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This article was published in Volume 12, Number 1 “Psychic Pain and Public Acts” of Mind and Human Interaction. The full reference is:
Falk, A. (2001). Political Assassination and Personality Disorder: The Cases of Lee Harvey Oswald and Yigal Amir. Mind and Human Interaction, 12: 2-34.

To cite particular passages or pages, please contact us for a hard copy of the original published version: E-mail: mind@virginia.edu; phone: 434-982-1045.

Political Assassinations and Personality Disorder: 
The Cases of Lee Harvey Oswald and Yigal Amir

Avner Falk, Ph.D., F.I.N.S. (Jerusalem), is an Israeli clinical psychologist, political psychologist and psychohistorian. In addition to forty scholarly articles, he has published A Psychoanalytic History of the Jews and psychobiographies of Moshe Dayan, David Ben-Gurion, and Theodor Herzl. He is currently completing a psychobiography of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Abstract

This study reviews the current psychological understanding of political assassination—concluding that most political assassins are late adolescents in their middle twenties suffering from a severe narcissistic personality disorder or from an underlying borderline personality disorder with narcissistic features—and sketches the unconscious emotional dynamics of the political assassin, which involve deep murderous rage against the mother, rather than the father, even though the assassinated leader is usually a man rather than a woman. The examples of John F. Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin Yigal Amir are adduced to illustrate these dynamics. An extensive bibliography is provided.

Foreword

In Jewish religious tradition, the Sabbath begins before sundown on Friday evening and ends after sundown on Saturday night. In the Jewish-majority state of Israel, where Jewish religious parties are vital to every coalition government and therefore enjoy an influence over state affairs far beyond what their polling numbers would suggest, the Sabbath is an official day of rest. Most shops are closed and there is no public transportation. Saturday night, the end of the Sabbath, when people resume their shopping, theater-going and other activities, is a favorite time for political rallies.

On the evening of Saturday, November 4, 1995, a mass peace rally was held in Tel Aviv’s City Hall plaza, then called the Kings of Israel Square. The star speaker was the seventy-three-year-old prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, co-winner of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize (with his colleague-rival Shimon Peres and with the Palestinian Arab leader Yasser Arafat). At the end of the rally, as Rabin walked down the steps from the square to his car in the parking lot below, a twenty-five-year-old Israeli Jewish law student named Yigal Amir fired several bullets into the prime minister’s back at point-blank range. Rabin was near death upon arrival in the hospital and died shortly thereafter. It fell to a stunned Eitan Haber, a prominent Israeli journalist and one of Rabin’s closest aides, to announce his death to a dumbfounded nation. The Israeli legal system excludes capital punishment, except in extraordinary cases such as that of the German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962); on March 27, 1996, the Tel Aviv District Court handed down its guilty verdict and sentenced Yigal Amir to life in prison.

The assassination of my prime minister shocked me profoundly, as it did practically everyone else in Israel. Political assassinations were not unheard of in twentieth-century Palestinian Jewish and Israeli history,1 but never before had an Israeli prime minister, the nation’s highest-ranking politician, been assassinated. It was as if the nation’s parent had been murdered. (Lentz, 1988, pp. 166-167, 172).

Perhaps this study is my way of dealing with the trauma of Rabin’s assassination. I first met Yitzhak Rabin personally in the US in the late 1960s, when I was a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis and he, as the Israeli ambassador to the United States, visited our local Israeli community. My first psychological study of Rabin was written during his second term as prime minister at the invitation of a local political journal, and a paragraph on Rabin’s assassination ends my most recent book, A Psychoanalytic History of the Jews. Indeed, this study is rooted in that brief allusion (Falk, 1993, 1996, p. 728). I do wish to make it very clear that I have not examined Yigal Amir clinically and do not presume to offer a psychological or psychiatric diagnosis of his personality. His dramatic and violent act of assassination, his arrogant behavior afterwards (especially during his trial), and above all the court testimony of the clinical psychologist who examined him, Dr. Gabriel Weil, do, however, give us a fairly clear picture of his personality, which I shall attempt to sketch later in the paper.

Introduction

The history of political assassination, including tyrannicide and regicide, is surely as long as that of human society, and is the subject of many great works of art. The Venetian traveler Marco Polo (c. 1254 to 1324) is credited with actually importing into the European languages the term assassin, which, intriguingly, derives from the Arabic word hashashin or hashishiyyin, meaning “hashish users.” In Il Milione (c. 1295-1305; Polo, 1928, 1958), he asserted that assassini was a derogatory appellation for the violent and fanatical Muslim sect of the Ismaili Nizaris (active in Persia, Iraq, and Syria from the death of the Fatimid Caliph al-Mustansir in 1094 to the Eighth Crusade of 1270-1272) because the Nizaris reportedly smoked hashish to induce in themselves ecstatic visions of paradise before setting out to murder their hated enemies—mainly the European Christian Crusaders (Ford, 1985, pp. 100-104; Lentz, 1988, p. xiii; Stein and Niederland, 1989; Falk 1996, p. 476).2

Late-medieval European chroniclers picked up the word assassini to label the Nizaris; the term soon came to mean “murderer” in most European languages, and assassination eventually came to designate the sudden or secret murder of prominent figures. Most writers on political assassination have used the terms “political murder” and “political assassination” interchangeably, though some distinguish between murder and assassination by using “murder” for the killing of citizens by their leaders and “assassination” to designate the reverse. I shall use the term “assassination” in the strict sense of the killing of a top political leader. Terrorists, of course, also use murder for political ends, and there is a considerable body of psychological literature on political terrorism. However, I shall restrict my discussion here to the assassins of political leaders (Crenshaw, 1981, 1995; Laqueur, 1987; Reich, 1990; Pearlstein, 1991; Weinberg, 1992; Carrère d’Encausse, 1993).

