J., in September 1949, died Monday at a nursing home in Trenton after 60 years' confinement. He was 88. [......] [ Howard Unruh Dies at 88; Gunned Down 13 of His Neighbors in 1949, by Richard Goldstein, The New York Times (Obituaries), Tuesday, October 20, 2009, p. B13. ] B. Syracuse (AP) - The father of the man who killed 13 people inside an immigrant services center in Binghamton, N.Y., said he had never seen his son with a handgun and did not know he owned one. [......] [ Gunman's Parents Express Sorrow for His Rampage, (AP), The New York Times, April 14, 2009, p. A-17. ] C. From my material, in which negative instances are conspicuously absent, I am forced to the conclusion that schizophrenic illnesses in the male are intimately related as a sequel to unfortunate prolongation of the attachment of the son and the mother. That schizophrenic disorders are but one of the possible outcomes of persisting immature attitudes subtending the mother and son relationship must be evident. The failure of growth of heterosexual interests, with persistence of autoerotic or homosexual interests in adolescence, is the general formula. The factors that determine a schizophrenic outcome may be clarified by a discussion on the one hand of the situations to which I shall refer as homosexual cravings and acute masturbation conflct - often immediate precursors of grave psychosis - and of the various homo-erotic and autoerotic procedures, on the other. [ Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., Personal Psychopathology - Early Formulations, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1972, 1965, p. 211. ]
Howard Unruh and Jiverly Wong were both suffering from paranoid schizophrenia - the "bearded lady" disease - and it was as the direct consequence of this pathological condition that they eventually "ran amok" in a murderous frenzy, cold-bloodedly destroying 26 men, women and children during the course of their insane rampages, and wounding several more. Mr. Wong's suicide, following his own rampage, brought the total number killed to 27. Unfortunately and tragically, this is an all-too-familiar story, one whose devastating consequences have been reported on frequently throughout recorded history. And due to the widespread nature of the underlying pathogenic conflict which had driven these killers insane, namely, their severe, repressed bisexual conflict and gender confusion, these tragic massacres of unsuspecting persons will continue to occur all-too-frequently, far into the future. The fact that Mr. Unruh "felt his neighbors were persecuting him and belittling him" and "that they were thinking of him as a homosexual", points to his paranoid projection onto his neighbors of his own unconscious awareness that he indeed was a homosexual. Likewise, when Mr. Wong wrote "that undercover police officers taunted him, tortured him and spread rumors about him," undoubtedly this "taunting" and "rumor-spreading" were, in his delusional, paranoid mind, connected to their supposed belief that he, too, was a homosexual, although Mr. Wong never actually used the word "homosexual", as Mr. Unruh had done. Dr. Sigmund Freud wrote in his "Notes on a Case of Paranoia" (The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12, Hogarth Press, London) that As Dr. Freud has illustrated how repressed bisexual conflict/gender confusion leads inevitably to schizophrenic symptomatology - the "bearded lady" disease - Dr. Lewis B. Hill, in paragraph C. above, explains how the factor of homosexuality initially gains a potentially pathogenic foothold in a person's psyche due to the "unfortunate prolongation of the attachment of the son and the mother." (Although unstated here by Dr. Hill, this same pathogenic formula is equally valid in the case of "prolonged attachment" in the mother/daughter relationship.) It is very obvious in Howard Unruh's case that he and his mother had a most "unfortunate prolongation" of their "attachment". And the end result of this pathogenic mother/son symbiotic relationship was his psychic emasculation and consequent homosexuality, which in turn was repressed, leading directly to his schizophrenic psychosis and following murderous paranoid rampage. It should be added here that his mother, who in reality was his "emotional emasculator", almost became the first victim of his sudden explosive rage and ensuing killing spree. Mr. Jiverly Wong, 41, had lived the last 19 years of his life with his parents. Obviously he, too, like Howard Unruh, falls into Dr. Hill's category of a man who has had an "unfortunate prolongation of the attachment of the son and the mother," leading to his own psychic castration and resulant homosexuality, which, when repressed, led inexorably to his paranoid schizophrenic breakdown with its lethal spree of violence aftermath. For Mr. Wong's parents to state "they did not know if their son was mentally ill" shows a spectacular ignorance, or denial of, the basic facts of what constitutes mental health. Here was a man who had lived a "nearly silent existence" in his parents' house "for the last 19 years", obviously with few or no friends of either sex, and had finally "stopped eating dinner or watching television and rarely emerged from his bedroom." This is a classic description of a man who is on the verge of committing suicide, or its emotional opposite - homicide - or both, as happened so tragically in Mr. Wong's case. Thus we see in both these cases the workings of a universally valid equation: "Unfortunate prolongation of the attachment of the son and the mother" leads directly to the development of homosexuality in the son [and daughter]. If then unconditionally repressed, this homosexual factor becomes the pathogenic core of all schizophrenic symptomatology, with its numerous attendant patholological conditions and extreme dangers. As Mr. Wong's father said, "All parents raise their children to become good human beings. You never imagine in your wildest dreams that they would end up doing something so horific." It is certain that the parents of Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and countless other schizophrenic-plagued individuals who have committed monstrous crimes aganst humanity, would wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Voong's tragic statement about his son. Most unfortunately - schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease - will continue to bedevil mankind on a daily basis, long into the future, or at least until this unshakeable truth about its primary etiology is finally universally acknowledged and accepted. Afterword: "We must recognize that the sexual affections are still the greatest constructive forces in the personality if properly conditioned and adjusted, but also that they may become the most insidiously, irresistibly destructive if perverted or unconditionally repressed. This statement is based upon the study of more than two thousand psychopathic and criminal personalities of many nationalities and intellectual levels." [ Edward J. Kempf, M.D., Psychopathology, C. V. Mosby Company, St. Louis, MO, 1920, p. 749. (See also Quotation 262, p. 179, in Schizophrenia - The Beaded Lady Disease, Vol. I.) ]
