Evil Deeds

A forensic psychologist on anger, madness and destructive behavior.

by Dr. Stephen Diamond

Ancient Aliens, the Collective Unconscious, and the Quest for Meaning

So-called "ancient alien" theorists fervently believe that past extraterrestrial visitations directly influenced and guided human history over the millennia. What is the underlying psychology of such seemingly outlandish convictions? Read More

Refreshment From Freud's Faucet

Sigmund Freud's "psychoanalysis" is the seminal fount (or faucet) from which all forms of contemporary psychotherapy more or less flow. Sunday, May 6, is his birthday. Read More

Essential Secrets of Psychotherapy: What is the "Shadow"?

The shadow is the unknown ‘‘dark side’’ of our personality—dark both because it tends to consist predominantly of the primitive, negative, socially or religiously depreciated human emotions and impulses like sexual lust, power strivings, selfishness, greed, envy, anger or rage, and due to its unenlightened nature, completely obscured from consciousness. Read More

Stress, Psychosis, and the Creator of "Kony 2012"

Severe stress sometimes precipitates psychosis. When a citizen's behavior becomes so bizarre, threatening, self-destructive or violent that it demands the attention of the police, that individual may be legally detained against his or her will and taken to a designated psychiatric facility for evaluation and possible involuntary hospitalization. What happens next? Read More

DSM-5 Hysteria: When Does Normal Grief Become Neurotic Bereavement?

DSM-IV-TR clearly draws a distinction between "normal" and pathological bereavement. As it should. When does a "normal grief reaction" become a debilitating, prolonged and potentially life-threatening mental disorder? Read More

Return of the Repressed: Is a Mysterious Outbreak of Mass Hysteria Proving Freud Right?

In a tiny, unknown New York town, something remarkable is happening. It could turn out to be a crucial wake up call to contemporary psychology and psychiatry not to forget or stray too far from its Freudian roots in the "unconscious." Which is sadly exactly what has happened in recent decades. Read More

Essential Secrets of Psychotherapy: The Healing Power of Clinical Wisdom (Part Three)

What really happens in psychotherapy? The answer to that question is complex. And depends in part on the type of psychotherapy one seeks. But one thing psychotherapy can convey to patients are certain essential secrets to living a more rich, meaningful, creative, balanced life. What are some of these secrets? Here, in Part Three of this series, are seven more. Read More

The Devil Inside: Psychotherapy, Exorcism and Demonic Possession

Based on having read the (mostly) horrific reviews for the new supernatural horror flick "The Devil Inside" (2012), I won't be sprinting to the theatre to see it any time soon. Make that ever. But, despite its reported pure stupidity and total lack of originality or redeeming artistic value, fans are nonetheless flocking to it in droves. What's the fascination? Read More

Joran, Casey and Psychopathic Narcissism: A Forensic Commentary

Having previously posted on both Casey and Joran, it is hard not to note some striking similarities. How can we understand their seeming lack of profoundly human, universal feelings like empathy, guilt, remorse or shame? Though I cannot provide a forensic evaluation without having first formally examined someone myself, there is much to learn from these tragic cases. Read More

Essential Secrets of Psychotherapy: The Healing Power of Clinical Wisdom (Part Two)

Essential Secrets of Psychotherapy: The Healing Power of Clinical Wisdom (Part One)

What really happens in psychotherapy? The answer to that question is complex. And depends in part on the type of psychotherapy one seeks. But one thing psychotherapy can convey to patients are certain essential secrets to living a more rich, fulfilling, meaningful, contented, creative, balanced and psychologically healthy life. What are some of these secrets? Read More

Linehan and Jung as Wounded Healers: Two Dialectically Different Approaches to Dealing With Inner Demons

Recently, sixty-eight-year-old clinical psychologist Dr. Marsha Linehan, famous for her fusion of spiritual, cognitive and behavioral treatment known as Dialectical Behavior Therapy, made a shocking and courageous public confession: Linehan has suffered from what she believes to be Borderline Personality Disorder all her adult life. Read More

Diagnosing Scrooge Syndrome: What A Christmas Carol Can Teach Us About Treating Chronic Embitterment

Ebenezer Scrooge's ill-tempered, pessimistic misanthropy is reminiscent of something I've written about here in the past: Post-Traumatic Embitterment Disorder. Could Scrooge be a poster boy for PTED? How might Mr. Scrooge be diagnosed and treated today by a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist? Read More

Is "A Dangerous Method" a Dangerous Movie?

After months of anticipation, director David Cronenberg's most recent film, "A Dangerous Method," does not disappoint. For me, it succeeds both as a work of art and as a fascinating, intimate peek into the momentous birth of psychoanalysis, from which just about every form of modern psychotherapy derives. Read More

Psychology's Escalating Civil War: How Do We Understand, Diagnose and Treat Mental Disorders?

Psychotherapy is under siege. There is an increasingly hostile war being waged within the mental health field. A heated battle for the hearts and minds of the profession and public. One which will determine whether we progressively advance as a society in our psychological understanding and treatment of mental disorders or dangerously regress. Ready for a revolution? Read More

What Motivates Excessive Sexual Promiscuity?

