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John W. Hinckley, Jr.: A Case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder

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Abstract

This article is about John W. Hinckley, Jr., whose attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981 was unsuccessful and whose trial in 1982 resulted in a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. It focuses on the view of psychiatric experts that he has a narcissistic personality disorder and on the fact that this diagnosis is the primary rationale for his continuing confinement to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. I conclude that the question of his release raises the difficult issue of the possible conflict between justice and care.

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Notes

  1. In a more recent article on John Nash (Capps 2011a) I have explored the relevance of his contribution to game theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize, to research studies of the schizophrenic brain and, specifically, how it deviates from the normal brain. I suggest that the Nash equilibrium, his major contribution to game theory, is descriptive of the normal brain, whereas the game theory promoted by John von Neumann is descriptive of the schizophrenic brain.

  2. Zanor (2010) adds that many experts in the field of psychiatry are disturbed by the fact that the manual’s committee on personality disorders has evidently decided to eliminate narcissistic personality disorder. Dr. John Gunderson, who chaired the personality disorders committee for the DSM-I, has challenged this decision on the grounds that the diagnosis is important for organizing and planning treatment. He has also raised questions about a new approach to diagnosis favored by the DSM-V committee on personality disorders which involves making an overall, general diagnosis of personality disorder and then selecting particular traits from a long list in order to best describe the patient. This approach contrasts with the current approach of defining a personality disorder by a cluster of traits to which the clinician matches the patient.

  3. In The Insanity Defense and the Trial of John W. Hinckley, Jr. Lincoln Caplin (1984) notes that John Hinckley offered to plead guilty to all counts against him, in exchange for a recommendation by the Justice Department that his sentences be served concurrently, not consecutively, so that he might be eligible for parole in 15 years rather than serving in prison for life (p. 125). He added: “The upshot of the Hinckley verdict was that he can be released from St. Elizabeths long before he would have been eligible for parole under the terms of the plea he offered” (pp. 125–126). On the other hand, Thomas Szasz, author of The Myth of Mental Illness (1960), wrote an Op-Ed piece in the Washington Times (May 12, 1983; republished in Szasz 1984) in which he suggests that Hinckley was misled in pleading insanity, “partly by believing the plea would fail and partly by believing that if it succeeded he would, sooner or later, be released from captivity.” He adds, “I venture to predict that the only way the authorities charged with determining Hinckley’s fate will let him leave St. Elizabeths Hospital is in a pine box” (p. 152).

  4. An expert witness at the trial of O. J. Simpson, who was accused of having murdered his estranged wife and her male companion, testified that he believed Simpson had narcissistic personality disorder. When Simpson’s lawyers convened for lunch after this testimony, they joked that this diagnosis would also apply to them.

  5. It is interesting to note in this connection that John Nash, in the early stages of his psychosis, believed that the newspapers contained coded messages intended for him and that they provided instructions for how he was to carry out his special mission as a messianic figure.

  6. Before he left his hotel room for the taxi ride to the Hilton Hotel where President Reagan had a speaking engagement, Hinckley wrote a letter to Jodie Foster. He noted that there is “a definite possibility that I will be killed in my attempt to get Reagan” and that it was for “this very reason that I am writing you this letter now.” He went on to say that by this time she well knows that he loves her very much for over the past seven months he has left her dozens of poems, letters, and love messages “in the faint hope that you could develop an interest in me.” He noted that he feels good about the fact that she at least knows his name and how he feels about her, and that “by hanging around your dormitory, I’ve come to realize that I’m the topic of more than a little conversation, however full of ridicule it may be. At least you know that I’ll always love you.” He concludes by noting that he would abandon the idea of “getting Reagan” if only he could win her heart and live out the rest of his life with her, but that he “cannot wait any longer to impress” her and has “got to do something now to make you understand, in no uncertain terms, that I am doing all of this for your sake! By sacrificing my freedom and possibly my life, I hope to change your mind about me.” He asks her “to please look into your heart and at least give me the chance, with this historical deed, to gain your respect and love” (Caplin 1984, pp. 11–12).

  7. Given the sexual connotations of the son’s desire to touch his father’s gun, we may view this story as reflecting the aspect of Freud’s Oedipal theory that is rarely discussed, i.e., that the first stage of the Oedipal conflict involves the boy’s sexual attraction toward his father, which is subsequently replaced by the boy’s sexual attraction to his mother and jealousy of his father (See Freud 1960, 21–22; also Capps 2002, pp. 73–77). As for Goldman’s point about Jodie Foster being the idealized mother figure for Hinckley, when Allen Sonnenschein (1983) asked Hinckley if there was any truth to the idea that Jodie Foster “was some kind of mother substitute” for him, he recalled the phrase “idealized mother figure” introduced by Dr. Goldman at the trial, but declined to answer the question: “The more I comment on this, the sillier it will become. I can’t give you a definite yes or no, because the whole thing is beyond me” (p. 165).

