Killing Disorders
Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress by Rachel M. MacNair
Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences Of Killing
Universe Press, 2005
(207 pages, $17.95, paperback)
reviewed by Anne Barbeau Gardiner
Even though human nature so resists causing death or harm to others that those who do it often suffer severe psychological problems, social scientists who study post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) almost never focus on the perpetrator, except in cases of “abusive violence” or “atrocities.”
Rachel MacNair, an independent researcher and director of the Institute for Integrated Social Analysis, does so in this very timely and important study of what she has named “perpetration-induced traumatic stress.” (She observes that “the concept that perpetration is itself a form of suffering is not unusual in religious literature.”)
Shell-Shocked
In the first chapter, she sifts through research done on combat veterans, which oddly enough rarely distinguishes those soldiers who killed intentionally from those who did not, and yet, as she demonstrates, the post-trauma symptoms of the former are worse than those of the latter. Indeed, “those who had killed in light combat had a higher mean score [of PTSD] than those who had not killed in heavy combat.”
The symptoms, years later, may include sudden rages, emotional numbing, insomnia, panic attacks, flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive thoughts and imagery, hyper-arousal, self-hatred, and substance abuse. Some of these reactions were once vaguely described as “shell shock,” “battle fatigue,” and “soldier’s heart” until the symptoms were studied more closely.
One reason there has been no focus on veterans who suffered perpetration-induced traumatic stress is that there is a consensus that the veteran has no reason to suffer apart from having committed “atrocities.” Only the villainous are supposed to suffer the psychological consequences of killing.
Looking at the testimony of public executioners and police officers, MacNair finds that even though their killings are socially sanctioned, a number still suffer post-traumatic stress similar to that endured by combat veterans. She cites Fred Allen, who after assisting in 120 executions was haunted by intrusive imagery: “Just like taking slides in a film projector and having a button and just pushing a button and just watching over and over, him, him, him.” She also cites John Robert Radclive, a former Canadian executioner, who lamented: “Now at night when I lie down, I start up with a roar as victim after victim comes up before me.”
In a chapter on the Nazis, she recounts how gas chambers were devised to create a “distance between executioner and victim” because of the “major psychological difficulties” developed by the Einsatzkommandos, earlier murder squads whose members would often commit suicide, go mad, or sink into alcoholism. One of these members, who had not even seen his victims’ faces when he shot them, lamented that he was haunted by their necks.
Anne Barbeau Gardiner is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She has published on Dryden, Milton, and Swift, as well as on Catholics of the 17th century.
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