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Johanna Gallers, May 11, 2006
The May 2006 MWA-Colorado Chapter meeting featured
a talk by Dr. Johanna Gallers, a psychiatrist and trained FBI profiler.
She has taught at Metropolitan State College, Mesa State College, California
State University, Northridge and several other colleges and universities
in Colorado and Los Angeles; and received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology
from the California School of Professional Psychology in Los Angeles in
1984. In private practice for 22 years in New York City and Los Angeles,
she founded and directed a counseling center in Los Angeles that specialized
in treating survivors of sexual and physical abuse. Additionally, she
served as a consultant on a congressionally mandated study of the effects
of combat exposure on Vietnam veterans, as well as a training coordinator
and consultant to a number of organizations specializing in the treatment
of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in various victim populations. In 1991,
Dr. Gallers completed specialized training in Criminal Profiling and Crime
Scene Analysis provided by the FBI.
Gallers opened her presentation by saying that the
psychopaths among us are born, not made. While serial killers tell a consistent
story: violent home life, abuse as a child, bad parenting, etc., there
must be a genetic predisposition inborn in a person's brain before a serial
killer will emerge.
"Whether or not someone becomes a serial killer or
a non-violent psychopath, that's where environment comes in," she said.
"There are psychopaths among us who never turn violent. Those are the
ones who grew up in healthy homes with good parents. But they're still
psychopaths. It's in their brains."
Decades of study has shown that this genetic anomaly
alters the way emotions are processed in the brain, she said. In normal
people, inside the Limbic system of our brains, the amygdela processes
negative words and images. However, the amygdela does not work in the
brains of psychopaths. This birth defect leaves its victims to process
such stimuli in the visual cortex, and the emotion that should accompany
the perception of violence is just not there, and cannot be developed.
It's like they're watching a two-dimensional movie throughout their lives,
because there is no depth to any of their experiences.
Gallers used the example of language. There's denotative
language, which is limited to definition of words; and there's connotative
language, which allows us to bring an emotional context to the words we
use. Psychopaths cannot respond connotatively or even understand the reference.
"A psychopath will say the words 'I love you' because he
knows that's what a woman wants to hear, and it will lead to a positive
result," Gallers said. "But he will not be able to feel the words. He
will not really understand why those words are so important. That doesn't
matter to him, as long as they get him what he wants. Words are manipulative
tools."
The vast majority of psychopaths are male (90 percent),
and the few female psychopaths have different brain-wave patterns than
males, so whatever it is that triggers this genetic trait is limited to
men, Gallers said. There are other physical and psychological traits they
all have in common.
They all have a very low resting heart rate.
As children, there is a consistent pattern for every one
of them: fire setting, late-age bed wetting and cruelty to animals.
They all meet the clinical definition of malignant, narcissistic
extroverts.
This definition is quite specific. Malignant narcissists
internalize a self-hatred that leads them to compensate by creating a
grandiose fantasy life. They fantasize that they're perfect. And they
burn with resentment when they're reminded that they're not.
"We all know narcissists, people who need to be the center
of attention. They might be boring but they're not psychopaths," Gallers
said. "But malignant narcissists need to exact revenge for the wrongs
they perceive. As children they will begin to fantasize about taking hostages
or hurting others.
There is usually a psycho-sexual component in their fantasies
from a fairly early age."
Of course, with this kind of diagnostic precision, the question
of what to do with the knowledge becomes problematic.
"Today we can pick these kids out very early on," Gallers
said. "Teachers know who they are. Therapists know who they are. The problem
is, there's no cure for it, and parents generally do not want to hear
that their child is a psychopath."
Making the issue particularly thorny is the fact that therapy
is useless in such cases. There is no drug that will make the amygdela
"switch on." Therapy in fact will exacerbate the problem, because a psychopath
will learn just that much better how to manipulate words in therapy.
"They'll be brought in for treatment to deal with obsessive-compulsive
behavior," Gallers said."Well, they're not necessarily stupid. They will
learn what to say and how to say it to get the appropriate response from
a therapist - that is, that they're OK and they can stop coming. Once
they've succeeded at conning the therapist, their fantasies can continue
and in fact will become more grandiose."
"Their obsessions are often sexual in nature as well," she
said. "And it's very often violently sexual. The stimulation needs to
be over the top in order to have an effect, since there's no emotion behind
it." As fantasies progress, and the psychopath falls deeper into the spell
of his own narcissistic need for gratification, there's more of a risk
that violence will ensue. Only a very strong sense of discipline can make
a difference.
Especially in cases where the child is in an abusive home,
perhaps exposed to violence or sexual activity as a young person, there's
almost nothing that can be done to keep such a child from turning into
a killer, Gallers said.
