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Aswad -> RE: Ever try the other side? (11/25/2008 6:44:14 AM)
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Actually, he's missing the point. Good profilers can certainly think "how can someone do such things?" Great profilers think it in a different tone of "voice" and a subsequent chill down their spine. Excellent profilers don't need to ask, as they already know. This is kind of like with method acting: a method actor must internalize the role they are about to play, and many need to retain the role off-screen in order to make it work. When Ganz stepped out of the make-up room as Hitler, people who had met the man fell silent, and someone whispered "der Führer ist zuruck!" ("he is back!"). The woman who played Martha Goebbels broke down after the scene where she poisons her children to "save" them from a world without the Third Reich. Both of them are method actors who had to, in part, become the person they were portraying in order to do so to the best of their ability. An excellent profiler will do something similar, and has the mental flexibility to step off the cliff and the fortitude to climb back up. But those are wasted on the average serial killer, who is acting impulsively or irrationally. They're better applied to those who have acted rationally, who simply have an aberrant personality or different set of values that they live by.
However, few people have a developed ability to internalize another person in that way, to take on a different mindset and values temporarily, and in effect compartmentalize their mind into primary and secondary personality profiles. Some may even consider that ability to constitute, or be symptomatic of, a pathology. I would say that it is only pathological if one lacks a sense of which is the primary personality profile, or one lacks control over it (e.g. involuntary dissociation, triggers, etc.), or possibly also if the transition is quick and easy to accomplish. Spending too much time in a secondary personality profile, however, will be damaging, since that will affect deeper responses and basic conditioning, at best causing dissonance.
Health,
al-Aswad.
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