Though most journalists and publicists have condemned political assassination, a few literary and political writers have actually advocated it, including the sixteenth-century English writer Edward Sexby and his twentieth-century ideological successor Edward Hyams. A year before the death of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), his former officer Edward Sexby published a book entitled Killing No Murder which justified tyrannicide in general and called for Cromwell’s assassination in particular. “Killing No Murder” became a revolutionary political concept. Three centuries later Edward Hyams published a book of the same title; like Sexby, Hyams believed that political assassination was justified when the lives of many people could only be saved by assassinating their leader (Sexby, 1657; Hyams, 1969).3

Of course, as in any psychoanalytic study, the stance of the present study is psychological rather than moral: its point is to explain political assassination, not to judge it. The questions before us are these: Are the assassinations of modern political leaders rational acts of principle, as writers like Sexby and Hyams might have claimed? Or do assassins’ psychological dispositions bear significantly upon their decisions to kill? Is there a particular psychological pattern—even a clear personality disorder—shared by modern political assassins? And, if we can identify such a pattern, can clinicians hope to help prevent political assassination?

From “a pattern of isolation and immaturity” to the “presidential assassination syndrome:” Understanding political assassins as disordered personalities

Observing that individual actors have proven more successful than groups in carrying out assassination, F. L. Ford (1985) asserts that “the incidence of assassination in history bears little or no discernible relation to rates of private crime, popular unrest, or battlefield casualties” (p. 384), suggesting that the psychological dynamics of what we are calling “political assassination” are in fact not likely to be “political” in any straightforward way. His and others’ claim that “a significant correlation does exist between suicides and political murders committed in certain societies . . . . [though] the linkage has yet to be established as a universal phenomenon” (p. 384) further indicates that the motivations of political assassins involve, rather, a complex confluence of the personal (or the personality) and the political.

When we compare what is known about the various modern political assassins, certain common elements quickly emerge: they typically seem to be incapable of assuming adult roles in their societies, to be committed to avenging themselves for perceived past injuries, and to be at once desirous of recognition and chronically unhappy with themselves. Deep feelings of failure, helplessness, and despair commonly precede the assassination itself. Though traumatic external events may occasion the actual assassination, these “precipitating events” actually seem merely to weaken the potential assassin’s already shaky defenses against a pre-existing murderous rage (Rothstein, 1964, 1975). James Earl Ray, who murdered Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, for example, was frightened and enraged by President Lyndon Johnson’s “abdication” speech just four days earlier; Lee Harvey Oswald was reportedly greatly upset by the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Viet Nam in 1963 three weeks before he shot President John F. Kennedy, as well as by an interview in which Fidel Castro claimed that Kennedy’s United States was trying to kill him;4 and Arthur Bremer, the would-be assassin who stalked President Richard Nixon and wound up shooting Governor George Wallace of Alabama on May 15, 1972, was significantly upset by a speech made by Nixon not long before the assassination attempt in which the president announced the escalation of the Viet Nam war. In US political history alone,5 John Wilkes Booth (President Abraham Lincoln’s assassin in 1865), Leon Czolgosz (the killer of President William MacKinley in 1901), Dr. Carl Austin Weiss (who shot Senator Huey P. Long to death in 1935), Lee Harvey Oswald, and Sirhan ibn Bishar Sirhan (who assassinated presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968) were all severely troubled and failed adolescents who were in their mid- or late twenties when they carried out their desperate acts (Rothstein, 1975, p. 282).

Let us take John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865) as an example. John was an ambitious fourteen-year-old actor already yearning for world fame when his father died in 1852. His father, Junius Brutus Booth (1796-1852), was an alcoholic and emotionally unstable English actor who had immigrated to the United States in 1821 and had become very popular, second only to Edwin Forrest, the best-known American actor of his time. John Wilkes Booth was the ninth of his father’s ten children, and may well have been an unwanted child, considering how many pregnancies and childbirths his mother had undergone before him. John’s older brother, Edwin Booth (1833-1893), was a famed actor and an alcoholic like his father, with an equally “unruly” temperament. John himself was emotionally unstable and deeply envious of his elder brother. After his father’s death he declared that he would perform a great destructive feat “never before accomplished by any other man and something no other man would probably ever do” (Weissman, 1958, quoted in Sargent, 1975, p. 299). Thirteen years later, an unhappy twenty-six-year-old despite his apparent theatrical success, Booth assassinated US President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), hoping to gain the world fame he craved (Lentz, 1988, pp. 2-3).

In modern psychological terms, this pattern of social immaturity, extreme swings in self-esteem, and deep feelings of righteous rage among political assassins suggests a common pathological personality organization. Sargent’s study of American presidential assassins found that, suffering from very painful feelings of helplessness and worthlessness, they are typically motivated by the fantasy that “he who kills the president of the most powerful country in the world becomes more powerful than anyone [else] in the world” (Sargent, p. 305). Perez-Rincon (1981) argued that the deepest unconscious motivation of the political assassin is the craving for recognition. Rothstein (1973, 1975) suggested that potential assassins create “pseudo-communities” of fellow youths who approve of their actions—both similar to and different from adolescent gangs and other peer groups—in order to alleviate an inner emotional pain (Thomson et al., 1997; Bremer, 1973). Though writings on the psychology of political assassination do not always come to this diagnostic conclusion explicitly, modern studies of the subject collectively present a portrait of the assassin as a person suffering from severe, malignant narcissism compounded by borderline personality organization, acute psychological disorders with their roots in early childhood development.

Borderline personality disorders are severe conditions characterized by instability, impulsiveness, unpredictability, extreme and rapid shifts of idealization and devaluation, diffuse and chronic anxiety, excessive manipulation of others, outbursts of inappropriate and intense rage, magical feelings of omnipotence, severe confusion of self-identity (what is clinically called “identity diffusion”), the inability to be alone, and self-damaging acts (Rothstein, 1964; American Psychiatric Association, 1994).6 Although one of the most characteristic aspects of borderline personality organization is its emotional instability, Kernberg (1975) defined it as “a specific, stable, pathological” condition in which the sufferer is dominated by the aggressive needs that are developmentally characteristic of infants (p. 3). Idealization, projection, and denial are all typical behaviors for individuals with borderline personality organizations.

While generally less severe than the borderline personality disorder, the narcissistic personality disorder is also a defensive character structure designed to protect the individual from unbearably painful feelings of helplessness and worthlessness by erecting at a very early age what is called a “grandiose self:” an amalgamation of idealized self-images, idealized images of the mother, and actual self-images “as a defense against an intolerable reality in the interpersonal realm, with a concomitant devaluation and destruction of object images as well as of external objects” (Kernberg, 1975, p. 53). Feelings of superiority alternate with feelings of inferiority, forming a vicious circle in the narcissist’s mind. According to Kohut (1971), these feelings of inferiority are the person’s reaction to not measuring up to his grandiose expectations of himself. Feelings of superiority then develop as an unconscious defense against the feelings of inferiority, reinforcing the person’s grandiose self.

