The psychoanalysts depicted in New Yorker cartoons have
almost certainly never shot a gun, and you may be wondering where it is that I,
as a psychoanalyst, have the wherewithal to weigh in on something that is so
completely out of my purview. The NRA,
in fact, has determined that ALL health and mental health professionals should
not weigh in on gun control – they tweeted on November 7th (My
father’s birthday) that "Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane".
So, first of all, let me state that I live in a flyover, red
voting state – and that my family on both sides has hailed from the Midwest for
generations (and has generally been dead red in their voting habits).
My Mother and Father went bird hunting
together when they were dating – a sport each had learned and practiced with
their parents.
Even when we lived in
Florida for a time when I was growing up, I hunted ducks and mourning doves
(yes, we hunted mourning doves – and ate them, too) in Lake Okeechobee and rice
fields respectively.
I am the proud
holder of what I think used to be called a Riflery merit badge (it is now
called a
Rifle
Shooting merit badge – if you scroll
to the end of the linked BSA site, you will see an NRA banner) and learned to
shoot a revolver as part of earning that badge.
I am also proud to say that I winged a bird – an actual bird called a
snipe, not the fake kind you chase after on Boy Scout camping trips – the first
time that I shot a shotgun, but more about that later.
The “stay in your lane” comment is one that the NRA made in
response to a physician writing with concern about gun violence.
Within the psychology/psychoanalysis field
there have been a number of professionally based responses.
Jane
Tillman has written about this issue as a citizen and a suicide researcher
and
Todd
Essig has charted in a Forbes magazine blog the ways in which the NRA and
the politicians that they have supported have undermined our ability to use
data to argue for gun control by preventing federal monies from supporting
research on the relationship between guns and violence or suicide.
This post is more personal – coming from
someone who has a long relationship with guns – including both the good and the
very bad ways that they can affect a family (more about that later), but beyond
that I would like to use my psychoanalytic mind to attempt to better understand
some of our apparent irrationality about exploring the limits of our second
amendment rights.
There are of course
many reasons for the attitude that “we will only let them pry our guns out of
our cold dead fingers” exists – I will not talk about all of them, but most of
them are far from irrational.
But I do
think that some of them– such things as profits that gun manufacturers make,
while significant, are likely less important than what I am about to discuss.
My grandfather killed himself with a shotgun. He did this shortly before my parents were to
have married – they had to postpone their wedding in order to have the
funeral. There was some question about
whether his death was a suicide. He shot
himself in the shoulder – he was dressed in formal wear (a tux, I think) in preparation
for a celebratory dinner of some sort.
My father’s younger brother, my uncle Peter, found him and called for an
ambulance. There was an inquest because
his life insurance policy would pay double the face value if it was an
accidental death and nothing if it was a suicide. Ultimately the insurance company split the
difference and paid the face value of the insurance, but the record of the
inquest remained and I was able to read it as an adult after my clinical
training.
At this point, you might think that I would make a plea to
prevent the sales of all guns so that catastrophes like the one that ended my
grandfather’s life would never happen.
My intent here is different, though.
I would like to clarify two things – first that events like suicide and murder,
have impacts across generations. And
second, to clarify, but this will take some time, what I think are some of the
motives that lead gun advocates to be so rabid about avoiding what appear to be
common sense limits to weapons proliferation – something that is relevant to my
grandfather’s death – but likely not in the way you are thinking at this moment.
My father denied – in the court documents and throughout
most of his life – that his father committed suicide. He maintained that his father’s death was an
accidental death - period. And he did
this quite vehemently. Reading the court
documents made it quite clear that, while the triggering of the weapon at the
moment that it was triggered may not have been the moment that my grandfather
intended to kill himself, he was quite likely intent on killing himself. He may, for instance, have tripped on the way
to killing himself or to storing the weapon for later use in killing himself,
as my uncle Peter has surmised.