756 "SHAKE THE DEVIL OFF" opens with the suicide of Zackery Bowen, an Iraq war veteran who ended his life in 2006 by leaping from a roof in the French Quarter. In Bowen's pocket, the New Orleans police found his dog tags, keys and a note that read: "I had to take my own life to pay for the one I took. If you send a patrol to 826 N. Rampart you will find the dismembered corpse of my girlfriend Addie in the oven, on the stove and in the fridge along with full documentation on the both of us and a full signed confession from myself." The police went to the couple's apartment, where they discovered that Bowen had murdered Addie Hall more than a week earlier, then baked her legs in a tinfoil pan, packed her torso in the refrigerator and boiled her head, hands and feet in pots. Yet as soon as the author, Ethan Brown, finishes recounting these horrific details, his first question is: "Why was Zackery Bowen, a former Army sergeant, a veteran of two wars (Kosovo and Iraq), and a beloved bartender and deliveryman in the French Quarter, in such unimaginably deep emotionl pain?" [.....] The author finds in Bowen a singular example of such double-barreled post-traumatic stress, and produces interviews to show that Bowen was both fun-loving and responsible before going to Iraq, where he became depressed. The depression grew worse after he got home, and his marriage fell apart. Bowen drank and took drugs, then fell in love with Hall, a volatile poet and bartender who also abused alcohol and drugs. The couple lived through Katrina, refusing to evacuate, and afterward their relationship became turbulent. Brown reports that Bowen, who had begun frequenting gay bars, eventually entered into a secret homosexual relationship. When Hall found out, she broke up with him, and they were fighting over their apartment on the night Bowen killed her. Brown concludes that the combined post-traumatic stress from Iraq and Katrina is the reason Bowen killed Hall and himself, and the jacket echoes this cry, claiming that the book is a tribute "to two victims of these disasters, Zackery Bowen and Addie Hall." [.....] A more nuanced analysis would consider Bowen's drug and alcohol abuse, his cover-up and confusion about his sexuality, his reaction to his parents' divorce and his unhappy adolescence, during which he exhibited low self-esteem and dropped out of his California high school. Although Brown has reported all the facts that would support a fuller explanation, his sympathy for his subject has led him to a shakier conclusion. There is a difference between explaining and explaining away. Interestingly, Bowen himself didn't blame either Iraq or Katrina for the murder. In his last note, he alone assumed responsibility, referring to the life "I took." [.....] [ A Streetcar Named Despair ], by Lisa Scottoline, in a New York Times Book Review, September, 2009. The author of the book, "SHAKE THE DEVIL OFF", asks the question: "Why was Zackery Bowen, a former Army sergeant, a veteran of two wars (Kosovo and Iraq), and a beloved bartender and deliveryman in the French Quarter, in such unimaginably deep emotional pain?" The true answer to this question is that Zackery Bowen had been driven homicidally/suicidally insane as the direct result of his severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion, a conflict which had plagued him since early adolescence. When this deeply repressed conflict finally burst forth into his conscious awareness, it caused him to run amok and slaughter Addie Hall in a fit of overpoweringly lethal rage, followed shortly by his own self-destruction. Only a person suffering from an acute paranoid schizophrenic psychosis - the "bearded lady" disease - could have carried out such a brutal physical assault upon another human being, including the surgical-like dismemberment of that person, as Bowen had done to the body of his estranged wife, Addie Hall. Bowen's severe underlying mental illness first began to surface during his Army tour in Iraq, where he suffered from "depression", and when he returned home this depression "grew worse". Consequently, his first marriage was disrupted, or "fell apart", leading him later to a second marriage to the ill-fated Addie Hall. Both Bowen and Hall are said to have abused drugss and alcohol, indicating that not just Bowen, but Addie Hall also, was afflicted with schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease. Their short-lived lives together were reported to have been volatile and turbulent, as would be the natural consequence of their, or any other couple's, folie a' deux. When Bowen's lifelong-repressed homosexuality eventually gained access to his conscious awareness, he started visitng gay bars, and consequently soon became involved in a "secret" homosexual relationship. But obviously it was not secret enough to keep Addie Hall from finding out about it, and thus the stage was set for the horrifying resolution of the problems besetting these two tragedy-prone, mentally ill human beings, both of whom were ultimately destroyed by mankind's oldest nemesis - schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease - and which resolution has been so shockingly and painfully detailed by Lisa Scottoline in the above Quotation.
755 A. Ms. [name deleted] I hesitate sending an email because I know they somehow can end up going around the world. However, I will risk it to hopefully give you some insight into my son, [name deleted] who now goes by the name [woman's name]. I am his biological mother [name deleted] who he has denied as being his biological mother for some 25 years. I'd like to believe that this letter will be kept confidential the same as if you were speaking to a patient. Ever since [son] was 22 years old he's been in and out of mental wards at least six times that I'm aware of. Always diagnosed as schizophrenic and/or psychotic. He has taken medicine for these afflictions all these years. He's had ups and downs and we've stood by him as a family only to be taken advantage of over and over again. His [a family member] was recently taken by ambulance to the ER with chest pains because of the problems [son] left behind in [location deleted]. His [a family member] provided him a house of his own the past six years and it turned out to be a pig sty. [Son] left in the middle of the night and took a bus to [location deleted] and just left the mess behind. In May last year [son] was put in the mental ward at [hospital name deleted] in [location deleted] because of a diabetic episode (so I was told). Then he wrote and told me they gave him a pill in the hospital that would make him become a woman. Ever since then he has written dozens of email letters to me and his brother stating how he will become a woman using specific drugs. We wouldn't have a problem with him being transgender except we don't believe that is the case. We believe he has taken on the personality of a woman and therefore, dresses and says he is a woman. Do you have all of his past medical records so that you can better assist him? I have pretty much gone along with all the bizarre things that he has written to me but I haven't believed them. Like telling me he's been having a monthly period and finding blood in his panties. He gets very upset if I don't believe him so I pretend. As a family we are extremely confused. I can forward you some of his messages to give you an idea if it would be helpful. He gave me your card and I looked at your myspace entry. I found you to be a delightful person and I'd even be pleased to have you for a friend (not that it would happen as I live in [location deleted]. Nevertheless, I'm concerned that [son] (woman's name) is not getting the proper medication if he is still schizophrenic. Can a person be schizophrenic for 25 years and suddenly not be and then just as suddenly become transgender? Never in his life have I seen a feminine side to him. He's always acted like a man.. This is long and I have so much more I'd like to say but I know your time is valuable. I also know that legally you can't tell me anything because [son] has rights. Which I find amazing because we as a family have no rights. Forgive the intrusion. I just wish I understood. I do know that [son] has abused the system and has gotten money from all kinds of sources. He's financially a disaster and always has been. He dare not even return to [location deleted] or [location deleted] because of bad debts. I recently sent [son] some money and told him exactly what to do with it.. He didn't do what I said and I let him know. He fired back a nasty email typed in huge red letters and I haven't heard from him since. Naturally, I am always concerned about his safety and the safety of others around him. He has quite a temper and screams and yells and talks to himself when he thinks he's alone. Thank you for your time. Sincerely, [ Name deleted for privacy reasons - Please also refer to Impressions # 70-65 ] B. He was seeing a psychiatrist when he was in high school because the school called me and told me if I didn't have him committed