Malignant narcissists are those who need to have what are called “aggressive triumphs” in their interpersonal relationships in order to protect the grandiose selves they have defensively constructed (Volkan and Ast, 1994). Further, the painful feelings of shame and humiliation at the core of the narcissistic personality often produce a profound need for vengeance and lead a narcissistic person to extreme acts of aggression and violence in a desperate attempt to heal the narcissistic injury and restore the damaged self-esteem. Indeed, Kohut saw the wish for vengeance as an essential part of “narcissistic rage,” a specific kind of rage characterized by “the need for revenge, for righting a wrong, for undoing a hurt by whatever means, and a deeply anchored, unrelenting compulsion in the pursuit of these aims, which gives no rest to those who have suffered narcissistic injury” (Kohut, 1978-1991, vol. 2, pp. 637-638). The assassin typically harbors deep feelings of righteous rage at what he feels to be unjust injuries inflicted on him or his loved ones by others. Socarides’ study of the unconscious dynamics of the wish for vengeance suggests that this desire derives from very early narcissistic injuries that have never been healed (Socarides, 1966, 1995).

How is such a person formed? The individual’s mind is shaped in infancy and early childhood out of the primary relationship between the infant and the mother. Some mothers, due to their own difficult and complicated childhoods, are emotionally very immature. They depend on their children and need their children to take care of them, to console them for the losses, blows, and troubles that they have suffered. Such mothers are closely attached to their children and cannot let go of them. When the child naturally tries to separate from such a mother, to “individuate,” she feels it as an abandonment and becomes enraged, rejecting the child. The child reacts with anxiety and rage, then denies that rage, clings to her again, remains part of her, and does not complete the vital process of maturation into independence. During adolescence, this separation-individuation crisis recurs, and the adolescent has another opportunity to break away from parents and to form a separate identity. In healthy families the adolescent succeeds in doing so, building a separate life. But if the initial separation-individuation stage in infancy has not succeeded, there are serious difficulties in separation and independent identity formation in adolescence. When it comes time to leave the home, the separation-individuation crisis resumes.

Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, Marguerite Claverie Pic Oswald Ekdahl, was just such an immature woman, a severely narcissistic—and probably borderline—personality.7 Marguerite’s own mother had abandoned her (from Marguerite’s point of view) by dying when Marguerite was an infant, and her father, too, was inadequate. Very unstable, the teenage Marguerite dropped out of school in the ninth grade and married Edward John Pic, Jr., who left her when she was pregnant with her first child. Feeling abandoned again, she named her baby boy John Edward, treating him as a link to the man she had lost. A couple of years later Marguerite married Robert Edward Lee Oswald. Robert’s father, Harvey Oswald, had died, and Marguerite felt this as another abandonment. Robert himself died of a heart attack when Marguerite was seven months pregnant with their third child—who, Marguerite hoped, would be a girl (Hartogs and Freeman, 1965; Rothstein, 1966; Volkan, 1981, pp. 318-321; Thomson et al., 1997, p. 120). It was, of course, a boy. Disappointed and repeatedly abandoned by the people who were closest to her, the unhappy Marguerite named her fourth son Lee Harvey, giving him his father’s second middle name and his paternal grandfather’s first name. From his birth, then, Lee Harvey Oswald was what is clinically known as a “living linking object” for his mother to the men she had lost and whose loss she could not mourn. She did not see Lee as a separate person at all but as an extension of herself. At once highly controlling and extremely neglectful, Marguerite was an inadequate mother; in the first seventeen years of Lee’s life, she moved him twenty-one times and he attended twelve schools.

From what we know, Lee Harvey Oswald experienced his mother as seductive, manipulative, domineering, critical, frustrating, depriving, castrating, and rejecting, and he never achieved any emotional separation and individuation from her. Throughout his life he unconsciously harbored murderous rage at her but also yearned to fuse with her like an infant (Rothstein, 1966, pp. 264-265; Thomson et al., 1997, p. 121). Hamilton (1986) believed that Lee’s “attempts to master feelings related to the death of his father” (p. 43) before he was born were a central theme in his life. Other scholars have argued that the “central theme” was Lee’s rejection by his severely narcissistic mother. “Unloved from birth, fatherless, emotionally neglected, and perhaps even sexually exploited by his mother, Lee Harvey Oswald was deprived of any opportunity for decent human relationships” (Thomson et al., 1997, p. 135). Either way, this relationship to his mother (and to his absent father) fostered the development of most, if not all, of the symptoms of a severe borderline personality disorder (Thomson et al., 1997).

Infants are not able to integrate their positive and negative experiences of their mothers inside their minds. Instead, they unconsciously split their mental image of their mother into two, as in the fairy tale “Snow White:” the idealized, all-good mother, and the all-bad, suffocating one. The idealized mother-image is, among other things, later transferred to one’s country and nation; the denigrated one is displaced to enemy countries and nations. Eventually, in normal development, the child is able to see others (the all-important mother included) as individuals composed of both good and bad. Under conditions of bad mothering such as Marguerite Oswald’s, however, the child is unable to achieve this normal development, and is therefore condemned to what is called “splitting”—to seeing not only the external world, but also their own inner worlds rigidly segregated into absolutely good and absolutely bad. Bad feelings are kept separate from good ones, feelings from thinking, the ideal self from the actual one, and idealized others from scorned ones.