My grandfather was the owner and proprietor of the family
business – a department store that his father – my great grandfather – had
started. This business had survived the
depression and was now, in the 1950s, a going concern that supported my
grandfather and his family. My father
was employed at the store. But a fire at
the store about a month before my grandfather’s death had created a crisis for
its continued viability. For three weeks
after the fire, my grandfather had been inconsolable – he blamed himself for
the fire – fearing that he had not closed the grate on the furnace before going
home on the night when the fire occurred.
For the last week of his life, he had returned to being himself and his
mood seemed buoyant again.
Reading the above account from the court documents as a
clinician, I was struck by how frequently a positive change in mood occurs when
people who are depressed have made a plan to kill themselves – they see a way
out of their predicament and their mood lifts.
I became convinced that my grandfather had killed himself. I guessed that
my grandfather felt something like, “I have gone from being the breadwinner for
my family to having endangered them.
They would be better off if I weren’t here.”
I am aware of having gone into more detail than I needed to
in the story of my grandfather’s death.
I think I did this in part to give you context, but also because I
needed to convince you that his death was somehow justified – or
understandable. I think that, though I
never knew him, I am protective of him and that I want to prevent your negative
judgment of him – and I think that betrays that I have judged him – I think I
feel ashamed of having a grandfather who killed himself. And if that is the case, I believe that it is
even more the case that my father’s denial of his father’s suicide was, in large
part, a way to avoid feeling the tremendous shame that I feel to a much smaller
degree.
I knew very little about my grandfather from my father. He almost never spoke about him. One little thing that I knew about him from
Dad was that he wrote Dad a letter every week that Dad was in college. I knew this in part because my father felt
badly that he had not done the same with me.
But it was only when Dad was digging around trying to find evidence that
he had been in the army because the records of his service had been lost in a
St. Louis fire that I read the letters his father had written. My father had letters that were written not
only to him, but also to his mother and to another family member – in one case
three letters from the same week. Each
of the letters was very warm and focused, despite being written in the same
week, on very different events that had occurred in town. Each letter was tailored to the interests of
the reader – and my grandfather clearly had that reader in mind – weaving their
interests into the stories that he told.
But it was not just that grandfather used content that was of interest
to the reader, but he also clearly and warmly expressed his affection for the
reader – talking about shared experiences and the way the reader had brought
him joy at some point in his life.
It was very odd to discover that my grandfather – a person
that I knew so little about other than the fact of his death – was such a warm
and caring person. I should have known
that from the way that my family operated.
Despite his three sons having moved to very different parts of the
country, we all regularly got together at Thanksgiving at one or the other
brother’s homes. Grandmother was always there
as well as most all of the first cousins.
We generally had between 18 and 22 for dinner and the annual football
game. All was not peaches and roses –
there were regular dust ups and a fair amount of bullying – especially at the
football game – but there was also a lot of warmth. And there was a contrast between the warmth
of the family and the feelings between my father and his children.
My father, after he left the family business, became a
travelling salesman, using the electronics skills he had learned in the
military to sell electrical systems to engineers who were largely working to
improve the functioning of automated factories.
This meant that he was generally on the road for two to three and
sometimes four nights a week. He was
largely physically absent. But he was
also psychologically absent. He had a
hard time connecting with his children about their day to day lives – whether that
was our sporting events or our homework and school achievements or our social
lives. At home he would frequently spend
the weekends immersed in tasks that involved fixing things and our helping him
frequently involved holding a flashlight so he could see his work better, but
rarely involved interacting in a more give and take manner.
Now, we could just chalk his emotional distance up to his
being a typically emotionally remote man of the mid twentieth century except
that he could be remarkably interested in others and quite compassionate in his
engagement with them. This included both
friends that he made through work and through his engagement at church, but
also with our cousins. At a recent
family reunion, the spouse of one of my cousins talked about the importance of
the letters that her husband frequently received from my father while my cousin
was in college as helping to sustain him through difficult and lonely times,
something I did not previously know about.
Additionally, there were things that my father could teach us – and teach
us well and warmly. One of these was
skiing. He was a good and patient
teacher and truly enjoyed being with us and talking with us when we were riding
up ski lifts together. And I think it
important that this activity was one that he learned on his own – this was not
a family activity for him growing up. It
was also the case that, as the result of consistent efforts on my part, he and I
became, as adults, quite close and were able to establish the kind of
relationship that I had longed for as a child.
