The title is self-explanatory. The current spree of mass murderers suggest several different psychological characteristics. The first characteristic is that the potential mass murderer notices the recurrent nature of mass murders that take place in any given society. His grandiose fantasy is that he wants to out compete past mass murderers. Therefore, he diligently plans how he is going to surpass all previous mass murderers and become the greatest mass murderer in history. He is dark side competitive towards other mass murderers. He displaces his competitive urges into murderous/suicidal deeds rather than the normal competitive activities of other people.
The second characteristic is that he envies the people that he kills. He wants to die the same way that they do. Therefore, he is both the victim and the perpetrator of murder. He sees death as a desirable solution to his problems with the world. He may even hate the world and the people in it and think that he is nothing and should die along with his victims. He is like a person split in two parts. One part wants to kill others, while at the same time wishing to die himself. He thinks in black-and-white terms. It is either all or nothing. At some point he adopts a paradoxical vision of himself as omnipotent and grandiose and also undeserving and of low value.
He abstracts people and takes the position of the loner and justifies that his position is the absolute right one and dares anyone to prove that there is another way to view the world and existence. He is emotionally repressed, insulated and traumatically reverberating towards insults that have never been resolved. He can number his persecutors one at a time, but his revenge extends through the coping mechanism of generalization. He goes from one victimizer to a hundred victims and victimizers, all deserving to die. Mass murder and suicide is his solution to his problems He believes that if he were in the massacred position that he would omnipotently survive, when in fact he has very powerful mixed feelings about being alive and dead.
He believes that he can do whatever he wants, but that no matter what he does it’s not going to change anything. So, he resorts to mass murder and suicide to drastically change his sense of non-being. He lives in a black hole where part of him wants to do nothing and another part wants to do something. When he plans to mass murder, he believes he is doing something and he does experience the feeling of being God and the Devil at the same time. He has the omnipotent power of life and death. His defenses make him so armored that he renders it impossible for anyone to get to him. He fights voraciously against being vulnerable. He won’t and can’t feel the normal range of human emotions. His coping mechanisms, learned in childhood, are usually justification, rationalization, intellectualization, abstraction, repression, splitting, drinking and drugs.
Most of us utilize very well internalized mechanisms for keeping our dark side inclinations and emotions in check and under control. A Mass murderer at some point has had this part of his survival/kill or be killed mind brain ripped open and then he proceeds to act out his fantasies onto very specific and significant target people. Murder and suicide is his solution to his need to be heard, understood and accepted. His grandiosity keeps him from understanding that his very distorted thinking, not only gets him rejected socially, but, it also alienates and pushes other people away; because of its extreme idiosyncrasy. Through mass murder and suicide, he finally gets everyone’s attention. It is only when he commits his atrocities, that people and the media start to try to analyze and understand him. In his perverse way, he has achieved his goal.
In fantasy, he gets his reckoning. But when the fantasies intensify to the point of acting out, he loses all sense of normal morality and impulse control. He is driven to feel omnipotent God and devil like power through destruction and murder. His level of existence is at the survival levels. He even becomes consumed about the visualizations concerning his own death. He doesn’t question. He just acts! He cannot solve his own problems as most of us would consider to be by normal methods. He believes in very black-and-white terms that he can solve them through mass murder and self suicide.