As Lee Harvey Oswald clearly harbored a grandiose self, the sine qua non of the narcissistic personality and the result of such splitting, Thomson et al. argued that he suffered from an anti-social personality disorder, a severe form of narcissistic personality disorder. Hence he beat his Russian wife Marina and was twice court-martialed before being granted a dependency discharge from the US Marines to support his ailing mother. In another act that reflected his narcissistic personality disorder, three days after being discharged he sailed for Europe, skipped the Swiss school that had accepted him, went to the Soviet Union, and renounced his US citizenship. Despairing when he was turned down for Soviet citizenship, he attempted suicide and then lived unhappily in the USSR for over a year. His second attempt to leave the US (via Mexico) was rejected shortly before he assassinated Kennedy. His earlier failed attempt to kill General Edwin Walker and his botched attempt to defect to Cuba represent desperate efforts to heal the chronic (and in fact irreparable) damage done to his self-esteem by an ambivalent, narcissistic mother:

He had failed as a Marine, a revolutionary, a husband, a provider, and a lover .... Now he would have the chance to kill the President of the United States and be welcomed to Cuba as a hero by Fidel Castro. He would undo the humiliating rebuff in Mexico City and still any of [the Cubans’] doubts about him .... In his mind, Oswald, in one bold stroke, would undo all his past humiliations and failures. He would kill the sexual rival for Marina’s affection. He would take his revenge on the society he blamed for his mother’s failures. He would destroy the man who held the position he felt his skills entitled him to hold. Kennedy was a symbol of all Oswald envied (Thomson et al., 1997, pp. 135-136, emphasis added).

As Rothstein (1966) wrote of Oswald: “Ironically enough, despite Lee’s hostility to his mother, he may have revealed his attachment to her by acting out through the assassination his conception of her own wish to be famous” (p. 264). At the same time, Oswald’s quest for an ideal “motherland” in the USSR, Mexico, and Cuba was a desperate unconscious yearning for the good mothering that he had never experienced. Through the unconscious defense of splitting, Oswald denigrated the United States (the bad mother) and idealized the Soviet Union and Cuba (the good mothers). Through the unconscious process of “projective identification”—an unconscious process by which “parts of the self and internal objects are split off and projected into the external object, which then becomes possessed by, controlled and identified with the projected parts” (Segal, 1973, p. 27)—Oswald seems to have repeated his early-life trauma with the roles reversed: he became the injuring early mother, while assigning to the president his own role of injured infant. Thus he displaced his murderous rage at his mother to Kennedy, with whom he identified.

In his study of ten psychiatric patients of background and emotional structure similar to Oswald’s, Rothstein (1964) concluded that there was actually a discernibly distinct psychiatric illness, called “presidential assassination syndrome,” characterized by early maternal deprivation and severe rage against women, a weak and passive father dominated by the mother, rage and rebellion against authority, an inability to develop a mature masculine role, and severe confusion of self-identity. But what does murderous rage against one’s mother have to do with killing the male President, whom most people think of as “the father of the nation”?8 Would we not expect the President of the United States, the most powerful man on earth, to play the unconscious role of the father in the assassin’s mind? Freud considered Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which involves the assassination of a king, a representation of unconscious patricide, and the early psychoanalyst Richard F. Sterba (1946) asserted the “father-significance” of the President for most Americans. But later psychoanalytic scholars have suggested a more complex picture of the psychological significance of the President. Some research suggests that the nurturing and care-taking role of the chief executive in the unconscious mind of children is more maternal than paternal; Abse and Jessner (1962) have argued that male political leaders display feminine as well as masculine character traits, and Abse and Ulman (1977) suggest that the feminine-masculine mixture in the narcissistic political leader is in fact the secret of his charisma. DeGrazia (1945) observes that, to his patients, the President personified the mental representation of the mother from early infancy before sexual distinctions were made. (Rothstein, 1964, pp. 251-252; Wolfenstein and Kliman, 1965, Chapter 2; Post, 1986, 1993).

For most citizens, this compound of masculine and feminine probably holds a sort of balance. But the more disturbed—i.e., the more developmentally stunted—the individual, the more likely he is to treat his political leader as an early mother rather than as a father. Because a potential presidential assassin’s borderline personality organization causes him to operate on a developmentally infantile emotional level (different from most of his fellow citizens), murderous rage against women (rather than men) is a key aspect of his emotional disturbance. To him, the president unconsciously stands for the all-powerful, depriving and rejecting early mother—rather than the good paternal or maternal figure that omnipotently satisfied all needs (De Grazia, 1945; Sterba, 1946; Sargent, 1975 p. 305; Roazen, 1975, pp. 535-536). Thus Rothstein (1964, 1966) argued that the presidential assassin only superficially treats the president as a father figure, that more deeply he experiences the president as the frustrating, hated early mother who must be killed if he is to live, and with whom, at the same time, he yearns to unite through the act of killing—that is, to identify with the punishing, “killing” mother by himself “punishing” the figure with whom he has identified her. Rothstein hypothesized that the presidential assassin unconsciously and successively displaces his murderous rage from his mother to all women, then to men, to the military, to the government, and finally to its all-powerful chief executive (Rothstein, 1966, p. 265). By killing the president, then, Oswald unconsciously murdered his bad mother and united with her at the same time (Rothstein, 1966, p. 264; Klein, 1984, vol. 3, pp. 61-93).

Intriguingly, there may be a reciprocal quality to this developmentally “primitive” relation of assassin to politician. Rothstein (1975) even went so far as to argue that the victim of a presidential assassination unconsciously plays a role in his own demise (p. 265), which I believe to have been true of the late Yitzhak Rabin as well: behaving as if he were omnipotent and immortal, he made light of the many real threats to his life by extreme right-wing Israeli Jewish fanatics and refused to wear the bulletproof vest that his bodyguards repeatedly asked him to don. Whereas malignant narcissism is common among political assassins, many political leaders are adaptive, high-level, successful narcissists. The chronically “wounded self” of the narcissist gives rise either to a “mirror-hungry” person who requires an endless supply of admiration to shore up his grandiose self, or to an “ideal-hungry” person who seeks an idealized leader to merge with and assuage his painful feelings of self-doubt and worthlessness (Kohut, 1977). The “successful narcissist” politician gains admiration he “needs” from followers, both narcissistic and non-narcissistic. The narcissistic political assassin, however, oscillates between these responses, sending his self-esteem up and down even as he may long for (or long to be) the idealized leader. Like the leader, the assassin craves success, but is plagued by chronic fragility, uncertainty, and intense envy, even as he appears untouchable, invulnerable, withdrawn into “splendid isolation.” (Akhtar and Thomson, 1982; Weissman, 1958; Rothstein, 1964, 1966, p. 245; see further references in endnotes9).

