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by Joseph Scalia III, Psya.D.
When it comes to society’s competing viewpoints on the trophy hunting and commercial trapping of wolves, a number of angles exist. Already in the public discourse and thereby available to collective awareness, regardless of positions taken, are especially the voices of science, of ranching, of environmentalism, and of human-animal ethics. There is even the voice of the social sciences, in general, arguing for a new narrative.
This essay proposes, in addition to existing perspectives, that there needs to be a psychoanalytic one. Our “wolf management” goals attempt only to reduce the lethal “taking” of wolves, and of aiming for a wolf population that allows Canis lupus to reproduce in numbers that prevent extinction. But if one stops and thinks about it, to kill some in order to protect others is as dubious as are the concepts of “fair chase hunting” and “ethical hunting.” That is, what hunted being would find it fair or ethical to be killed just because humans have changed the rules of the hunt? All of these concepts inhere a de-sentient-ization – as I am calling it -of the wolf, beings who “perceive and feel things,” as the Oxford English Dictionary proposes. It is akin to our dehumanization of some members of homo sapiens, but even worse, in that we dehumanize only “some” members of humanity, whereas we de-sentient-alize “all” members of Canis lupus.
There is a gap in our deliberations, a hitherto societally unasked question: “What sort of person kills a wolf?” As a psychoanalyst, I will consider relevant concepts that have emerged over the 125 years, with Sigmund Freud’s founding of the discipline. Specifically, I’ll take up the factor of psychopathology, of diagnosis, as an arena that needs to become part of the public discourse, part of what we need to collectively, even if disputationally, dialogue about, and to consider what to do with from societal and political perspectives as informed by clinical ones. This paper is therein an initial foray.
When a person authorizes themself to trophy hunt or to commercially trap this iconic being, there is, in the view offered here, always a personality construction or structure, a self formation, that has gone awry, either malignantly affecting the entirety of an individual’s makeup, or a more circumscribed effect which is more localizedly damaging. I will reflect upon each of them psychoanalytically to a degree that gives the public enough information to reflectively wade into the problem.
The first type I’ll address is the most disturbed and also the most disturbing. It is that of the psychopath. It arises from profound disturbances occurring in the most vulnerable formative time of one’s life, that which is before the child’s development of language and thus to which the child can only respond by a malformation in their very personhood foundation. It is that upon which the rest of one’s entire life-orientation edifice will be built. There are, it is true, differentiated pathologies that emerge from this sketch. Some children in this situation will develop a depressive experience of life, some a schizoid one, others, for example, a paranoid or a psychotic one, based on a combination of numerous and more specific environmental provisions coupled with whatever uniqueness and potential selfhood that the child was born with. The psychopath, in particular, experienced from the parents a gross and characteristic insensitivity and violent response toward the most fundamental expressions of need. The two case examples I’ll give provide a sense of how the parent treats their child in ways that are psychopathy-generating.
A caveat: although it is elsewhere argued that diagnosing in absentia is subject to error due to its exclusion of other characteristics than here available, those limitations do not preclude psychoanalytic interpretation of publicly documented behavior. And in any case, the actions of the two following persons are far more heinous toward the wolf than is the attribution of any diagnosis. I have elected to side on the precedent of Bandy X. Lee’s (2019) anthology, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess A President. For them, as for me now, “duty to warn” takes precedent over the Goldwater Rule, the latter inhibiting mental health professionals from diagnosing individuals they have not personally interviewed, the former mandating us to warn the public of destructive phenomena that we are trained to recognize. I should be equally clear about what follows: my characterization of Roberts is my psychoanalytic opinion drawn exclusively from his publicly documented conduct. I have not examined him, do not possess his clinical or childhood history, and do not assert the developmental formulation that follows as biographical fact. Thus, the following.
Wyoming is a state that makes it legal and even celebrated to run over coyotes and wolves with snowmobiles. Wyoming so insouciantly de-sentient-izes wild Canis lupus that they call their “sport,” of all things, “coyote-whacking.” Cody Roberts took it further. First of all, he duct-taped the mouth of his victim, a yearling female wolf. Someone who can do this, along with the rest of what I’ll describe of his actions, and do it with the glee that he did, can, in my psychoanalytic opinion, be understood through a psychopathic formulation of having been silenced in soul-killing ways from the beginning of life. On that formulation, like psychopaths do, in order to defend against developmental helplessness – and thus have a chance of maturing – Roberts can be understood as projecting that helplessness into another, this cursed wolf, who was made to serve in substituto as his own killed self, killed in both soul and body. His conduct can then be understood as an enactment of his own soul-killer, with whom, in this formulation, he is defensively identified. Roberts’ victim was made to suffer senseless violence that, on this interpretation, mirrors the developmental violence posited by the formulation. What psychoanalysis would understand here as unprocessed fury, his wrapping his victim’s mouth with duct tape rendered her incapable of speaking out against the murderous assault. In this psychoanalytic reading, as if his own voice had been stolen from him, he stole the wolf’s from her. And then he went sadistically further.
