1 Boring Old Man

The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy
by Harold F. Searles

Although it is a common belief that one person can drive another crazy, no one has systematically studied either the modes and motives for doing so or how this idea appears in the relation of patient and therapist. Searles describes a number of modes which have in common ‘the initiating of … interpersonal interaction which tends to … activate various areas of [the other’s] personalityin opposition to one another’. He lists eight motives encountered in schizophrenic patients or in their parents which may account for the desire to drive another person crazy:

1. the psychological equivalent of murder
2. the attempt to externalize threatening craziness in oneself
3. the attempt to find surcease from a situation of intolerable conflict and suspense
4. the child’s wish to expose covert craziness in the parent
5. the desire to find a ‘soul mate’ (the precariously integrated parent is often a lonely person who hungers for someone to share his private emotional experiences and distorted views of the world)
6. a conscious or unconscious desire to draw the other person into a healthier closeness, which miscarries because of the weakness of the child’s ego
7. the mother of the schizophrenic keeps before the child the threat that she will go crazy if he becomes an individual by separating himself psychologically from her
8. the attainment, perpetuation, or recapture of the gratifications inherent in the symbiotic relation

More concretely, driving others crazy seems to be a standard military procedure. Braveheart and his men paint themselves as monsters and scream at the enemy – an early form of Terrorism. War paint is something of a universal tactic to induce fear. Osama bin Laden did a fine job of creating insanity, blowing up the twin trade towers using our own planes. None of us are yet over that one. But there’s one method that transcends them all – Searles, Generals, and Terrorists aside.. In its more benign form, it’s simple indirectness. If you want your child to do something, or not do something, instead of saying it outright, you create "strategies" to move him or her in the desired direction. While we all do this some, some people do it most [or all] of the time. The net result is a child who is always looking behind things. "What’s she trying to get me to do?" And the child grows up, always on the lookout for hidden motives. While looking for hidden motives is a decent skill to have, children who have been raised primarily by "strategy" have no intuition for truth, and spend their lives in a paranoid search for something that children of "straight talking" parents just know. Even benevolent strategies can produce paranoia, "If you have to trick me into doing things, there must be something shady going on."

In the political realm, "tricks" are the order of the day. Each action is carefully weighed. "How will it be perceived?" "If I vote for the war, what will it do to my electability?" "If I argue with the Religious Right, can I ever run again in …" Some of that’s good. It’s part of the bedrock of Democracy. Respond to the voters, or else… Politics is, in many ways, the art of looking good, and making your opponent look very bad. I’ll bet it’s been that way since the dawn of time. And there’s a very fine line between "politics" and "dirty tricks." For example, bringing up the sermons of Reverend Jeramiah Wright seems to be a legitimate political ploy to me. Reverend Wright says crazy things. It’s legitimate to ask Obama to respond to his connection with Reverend Wright. In 2000, it would have been legitimate to ask George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to explain their connection with the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century, their association with the likes of Michael Ledeen, Laurie Mylroie, William Kristol, the Neoconservatives. That didn’t happen, and it was a colassal mistake. Sometimes, sticking to the "issues" doesn’t get at what really matters.

So, where does one draw the line between "politics" and "dirty tricks?" Some "dirty tricks" are easy – breaking into Daniel Ellsberg’s Psychiatrist’s office, starting a rumour that John McCain fathered an illegitimate black child, the Watergate break-in, big things. But what about actively interfering with the electoral process for the other side? I personally think that’s a "dirty trick." What about coordinated hammering and spinning every possible story, like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh with the Jeramiah Wright saga, or 2 hours yesterday on Fox News devoted to Obama saying "typical white person," or running the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky story like it’s fresh news that must stay on the front burner every single day.