A psychological portrait of an Israeli political assassin

Trying to save Yigal Amir from life in prison, his underpaid lawyers argued that during the assassination he was in an “abnormal mental state” and therefore, if judged guilty of murder, should be found to have diminished criminal responsibility. The prosecution naturally objected, but presiding Judge Edmond Levy insisted that the Court wished “to understand this phenomenon” and to be sure that Amir could legally stand trial. Under the court’s order, Amir was examined by three of Israel’s six state psychiatrists—the Israeli-born Dr. Yaacov Margolin of the Tel Aviv District, the Argentine-born Dr. Yair Bar-El (originally Carlos Breyter) of the Jerusalem District, and the South-African-born Dr. Aubrey Abraham Zabow of the Southern District.10 These three psychiatrists and the clinical psychologist who assisted them—the French-born Israeli psychologist Dr. Gabriel Weil of the Beer-Sheba Mental Health Center—filed their reports with the Tel Aviv District Court, which has kept these reports secret to this day. The ambivalent court, however, did allow Dr. Weil to testify publicly on his findings (Tel Aviv District Court, 1996; Bar-El, 1998; Margolin, 1998; Weil, 1998). The public record of Dr. Weil’s testimony is therefore the only source for clinical psychiatric and psychological findings about Rabin’s assassin.11

The psychiatrists and the clinical psychologist who examined Yigal Amir found that he knew what he was doing, that he was responsible for his actions, and that he was fit to stand trial. Dr. Weil claimed that he and the psychiatrists had reached the same conclusion in different and independent ways (Tel Aviv District Court, 1996, pp. 237, 247). Dr. Weil himself testified that Amir “has no personality disorder ... I did not say that he suffers from a schizoid personality disorder. He has [schizoid] traits, though” (Tel Aviv District Court, 1996, p. 238, author’s translation from the Hebrew). This aspect of Amir’s personality is responsible for his notorious “coldness”—the police who questioned him on the night of the assassination found Amir “cold as a fish” (Haaretz, January 29, 1996, p. 3A, author’s translation from the Hebrew), much as Oswald’s interrogators had found him—although deeper inside he seethed with passionate and violent feelings (Yediot Aharonot, Saturday Supplement, March 29, 1996, p. 3, author’s translation from the Hebrew). But the “schizoid” traits alluded to by the psychologist are only one aspect of his disorder. In my view, Dr. Weil’s testimony and the psychiatrists’ reports were a kind of “hedge:” a conscious or unconscious attempt to help the prosecution prevent Amir from being found “not guilty by virtue of mental illness” (Tel Aviv District Court, 1996, p. 238, author’s translation from the Hebrew).12

To my mind, despite the state psychiatrists’ and psychologist’s protestations (however understandable), their testimony clearly portrays Yigal Amir as suffering from a severe narcissistic personality disorder with an underlying borderline personality organization.13 Like most narcissists, Yigal Amir perceives himself very differently from the way others experience him; while others see him as a vile murderer, he thinks of himself as a special and unique being, different from (and above) all others, “a messenger or slave of God, the slave of his people” (Tel Aviv District Court, 1996, p. 240, author’s translation from the Hebrew). According to the psychologist, Amir, a man of strong religious faith, believed that he had received “an order from Heaven” to assassinate Rabin, and therefore had allowed himself to break the holy commandment of “Thou shalt not kill” to murder Yitzhak Rabin on the basis of the Jewish rabbinical rulings of Din Rodef (the punishment of the persecutor) and Din Mosser (the punishment of the informer). Amir affirmed that he feared that someone else might rob him of the holy hero’s laurels by assassinating the prime minister before he could: “I wanted a thinking man to do it. I was afraid that an Arab would do it. I wanted Heaven to see that someone of this people did it” (Gewirtz, 1996, p. 2, author’s translation from the Hebrew).

“At the same time,” Dr. Weil observed, “he perceives that all those around him are of lesser value, the government is no good, the people are busy with bread and entertainment, the rabbinate is corrupt … Those who are not party to his idea and vision become part of that crowd which he despises” (Tel Aviv District Court, 1996, pp. 240-242, author’s translation from the Hebrew). This notion reflects the malignant quality of Amir’s narcissism, by which he sustains his own grandiose vision of himself by devaluing others. This black-and-white splitting of others into “good” and “bad” is replicated in his internal world. Dr. Weil reports, further, that “Yigal’s personality has certain parts which are not harmonically integrated .... His feeling and thinking are not well connected inside him” (p. 247). “He tries to base his inner balance on reason alone and attempts to close up his feelings” (p. 243). In my view, this persistent and pervasive splitting is a symptom of Amir’s borderline personality organization, for it reflects his fixation in the early state of development at which the child is unable to connect the positive images of people in its environment (its “internalized objects”) with the negative ones. As Dr. Weil testified, “in optimal persons there is a good connection between those internal parts. In Yigal Amir there is [no] good integration of these internal parts” (p. 248).

Also like other narcissists, Yigal Amir apparently suffers from extreme up-and-down swings in his self-esteem. His feelings of superiority are openly displayed. During his arrest and trial he was smiling, cocksure, and arrogant, which infuriated most Israelis. He constantly spoke to those around him, chewed gum, showed his contempt for the government and for the court, expressed satisfaction with what he had done, and expressed no feelings of guilt or remorse. He argued with the lawyers and with the judges on legal matters, even though he had just failed his final exam in law school. When asked about the meaning of Amir’s infamous smile, Dr. Weil reported that, expressing “not even a hint of guilt feelings” (p. 240, author’s translation from the Hebrew), Yigal smiled to signify his “sense of superiority and … the feeling of mission … because he feels that [the assassination] was absolutely necessary” (p. 240).14

At times Yigal’s mother seemed to understand him better than his father, though at others, as we shall see, she showed little understanding of her son’s feelings. While the father angrily called his son a “simpleton” for smiling after having murdered the prime minister, the mother was widely quoted in the Israeli media as commenting that the smile was not an idiot’s smile, but a cover-up for something, or a smile of embarrassment. Based on certain psychological tests, probably including the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Dr. Weil concluded that Yigal’s arrogant smile concealed an underlying depression, rooted in “his feeling of helplessness, on the background of his inability to influence the public system to adopt his views” (Tel Aviv District Court, 1996, p. 245, author’s translation from the Hebrew). Like most narcissists, Amir seems not to need anyone, but in fact he is a very deprived, needy, and dependent adolescent who craves boundless admiration, attention, and love. Though in his testimony Dr. Weil could not report any clinical signs of depression in the assassin, certain symptoms did appear in the course of the trial. While the trial was in session, when he was being watched by the whole world on television, he was smiling, provocative, and derisive of others, apparently feeling special and important. During breaks in the court proceedings, when he was in jail awaiting their resumption, however, his mood changed. He no longer smiled and looked rather depressed.15

When the trial resumed, Yigal regained his good mood, but one journalist suggested that he finally did break down emotionally when his life sentence was read out in court on March 27, 1996:

Anyone watching the sentencing the day before yesterday saw a man in deep depression, pale and hard of speech …. In his court speechifying Yigal Amir never mentioned his family with as much as one word. During his police interrogation he said that he had known his act could have destroyed his family. [But at] the conclusion of the trial, when he got up to speak, he suddenly said: “I have destroyed my family.” He did not dare to look up at the many members of his family who were sitting in the courtroom (Gewirtz, 1996, p. 2, author’s translation from the Hebrew).