they would. He was 15 then. [ From the boy's mother - See quotation A. above. ] This is the case history of a middle-aged man who had managed to keep his severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion under total repression since early adolescence, with the consequences thereof leading directly to the appearance of his lifelong schizophrenic symptomatology - as it invariably does in all such instances of this illness. These powerful repressed forces - both physiological and emotional - finally gained such enormous strength and urgency in this man's unconscious mind that they overwhelmed the prohibitive, repressing ego and burst forth into conscious awareness as an compelling and authentic feeling that he was turning into a woman. And here in this paranoid psychological state he currently exists - firmly and stubbornly (psychotically) convinced that, through no fault or desires of his own, his formerly male body is inexorably transforming itself into a female one. This case is almost exactly analagous to that of the widely-cited one of the schizophrenic German Judge, Daniel Paul Schreber, who at midlife also suddenly experienced a similar bisexual/gender confused sexual identity crisis, with comparable paranoid schizophrenic symptoms and outcome to those experienced by this middle-aged man reported on above. In Judge Schreber's case, it was his psychotic belief that God wanted him to change into a woman so that he, God, could procreate with him by means of "divine rays" for the sole purpose of creating a new species of humans beings. By contrast, in the case reported on in Quotation A. above, this schizophrenic man's psychotic belief is that certain female genes ("XX") in his body necessitate this change into the female form, and that consequently he is powerless to resist this transformation. Sigmund Freud has posited, and correctly so, that all paranoid schizophrenic psychoses have their root in the psychotic person's denial, or repression, of his or her powerful homosexual feelings and sexual cravings, which, if they finally do manage to break through into consciousness, are rationalized as being caused by forces beyond the control of the schizophrenic person. In other words, the psychotic person feels that these ego-dystonic homosexual, or opposite-sex feelings, are not really his or her own but are imposed upon them by ruthless outside forces (thus the paranoia), thereby freeing them from assuming any conscious personal responsibility for these formerly - prior to their repression and the cause of their represion - intolerably painful and distressing to the ego, desires and feelings. Furthermore, It is to be noted here that this man's schizophrenia was already glaringly evident at age 15, and this is the reason "schizophrenia" was formerly known by the name of "dementia praecox" (precocious dementia), due to the fact that its first overt symptoms often manifested themselves during the afflicted person's early pubertal years, when the first powerful biological sexual urges appear. If at this time there was already established within the future schizophrenic's psyche a strong conflict and sense of confusion about his or her primary sexual identity - due to severe familial emotional warping - then these powerful pubertal sexual forces, suddenly unleashed during this pivotal time in the conflicted individual's formative emotional and sexual life, provide, when unconditionally repressed, the "energy" force which "fuels" the myriad symptoms of their schizophrenia, such as hallucinations, both visual and audio (hearing voices) - and paranoid thoughts and feelings. It has been stated that "Schreber's name is legion." The above case is but one more example of the truth of that statement. [ Please see further references to the renowned paranoid schizophrenic, Daniel Paul Schreber, in the books "Schizophrenia - The Bearded Lady Disease, Vol. I ", and in the upcoming "Vol 2", as well as on this website: www.Schizophrenia-TheBeardedLadyDisease.com. ]
754 A. Bridgeville, Pa. - Tortured by loneliness and his lack of success with women, George Sodini developed a plan to get even. On Tuesday night, he executed it, opening fire in a fitness center here and hitting 12 women, 3 fatally, before turning a gun on himself. [.....] In his online journal, which has since been taken off the Internet, Mr. Sodini, a programmer-analyst at a local law firm, said that he had not had a girlfriend since 1984 and that he had not had sex since July 1990, when he was 29. "I actually look good," Mr. Sodini wrote in an entry dated Dec. 29, 2008. "I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne - yet 30 million women rejected me - over an 18- or 25-year period. That is how I see it. Thirty million is my rough guesstimate of how many desirable single women there are. "A man needs a woman for confidence. He gets a boost on the job, career, with other men, and everywhere else when he knows inside he has someone to spend the night with who is also a friend." [.....] Mr. Sodini's writings and rationale are all too familiar, said Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychologist and adjunct law professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburg, who has studied mass murderers. "Mass shooters aim for the attention and notoriety of other mass shooters," he said. "If you read this blog, it may explain to the reader why he feels hopeless, but it doesn't explain why he decides to take the lives of innocent strangers, which is the point. He's channeling that sense of masculine, sexual failure into a conquest that results in a mass killing. [.....] Trish Cowen, who lived across the street from Mr. Sodini for 13 years, said he had been friendly but had largely kept to himself. "I never saw any women over there, and he wasn't bad looking," Mrs. Cowen said. "I don't understand it. I just assumed he was gay." Gunman Drew Dark Portrait of Loneliness Before Shooting Women, by Sean D. Hamill, The New York Times, August 6, 2009, p. A-16. B. What was unusual about Sodini was how explicit he was in his blog about his personal shame and his hatred of women. "Why do this?" he asked. "To young girls? Just read below." In his gruesome, monthslong rant, he managed to say, among other things: "It seems many teenage girls have sex frequently. One 16 year old does it usually three times a day with her boyfriend. So, err, after a month of that, this little [expletive] has had more sex than ME in my LIFE, and I am 48. One more reason." [.....] Soon after the Virginia Tech slayings, I interviewed Dr. James Gilligan, who spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts and as a professor at Harvard and N.Y.U. "What I've concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal, he said, "is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one's manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act." Women At Risk, Bob Herbert, The New York Times, August 8, 2009, p. A-17 Once again a person suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, has suddenly "run amok", resulting in the wounding and slaughter of more more innocent citizens. The two professors commenting on this particular case, and the countless other cases similar to it, are correct about the shooter(s) being afflicted with a sense of masculine (sexual) insecurity, but they do not delve deeply enough into the problem of why this particular factor should often lead so tragicaly to outright insanity and bloodshed. The answer, of course, is that this sense of sexual insecurity, which is common to all such shooters, invariably has its root in their severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion, and that this basic conflict is always the triggering factor which leads directly to their schizophrenic breakdowns and resultant murderous rampages. Trish Cowen, who was George Sodini's neighbor for 13 years and said she had never seen any women with him during all that time, even though "he wasn't bad looking," provided the explanation for this case - and of all others like it - when she intuitively remarked that "I just assumed he was gay." For