Promiscuity is formally defined as including not only frequent but "indiscriminate" sexual behavior. Preference for frequent sexual contacts is not necessarily the same as being sexually indiscriminating. The latter, in women, indicates a possible compulsive, and therefore, pathological quality to the excessive sexual behavior, referred to traditionally as nymphomania. Read More

Secrets of Psychotherapy: What's Love Got to Do With It? Part Two

Psychoanalysis has been called both the "talking cure" and, curiously, the "love cure." In fact, Freud himself once said, in a letter to Jung, that "psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love." What did he mean by this strange statement? And what are the implications for modern psychotherapy? Read More

Anger, Rage and Pathological Embitterment: What Motivates Mass Murders?

During the past two weeks we experienced back-to-back mass shootings here in California. What everyone—including the two radio hosts who briefly interviewed me on the air after each incident—wants to know is: What motivates such individuals to commit mass murder? And how can they be identified and prevented from perpetrating these evil deeds? Read More

Is Greed Ever Good? : Psychological and Spiritual Perspectives on Selfishness

With unemployment at almost 10% and an economy on the brink of depression, people are directing their frustration and fury against what they see as the cause of our national economic nightmare. They are protesting against one of the oldest and deepest of human evils. And scapegoating the most obvious, symbolic, convenient and concrete embodiment of that evil: Wall Street. Read More

Secrets of Psychotherapy: What's Love Got to Do With It? Part One

When it comes to matters of love and intimacy, most people tend to think that all they need to do is identify, meet, and choose the right person. Find the right fit. But what if, as the flamboyant father of Gestalt therapy, psychiatrist Frederick "Fritz" Perls suggested, finding love has at least as much to do with becoming the right person as meeting him or her? Read More

Psychology and Politics: Can Therapy Heal Britain's "Broken Society" ?

David Cameron, Prime Minister and Conservative Party Leader of the U.K., spoke recently at a youth center about the horrifying outbreak of violent rioting, looting and lawlessness in London and other parts of England during the past few weeks. What he said was astonishing. Read More

Anatomy of the Norwegian Rampage : Our Rage Epidemic Spreads to Scandinavia

Last Friday, thirty-two-year-old Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian citizen with an apparently privileged education and background, allegedly massacred at least sixty-eight teenagers at a political youth camp located on a tiny island just off the coast of Norway. Norwegians have suddenly lost their innocence. Evil is undeniably now openly in their midst. Read More

Did Casey Con Her Forensic Psychologist?

Dr. Harry Krop--a forensic psychologist who reportedly met with Casey Anthony in jail for a total of approximately twenty hours--told Dr. Drew Pinsky during an interview last week that, in his professional opinion, the recently acquitted Casey does not suffer from any diagnosable mental disorder whatsoever. None. Nada. Zip. Zero. Is that possible? Maybe. Read More

O.J. Revisited: Those Who Don't Learn From the Past Are Doomed to Repeat It

For criminal prosecutors, one of the biggest lessons from the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial back in 1995 should have been that, especially in circumstantial cases, psychology plays at least as powerful a part in jurors' decisions as so-called scientific evidence. Read More

The Tree of Life: Does Terrence Malick's New Film Bear Artistic or Philosophical Fruit?

The Tree of Life (2011), American filmmaker Terrence Malick's fifth movie in his forty-year-long career is, to me, a massive failure on almost every level: as entertainment, philosophy, theology, psychology or art. Read More

O.J. Revisited: Will the Casey Anthony Jury Acquit If They Can't Make It Fit?

"Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." For criminal prosecutors, one of the biggest lessons from the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial back in 1995 should have been that, especially in circumstantial cases, psychology plays at least as powerful a part in jurors' decisions as so-called scientific evidence. Read More

Did Casey Kill Caylee? How Forensic Psychology Can Help Humanize Evil Deeds

Forensic psychology and psychiatry can offer explanations--if not necessarily excuses--for destructive or evil behavior. Will it be introduced during Casey Anthony's murder trial? Read More

Did Casey Kill Caylee? A Clinical and Forensic Psychologist Comments on the Case (Again)

Casey Anthony is charged with having allegedly killed her two-year-old daughter Caylee. When it comes to sensationalistic trials like this, the public seems equally repulsed and fascinated. Such disturbing cases beg the psychological questions: If guilty, what makes a mother murder her only child? Is she evil? Mentally ill? Or both? Who commits filicide? And why? Read More

On the "Feminization" of Psychotherapy: Does Your Therapist's Gender Really Matter?

A recent New York Times article by Benedict Carey (May 21, 2011) titled "Need Therapy? A Good Man Is Hard to Find," highlights the fact that men have been abandoning the psychotherapy field in droves for decades. What's happening to the psychotherapy profession? Why have men deserted the field? And does sex really matter in psychotherapists? Read More

On the Violent Life and Death of Osama bin Laden: A Psychological Post-Mortem

Tonight the world learned from President Obama that notorious Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces during a firefight in northwest Pakistan. Bin Laden wanted to die as a martyr. In this sense, his wish has been obliged. But does his death make him even more dangerous? Read More

Dr. Stephen Diamond, Ph.D., is a clinical and forensic psychologist in LA and the author of Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity.

more...

About Evil Deeds

Evil Deeds began almost four years ago as a blog about forensic psychology, anger, violence and the destructiveness of human evil. It has since evolved to more broadly include other related and relevant topics such as mental health, spirituality, psychotherapy, psychopathology, depth psychology, existential therapy, creativity, and the archetypal quest for meaning and purpose.