As Gewirtz’s reportage obliquely indicates, the key to understanding why Amir assassinated the prime minister does indeed lie in understanding the dynamics of his family. But, in the aftermath of the assassination, few Israelis, even intellectuals, really tried to understand why the young man had done what he did. Many said that he was a member of the fanatical, orthodox Jewish right wing, but few tried to comprehend how he came to be that way, and why it was he, of all the members of that right wing, who actually carried out the assassination. By examining his family history, we can reconstruct how he became someone who would respond to the events of his life by striking out at the single most important figure of his national community.

Most of the Israeli journalists who covered Yigal Amir’s murder trial found his family bizarre, many noting particularly the unusual character of the assassin’s mother, Geulah. Some Israeli journalists wrote shortly after the assassination that we Israelis could not possibly understand the Amir family: it was a very strange family, a riddle about which only a foreign expert could say anything.16 The psychologically-minded Israeli journalist Uri Avneri noted that, “In a family of a protective mother and devoted sisters Amir was no doubt a king, mother’s spoiled boy. When he smiles in court, he is saying, ‘See, Mom, I did it! Everything is all right!’” (Avneri, 1995, p.1, author’s translation from the Hebrew). Almost universal was the impression that, as one reporter wrote, “[w]hoever watched the Amirs in court and on their way to the police interrogation and back could see a clear family hierarchy. A big, outspoken, domineering and opinionated woman, and a little man in orthodox Jewish dress, closed up in himself and taciturn, who tagged along” (Gewirtz, 1996, p. 2, author’s translation from the Hebrew). Many believed that Yigal and Haggai—Yigal’s elder brother, who had prepared the lethal bullets and had been charged with complicity in the assassination—were rotten apples from a poisonous tree. As I shall suggest, there is an element of truth in this charge, but the psychological truth is rather more complex than such demonizing journalism would allow us to understand.17

Yigal’s parents, Geulah and Shlomo Amir, figures of so much speculation, come from Jewish families who immigrated to Israel from the Arab country of Yemen in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Most of these families were poor and had numerous children. They spoke Jewish Arabic and Yemenite Hebrew (rather than Israeli Hebrew) and lived in crowded housing under harsh conditions. The Yemenites were typically looked down upon as “primitive Asiatics” by the dominant Ashkenazi (European Jewish) population, whose wives often employed Yemenite women as charwomen and maids. Some of the Yemenites, like the Amirs, eventually adopted the practices of the Ashkenazi ultra-orthodox Israeli Jewish community.18

Shlomo Amir is an orthodox Jewish scroll writer and ritual butcher. In line with the customs of his community, his marriage to Geulah was arranged by a matchmaker. Shlomo is rigid, closed-up, passive, and plainly dependent on his wife. Though in his wife’s absence Shlomo Amir did step into the role of family spokesman, he appears a small, weak man whenever they are together. The mother obviously dominates this family, and Shlomo seems to know that his son Yigal is Geulah’s favorite: “when the Amirs came to visit Yigal in jail for the first time, and found out that only three members of the family could go in and see him, the father stayed outside” (Gewirtz, 1996, p. 2, author’s translation from the Hebrew). By contrast, clearly capable and independent, Geulah Amir made a living running a kindergarten in her home and was thought by acquaintances (including an advertising agent who had unsuccessfully run for mayor of the Amirs’ town with Mrs. Amir on his ticket) to be “a charming woman, interested, open and warm” (Gewirtz, 1996, p. 2, author’s translation from the Hebrew). One perceptive female journalist19 rightly observed, however, that what you see on the outside is not exactly what is on the inside (Ringel-Hofmann, 1995).

When Yigal’s trial began, another side of Geulah began to emerge, as she began to appear hypersensitive, short-tempered, and arrogant. Though in one of her first interviews after the assassination she disowned her murderous son, the following month she declared, “I am his mother, and I shall go on being his mother, no matter what anyone says. Let no one expect me to say today that he is not my son” (quoted widely in the Israeli media). At the outset of the trial, Geulah Amir had a highly-publicized verbal clash with Rabin’s aide, Eitan Haber, a writer and biographer in his own right (Haber, 1978), who, like many other Israelis, was enraged by the murder of his idealized father figure. The episode began when Shlomo Amir approached Haber saying, “I want to ask you for forgiveness.” Rather than accept the father’s apology, a furious Haber shouted at him, “Don’t come near me. If you keep talking to me, I’ll strike you!”20 Upon hearing this, Geulah Amir exploded, crying to her husband, “Leave him alone, he’s a monster!” (Haber later commented that it was weird that the woman who had bred two monsters should call him one.) Under the angry Geulah’s orders, her husband filed a complaint with the police against Haber for “threats and incitement” (Maariv, December 20, 1995, p. 2; Maariv, December 21, 1995, p. 3; Yediot Aharonot, December 26, 1995, p. 14).21 Some Israeli journalists considered Geulah Amir aggressive, calculating, and manipulative with the press. Others observed that during the proceedings she continuously murmured curses at the judges and the police. Still others accused Geulah Amir of being seductive with her son and called her tough, aggressive, and lying: “She cursed the policemen and Yigal’s interrogators all the time while sending Yigal caressing looks” (Maariv, Saturday Supplement, December 29, 1995, p. 20).