Mr. Sodini was gay, although at a deeply repressed, unconscious level, and it was these powerful, albeit totally frustrated homosexual longings which had finally driven him insane (paranoid schizophrenic) and were the direct cause of the terrible rage which led him to perpetrate his sudden, lethal assault on the 12 unsuspecting women in the Bridgeville gym, with such tragic consequences. Mr. Sodini was "insanely" jealous of all women, since at a deeply unconscious level that is the gender he himself wished to be. During his "gruesome, monthslong rant" before his attack on the gym, he noted that "It seems many teenage girls have sex frequently. One 16 year old does it usually 3 times a day with her boyfriend. So, err, after a month of that, this little [expletive] has had more sex than ME in my LIFE, and I am 48. One more reason." Note here that Mr. Sodini is not insanely jealous of the boy who is having sex three times a day with his girlfriend, but is insanely jealous of his girfriend! Why? Because again, at a deep unconscious level, he would like to be that 16-year-old girl having sex three times a day with her boyfriend, thereby highlighting both his powerful homosexual feelings towards the boyfriend and his consequent longings to be of the opposite sex - specifically in this instance to be the 16-year-old girl so that he could then satisfy his overwhelmingly urgent homosexual, or opposite-sex sexual cravings - and like her, "usually three times a day." He has completely identified himself here with the girl rather than with the boy, thereby clearly demonstrating his severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne - yet 30 million women rejected me - over an 18- or 25-year period. That is how I see it." Except for the "clean-shaven" reference (although females are also "clean-shaven"), this could be a woman describing herself to a friend while wondering why she does not have more boyfriends. And Mr. Sodini's "touch of cologne" comment is especially feminine-tinged. The original Greek meaning of "paranoia" was explained as being a diseased psychological condition comprised basically of "faulty reasoning", and this faulty reasoning invariably leads to unwarranted feelings of distrust of others and false feelings of being persecuted by others. Both these factors can be observed at work here in every facet of Mr. Sodini's thinking and reasoning. The Greeks combined all forms of madness under the rubric of paranoia, and with good reason, for all madness has at its etiological root the pathogenic factor of severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion. Or, as the brilliant Bulgarian psycho-analyst, Julia Kristeva, has so cogently observed: "Sexual identity guarantees our psychic unity." Unfortunately, Mr. Sodini's "sexual identity" had been fractured into a thousand disparate pieces, with horrific consequences ensuing therefrom. "Back in the fall of 2006," Bob Herbert further reports in his New York Times column of August 8, 2009 (quotation B. above), "a fiend invaded an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania, separated the girls from the boys, and then shot 10 of the girls, killing five." It is glaringly obvious that this "fiend" loved the boys and not the girls, as did M. Sodini, and as do all beserkers who run amok and kill. In some cases the victims may also include members of the same sex as are the killers (as in the Virginia Tech and Columbine massacres), but only because such shooters also hate and fear their own powerful homosexual attraction to these same-sex members, and consequently in their paranoid madness they attempt to destroy not only the furiously envied females but also any males who may tempt and stir up theit repressed and terrifying homosexual feelings. In summary, All persons who run amok and kill others for no rationally discernible reason, do so because they are are afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia - the "bearded lady" disease - the etiological root of which pathological condition invariably stems from the ever-present factor of severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion. Furthermore, this deadly "beserker" syndrome will never be completely eradicated until this universal truth about its cause is fully acknowledged and acted upon accordingly, and before more such tragedies can reoccur. "We must recognize," wrote the great psycho-analyst, Dr. Edward J. Kempf, in his monumentally important work, Psychopathology, 1920 , "that the sexual affections are still the greatest constructive forces of the personality if properly conditioned and adjusted, but also that they may become the most insidiously, irresistibly destructive if perverted or unconditionally repressed." Mr. Sodini's true "sexual affections" were most certainly "perverted" and "unconditionally represed", and thereby became, as Dr. Kempf teaches us, "irresistibly destructive." The above equation applies equally and truly to every person throughout history who has suddenly run amok and left death and destruction in his or her wake, and furthermore it applies to every one of history's other "beserkers", such as Hitler, Stalin, and most recently Osama bin Laden, who cold-bloodedly ordered the destruction of nearly 3,000 innocent persons by means of a an insane suicidal aerial attack on New York's Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. But of course the consequences of bin Laden's madness pale, at least for now, in comparison to the almost unimagineable death and destruction wreaked upon the world in the near past as the direct result of the same paranoid schizophrenic madness afflicting other men, such as Adoph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot of Cambodia, to name only the most prominent of an ever-lengthening list of such madmen. Psychologically-speaking, all mass murderers throughout history are George Sodini's writ large, victims themselves of the "bearded lady" disease - paranoid schizophrenia.
753 I suppose that one thing I'd like to get across to you is that I have tried. Tried what? I guess what I'm saying is that I tried with all my might to stay in the closet..to change whom I am. Most people in a similar situation would say the same. You try so hard that your knowledge of whom you are is on a very subconscious level most of your life. The older I got, the more I became aware of whom I was. And the more I vehemently kicked it under the rug. I know there was a limit to my sanity living this way. I honestly toyed with the fact that leaving this life might cause less pain for everyone involved. I came to the conclusion that my kids would probably rather have me here and flawed, than not here. I'm not saying this to be dramatic.. I'm simply stating a fact. For years I've been tossing around ideas and trying to figure out ways to deal with myself and my situation. I have absolutely hated the way that I have disappointed so many people. To My Dear Family , [para 5], writer's name deleted for privacy reasons. [See also Impressions item #54, this website.] The above quotation clearly shows how the immense psychic and physical effort required for a person to repress his or her powerful bisexual conflict and gender confusion will lead inexorably, if the conflict is not resolved, to insanity and/or self-destruction - twin elements of schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease. Most fortunately, this wife and devoted mother, plagued by years of fiercely battling against her deepest sexual and emotional feelings, finally summoned forth the enormous courage and intellectual honesty necessary to face the truth about herself - thereby saving her own life, both literally and figuratively, as well as allowing her to remain a loving mother to her children, and a close and caring friend of their father. This brave woman speaks of being "flawed", as if homosexuality were some sort of flaw. It is no more of a "flaw" than being heterosexual is a "flaw". Both sexual orientations are elemental parts of the ebb and flow of human desires and emotions - in essence, a direct inheritance from our mammalian ancestry.
