Psychoanalytic Excavation

A Look at What Lies beneath the Surface of Human Behavior and Motivation

Dr. Prudence Gourguechon is President of the American Psychoanalytic Association. See full bio

November 6, 2009, Media

Fort Hood: Looking for meaning when there is none

Tolerating not knowing meaning and motive at Fort Hood

Our human desire for meaning and explanation is a good thing, but when there is a void of meaning or explanation, it can push us into dangerous territory. We hate not knowing why something happened, but it is better that we tolerate the tension of not knowing than find ourselves making up false stories of causation that can do much harm.

Listening to the media reporting on the horrific massacre at Ford Hood, I was struck by this intense desire we humans have to find meaning, to explain. Many of the news stories (especially when there was little news to cover), focused on theories of motive.

Some of the "story" elements that came up repeatedly were these: post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the horrible stories the shooter must have heard in his work as a trauma specialist, especially horrible stories about life in combat in Iraq, his allegedly having been harassed about being a Muslim, and his imminent deployment to Iraq, which factual evidence suggested he wanted very much to avoid.

The newspeople were trying to make meaning and define motive, with these sparse story elements and their many experts. It you string together these elements, you might seem to have a comprehensive narrative, but you don't. A man being harassed, a man whose heard dire stories of life in the Army in Iraq, a man who is afraid to be deployed. All true, but entirely irrelevant. These things are true for many people, who do not go on to try to kill dozens of people.

We all learned in high school science that correlation does not equal causation. The fact that two things seem to occur together does not mean that one caused the other.

A final note:

Psychologists, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists are ethically bound to temper their opinions of the mental lives of people we haven't treated. In other words, we don't diagnose strangers or celebrities or figures in the news. Ethically, we can talk in generalities only.