Skip to primary content

Insanity | Aug 08 2000

“I should have gone to college and gone into real estate and got myself an aquarium, that’s what I should have done.” – Jeffrey Dahmer

As part of my research for my novel-in-progress, I recently spoke with a friend, a forensic psychologist, about sexual deviancy. In the course of our conversation, my friend said something that astounded me: most serial killers are sane. As an example she cited Jeffrey Dahmer, the guy who killed and dismembered several dozen young men. (Did he also eat them? I think he may have eaten some, or parts of some. In any case, he definitely killed them all and dismembered some, storing their remains in his freezer.) Dahmer was sane, my friend said, and her reasoning – the reasoning of her profession – hinged on whether Dahmer could distinguish between right and wrong. About this there could be no doubt: Dahmer went to great lengths to conceal his actions, a sure sign of a person who knows he’s done something wrong, something for which he would be punished if caught.

I assumed that my friend was talking about criminal responsibility – a more narrow concept than sanity, one that applies only within a legal context – but it soon became clear that her definition applied more generally. The key issue was whether the person possessed an accurate picture of reality.
“So whose picture can be said to be inaccurate?” I asked.

“People who suffer from extreme paranoia, hallucinations, delusions. People who believe the KGB is after them. People who think they’re god, or that god is instructing them to do things.” (Nearly every Christian saint was insane by this definition; but that’s another matter.)

It’s funny what I thought when she said this. I thought of arguments I’ve had with computer manufacturers, or rather their tech support people, about whether a particular problem was hardware- or software-related. Tech support types inevitably claim that one’s problems are software-related, which means that they, the tech support types, are not responsible for fixing anything, that in fact they can’t fix anything because nothing is broken.

My friend was saying that Dahmer’s problem was software-related. Yes, something strange had gotten into the machinery, but the machinery itself was in good working condition: Dahmer could hear what we hear and see what we see, and that’s what matters.

Maybe I’m being unfair. Probably I am. Because now that I think of it, my friend did say that when called in to interview people who’ve committed sexual crimes, she has difficulty dealing with the so-called sane ones, that it sickens her to be in same room with such people. So it’s not as though she equates sanity with morality.

This is what interests me – that insanity and immorality are conceptionally unrelated; that it’s not insane to be immoral, nor is it sane to be moral; that the two have nothing to do with one another.

Perhaps this is how it should be; I don’t know. But the fact is, Dahmer is crazy. It is crazy to murder innocent people and to cut them up and possibly eat them. It’s not just that these things are immoral (plenty of things are immoral without being crazy; say, cheating on your taxes); it’ that it takes a crazy person to be that immoral.

Psychology passes the buck here, and in doing so becomes a kind of tech support function for humans, one applicable only in cases in which people come to believe grossly false information about themselves or their environment.

Call me stubborn, but I still find this astounding. So much so that I approached my friend a second time to make sure I had understood her correctly. She assured me I had. Dahmer is sane, she said – or was sane, having long since been murdered in prison by a fellow inmate, a convicted killer on anti-psychotic medication who claimed to be Christ because he was a carpenter and his mother’s name was Mary.

You know: a crazy person.