752 In unflinching and objective language, they hold up a clinically honest mirror to what they witness as they follow their homeless subjects in and out of jail and hospitals, as they are evicted from their camps and set up new ones, as their relationships blossom and collapse and as they struggle over race and gender. These are not just episodically homeless people who spend a short while on the street in between personal crises. These are the most chronically homeless we have, the ones you see sleeping in filth and scratching out survival year after year as they struggle with mental illness, substance abuse, acute disabilities or all three. There is no sugarcoating here. For the faint of heart, there will be stiff reading moments about people vomiting and defecating, jamming needles into oozing abscesses and selling sex for dope hits. Equally hard to read are the accounts of broken people crying about abandoning their families, childhood abuse they suffered, shivering at night in the rain, and all the other human miseries that attend most lives lived outside. ----Meredith Maran, San Francisco Chronicle, 6/21/09, in a review of the book Righteous Dopefiend, by Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg, (University of California Press, 359 pages; $24.95)
The key sentence in the above quotation is "...and as they [the mentally ill homeless] struggle with race and gender." For truly all chronically homeless persons are struggling with severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion, otherwise known as schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease. In the time prior to the discovery of the supposedly miracle-working psychotropic drugs in the early 1950's, all these unfortunate people would have been housed in the many mental hospitals then existing through the United States. In a tragic twist of fate, these hospitals were then shut down, one-by-one, in order to save money and because it was now falsely and foolishly believed that all the mentally ill had to do to stay well was to take their daily pills as prescribed, and all would be made stable again in their emotionally troubled lives. Of course we now belatedly realize that the severely mentally ill are totally incapable of looking after themselves - pills or no pills - and consequently they end up on the streets of our nation, struggling to stay alive throughout the year under the most bitter and life-threatening of circumstances, as chronicled so vividly and shockingly in the above quotation. Basically, our prisons and juvenile detention centers have now taken the place of our former mental hospitals, to the great detriment of all concerned, while leaving a sizeable group, whose members have yet to be apprehended, of potentially extremely dangerous paranoid schizophrenic individuals roaming around the country ready to commit, when adequately provoked - at least in their own deranged minds - the most monstrous of crimes against unsuspecting and innocent citizens. All one has to do is to read the daily newspapers, which chronicle these terrifying cases on a dismayingly frequent basis, to fully comprehend the tremendous problem this state of affairs poses to society. Admittedly, It is most unfortunate to be forced to keep a schizophrenic person locked up in a mental hospital, sometimes for a lifetime, in order to protect that person from himself/herself, and also to protect society from the possible depredations that might be visited upon it as the direct result of that mentally ill person's madness. In the hospital the schizophrenic person would be given adequate medical care, food, a warm and safe place to sleep, and a fellow-group of patients to interact with, both male and female, and from which emotionally-enriching friendships hopefully may grow and flourish. And, most important of all, along with their daily regimen of psychotropic drugs, which in reality are nothing more than chemical strait-jackets, they have a further chance to interact with each other in group therapy sessions and, if they are very fortunate, to be given the opportunity to engage in individual psychotherapy with a psychologist or psychiatrist. For no "cure" will ever be possible without the schizophrenic person first gaining deep insight into the severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion which initially triggered his/her psychotic breakdown, and is now the primary cause of their hospitalization. None of these psychological tools to aid in the patient's recovery from mental illness is available on the mean, dog-eat-dog streets of big-city America, or on the streets of any other nation, for that matter. Some municipalities, however, do their very best to provide help to their mentally ill, homeless populations, but nothing can compare to that which a truly well-run, enlightened and psychodynamically-oriented mental hospital will be able to provide to its patients.
751 Hi Mike, I just watched an episode of The American Experience about Jim Jones. It is a PBS documentary that I recorded on my VCR the other night. Different people were talking about Jim Jones and his sex life. This one lady said that Jim Jones believed that he was the only heterosexual person in the world. He believed that all of the women were lesbians and all of the men were gay. He would sodomize some of the different men in his congregation but he publicly said that they should give themselves enemas first. Jones seems like a classic example of the bearded lady syndrome. I still have the documentary recorded on a VCR tape and could send it to you if you'd like. Best regards John [ Please refer to the Impressions section of www.Schizophrenia-TheBeardedLadyDisease.com , # 57, to view the PBS documentary on the life of the paranoid schizophrenic madman, Jim Jones. ] On November 18, 1978, in Jonestown, Guyana, The cult leader Jim Jones ordered the death by self-inflicted suicide of 909 innocent men, women and children. Those few who resisted his insane edict were murdered by his henchmen who then, along with Jones, took their own lives. In his raging paranoia, he believed the U.S. government was preparing to raid his compound and shut it down. The fact that Jones truly believed he was the only heterosexual person in the world, that all women were lesbians and all the men were homosexuals, and that he was currently engaging in homosexual anal intercourse with various members of his congregation, proves beyond any doubt that he was a raging madman afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia - the "bearded lady" disease. Interestingly, Jones always took the active role in the homosexual anal intercourse he indulged in. At a much deeper level, of course, his most fervent desires were to play the passive, feminine role, but his defenses against this role were too powerful to be overcome and thus contributed directly to the development of his floridly psychotic - and eventually lethal - behavior. By playing the active role in homosexual anal intercourse, he could rationalize to himself that he was really a strong, masculine man and not a passive, feminine one, which of course at the deepest and repressed level of his unconscious he truly was. Furthermore, his public demand that the men he had anal intercourse with must first give themselves enemas demonstrates a striking sense of feminine fastidiousness on his part, and also a personal familiarity with enemas - wherein the male is always in a passive, feminine-like situation. It would be very instructive to know how many enemas were administered to Jim Jones by his mother, or other caregivers, when he was a youth, and if so did he continue these anal erotic practices throughout his life To further guide us in our understanding of the horrendous tragedy that occurred in Jonestown on that terrible day in November, 1978, we must turn to the profound wisdom and insight contained in the written words of that world-famous psychiatric patient, the German Judge, Daniel Paul Schreber: "I would like to meet the man who, faced with the choice of either being a demented human being in male habitus, or a spirited woman, would not prefer the latter. Such and only such is the issue for me." (Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of my Nervous Illness ) Jim Jones had been desperately struggling with his own severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion since he was a small child, and the sexual and emotional tensions resulting from his frustrated, long-repressed opposite-sex cravings and sexual desires slowly mounted over the years until they finally burst forth and triggered the massive psychotic breakdown which led directly to his ordering the wanton massacre of the 909 people at the ill-fated Jonestown compound. Sigmund Freud once made the statement that what man represses at his deepest level are his pederastic instincts, specifically - his passive, feminine pederastic instincts. Jim Jones was such a man. And the consequences springing from the repression of his passive, feminine pederastic instincts led to a human tragedy of almost unimaginable proportions. At Jonestown, schizophrenia - the "bearded lady" disease - added one more chapter to the untold thousands of human tragedies occurring over the millennia which can invariably be attributed to the toxic affect of the undischarged libido arising from the schizophrenic person's severe, unconscious bisexual conflict and gender confusion.
