'I carried it too far, that's for sure.'

Dahmer pleaded guilty but insane before the trial. The psychiatric experts who would testify also agreed that he knew right from wrong. This left just two questions for Dahmer's jury to decide: Did he have a mental disease and, if so, could he have controlled his conduct and chosen to stop killing?

But from the day I entered the fifth-floor courtroom in the reassuringly named Safety Building, the words I kept hearing from lawyers, spectators, and forensic experts were "healing" and "understanding." The endless talk about Dahmer's profound mental illness, treatment needs, and prognoses made me think of his homicides as almost incidental.

Eventually I developed my own understanding. The euphemistic-sounding words reflected everyone's overwhelming need to deny their revulsion at Dahmer's atrocities and the issues arising from them. They tried to do this by distancing themselves and distorting the reality. Dahmer, for his part, needed to deny that sadism, or hatred of homosexuals and blacks, had motivated him to murder, dismember, and cannibalize so many such victims.

"I carried it too far, that's for sure," Dahmer told police in explaining his frustrated search for a totally compliant, zombie type sex slave who would always be there for him. In 60-plus hours of confessing, Dahmer had also explained that "I was not into torture. This was not a hate thing. This thing had no racism. This was not a homosexual thing."

The doctors needed to deny their revulsion at Dahmer's deeds, and also their personal and professional inadequacy to explain or deal with an undocumented horror on this scale. Several did so by dwelling on positive traits which they said made Dahmer "a likable guy" and "a forthright historian." Most did so by elaborating on Dahmer's explanations for why his monstrous killings were not sadistic:

"The drugging [was done] to satisfy his sexual need for a not fully cooperative partner."

"The drilling enterprise...was not sadistic...it was a realistic attempt to disable, but not to kill...."

"The killing was the unintended consequence of the drilling...the taking-of-life issue...."

"Death was an unintended by-product of his efforts to create a zombie."

"Dismembering was a disposal problem...."

"The disemboweling. . . [was] the most efficient way of handling all the remains, which only served an administrative function."

Dahmer's lawyer, Gerald P.Boyle-described as "folksy"--and fervent Milwaukee District Attorney Michael McCann needed to deny their own revulsion and the damage Dahmer's acts had done to their city.

Psychiatric testimony at Dahmer's insanity trial compounded the craziness arising from these converging denials. It spewed confusion over semantically similar--but differently defined--legal, psychiatric, and laymen's terms for mental disease and insanity. It also forced the jury to listen to crazy-sounding arguments pushed to logical absurdities by expert witnesses you could only regard as hired goons.

I became convinced that the insanity defense is an insanity that should be scrapped.

I had arrived, like many people, with decidedly mixed emotions about attending. As a psychologist, I was also braced for embarrassment: Dahmer's was the second trial in less than a year in which I would hear the insanity defense argued.

The first had been a rude awakening to psychiatry's hopelessly inexact nature and dubious value as an aid to distinguishing sanity from insanity. However, I hoped the narrowly defined psychiatry's issues in Dahmer's trial would keep to a minimum the confusion introduced by the psychiatric testimony.

I was wrong.

I realized that diagnoses and definitions of psychosis, paranoia, intact thought process, and other concepts I had believed in and studied were shams. For me, one low point came when a psychiatrist said Dahmer had proved his sanity by "remembering to reach for a condom" before copulating with his "dead corpses" or their dissected parts. The psychiatrist testified that Dahmer's capacity to delay gratification and his capacity for impulse control showed he could conform his conduct to social norms.

The doctors' struggles to maintain their images as competent authorities only compounded the lunacy. One referred to "the cannibalism we see in these sorts of cases..." Another said he knew of "other people with a sexual attraction to viscera." A third testified he had "seen hundreds of serial murderers in the last twenty years...."