How do we want to approach a traumatized person--in this case, who has committed a heinous crime? Bracket for a moment Oscar Pistorius' guilt or innocence and focus on the court-appointed psychologist's characterization of the session: the "double-amputee athlete had sometimes cried, retched, perspired and paced up and down during sessions in which she tried to assist him....Some of the sessions were just him weeping and crying and me holding him." Her sentiment was, though sympathetic, driven by pity and her takeaway that he was a "broken" man; this, as if there were something else he was supposed to perform in the session, such as remorse. Legal institutions require the cleanliness of remorse and the ultimate assumption of responsibility; this pure human wreck should, ideally, stand up like a man and face the music, or be simply warehoused in a psychiatric institution.
No apologist for the crime, I understand that a normative, and here, forensic, therapy serves as critical data in any legal consideration of an insanity defense. Still, the psychologist had unwittingly succeeded just enough in creating a safe space for the patient's discharge of lifelong trauma (the tip of the iceberg): perspiring, pacing, weeping, crying, retching, need to be held. These are progressively more profound levels of emotional discharge--like the peeling of an onion--for early-installed humiliation, brutal hurt, and existential terror.
Should it be a matter of "sane" people standing trial or their incapacity to stand trial, wherein you should drool, in a drug-induced stupor in a corner, until you are no longer a threat to society (perhaps neutralized with electroshock therapy). Is this healing? In the latter context, he would, undoubtedly never receive the kind of treatment he fortuitously received in his initial "sanity session."
Who knows, if that "accident waiting to happen" had received genuine therapeutic resource, instead of re-enacting the narrative of miraculous and salutary triumph over adversity, which we all prefer. It's no coincidence that we encounter recurringly, like clockwork, young celebrities falling all around us, like bleached skeletons in the desert. We love heroes and we lament their fall. We celebrate Bill Cosby's triumphant career and lament his "fall." Why is it that no one cared to bat an eyelash over almost five decades?
It's of course lonely at the top. Our celebrities, heroes, and leaders need no support--they float our dreams. Aren't they really our charges rather than the reverse, wherein we avidly devour them for diversion? This is why I love celebrity culture and the institutions that support it and utilize celebrity for its own ends.
(this is a work in progress; go easy)
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