When it comes to society’s competing viewpoints on the
trophy hunting and commercial trapping of wolves, a number of angles exist.
Already in the public discourse and thereby available to collective awareness,
regardless of positions taken, are especially the voices of science, of
ranching, of environmentalism, and of human-animal ethics. There is even the
voice of the social sciences, in general, arguing for a new narrative.
This essay proposes, in addition to existing
perspectives, that there needs to be a psychoanalytic one. Our “wolf
management” goals attempt only to reduce the lethal “taking” of wolves, and of
aiming for a wolf population that allows Canis lupus to
reproduce in numbers that prevent extinction.
But if one stops and thinks about it, to kill some in
order to protect others is as dubious as are the concepts of “fair chase
hunting” and “ethical hunting.” That is, what hunted being would find it fair
or ethical to be killed just because humans have changed the rules of the hunt?
All of these concepts inhere a de-sentient-ization – as I am
calling it – of the wolf, beings who “perceive and feel things,” as the Oxford
English Dictionary proposes.
It is akin to our dehumanization of some members of homo
sapiens, but even worse, in that we dehumanize only “some” members of
humanity, whereas we de-sentient-alize “all” members of Canis lupus.
There is a gap in our deliberations, a hitherto
societally unasked question: “What sort of person kills a wolf?” As a
psychoanalyst, I will consider relevant concepts that have emerged over the 125
years, with Sigmund Freud’s founding of the discipline. Specifically, I’ll take
up the factor of psychopathology, of diagnosis, as an arena that needs to
become part of the public discourse, part of what we need to collectively, even
if dispositional, talk about, and to consider what to do with from
societal and political perspectives as informed by clinical ones. This paper is
therein an initial foray.
When a person authorizes themself to trophy hunt or to
commercially trap this iconic being, there is, in the view offered here, always
a personality construction or structure, a self-formation, that has gone awry,
either malignantly affecting the entirety of an individual’s makeup, or a more
circumscribed effect which is more localized and damaging. I will reflect upon
each of them psychoanalytically to a degree that gives the public enough
information to reflectively wade into the problem.
The first type I’ll address is the most disturbed and also the most disturbing. It is that of the psychopath. It arises from profound disturbances occurring in the most vulnerable formative time of one’s life, that which is before the child’s development of language and thus to which the child can only respond by a malformation in their very personhood foundation. It is that upon which the rest of one’s entire life-orientation edifice will be built.
There are, it is true, differentiated pathologies that emerge from this
sketch. Some children in this situation will develop a depressive experience of
life, some a schizoid one, others, for example, a paranoid or a psychotic one,
based on a combination of numerous and more specific environmental provisions
coupled with whatever uniqueness and potential selfhood that the child was born
with. The psychopath, in particular, experienced from the parents a gross and
characteristic insensitivity and violent response toward the most fundamental
expressions of need. The two case examples I’ll give provide a sense of how the
parent treats their child in ways that are psychopathy-generating.
A caveat: although it is elsewhere argued that
diagnosing in absentia is subject to error due to its
exclusion of other characteristics than here available, in this case, those
objections clearly indicate a very small margin of error. And in any case, the
actions of the two following persons are far more heinous toward the wolf than
is the attribution of any diagnosis.
Wyoming is a state that makes it legal and even
celebrated to run over coyotes and wolves with snowmobiles. Wyoming so
insouciantly de-sentient-izes wild Canis lupus that they call
their “sport,” of all things, “coyote-whacking.”
Cody Roberts took it further. First of all, he
duct-taped the mouth of his victim, a yearling female wolf. Someone who can do
this, along with the rest of what I’ll describe of his actions, and do it with
the glee that he did, must be conceptualized psycho-pathogenically as having
been silenced in soul-killing ways from the beginning of his life. Like
psychopaths do, in order to support his disenfranchisement from his
developmental helplessness – and thus have a chance of maturing, Roberts
projected it into another, this cursed wolf, who was made to serve in
substituto as his own killed self, killed in both soul and body.
He then enacted his own soul-killer, with whom he is
defensively identified. Roberts’ victim was made to suffer the same senseless
violence that he himself cannot recover from, cannot allow himself to think,
indeed does not have the ability to consider. Fueled by the unprocessed fury
that he experienced, his wrapping his victim’s mouth with duct tape rendered
her as incapable as his child self was to speak out against the murderous
assault. Just as Roberts’ voice was stolen from him, he stole the wolf’s from
her. And then he went sadistically further.
Let’s make this perfectly clear. Roberts not only ran
her down once. He turned around and did it again. He then loaded her onto his
snowmobile and rode down to a bar in the small town where he lived, a bar at
which the patrons mostly knew each other. He proceeded to parade the gorgeous
young wolf, and to have photos and videos taken of him tormenting her, as he
presented himself with what I can only call a “shit-eating grin.” At one point,
he even bent over face-to-face as though to kiss her, but he jerked away when
she somehow summoned the energy to attempt to strike his face, foiled only by
the duct tape. She was left in a corner, laying there in obvious exhaustion and
torment. After a time, he took her outside and killed her.