"So what do you do? There's no cure. The only appropriate
thing to do is put them in military school and teach them discipline and
how to take orders so they don't turn violent randomly. They become assassins,
snipers, killers who are trained to only kill on command."
As to the issue of being extroverts, Gallers said that applies
to the psychopath's need to have external stimuli. The internal life of
a psychopath is stunted by their inability to feel true emotion and to
feel empathy. So while they might be loners, they are actually extroverted
in that they base their feelings of self-worth on what others think -
or on what they believe others think.
"With some few exceptions, these are not articulate, socially
adept people," Gallers said. "They need to express their grandiose fantasies
somehow. Violence allows them domination. It allows them to express revenge
for slights. It allows them to be in control."
Control, in fact, is very important to the self-image of
the malignant narcissist.
"Psychopathic killers are very organized. They bring their
weapons with them, they've planned everything out, and they don't leave
bodily fluids or other evidence behind. This makes it extremely difficult
to catch them," Gallers said. "It takes meticulous police work, and even
then luck plays a part. Disorganized killers usually are caught right
away. They are impulse-driven. They leave forensic evidence that's easy
to track and they leave other clues behind. Organized psychopath serial
killers are a different story all together."
One small relief in considering the careers of serial killers,
Gallers said, is that while they are never cured, they eventually do stop.
"They outgrow it," she said.
As an example, she pointed to the BTK killer in Kansas.
"He was not going to be caught," she said. "It had been more than a decade
since he'd killed, and he wasn't interested in killing again. He was done
killing. But his narcissism got him caught. He wanted to tell the world
he was a successful serial killer. He made the conscious decision to allow
himself to be caught, knowing he would spend the rest of his life in prison,
because he had to be recognized as this notorious, successful killer."
Gallers peppered her talk with references to many well-known
serial killers, including Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer. Her training
has brought her in contact with many serial killers and with the investigators
who profile, track and catch them.
"When we're faced with a serial killer's handiwork, there's
really not a lot we can do but to study the victims and figure out everything
and anything they might have in common," she said. "We start with a thorough
crime scene analysis, and then a victim analysis."
The choice of victim will tell investigators quite a lot
about the killer. For instance, the Green River Killer chose prostitutes,
women who were easy prey. This was a murderer who was looking for people
who would not be missed quickly. On the other hand, a killer like Ted
Bundy looked for victims to make a statement. He chose college-educated,
attractive, desirable women who lived fairly protected lives. He did so
because they took skill to hunt and kill. He admitted as much to the FBI
officers who interviewed him before he was executed.
In America, with a few exceptions, our serial killers are
white men, she said. White men in this culture feel a sense of entitlement
and empowerment, and the psychopath serial killers in this population
feel that they are, for whatever reason, kept from this position of power.
They are angry and feel entitled to take lives in order to show the world
that they are powerful. The psychopaths who do not turn into killers in
this population become the unethical CEO who plunders his company's assets
or the con men who find power via other means.
Besides the choice of victim and the specific crime scene
analysis, profilers and other investigators hunting a serial killer consider
the signature behavior exhibited in each murder. This is different from
the Modus Operandi, the M.O., which can and does change as the killer
learns and the situations alter. But what never changes, Gallers said,
is the signature behavior: the ritual around the killing that allows the
violent psychopath to live out his personal fantasy.
"There are two kinds of profiling," she said. "There's Inductive
profiling, which is the generalized categories we've been talking about
- like white male, between 25-35 years old, bad youth. There are many
inductive profiles in FBI files.
"Then there's Deductive profiling, and each one of those
profiles is unique and developed strictly by the evidence. The investigators
drop all preconceived notions and consider the scene, the M.O., the victim
analysis, everything specific to the crimes at hand, in order to make
the profile of an individual killer."
What with all the talk of serial killers, rapists, pedophiles,
and other deviant behavior, the mystery writers listening to Gallers were
a sobered bunch as she wound up her presentation and answered numerous
questions.
Gallers tried to reassure us.
"The thing to keep in mind is that there are really very
few serial killers. There are very few people who kill," she said. "And
most people who kill will kill only once and never again, because they
killed for a specific reason. The taboo against killing is very much alive
and well and operating. Perhaps only one percent of the entire population
is made up of psychopaths. We hear more about serial killers because we're
better now at catching them, and the media is very good at publicizing
them."
For those Mystery Writers who would like to study more on
the subject, Gallers recommends two texts: The Psychopathic Mind: Origins,
Dynamics and Treatment by J. Reid Meloy and Criminal Profiling:
An Introduction to Behavioral Evidence Analysis, by Brent E. Turvey.
— submitted by Lee Ann Fleming
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