750 A. A court rejected three of four witnesses for the Burmese opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, a move critics said was aimed at sabotaging her defense against charges of violating the terms of her house arrest. One of her lawyers, U Nyan Win, called the move unfair, and he said it made it likely that a verdict could come as early as Friday. Myanmar's government arrested Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi after an uninvited American intruder was allowed to stay in her home for two days after he swam across a small lake on May 4. On Wednesday, the American, John Yettaw, testified that he had been prompted by a "vision" that she would be assassinated by terrorists, and he said that "God sent me to warn her," according to Mr. Nyan Win. (Reuters) Myanmar: Nobel Laureate's Witnesses Are Blocked , The New York Times, May 25, 2009. [Reference also: 'The Lady' and the Tramp , Newsweek magazine, June 22, 2009, p. 54.] B. According to the government mouthpiece, The New Light of Myanmar, an official testifying at the trial on Wednesday said the police had found a strange collection of items that the swimmer - John Yettaw, 53 - had left behind in her home. They included "two black chadors usually worn by Muslim women, two black scarves, two long skirts, one red torch light, six color pencils in a plastic bag, three pairs of sunglasses, two signal lights, a pair of swimming glasses, one two-pin plug, two pieces of circuit wire, one recharger, a black bag with a zip in it that was used to keep the apparatuses, a plastic bag with a zip in it, two pairs of gray stockings, five parts of an English book, and a bag with pieces of torn paper sheets in it." The paper quoted a witness, a police captain named Tin Zaw Tun, as testifying that Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi had signed a search form accepting responsibility for the items. "Asked why Mr. John William Yettaw left two chadors, she replied that he left them as gifts for her," the paper said. No explanation has been given for why Mr. Yettaw, of Falcon, Mo., swam to her home on May 3. He is also standing trial, along with two women on Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi's household staff. "Everyone is very angry with this wretched American," said U Kyi Win, a lawyer for Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi. "He is the cause of all these problems. He's a fool." After Briefly Letting Diplomats In, Myanmar Locks Them Out of Dissident's Trial, Seth Mydans and Mark McDonald, Bangkok, The New York Times, May 25, 2009. C. Several news reports said investigators found underwear belonging to two of his victims in the hotel attacks in Mr. Markoff's apartment in Quincy. Citing unnamed sources, the reports said investigators also found a hand-gun hidden in a hollowed-out anatomy textbook. The New York Times, Abby Goodnough and Amy O'Connor, April 23, 2009. Mr. John William Yettaw is not a "fool", as he is angrily described by lawyer U Kyi Win, in paragraph B. above, rather he is the unfortunate victim of a very severe case of mental illness - specifically, that of paranoid schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease. In his own words before the Burmese court, trying him on charges of illegal entry into the country and trespassing at the home of Burmese opposition leader Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, he testified that all his illegal actions had been induced by a "vision" he had experienced that she would be murdered by terrorists and "God sent me to warn her." This is a classic example of a paranoid-type schizophrenic delusion, and it is invariably the product of a pathogical condition arising from severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion within the psyche of the afflicted individual. The only clothing that Mr. Yettaw reportedly carried with him as he swam across the lake to Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi's compound consisted solely of female garments, namely - the "two black chadors usually worn by Muslim women, two black scarves, two long skirts," plus an extremely odd collection of other items, as listed in paragraph B. above. The fact that a man illegally swimming acrosss a lake to save the life of an internationally prominent woman whom he delusionally believes is marked for assassination, would be carrying only females clothes with him, points to an element of severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion within that individual's psyche. The two chadors supposedly were for the woman. What about the "two black scarves" and the "two long skirts" - who were they for? Perhaps for Mr. Yettaw himself to change into from the wet clothes, or bathing suit, he was wearing during his swim. Conjecture, certainly, but this explanation fits perfectly within the "bearded lady" genesis of all functional mental illness, including the psychotic paranoid symptomatology exhibited in this case by the deluded Mr. Yettaw. A similar case recently reported on ( Paragraph C. above) is that of Mr. Phillip Markoff, of Quincy, Massachusetts, who is charged with the murder of one woman and the robbery of several others. When the police later searched his apartment, along with the gun used to commit the murder was found a collection of intimate female undergarments which Mr.Markoff had stolen from his victims. "Investigators also recovered several of the cellphones, or TracFones, laptop computers and four pairs of women's underwear inside socks hidden in a box spring." Having graduated from Boston University School of Medicine in 2007, and now planning shortly on getting married - with no prior criminal record - Mr. Markoff's unexpected, angry and murderous actions directed against helpless and defenseless females are clearly the product of a mind suddenly unhinged by paranoid schizophrenia, which is invariably caused by severe, underlying bisexual conflict and gender confusion. In both of these cases, it was emotionally extremely imperative for each of the men - Mr. Yettaw and Mr. Markoff - to have intimate female apparel nearby, for whatever purposes they might need them, such as cross-dressing, etc. Although their paranoid psychoses fortunately played out in different ways - only the one having a directly lethal outcome - yet both psychoses were the inevitable consequence of a similar "bearded lady" pathology - as is always the case in every such instance of this extremely dangerous and devastating mental illness.