Wanting to be seen as a strong and fearless man, he unrealizably
showed himself to be a thug, a bully, and a coward. One person, albeit
surreptitiously, disseminated photo and video accounts of this dungeon,
allowing us a glance at the psychopathologies of those present. Unlike others
who were imprisoned, laughing along with Roberts and participating in and
condoning the monstrously abusive, this witness made his or her voice heard. We
were able to see how psychopath and neurotic, addressed below, found it all
just a bit of fun!
Flouting any appreciation of contributing to the best of
humanity, not knowing what the best of humanity even is, is inextricably
psychopathic, creating one’s own law, one’s own way of operating, and requiring
others to believe that he is their guide and protector. He needs the neurotic
to be the one he “guides.”
And the neurotic wants a “protector,” and is seducible by
the likes of a Roberts to believe that he is such a one. A look now at our
second case example will lead us naturally into a look at the gullibility of
the neurotic, who in this case elected this man with 77% of the vote!
Paul Fielder, a Montana State Representative, and a
promoter of the killing of wolves, has likened wolves to wasps. If wolf pups
die directly or indirectly due to Fielder’s actions, he is not troubled. He
says that just like the larvae who are killed when he sprays a wasp nest, so
are wolf pups when their parents are killed, the pups being, to him, no more
sentient or social than popular culture imagines wasps to be.
While one can imagine that Fielder wanted to provoke for
its own sake, he has been a frequent and very loud, very public voice for the
killing and the de-sentient-ization of wolves. Like Roberts, he not only flouts
compassion but also relishes being admired for that. Also, like Roberts, he
wants to present himself as the epitome of manhood, of strength. And he wants
to be admired for that as well. In a broadly, publicly disseminated voice, he
has supported Montana’s arguably genocidal actions against the wolf.
He has promoted the killing of some 450 wolves in
Montana, a state that provides home to perhaps 900 or so wolves. He has – with
the same insouciance that Roberts shows us – presented scientifically untenable
arguments for his quotas, killing by foothold traps, from which wolves
sometimes attempt to escape by chewing off their trapped leg; and killing by
snare traps, which strangle the wolf to death; and other means of killing. He,
like others of his ilk and like those neurotics who follow him, have absolutely
no compassion for the suffering caused.
Unlike the psychopath, though, the neurotic does have
a capacity for empathy, a significant point that I will
address.
As disclaimer or caveat, let me first be very clear that
not all neurotics follow sadists. They do, however, per definitionem struggle
in one way or another, to hear and to follow their own minds, though that
struggle may resist consciousness. Thus, if they live in a culture in which
wolf de-sentient-ization has prevailed for generations, they are vulnerable to
finding validation and belonging by uncritically identifying with that very
same de-sentient-ization, without realizing that they have falsely adopted the
view as their own. Earliest psychical development, though it is perfect for no
one, was good enough for the neurotic to develop a foundation of being that is
missing in the psychopath. But it then failed them.
Subsequent to developing that foundation, we all enter
the still early phase of life in which we must cohere a selfhood within the
familial and then the social surround. If all goes well, we also build up, at
this time, a simultaneous ability to register familial and societal rigidities
or inflexible and ultimately damaging group life. And yet further, we are able
to live stably within the social order while maintaining this flexibility.
All of this is, of course, a very tall order, and most
people do not accomplish it at the developmental time that it is all first
called for. Developmental disruptions anywhere in this progression will yield
neurosis, that condition in which most humans live. Few of us, in fact, ever
become comfortable living without unrecognized overreliance on the values,
ideals, norms, and prohibitions prescribed by others, that over-reliance itself
being one way of saying what neurosis is.
As political theorist and psychoanalyst Cornelius
Castoriadis understood it, democracy is best understood as a civilizational
world wherein it itself generates free-thinking people, who themselves generate
democracy. That is, a free world, an aesthetic world rather than an ideological
one, will be peopled by those who can think for themselves. We are a long way from that, but we will remain so if we cannot take account of what
psychoanalysis has to teach us about the unconscious, and to select our respectively
unique ways of responding to it. Late in his life, Freud saw hope for humankind
and the world, although “in a far, far distant future.” He also, explicitly
written, saw any possibility for that evolution all-inclusively transforming
not only economic injustice, but also the psychical blindness.
We cannot afford for this to be a censored topic.
Joseph Scalia III, Psya.D. is a psychoanalyst in
private practice. He is Co-Director of the Institute for a Democratic
Psychoanalysis. He has served as President of both the Montana Wilderness
Association and the Gallatin Yellowstone Wilderness Alliance. With Lynne
Scalia, his most recent book is Critical Consciousness: Beyond Impasses in
Environmentalism, Psychoanalysis, and Education.
