On the Memory of Killing Afghan Civilians

I read a piece in the paper about a soldier who killed 16 Afghan civilians. He claims he can remember before and after, but not during the crime. His attorneys are going to argue in his defense that he had a “diminished capacity”. I assume that means he didn’t have all his marbles. Let’s look at it from a Primal perspective.

After several deployments where people were trying to kill him, and shortly after a bomb went off that injured his teammates, he finally cracked. What does that mean? The pain from his early life and his current traumas all merged and edged out his third line; the pain replaced his perceptive, critical apparatus and flushed out all ability to hold back impulses. It also replaced any reflective capacity for what he was doing. It was as if he was in a dream: what happens in that dream is that lower-level processes take over; logic is abrogated and feelings fill all cognitive space. No wonder he cannot remember. His conscious/awareness was missing. All the past and current pain merged together to blot out any awareness. He was acting as if sleepwalking. (We have had a patient who walked to a store and bought gum while asleep and later had no memory of it. He was in the same state as our soldier/killer: unconscious.) That is, his unconscious replaced conscious/awareness. When he discharged enough rage, fear, and pain he could finally realize what he did, but not during his act.

This is the classic Primal definition of transient psychosis: pockets of insanity due to being overcome with a combination of past and present pain. The third-line cognitive functions cede to the lower levels, which are in overload and need expression. It is all acted out as if in a dream; the perpetrator doesn’t know any better because there isn’t any functioning top level for the moment.

Now what is strange in all this is that in a Primal the patient’s brain must cede to lower levels so that she can have access to deeper levels of consciousness. And when that happens the patient is again in the past, reliving being yelled at by her mother, seeing her earrings and smelling the odors in the kitchen. She is “back there”; there is little top-level functioning. If there were, the Primal would be aborted and she would be back in the present. And she would be in control again. And patients who need control have a hard time letting go of top-level cognition. They often must exert control because of the power of lower-level pain.

Our killer was “back there” too, but he was not in a safe clinic where he could act out violently by punching the walls or screaming out his hate. He took his feelings into the present; he had no one to help him into his feelings. He didn’t even know that he had feelings or that they were hidden somewhere inside of him. But the signs were there, and if there were a shrink around who knew the signs the killing could have been avoided. If there were a group culture of knowing about feelings and understanding that it is important to see a professional when the pressure builds, there might not be any murder. We need to teach kids in school about feelings, not just punish them when they act out, but help them understand how feelings push them to act out and what they can do to avoid it. Everyone in the class must pass a test on this subject; it is essential to the learning process. They need to learn about ADD and what causes it, assuming the shrinks manage to learn about it as well. We can feel for all the murder victims and for the killer too. It is too late for him, his life is over; but let us change the zeitgeist of schools and the military and save lives.