Dr willard gaylin biography examples
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Hatred: The Psychological Descent Into Violence
We all get angry at the built-in frustrations and humiliations of everyday life. But few of us ever experience the intense and perverse hatred that inspires acts of malignant violence such as suicide bombings or ethnic massacres. In Hatred , Dr.Willard Gaylin, one of America's most respected psychiatrists, describes how raw personal passions are transformed into acts of violence and cultures of hatred. Such hatred goes beyond mere emotion. Hatred, Gaylin explains, is a psychological disorder, a form of quasi-delusional thinking. It requires forming "a passionate attachment," an obsessive involvement with the scapegoat population. It is designed to allow the angry and frustrated individual to disavow responsibility for his own failures and misery by directing it towards a convenient victim. Gaylin dissects the mechanisms by which cynical political and religious leaders manipulate frustrated and deprived people, leadi
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Government agencies and professionals who deal with damage claims are literally trying to determine the dollars-and-cents worth of human life. How do we decide what is an efficient annual cost for a nursing home? Or the cost for a new liver? And who is going to pay? Dr. Willard Gaylin was a psychiatrist and president of the Hastings Center, an institute devoted to studying the relationships between biology and ethics. In this episode of World of Ideas, Gaylin explored the growing conflict between the survival of communities and the survival of the individual.
TRANSCRIPT
BILL MOYERS: [on camera] Good evening, I’m Bill Moyers. When I was growing up in Texas no Fourth of July oratory was complete without references to the “dignity and worth of the individual.” The phrase became a cliché, true but boring. Now it’s taking on a new meaning. Government agencies and professionals who deal with damage claims are literally trying to determine the dollars-and
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From Booklist
Gaylin, a professor of clinical psychiatry, attempts to place hatred at the center of our contemporary crises concerning Palestine and al-Qaeda. He examines hatred as a mental disorder, going beyond its normative emotional connotation into delusional thought patterns. Passionate, but irrational, attachment to a scapegoat population allows the hater to deny responsibility for failures and frustrations. Gaylin breaks down the mechanics of this process and integrates it with the fara associated with politicians and religious leaders able to manipulate such deprived persons to their own end. But Gaylin's position ignores the objective conditions of Palestinians or members of al-Qaeda that justify their hatred. As his analysis is based on a clinical model, the assumption is that objective application is possible. Yet, at points Gaylin asserts that the hatred of Americans and Israelis is based on mere jealousy and envy, and that hatred results from deficiencies of the hater