My hypothesis about the primary reason for my father’s
physical and emotional distance when he was more actively parenting (or not
parenting) my siblings and me is that this would have involved remembering his
father and the interactions that he had with him as a son – and that this was
too painful for him because he was, on some very deep level, profoundly ashamed of his action and, I think, he felt betrayed by his father’s choice to leave him through
suicide.
I have some support for my hypothesis. As a result of my conversations with him, my
father ultimately acknowledged that he had always believed that his
father had committed suicide.
Unfortunately my father died before I talked through with him his
reasons for denying his father’s death to be a suicide for as long as he
did. I tried out my hypothesis on my
Uncle Peter recently, and he felt that it had some merit. Even if it is “true”, there were certainly
other factors that accounted for his emotional distance – I’m sure Freud would
want us to work on the Oedipal elements, and personality theorists would talk
about his being primarily introverted (though functioning, as a travelling
salesman, as an extrovert). I’m sure
these and many other factors played into our relationship. But I think his father’s suicide was a very
important factor and one that was largely hidden from my – and likely from his –
view.
So the point of this lengthy tale is that suicide has an
impact to the third generation. Indeed,
I’m sure it is a factor in the relationship between my son and me. And this in the context of a family that
apparently recovered well from it. The land
the store was on was owned by the family and through a series of real estate
deals, it became a consistent source of income for my grandmother who was able
to live independently (and visit us regularly wherever we were in the US, and
sometimes abroad) for the rest of her life.
For many families a suicide can have much greater and easier to track
deleterious economic effects and these do not take the kind of psychoanalytic
sleuthing I have engaged in to discover subtle impacts across time. Neither suicide nor murder is good for the
families in which they occur.
So, to reiterate, this story is not that this suicide could
have been prevented.
Suicides are as
variable as the people who engage in them, and I think, for reasons I will
spell out shortly, that my grandfather likely would have figured out how to
kill himself without having access to guns.
But for many people, easy access to a means to kill oneself can be demonstrated
by how suicide rates plummet when those easy means are not accessible – as
a New York
Times Sunday Magazine article articulated ten years ago.
All that said, I can’t help but wonder if my
grandfather would not have taken his life if he did not have such an easy means
to do it with.
But the point of the
story is that suicide (and murder) are complex physical and psychological
events that we should work to prevent with whatever means we have available to
us.
Have you ever held a loaded weapon in your hand? There is an awesome feeling of power that
goes along with it. There is also an
awesome feeling – or should be – of responsibility. This is related, in no small measure to fear –
fear of what could go wrong if this thing fired unintentionally or hit and
unintended target. There is no going
back from the impact of the bullet.
If you have ever been trained in using a weapon – as I have –
the first and most important part of the training is gun safety. Recently I was talking with two men who first
held guns in their hands in the military.
Both talked about how the rigidity of basic training became ramped up
when gun training began. Those in charge
of the range laid down the law about when and where a weapon could be pointed. In my own training the first and foremost
rule was never ever point a weapon at another human being. After that, there were many rules about
keeping weapons unloaded except when prepared to fire them, etc. As I later learned about the treatment of
suicidal patients, the first three rules were safety, safety, safety and then,
after that, other things could be introduced.
Weapons are very powerful tools. Remember the snipe I injured the first time I
shot a shotgun? I found it on the ground
flapping its one good wing and running in circles as its other wing dragged,
broken, on the ground. I felt terrible
and wanted to put it out of its misery as quickly as possible. I loaded my shotgun and shot it from point
blank range, shooting its head clean off its body. I was quickly told that this is not the way
to humanely end the life of an injured bird – it is a waste of ammunition and
can make the bird inedible as it is destroyed rather than killed. The proper means to kill a wounded bird is to
pick it up and beat its head against the butt of the gun until it is dead.
