The twentieth century, according to Sigmund Freud, would see man’s capacity for both destruction and technology bring us closer to extinction. As his prophecy came close to reality a new breed of thinker emerged who would try to steer humanity away from disaster. Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words 1/3 Human, All Too Human, BBC 2011
A refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria arrived in the leafy suburbs of Hampstead. Already viewed as one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century he had spent decades looking into the secrets of the human mind. His name was Sigmund Freud. ibid.
Jung had formulated his own ideas: he believed that each of us has an individual destiny. ibid.
Jung believed each of us must face up to our own dark side. ibid.
Another thinker would go on to find wickedness not in the individual but in the very structure of society. Stanley Milgram was born in New York to Jewish parents ... He began to ask unprecedented questions about the human capacity for cruelty. ibid.
[Stanley] Milgram’s results would stun the scientific community. ibid.
The idea that most of us are capable of performing acts of cruelty simply because someone asks us to forces us to ask key questions about how we structure society. ibid.
In Britain a radical Glaswegian psychoanalyst R D Laing was using television to speak out about his views on the sickness in society. ibid.
A persuasive lecturer who insisted doctors should listen to their patients instead of abusing them. He believed much of what we call insane behaviour could be explained by family circumstances and life experiences. ibid.
A group of thinkers came on to the scene who believed that society could be cured and that human behaviour could be improved. One of these was anthropologist Margaret Mead. ibid.
[Margaret] Mead had been roundly debunked, though some still think her theories have merit. ibid.
Later Spock wrote a book – Baby and Child Care – which changed for ever the way we relate to our children. ibid.
B F Skinner believed he had found an all-embracing antidote to the ills of society. ibid.
Skinner was the most radical practitioner of behaviourism. He believed that each person starts out as a blank slate and is moulded purely by their environment. ibid.
Skinner’s successes were seen as momentous achievements, and his work lives on in every child and employee reward system around the world. ibid.
What Skinner seems to have missed was that humans are not simply blank slates. Each of us is born with innate qualities that affect our behaviour. ibid.
In the latter part of the twentieth century a group of British thinkers would emerge who would offer radical new ideas about what makes humans tick. These thinkers would take their cues not from humans but from animals. Enter Desmond Morris who started his career as a zoologist. ibid.
The book that made Morris’s name was The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal, and it had a shocking new claim at its heart: much of our normal human behaviour is derived from our animal ancestry. ibid.
Goodall did publish, and some did draw the conclusion that violence in humans and chimps is impossible to avoid. ibid.
Are we slaves to our natural instincts or can we master our behaviour? ibid.
In 1976 Dawkins published one of the most successful science books of all time. The Selfish Gene was a radical updating of evolutionary theory. ibid.
Genes often stand the best chance of survival if rather than fighting it out individuals cooperate and look after each other. ibid.
For Dawkins then humans are not simply selfish individuals who will do whatever it takes to reproduce our genes. ibid.
This is where a century of enquiry into human behaviour fought out on the airwaves has brought us. We are undoubtedly products of our biology, and the potential for human failing will always be there. But that doesn’t mean we’re slaves to our nature. The sophistication of the human brain and the ways in which we live together have given us the power to recognise and master our worst impulses. This after all is what being human is all about. ibid.
In 1886 a young physician established a small medical practice in Vienna … A radical and controversial new way of understanding our pasts and desires … would take the world by storm. Bettany Hughes: Freud: Genius of the Modern World, BBC 2016
He started to analyse his own dreams … Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams offered a radical new understanding of human nature, with the subconscious a reservoir of repressed inner desires and irrational impulses. ibid.
Rarely seen, little known, the world of forensic psychiatry is a mystery to most of us. Life on the Psych Ward, Channel 4 2016
These patients have committed some very violent crimes. And most are here because they’ve been judged too mentally ill to be in prison. ibid.
Is it possible for some of the most dangerously unwell people in Britain to ever join the outside world? ibid.
A bed here costs four times more than prison. ibid.
In any society in this world, psychopathic individuals and some of the other deviants create a ponerogenically active network of common delusions, partially estranged from the community of normal people. Some inspirational role of the essential psychopathy in this network also appears to be a common phenomenon. Dr Andrzej Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology
The modern-day psychopath is often characterised as the stuff of nightmares. Whether they love Chianti or crossbows, Hollywood has no shortage of these charismatic, violent and impulsive monsters … It is estimated that somewhere between 300 and 400,000 psychopaths live in Britain today. Horizon: What Makes a Psychopath? BBC 2017
‘Ryan Klug and I’ve killed someone … Yeah, I slit her throat and stabbed her in the heart.’ ibid.
What makes a psychopath? ibid.
Being a violent killer doesn’t simply make one a psychopath. ibid.
This checklist has 20 traits that psychiatrists look for. ibid.
Psychopaths have around 7% less grey matter in the limbic system of the brain than non-psychopaths as well as significant differences in brain activity. ibid.
Can psychopathy be cured? ibid.
This type of group therapy could actually make them even more violent … Group therapy became a kind of empathy finishing school … to wear the mask of sanity. ibid.
World leaders seem to score highly. ibid.
The Cold War – it is about a group of scientists who believe that they had found for the first time ever a way of controlling the human mind. They were convinced they had discovered how to change human memory. Adam Curtis, The Living Dead II: You Have Used Me As A Fish Long Enough, BBC 1995
Their certainty and optimism turned to paranoia. They found themselves in a strange world in which nothing could be trusted, not even their own memories. ibid.
Penfield invited a psychiatrist called Ewen Cameron to come and join him in Montreal. Cameron was fascinated by Penfield’s work. He believed that if it was possible to change memories, one could produce better, more rational human beings. ibid.
In a Gothic mansion overlooking Montreal, it was both a psychiatric clinic and a centre for research. His [Cameron’s] aim was to find ways of changing the memories in the minds of his mentally ill patients. ibid.