In the wake of Rabin’s assassination,  Geulah Amir clearly became something of a media celebrity herself, so we have many of her own words to help us understand her emotional relationship with her son the assassin. Initially, both she and her husband insisted that they could not understand how their son could have killed the prime minister. Whereas one journalist wanted “a foreign expert,” Geulah Amir told an interviewer that even the most expert psychologist would not be able to explain to her why her son did what he did. She even, in a sense, denied (denial is one of the key defenses of narcissistic and borderline personalities) that it was her son who had committed the crime: after the police had made Yigal re-enact the assassination and videotaped the re-enactment, Geulah said to the press, “I could not watch the re-enactment. He was a totally different person. This is not our Gali, this is another person” (Maariv, December 22, 1995, p. 5, author’s translation from the Hebrew).

Despite her intuitive grasp that Yigal’s smile was defensive, Geulah did not seem to understand much else about her son. Geulah Amir told her interviewer that her “Gali” had closed up to her during the year before the assassination. He had lost weight and hair and looked too serious. Geulah had kept asking her son, “How are you, ayuni [Arabic for “my eye” or “apple of my eye”]? Why do you look like that? Is anything wrong?” Although everything had gone wrong in his life—he had failed as a soldier, lost his girlfriend, had no work, and was failing in his studies—Yigal had told his mother that all was fine. Even if he had told her of his troubles, though, she probably would not have listened to him very attentively. In 1997 Geulah Amir was videotaped speaking to her jailed son by telephone for a television program about the Rabin assassination. She interrogated her “Gali” as to whether he had food, clothing, and blankets—not as to how he felt inside. It was obvious that he was telling her not what he felt, but what he thought she wished to hear. Nor was she really listening to him.

During the post-assassination period, then, several patterns emerged in Geulah Amir’s responses to her son’s act. In her early, humble phase, she issued a press release in her husband’s name and her own, asking forgiveness of Leah Rabin, the widow of the assassinated prime minister (who died five years later), and expressing contrition, shame and grief. A day later, Geulah announced, “I ask forgiveness of Leah Rabin and her children. If only I could find a way, I would have said this to Leah Rabin and her family personally. Forgive me, forgive me for what my son has done to you” (Yediot Aharonot, November 7, 1995, p. 22). By asking to be forgiven for the act of violence her son had committed, she in effect was behaving as if she and her son were one and the same person.

At the same time, her most prominent feeling toward her son during this period was one of righteous rage. In the interview in which she disowned her son, Geulah Amir declared that he had “betrayed her in an unimaginable way.” She told another interviewer that she was furious with Yigal and that it would have been better if Rabin’s bodyguards had killed him, because that would have purged the crime. On the fifth day after the assassination, Geulah recited a famous Biblical verse—with a twist: “I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me” (Isaiah 1:2) she said, adding “and against the people of Israel.” At the end of the first week after the assassination, Geulah Amir again addressed Leah Rabin in the Israeli mass media, again asking the widowed woman’s forgiveness, but this time stressing her own grief and suffering:

I, the mother, would not have expected my son to reach, to hit and to cause you this terrible disaster.... my heart weeps and will weep for many years to come, until I go to my grave. Neither you nor we shall go back to what we were before. But I, every day and every hour this pain, this fear will go with me. What can grow out of a person that you raise and give the best possible basis? And where did it come from? God only knows (Yediot Aharonot, November 10, 1995, p. 3, author’s translation from the Hebrew).

In some sense, these comments suggest, Geulah Amir felt that her son’s crime was first and foremost against her. On December 25, 1995, during her son’s trial, Geulah Amir was surprise-interviewed by an Israeli radio talk show host, who called her house, identified himself, and asked, “Who am I speaking to?” Geulah answered bitterly, “You are talking to the most hated woman in the country” (Kol Yisrael Audio Archives, author’s translation from the Hebrew). This statement reflected not only negative feelings about herself, but also narcissistic feelings of grandiosity and uniqueness.

Whether penitent or defiant, sympathetic or hostile in tone, then, Geulah Amir’s emotional responses to her son’s crime reflected an intensely ambivalent relationship to him, one that alternated between complete fusion with him on the one hand and angry rejection of him on the other. This oscillation suggests that Geulah loves her son in a narcissistic and symbiotic fashion: as a mirror image of her own grandiose self, not as a person separate and different from her. As one perceptive journalist rightly suggested of Geulah Amir after her son’s sentencing, “Yigal was to her a kind of continuity of her own self, her private redemption.… Yigal was meant to break through the feeling of siege that she had felt in her own life. That message he had received since his infancy” (Gewirtz, 1996, p. 2, author’s translation from the Hebrew).

Indeed, Geulah’s messages to her son were expressed in her very choice of his name.22 It is no accident that the assassin’s given name of Yigal and his mother’s name of Geulah sound similar: both derive from the Hebrew root ga’al, meaning “redeem.” The Hebrew word geulah means “redemption,” while yig’al means “he shall redeem.” When he was a little boy, she nicknamed him Gali, a diminutive for Yigali, which means “he shall redeem me.” The notion of redemption is deeply rooted in Jewish tradition: the Messiah is expected to redeem the long-suffering Jews from their afflictions. Indeed, the assassin’s mother may have been named Geulah by her parents because they wanted her to redeem them from their sufferings. In turn, Geulah seems to have named her second son Yigal because she wanted him to redeem her from her own suffering as an ambitious and intelligent woman married to a passive man whom she probably did not love, working hard to raise her children under difficult circumstances and later to run a kindergarten,23 and probably seeing no hope of changing her life for the better.

But the fusional bonds by which Geulah has tied Yigal to herself are bonds of hate as well as of love. Though all observers agree that her second son is plainly her favorite, she loves him only if he is the good, handsome, and intelligent boy who redeems her from her pain; if he is his own unhappy man, she rejects him. When she visited Haggai and Yigal in jail, she called her two sons “crazy” and wept bitterly with apparent rage, yet also remarked in the same interview that “Gali” was such a handsome boy. As a child, little “Gali” probably received love from his mother only if he was clever, talented, and amusing, redeeming her from her own unhappiness by serving as a positive reflection of herself—otherwise, she rejected him. We can easily imagine that, with a weak and passive father and a powerfully dominating mother, Yigal Amir’s childhood was an exercise in frustration. Such a father would have been a poor identification figure for his young son.