If you are not a hunter, that last line may have come as a
bit of a shock to you. It may feel
brutal and inhumane. In fact, it is very
quick and effective and becomes common place when hunting. It is also something that is a common part of
consuming meat of any kind – most domestic animals killed for consumption are
killed with blows to the head. We, in
picking up already butchered meat at the grocery store, are protected from the
course of events that has led to our being able to eat another animal. But hunters are not. They are engaged in the control of the life
and death of other animals on a regular basis.
How individuals respond to this – the ways that they differ
from each other and the different ways that each of them responds to it – is something
that is worth studying – and here I am asking you to consider the manifold
responses in a psychological thought experiment as an important aspect of the
psychology of our attachment to firearms.
There is a feeling of power, as I mentioned earlier, and control that is
certainly part of the process of hunting (and I assume, though I have never
served in the military, that this is true of being trained to use weapons to
kill humans and actually using them to do that). There is also a level of comfort with our
basic biologic being and with – as we prosaically call it – the circle of
life. We live until we die. And death is a part of our lived experience
when we hunt in a way that it is not when the dead are only occasionally confronted
on our grocery shelves and in funerals.
When Essig,
in the blog cited above, wonders about the
irrational position of the NRA that the answer to gun problems is more guns, I
think it may help to understand the psychology behind the NRA’s huge funding,
the tenacity and shrewdness of their lobbying, and the appeal of their message
to a broad swath of the American people.
As Antonio Damasio has recently pointed out in
The Strange Order of Things (following and updating
Freud’s insightful
but flawed analysis in
Civilization and Its Discontents), we have only been “civilized” for the past 10-15,000
years.
We have millions of years of
evolution that selected us before that – and Damasio maintains that evolution consistently
favored those of us (he starts with bacteria) that could band together against
a common enemy over those who did not.
We
formed clans or family groups long before we began to build cities, much less
states and countries.
The sense that we
will prevail by banding together
in order
to have greater strength against a foe is deeply coded in our DNA.
My position is not that there is a simple solution to the
impasse about how to properly manage the second amendment, but that our search
for something workable may be more fruitful when we acknowledge the roots of apparently
irrational positions like some of those of the NRA. The second amendment was put in place to
protect our ability to protect ourselves against an imperial and corrupt power
that would control us from without – as England controlled the colonies. As we self-styled educated folks band
together to attempt to eradicate a force that threatens us (the NRA and
unregulated guns) and we use the power of the pen (and word processor) to fight
that dangerous and corrupt force, it might help us to realize that we are
functioning, in that banding together, just as they are and that we may be
driven by the same primordial forces that have kept us “safe” for time
immemorial. If we can view the NRA and
its adherents as people who are driven as we are to protect ourselves, and if
we see them as being as committed to safety as we are, we might be able to find
some common ground – some way to assure us all that we are all better off with
limited but powerful safeguards – the kinds of safeguards that are woven into
all sanctioned forms of weaponry training.
We – both the NRA and those of us who do not believe that unlimited
proliferation of weapons will protect us – want to live in a world that is safe.
My grandfather came, I believe, to see himself as being a source
of danger to his family rather than being a force for good.
I feel great sorrow that he felt that to be
the case – or something like it, I cannot know what he was actually thinking.
I think that when we are able to see each
other as allies rather than enemies – when we are able to envision the world as
an organic whole that it is ours to preserve and protect (and I know of no
greater advocates for the environment than most hunters), we, together, can
figure out how to better protect ourselves.
If we can delay the action of suicide, we can work to help change the
perspective of those who believe that it is a rational action.
Over time, the formerly suicidal person can
come to realize the value of their contributions and can become generative –
and support that generativity in their offspring.
We can help them move from a position of feeling isolated and alone to a position of feeling connected - the best way to prevent suicide - and war. I’m not sure that the kind of help that my
grandfather needed to make this transition was available to him – not just
because his small town likely did not have a psych ward, but because he likely
did not feel that he could confide the things that he was feeling in
others.
I think he, himself, likely felt
both shame, but also reassurance at the course of action that he mapped
out - he had, on his own - worked out a solution.
If we fail to connect with each
other, to see each other as allies against what is truly threatening us, we sow
seeds of poison that can take generations to purify.
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