The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Dr. James Gilligan
The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Dr. James Gilligan
Chris Hedges speaks with the Psychiatrist Dr. James Gilligan about our rash of mass shootings and his book Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and it’s Causes.
Appears in this episode
American society is the most violent of any nation in the industrialized world. Nothing we do, from administrating the world’s largest prison system to militarizing our police, seems to help. Dr. James Gilligan, the former director of the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School and the former director of the Bridgewater State hospital for the criminally insane, argues that childhood abuse, and the shame it engenders, is the engine that fuels America’s deadliest epidemic. This abuse and shame, he argues, fosters a dangerous numbness that breeds a deep self-loathing and inchoate rage. It is only by understanding the causes of our national epidemic, and addressing those causes, that we will have any hope of stemming the nihilistic violence that grips American society. Dr. Gilligan’s grounds his writing not only in case studies of the violent patients he works with, but Greek myths and Shakespeare. Joining me to discuss his book Violence: Our deadly Epidemic and Its Causes, as well his book Holding a Mirror up to Nature: Shame, Guilt, and Violence in Shakespeare, which he co-authored with David A.J Richards, is Dr. James Gilligan, professor of Clinical Psychiatry at New York University.
The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Dr. James Gilligan
On October 1, 2017, Stephen Paddock, whose father was diagnosed as a psychopath and on the FBI's 10 most wanted list of criminals, fired on a crowd attending the Route 91 music festival on the Las Vegas strip In Nevada from his suites on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel. He killed 60 people and wounded 413. I served as a medical corpsman in Vietnam. That body count (60 KIA, 413 WIA) would qualify as a major firefight. On November 8, 2018, 50 or 60 survivors of that previous massacre, who became a survivors group on Facebook, were country-line dancing at the Borderline Grill and Bar on "College Country Night!" in Thousand Oaks, California. Ian D. Long, a disturbed Afghanistan war veteran, walked into the bar with a pistol, threw a smoke grenade and killed 12. One of the dead, Telemachos Orfanos, a survivor of the Las Vegas massacre, was killed by the gunman. This group now has the dubious distinction of having survived two major massacres. Around 7,000 soldiers were killed in wars since the 9/11 attacks. But the Washington Post recently reported the Army stated 30,000 of these veterans survived the war only to have committed suicide later upon their return. As the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who is also a survivor of the Allied firebombing of Dresden in the Second World War, used to say "and so it goes." America seems to be in a dance with Thanatos as it heads to its demise. But God bless Tsutomu Yamaguchi who died in 2010 at the ripe old age of 93. He is the only survivor of both the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Thanks for this interview. The term "soul death" makes so much sense and also reminds me of the writings of the psychologist Alice Miller. So much violence and evil emerges from people having been abused terribly in childhood. The Gilligans--both James here and his wife, the feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan--are treasures in the field of psychotherapy.