  8. From November 1983 to May 1984 Hinckley’s parents rented an apartment outside Washington, D.C., while establishing the headquarters for the American Mental Health Fund. Given their proximity to St. Elizabeths Hospital, Dr. William Patterson suggested that they engage in family therapy with their son. Hinckley’s father wrote about their sessions in Breaking Points (Hinckley and Hinckley 1986, pp. 308–309). He noted that the fact they changed positions from week to week “came to me to symbolize the dynamics of those meetings: the breaking up of ancient patterns, most often unconscious, in the ways we related to each other.” He also noted that he often dreaded the approach of their Tuesday sessions because “our once-silent, docile John was finding his voice, and most of what he had to say was directed at me.” He added, “Years ago, when Jo Ann and I used to tell each other wonderingly that our youngest child was too good to be true, we were closer to the fact than we knew. Of course he had angers, resentments [and] jealousies like anyone else: like water too long backed up by a dam, they came spilling out all at once leaving a more confident, more socially adept person behind.” And they also “made progress”: “I had to learn that not all problems will yield to logic, that there can be many ‘right’ solutions. Jo Ann had to discover that peace is not always the answer; she had to allow John and me to confront each other without stepping in to short-circuit healthy arguments.”

  9. His mother’s reference to the fact that he was their third-born invites consideration of the Hinckley family system and, more specifically, the influence of birth order on his development. His older brother Scott, who worked in his father’s company, may be viewed as the family’s standard bearer, the sibling who is held up as the model for others to emulate. The family’s honor or sense of its goodness and rightness is exemplified by this individual. John may be viewed as the symptom bearer, the member of the family who is designated as “the problem” or who owns the family’s problem (see McGoldrick 1995, pp. 111–112; see also Capps 2001, chap. 3). In the trial, the prosecution lawyer referred to John Hinckley as “the fifth wheel in that family” and as “the black sheep” (Bonnie et al. 2008, p. 113). These are more colloquial and moralistic ways of referring to the symptom bearer. That John, the third-born, was named after his father is also something of an anomaly. Quite likely, he did not perceive himself as his father’s namesake and positioned himself over-against this association with his father. In a poem his mother discovered in his bedroom after the assassination attempt, titled “Pretend”, he suggested that a person might pretend he is “The scion of something unthinkable/Satan’s long lost illegitimate son” (Hinckley and Hinckley 1986, p. 165).

  10. He has been allowed to have cats at St. Elizabeths Hospital (see Bonnie et al. 2008, p. 155). At the 2005 hearing the presiding judge noted that after the 2003 hearing in which much was made of his reading habits and how they reflected on his mental state, he stopped writing and reading almost anything outside of non-controversial magazines related to cats. This became a concern of his treatment team because it “closed off another window into his mind” and displayed “a defensiveness and guardedness that was not beneficial to him or to his therapy” (in Bonnie et al. 2008, 160). One could argue, however, that his affection for cats may provide an especially revealing “window into his mind.”

  11. Hinckley’s age may also have played a role in his decision to assassinate the President. In The Seasons of a Woman’s Life, Daniel J. Levinson (1996) discusses what he calls the “age 25 shift.” At this age “a woman comes to a clearer understanding that her life has . . . problems and decides to make some changes,” and the “changes are often highly specific: to get married, to end or stay in a difficult marriage, to have a child, get a job, [or] go back to school,” but these specific choices are “rooted in more general concerns” as she is “taking a firmer position about the kind of life she wants to have” (p. 98). Levinson did not identify this shift in his earlier study of men (Levinson et al. 1978) but believes it may exist for men as well. John Hinckley was just two months shy of his twenty-sixth birthday when he attempted to assassinate the President. While an assassination attempt may seem a rather incongruous example of the “age 25 shift,” his letter to Jodie Foster written the morning of the attempt suggests that he felt he needed to take a “firmer position” about the kind of life he wanted to have, even if this meant he would place his very survival in jeopardy.

  12. Frank Sulloway (1996) also discusses the interaction between shyness and birth order in his chapter on temperament (pp. 178–194).

  13. The third stanza is quite possibly an allusion to Robert Frost’s (1979) “The Road Not Taken,” as Hinckley suggests that one may start down a road, but instead of continuing on it, one might return to the point of divergence and take the other road instead.

  14. Although Hinckley had suggested an association between Napoleon and Josephine and himself and Jodie (see Hinckley and Hinckley 1986, p. 144), there are greater similarities between his delusional obsession with Jodie Foster and that of Don Quixote with Lady Dulcinea (see Capps 1999; also Green 1980–1981).

  15. The hearing context did not lend itself to a discussion of the possible transformation of Hinckley’s narcissistic personality (cf. Kohut 1966; Lachmann 2008; also Capps 2004b; Cataldo 2007). In fact, the expert testimony tended to focus on the negative aspects of the narcissistic personality and not on its potentially positive features.

  16. At a hearing in 1997 the chief pharmacist at St. Elizabeths testified that after she offered to lend him a book, Hinckley would frequently visit her office and began gathering information about her personal life. When she was unsuccessful in getting him to leave her alone, she filed an incident report which led to his being ordered not to go in the general vicinity of where she worked and to limit his contact with her to business matters. However, even after these restrictions had been imposed, she noticed that he would be in the lobby on the third Monday of every month when she attended a committee meeting. She described him as “staring [her] down” on these occasions (Bonnie et al. 2008, pp. 146–147).

  17. His father died January 29, 2008.

  18. In her autobiography Maggie Kuhn (1991), the founder of the Gray Panthers in 1970, tells about her brother’s release from a psychiatric hospital where he had lived for twenty years. This was in the 1950s when the mental hospital “was forced to make severe cuts because of a loss of funds and the growing belief that the mentally ill did not need to be confined to such places.” He lived with Maggie and their mother who treated him “gently and with great affection” (pp. 123–124). After their mother’s death, he became more prone to fits of temper and violent behavior, and during the remaining years of his life his condition steadily deteriorated.

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Capps, D. John W. Hinckley, Jr.: A Case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Pastoral Psychol 62, 247–269 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-012-0443-2

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