Let’s make this perfectly clear. Roberts not only ran her down once. He turned around and did it again. He then loaded her onto his snowmobile and rode down to a bar in the small town where he lived, a bar at which the patrons mostly knew each other. He proceeded to parade the gorgeous young wolf, and to have photos and videos taken of him tormenting her, as he presented himself with what I can only call a “shit-eating grin.” At one point, he even bent over face-to-face as though to kiss her, but he jerked away when she somehow summoned the energy to attempt to strike his face, foiled only by the duct tape. She was left in a corner, laying there in obvious exhaustion and torment. After a time, he took her outside and killed her.
Presenting himself as a strong and fearless man, he instead showed himself to be a thug, a bully, and a coward. One person, albeit surreptitiously, disseminated photo and video accounts of this dungeon, allowing us a glance at the psychological dynamics on display. Unlike others who were imprisoned, laughing along with Roberts and participating in and condoning the monstrously abusive, this witness made his or her voice heard. We were able to see psychopathic conduct and neurotic identification, the latter addressed now, operating together while those present found it all just a bit of fun!
Flouting any appreciation of contributing to the best of humanity, not knowing what the best of humanity even is, is inextricably psychopathic, creating one’s own law, one’s own way of operating, and requiring others to believe that he is their guide and protector. He needs the neurotic to be the one he “guides.”
And the neurotic wants a “protector,” and is seducible by the likes of a Roberts to believe that he is such a one. A look now at our second case example will lead us naturally into a look at the gullibility of the neurotic, who in this case elected this man with 77% of the vote!
Paul Fielder, a Montana State Representative, and a promoter of the killing of wolves, has likened wolves to wasps. If wolf pups die directly or indirectly due to Fielder’s actions, he is not troubled. He says that just like the larvae who are killed when he sprays a wasp nest, so are wolf pups when their parents are killed, the pups being, to him, no more sentient or social than popular culture imagines wasps to be. While one can imagine that Fielder wanted to provoke for its own sake, he has been a frequent and very loud, very public voice for the killing and the de-sentient-ization of wolves. Like Roberts, he not only flouts compassion but also relishes being admired for that. Also like Roberts, he wants to present himself as the epitome of manhood, of strength. And he wants to be admired for that as well. In a broad publicly disseminated voice, he has supported Montana’s arguably genocidal actions against the wolf. He has promoted the killing of some 450 wolves in Montana, a state that provides home to 900 or so wolves. He has – with the same insouciance that Roberts shows us – presented scientifically untenable arguments for his quotas, killing by foothold traps, from which wolves sometimes attempt to escape by chewing off their trapped leg; and killing by snare traps, which time-consumingly strangle the wolf to death; and other means of killing. He, like others of his ilk and like those neurotics who follow him, have absolutely no compassion for the suffering caused.
Unlike the psychopath, though, the neurotic does have a capacity for empathy, a significant point that I will address. It is neurotics who might be swayed toward empathy when confronted with the possibility of their unwitting complacency and indefensible cruelty. Thus, consider the following disclaimer or caveat.
Not all neurotics follow sadists. They do, however, per definitionem struggle in one way or another, to hear and to follow their own minds, though that struggle may resist consciousness. Thus, if they live in a culture or subculture in which wolf de-sentient-ization has prevailed for generations, they are vulnerable to finding validation and belonging by uncritically identifying with that very same de-sentient-ization, without realizing that they have falsely adopted the view as their own. Earliest psychical development, though it is perfect for no one, was good enough for the neurotic to develop a foundation of being that is missing in the psychopath. But it then failed them.
Subsequent to developing that foundation, we all enter the still early phase of life in which we must cohere a selfhood within the familial and then the social surround. If all goes well, we also build up, at this time, a simultaneous ability to register familial and societal rigidities or inflexible and ultimately damaging group life. And yet further, we are able to live stably within the social order while maintaining this flexibility. All of this is, of course, a very tall order, and most people do not accomplish it at the developmental time that it is all first called for. Disruptions anywhere in this progression will yield neurosis, that condition in which most humans live. Few of us, in fact, ever become comfortable living without unrecognized overreliance on the values, ideals, norms, and prohibitions prescribed by others, that over-reliance itself being one way of saying what neurosis is.
As political theorist and psychoanalyst Cornelius Castoriadis understood it, democracy is best understood as a civilizational world wherein it itself generates free-thinking people, who themselves generate democracy. That is, a free world, an aesthetic world rather than an ideological one, will be peopled by those who can think for themselves. We are a long ways from that, but we will remain so if we cannot take account of what psychoanalysis has to teach us about the unconscious, and to select our respectively unique ways of responding to it. Late in his life, Freud saw hope for humankind and the world, although “in a far, far distant future.” He also, explicitly written, saw any possibility for that evolution all-inclusively transforming not only economic injustice, but also the psychical blindness.
We cannot afford for the psychopathology of wolf de-sentient-ization to remain a censored topic. Omitting its discourse is as damaging as committing the crime.
Joseph Scalia III, Psya.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is Co-Director of the Institute for a Democratic Psychoanalysis. He has served as President of both the Montana Wilderness Association and the Gallatin Yellowstone Wilderness Alliance. With Lynne Scalia, his most recent book is Critical Consciousness: Beyond Impasses in Environmentalism, Psychoanalysis, and Education.