749 A. The man who killed 10 people during a shooting spree last month in southern Alabama left a letter for relatives, writing that he wanted people to pay for making his mother and him suffer, according to a news report. In the letter, obtained by the Dothan Eagle newspaper, the man, Michael McLendon, left [picture], wrote that he shot his mother to death while she slept, then set fire to the rural home they shared. After leaving the house on March 10, Mr. McLendon, 28, went on a 24-hour shooting spree and killed nine more people before committing suicide. "Moma was very sick," he wrote. "Had lung cancer I think. So I put her out of her misery. I'm sorry! But Moma had suffered enough. And so have I. Some of the people who made us suffer will pay." An autopsy did not support Mr. Mclendon's claims about his mother's being ill, said Chief Deputy R. W. Whitworth of the Coffee County Sheriff's Office. (AP) Alabama: Letter by Gunman Claims He and His Mother 'Suffered Enough' , The New York Times, April 4, 2009. B. Among those who prove incapable of achieving the biologically ordained heterosexual goal are a great many to whom the mother has continued to be of excessive significance, overshadowing or coloring strongly all prehensions of other women. This handicap is most vividly illustrated in the case of the woman who has married for spite a man whom she soon comes to loathe, yet with whom the peculiarities of her personality, or economic factors, or other cause, force her to live. When a son is born of such a union, he is generally sacrificed to the mother's unsatisfied erotic tendencies, and he becomes tied to her by the sort of intimacy so remarkably symbolized by Von Stuck in his paintng, Die Sphinx. Whether he comes finally to rebel, hates her, and goes through life destroying as much as he can of that which arouses the mother stereotype, or instead goes on being her child-lover, the result is most unfortunate as to his growth in personality. It is almost certain that he will not proceed in erotic development past interest in his own sex. Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., Personal Psychopathology / Early Formulations , W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1972, 1965, p. 196. C. From my material, in which negative instances are conspicuously absent, I am forced to the conclusion that schizophrenic illnesses in the male are intimately related as a sequel to unfortuate prolongation of the attachment of the son and the mother. That schizophrenic disorders are but one of the possible outcomes of persisting immature attitudes subtending the mother and son relationship must be evident. The failure of growth of heterosexual interests, with persistence of autoerotic or homosexual interests in adolescence, is the general formula. The factors that determine a schizophrenic outcome may be clarified by a discussion on the one hand of the situations to which I shall refer as homosexual cravings and acute masturbation conflict - often immediate precursors of grave psychosis - and of the various homo-erotic and autoerotic procedures, on the other. Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., Personal Psychopathology / Early Formulations , W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1972, 1965, p. 211. Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan's two brilliant expositions on the pathology surrounding an unnaturally close, binding and intimate symbiotic relationship between a mother and her son, as outlined in Quotations B. and C. above, unerringly explain why Michael McLendon suffered a severe paranoid- schizophrenic psychotic break at the age of 28, causing him to run amok in a murderous frenzy and tragically destroy ten persons, including himself. In the psychiatric literature, this symbiotic type of mother/son relationship has sometimes been referred to as a CBI relationship - Close/Binding/Intimate - and it is always of a pathogenic nature. In fact, it can truthfully be posited that all functional mental illness basically stems from this single pathogenic CBI relationship between mother and son, or between mother and daughter, since it invariably results in the severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion in both sexes leading directly to schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease - as we have seen so dramatically illustrated here in the case of Michael McLendon and his "schizophrenogenic" mother. In every such CBI relationship, comparable to the one between Mr. McLendon and his mother, there is always an immense amount of unconscious rage directed at the CBI mother, since it is programmed into every person's basic genetic make-up to be a sexually free and independent organism, for the sole purpose of being able to fulfill nature's primal goal which is applicable to all species - namely, that of propagating itself. The CBI relationship strangles this urgent, primal instinct by emotionally - and consequently physically - "castrating" the son or daughter caught up in its pathogenic web. In this particular case it led directly to the killing anger directed against the mother unleashed by the now totally insane Michael McLendon. Tragically, however, on a conscious level he was totally unable emotionally to accept his furious rage at his mother, even while killing her as he simultaneously rationalized his reason for doing so - "Moma was very sick. Had lung cancer I think. So I put her out of her misery. I'm sorry!" - thus making it inevitable that his overwhelmingly powerful and suddenly unleashed - yet paranoid and mistakenly focused fury, would spill over onto other innocent victims, with deadly consequences. In every case of a person's running amok after a catastrophic schizophrenic "break," the ultimate cause is always to be found in the brilliant Harry Stack Sullivan's two quotations presented above - B. and C. For therein lies the explanation for the "CBI" petri dish upon which all functional mental illness, including its most extreme and often lethal manifestation - schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, is invariably incubated. "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world" - for both good and evil - as we can see clearly in Mr. McLendon's case, all too terrifyingly.
748 "We don't want to be normal," Will Hall tells me. The 43-year-old has been diagnosed as schizophrenic, and doctors have prescribed antipsychotic medication for him. But Hall would rather value his mentally extreme states than try to supress them, so he doesn't take his meds. Instead, he practices yoga and avoids coffee and sugar. He is delicate and thin, with dark plum polish on his fingernails and black fashion sneakers on his feet, his half Native American ancestry evident in his hair and dark eyes. Cultivated and charismatic, he is also unusually energetic, so much so that he seems to be vibrating even when sitting still. Listening to Mad Pride, Alissa Quart, Newsweek magazine, May 11/May 18, 2009, p. 54. The brief physical description of the schizophrenic man in the above quotation emphasizes, most likely unwittingly, his marked androgynous, "bearded lady" characteristics. To wit: "He is delicate and thin, with dark plum polish on his fingernails and black fashion sneakers on his feet." Considering that the factors of unconscious bisexual conflict and gender confusion form the basic etiological role in all functional mental illness, including its most severe manifestation in schizophrenic symptomatology, it comes as no surprise to see this invariable "bearded lady" configuration delineated in the above case. The fact that this schizophrenic person "is also unusually energetic, so much so that he seems to be vibrating even when sitting still," demonstrates that he is in the relentless grip of a prolonged manic state fueled by enormous quantities of dammed-up sexual energy emanating from powerful, repressed - and thus unacknowledged - ego-dystonic sexual passions, as is always the case in every manic state. If this unfortunately mentally ill man would consent to take his "meds", they would tranquilize him to the extent that these urgent. yet frustrated "bearded lady" sexual passions would temporarily be "tamped down", thus losing their energy force and consequent ability to drive his mania - or drive him mad - for as long as he continued to take them.
747 On the Morning of Friday 28 March, a bright, clear, cold day, Virginia went as usual to her studio room in the garden. There she wrote two letters, one for Leonard, one for Vanessa - the two people she loved best. In both letters she explained that she was hearing voices, believed she could never recover; she could not go on and spoil Leonard's life for him. Then she went back into the house and wrote again to leonard: "Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight it any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will now I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. "I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V." She put this on the sitting-room mantle and, at about 11:30, slipped out, taking her walking-stick with her and making her way across the water-meadows to the river. Leonard believed that she might already have made one attempt to drown herself; if so she had learnt by her failure and was determined to make sure of it now. Leaving her stick on the bank she forced a large stone into the pocket of her coat. Then she went to her death, "the one experience," as she had said to Vita, "I shall never describe." [ Virginia Woolf: A Biography ], Quentin Bell, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. New York, 1972, p. 226. Virginia Woolf once wrote: "Women alone stir my imagination." Whether or not she realized it at the time she wrote it, she was thereby proclaiming to the world that she was a lesbian, for it would be inconceivable for a truly heterosexually-oriented woman ever to make such a statement. And thus herein lies the etiological root of Woolf's long-standing paranoid schizophrenia - the "bearded lady" disease - as it invariably does in all such instances of severe mental illness. Virginia truly was a "bearded lady", long married to her patient, caring, maternal-figure-of-a-husband, Leonard, while simultaneously engaging in passionate emotional relationships throughout her life with numerous girls and women, and reputedly had at least one actual sexual relationship - that with her long-time lesbian friend, Vita Sackville-West. And it is upon this latter's remarkably androgynous character that it is widely hypothesized that Virginia based the protagonist of her widely-known book, "Orlando". (It is interesting to note that nowhere in her final letter to her husband, Leonard, does Virginia use the word "love".) Although ostensibly writing here about Orlando, Virginia in actuality is perfectly describing her own bisexul, gender-confused state of mind: "And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. It was a most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in. The comfort of ignorance seemed utterly denied her. She was a feather blown on a gale." ---"Orlando", Virginia Woolf, New American Library of World Literature, Inc., 1960, p. 103. (See also "Schizophrenia, The Bearded Lady Disease", Vol I, Quotations 384, 385, 386, pp. 277-279.) The above profoundly insightful description of a severely gender-confused, bisexually-conflicted person can be similarly applied to everyone - male or female - who is afflicted with schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, and it was this agonizing, and for Virginia an unresolvable conflict, with the resultant mental anguish and turmoil emanating therefrom, that relentlessly gnawed away at her fragile and beleagured psyche to the extent that finally - being unable to endure the pain of it any longer, drove her to her lonely death by suicide in the River Ouse, near her home. And thus schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, claimed for itself another hapless, tortured victim.
746 A. Though Mbeki's casting of Mandela as Lear was less than apt, there's still a tragic element in the multilayered narrative Mark Gevisser has painstakingly constructed. It attaches both to the country and to Mbeki. Freed from the scourge of apartheid, a liberated South Africa wasted the better part of a decade before starting to marshal its considerable resources to confront the scourge of AIDS (by which time nearly 30 percent of pregnant South African women were estimated to be HIV-positive. Thabo Mbeki was the central reason for that catastrophic misjudgment. In his suspicious mind, the notion that HIV and AIDS were causally related was only a "thesis" propounded by multinational drug companies bent on opening new markets in Africa. Mbeki's biographer struggles mightily - sometimes wordily, drenching his subject in adjectives like "guarded", "paranoid", and "repressed" - to reconcile the brooding recluse who sat up late into the night in presidential mansions in Cape Town and Pretoria, exploring the speculations of AIDS deniers, with the charming, reassuring diplomatic operative who in the 1980s sold the path of negotiation both to a nervous white establishment and to an underground movement that imagined itself bent on armed struggle. B. Once he'd replaced Mandela as leader, he must have understood that he'd never been the party's favorite son, that its ranks were still full of those who'd doubted him for years. Gevisser isn't able to pinpoint a time when the leader's prudence shaded into paranoia. But even after being reelected in 2004 by a margin bigger than Mandela's, Mbeki seems never to have felt secure. C. Meanwhile Thabo Mbeki sits in his new Johannesburg home like Nixon in San Clemente. Perhaps he's waiting for his David Frost to show up in order to get his story out. Or maybe he has started to write it himself. If he's capable of suspending his defense mechanisms and reflecting on his remarkable journey with something approaching candor, as few politicians ever are, he could clear up some of the ambiguities that linger in the story Mark Gevisser tells. How Mbeiki Failed, Joseph Leyveld, New York Review of Books, April 9, 2009, pp. 26, 28, 29; in a review of Mark Gevisser's A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeiki and the Future of the South African Dream, Palgrave Macmillan, 376 pp., $29.95.
Chronicled in the above quotations is but one more harrowing tale of the enormous damage that can be wreaked upon an unsuspecting society by a man in a position of enormous state power who himself is the unsuspecting victim of a severe paranoid psychosis. Thabo Mbekei's delusional idée fixe that HIV and AIDS are not causally related, despite overwhelming scientific proof to the contrary, tragically condemned many thousands of South Africa's citizens - men, women, and children - to be deprived of the life-saving benefits of retroviral anti-AIDS drugs for many years, until mercifully he was finally forced to relinquish the presidency of the country he had so dreadfully harmed. This is a classic case history of a person who has suffered a paranoid schizophrenic breakdown, the "bearded lady" disease, replete with the usual countless mad suspicions of covert forces conspiring against the "patient", Mbekei, including C.I.A. plots, fears for his life at the hands of unseen enemies, and an insane refusal to come to terms with, and finally relinquish, his delusional idée fixe that HIV and AIDS are not causally connected in any way. Mbekei's "anonymous", long-running polemic on the internet backing up his crazed beliefs can only be the product of a mind totally unhinged. Mbekei was not an uneducated man. He had attended Sussex University in Brighton, England in the 1960s, and was also enrolled at the Lenin Institute in Moscow for several years. Therefore his inability to recognize, and his obsessive refusal to admit to, the overwhelming scientific proof of the HIV/AIDS connection could not be justified or explained as the product of a backward, uneducated mind, but solely as the product of the severe mental illness which had destroyed his "normal" powers of intellect and reasoning. A very sad tale indeed, not only for Mr. Mbeiki himself but for all the HIV-positive citizens of South Africa who were denied retroviral therapy and thus lethally harmed as the direct result of his paranoid delusions. Furthermore, Mbekei's failure to come to the aid of the thousands of Zimbabwe citizens who were being systematically destroyed due to the paranoid madness of that country's own leader, Mugabe, was another tragic consequence of his madness. Only Mbeiki had the power and standing to help alleviate the terrible conditions in Zimbabwe, but he failed to do so. Thus we have seen the dreadful consequences of how not just one, but two paranoid leaders have had the power to cripple not only their own countries and grievously harm so many of their own innocent citizens, but have likewise failed to come to the rescue of citizens in other countries similarly sorely tried. The book reviewer Joseph Lelyveld writes that "Meanwhile Thabo Mbeiki sits in his new Johannesburg home like Nixon is San Clemente." At the end of his own presidency, Richard Nixon had also become paranoid, according to many accounts, and was described by some as occasionally walking around the White House at night talking to the pictures of former presidents which were hanging on the walls. It was also reported at this time that after a press conference at Walt Disney World, he had approached a man and a boy and asked the man if he was the boy's mother or grandmother. When the man answered he was neither one, Nixon slapped the man in his face and said "Of course you're not", and walked away. (Reference: Schizophrenia - The Bearded Lady Disease, J. Michael Mahoney, AuthorHouse, Bloomington, IN, 2003, p. 448, Quotation 592.) Mr. Lelyveld also writes that "Mbeiki wasn't simply being defensive when he warned his biographer not to dig too deeply into the psychological side of his makeup in search of a master key to his conduct." We of course now know what that "master" key is, the exact same key that is invariably operative in every case of paranoid schizophrenia - namely, severe unconscious bisexual conflict and gender confusion. This truth has been most strikingly documented by Daniel Paul Schreber in his Memoirs of My Nervous illness, his famous account of his own madness, and further very briefly but powerfully illustrated above by the paranoid Richard Nixon when he approached a perfect stranger and his young son and asked him if he was the boy's mother or grandmother. It has accurately been stated that "Schreber's name is legion," and Mbeiki and his neighbor, President Mugabe of Zimbabwe, (as well as was Richard Nixon) are all members of that fateful legion, much to the detriment not only of themselves but to the thousands of other of their innocent and unsuspecting fellow-citizens who have been tragically ensnared in the destructive web of their paranoid delusions - particularly in reference to Mbekei and Mugabe - and the horrendous consequences following therefrom.
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