October 9, 2006

Dear Colleague,

    Years ago, Father Ritter, founder of Covenant House in New York, solicited my help and the help of hundreds of thousands of others for an excellent cause, namely, to save the runaway children of the Greater New York area from physical and sexual abuse. He wrote a pamphlet in which he detailed the horrors of life in the streets and the haven the children were able to find at Covenant House, a Church-supported charity of impeccable credentials. So imagine my shock when I heard over the radio that Father Ritter himself took advantage of the children who came under his care.

     And now we have Representative Mark Foley of Florida, who had to resign from his post because he, the great champion in Congress of sexually abused children, has himself solicited the sexual favors of the House's teenaged pages, thus flagrantly abusing his power.

    I mention these two cases because they are, to my mind, extraordinary examples of psychological dissociation. I say "extraordinary," because there is also dissociation of the ordinary kind to which we are all prone. I mean, we are all prone to day-dreaming, thinking one thing and doing another. We feel murderous toward the boss, but we not only don't kill him, we actually greet him civilly at the water cooler. Some of us have sexual fantasies of a decidedly predatory character, but we are not, in actuality, predators; on the contrary, knowing that we have these fantasies, we are on guard against them and prevent their actualization by deliberately avoiding the people toward whom we are drawn or, if not that, then by compensating the bad fantasies with exemplary deeds.

    Extraordinary in the case of Father Ritter and Mark Foley is that they were able to radically dissociate their actions: they not only preached helpfulness toward the young, they worked at it. They were able to do good and then evil toward the same people. It's as though for a certain number of days they were Dr. Jekyll and then for the next number of days they were Mr. Hyde.

    What is frightening is that we are all, to some extent, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That's why H. G. Well's novel is so popular. We recognize our own split personalities in it. Place encourages the split. In the bedroom, I am sweaty, groaning, Adam. Barely an hour later, in the dining room, I am sipping tea, with my little finger elegantly curved over the porcelain tea cup, and reading The New York Times. Are these the same person--me?

    I wonder whether a major cause of evil in humans is our ability to compartmentalize--to put impenetrable barriers between our different selves. This ability is innate to our nature: we need it to survive. Hence, evil will always be with us. Hence, also, our mind--our intellect--will always be suspect, for its function is to recognize and breach the barriers, to connect the seemingly irreconcilable: for instance, an apple falling down a tree and the earth coursing around the sun.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu