DDorothy Otto Lewis knows her way of interviewing the dice. Clinical psychiatrist Lewis estimates he has visited more than a hundred murderers, death row inmates and some of America’s most infamous serial killers, including Arthur Scross and Ted Bundy. She has confirmed numerous death sentences for research, unequivocal killers – almost always on behalf of the defense madness plea, leading to New Yorker profiles and becoming abusive at times.
As shown in Crazy, not insane, the impossibly busy Alex Gibbons (totally under control, agents of Chaos, both from earlier this year) are featured in an HBO documentary, Lewis drowns out a few thin parts that some would dare or consider approaching. It seeks neither condemnation nor revenge, but seeks information: an empirical sketch of the dark abilities of the human mind, the boundary of empathy for the sick mind.
Louise, now in her 80s, is very beautiful, clear and measured; On camera, she credits a metaphorical understanding of crime in the United States with holes in old records over the years with uncertain curiosity and unsettled concern about possible missing diagnoses, and in particular the confluence of factors – “recipe for violence” – such as Makes. The film combines the evolution of Lewis’s research with his philosophical findings of the examination of murdered individuals over the years: first and foremost, the belief in the underlying evil. “You understand that when you are talking to these people who have actually committed some extraordinary acts of violence, there is an atmosphere that has created it,” he told the Guardian. “These people were not born dangerous. They were not born evil.
“You get a combination of factors, environmental and internal, that makes a person very violent,” Lewis said. “I don’t think anyone is born evil. Or, perhaps you say that we are all born with the power of evil, and you control it differently. “
Evil, which she pointed out in a controversial 2002 interview with Bill O’Reilly embedded in the film, is a religious concept, not a medical or scientific one. Crazy, not insane, the definition, testing and identification of so-called biological and psychic expressions outside of spiritual determinism, and the philosophical evolution from fixation, as a Jewish child in New York in 1940, seeks career intentions on “what makes the Nazis tick.” , For a long-standing belief against innate violence.
Along with longtime collaborator Dr. Jonathan Pincus, Lewis, a psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital in New York, and a professor at Yale University’s Center for Child Studies, identified three common factors among the most violent offenders: the risk of mental illness, particularly psychosis; Abnormal brain disorders, especially the temporal or frontal lobes that govern emotional regulation and impulse control; And almost always, the horrific abuse of childhood, often buried out of reach of memory and absorbed by some manifestation of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly and most commonly known as Multiple Personality Disorder.
Lewis, widely covered by Arthur Schoros, who terrorized the Rochester area of New York in the late 1980s, introduced the dissociative identity disorder as a defense of insanity in the 1980s (and had a blister pressing on both his temporal lobes and probably an accidental lobe). Stained on), Lewis was widely fired. Dissociative Identity Disorder is now listed in the DSM (American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), although some psychiatrists dismiss Lewis’ diagnosis as an impression of outside personality.
Lewis, both on film and on the phone, frequently supports his diagnosis with evidence of identity divided into past records – old letters, diaries, schoolwork and even artwork, clearly displaying different signatures, signatures, vocabulary and spelling patterns. . personas. He always finds evidence for childhood abuse beyond the prisoner’s memory: by physical marks, by interviews with family members, or in the parents’ medical records.
Crazy, not insane, a personal study of a person’s ability to apply clinical care to the most important questions of evil is simply an investigation of what makes a killer. De Le Lewis is a psychiatrist, researched curious researcher, archivist of Dissociative Identity Disorder; She is the mother of two children, the widow of her beloved husband Mel, the curator of her memoirs. Asked how she shared the horrible knowledge about her work from her home life, Lewis replied, “It should be clear from now on that I am no different. There are some really hard things you find, like in the past. Horrible and chilling scars of physical abuse, but “this is the kind of check you are willing to do if you want to see these types of patients. If not, stay in a private office fee, and you won’t have to endure such things.”
Then, what allows her to endure? The ability to face the black hole of darkness, the ability to follow the philosophical pretzels of guilt, complexity and the limits of empathy? “I don’t know … I’m just me,” he replied. “But I think I go to a death row inmate, an exam or a serial killer exam, with the same open mind, I have if someone comes to my private office fee.”
That open-mindedness extended to Bundy, the paradigmatic American serial killer, a .and manipulator who promoted the image of the “normal” and the savage charmer. Lewis, by contrast, found out through family interviews that Bundy had an incredible, interesting childhood story; His first three years were marked by instability and potential abuse at the hands of his unstable grandfather, who pretended to be his father. Even more provocative, Lewis admitted that she had misdiagnosed Bundy during her lifetime; In the final third of the film, Lewis argues that Bundy included his grandfather’s name, based on letters provided by Bundy’s wife, as well as letters showing some alternate persons and multiple signatures.
Throughout the film, Lewis argues for clearly imagining what can be learned if society addresses the moral condition as a clinical condition. With opposition to racial justice and national accountability (for some) on America’s criminal justice system, this summer’s mainstream recognition of the prison abolition movement is a similar invitation to imagine a less-oriented, more revenge-oriented world. Yet much of the discussion of prison abolition is also osed: what to do with the world’s Ted Bundies? Lewis argues the whole crazy, not mad against the death penalty; She argues that Bundy could have given invaluable insights into the minds of the most sought-after assassins. But it does not advocate changing sentences or removing l-k-ups for people with homosexual attitudes or track records. “Right now, I don’t think we really know how to do a lot of these solutions – you have to protect society until we know how to do it.” “It’s ridiculous to say, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry for him and so what happened, so let’s let him go.’ “It’s both crazy and insane.”
For all the pop cultural connections to Lewis’s work – a close comparison of Clarice Starling, the ever-present and fascinating fascination with Bundy (see: Netflix’s Zack Efron-starring Extreme Weekend, Shockingly Evil and Ville), and often the genre of true crime. Not much interest in the fictional depiction of serial killers. Neither was she keen to discuss the true crime – “I’m not familiar with that style unless it applies to everyone I’ve seen.” “I can’t comment on people fascinated by it.”
Lewis, however, pointed to another “current atrocity,” which “if you will, is to ‘separate children from their parents at the border’,” the kind of childhood trauma he has long studied. The main component of violence. “It’s torture,” he said, referring to the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy of separating families. “Anyone who doesn’t really know is really a very immoral, very loving upbringing,” he said.
“These people here – I don’t know if you can call these men, because she was a woman [the secretary of homeland security, Kirstjen Nielsen] Who signed on [the policy] – But all these men shook hands and said, yes, go ahead, do it, ” he said. “And you will wonder: What on earth is there to do?”
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