There is also obviously considerable “oedipal” tension between father and son, with Shlomo dismissing his son as a simpleton and Yigal rejecting his father’s expectations of him out of hand. This oedipal conflict, however, to my mind, is not Yigal Amir’s central problem; rather it is his infantile, pre-oedipal, fusional tie to his mother. Little Yigal may well have worshipped his father at first, but later may have become angry with him not only for submitting himself to Geulah, but also for not helping Yigal in his bid to mature. Whenever he tried again, as an adult, to separate from his mother and to become an independent person in his own right, she went on calling him “Gali” (a nickname appropriate to a small child, not a grown man) and “ayuni” because she unconsciously wanted him to remain her little boy and never to leave her. Like many narcissists, then, Yigal Amir not only suffers from an unresolved oedipus complex but also from an ambivalent symbiotic tie to his mother: unable to break away from her, he cannot stand her either, and in turn he denies his murderous rage at her.

Yigal’s feelings about himself are no less distorted. Because the ambivalent Geulah constantly gave her son double messages—love and hate, acceptance and rejection at the same time—his self-esteem and self-identity both became very unstable. Yigal is a smiling, charming boy, but at the same time he harbors extreme rage for his mother. Just as he tries to keep thinking and feeling strictly separate, his borderline personality organization causes him to be unable to integrate these two aspects of himself, the beneficent and the murderous. Thus his stunned mother was in some deeper sense right to claim, “This is not our Gali, this is another person.” His childhood taught him both to love and to loathe himself, and his adult successes and failures are all experienced through this lens.

At the age of twenty Yigal enlisted in the Israeli army.24 It was the first time he had ever left his mother’s home. As a soldier, Yigal Amir proved less than indispensable to his commanders and, two years into his military service, in June 1992, he was sent abroad on a “special mission.” Yigal took a quick security-guard course with the Israeli General Security Service (IGSS) and was sent to the Latvian capital of Riga by the Prime Minister’s Liaison Office and a semi-secret organization called Nativ as a guard (under the cover of being a Hebrew teacher) for Jewish immigrants to Israel. A superficial check run on Yigal by the IGSS found nothing wrong with his personality, and he was found fit for the mission and fit to carry a gun.25 But Yigal Amir was not an ideal security guard either. Two months later, in August 1992, he was sent back to Israel and returned to his army service; it seems that he had failed in his mission. His short mission in Latvia had helped Yigal get away from his mother physically, but not to separate from her inwardly. On June 29, 1993, having completed his three years of military service, he returned home to his mother. The process of separation and individuation, so vital to a young man’s growth and maturity, had failed again.

In fact, he was about to fail once more—this time in love, with a beautiful girl with whom he apparently had no chance of having a stable and long-lasting relationship. In the fall of 1993 he was admitted to the law school of Bar-Ilan University, an orthodox Jewish university in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan.26 A bright young man,27 Yigal at first did well in law school and seemed also to succeed in love. In the summer of 1994, after his first year at Bar-Ilan, Yigal met Navah Holzmann, an attractive, orthodox-Jewish economics student “from a good family,” who became his girlfriend. Yigal adored Navah, his first significant emotional relationship outside his family, and she “repaired his inferior self-image” (Gewirtz, 1996, p. 3, author’s translation from the Hebrew). All indications suggest that his relationship to her seems to have been unconsciously infantile, narcissistic, and symbiotic, like his tie to his mother. But after a few months with Yigal, Navah left him for another young man, his friend Shmuel Rosenblum, whom she soon married. Yigal was devastated. This abandonment was traumatic for Yigal as it repeated his early emotional abandonment by his narcissistic mother.

Some of Yigal Amir’s friends told inquisitive journalists that Navah’s parents had forced her to end her relationship with him or that it was he who had left her rather than she him (Karpin and Friedman, 1998, pp. 168-169). Avishai Raviv, a “veteran right-wing agitator” and an IGSS agent provocateur who knew about Yigal’s intention to assassinate Rabin—and who was later charged with inciting him to the murder (Karpin and Friedman, 1998, pp. 95, 215-232)—told the press that “following a personal crisis after he left his girlfriend [sic] Yigal Amir began to announce that he would murder Rabin” (Shavit, 1998, p. A 5).28 Did Raviv really think that Yigal had “left his girlfriend,” rather than that she had left him? Had Yigal told him so to conceal his profound sense of shame and humiliation? In my view, his abandonment by Navah was the straw that broke Yigal’s emotional back and precipitated the crisis that led him to assassinate Rabin. Navah invited him to her wedding, which he attended; everyone present found him depressed. Many people who saw him said that he looked like a shadow of himself.

Amir’s already shaky self-esteem had received a terrible blow. During his second year in law school, the year preceding his assassination of Rabin, his grades fell dramatically. Those who knew him found him very unhappy. Navah’s rejection surely enraged the narcissistic Yigal, but he apparently denied it to himself and others. After Navah left him, one young man who had known Yigal in college wrote to me that the anti-Oslo-agreement and anti-Rabin atmosphere in 1995 provided fertile ground for Amir to channel his despair into what he saw as a positive course. The roots of his murderous act, the young man believed, were in a home that made great demands on him but did not give him the emotional tools to deal with those expectations (Ansbacher, 1998, author’s translation from the Hebrew).

But it was not only in his personal life that Amir was failing during this time. Over the two and a half years between his army service and his assassination of the prime minister, Yigal Amir had sought to become a political leader. He had tried to organize young right-wing fanatics into anti-government and anti-Arab action, even on the Sabbath. In his testimony to the court, the psychologist reported that the assassin believed Israel to be drifting toward a shoah (holocaust). As Yigal saw it, Dr. Weil said, “nobody sees and nobody listens and everyone is indifferent, while he [alone] sees the catastrophe approaching, and it causes him to feel frustrated and impotent.… He keeps trying not to be impulsive, to be balanced, measured, planned, perhaps programmed as well” (Tel Aviv District Court, 1996, p. 244, author’s translation from the Hebrew). As Navah’s rejection hit him, he was failing in his political project too, rebuffed by the political leadership of the Israeli right wing as too hotheaded and his ideas rejected as too far-fetched or impractical.29

During the last few months before he killed Yitzhak Rabin, Yigal made desperate attempts to salvage his shattered self-esteem. He applied to the Jewish Agency for the Land of Israel, a quasi-governmental entity promoting Jewish immigration to Israel, for another mission abroad. It was a last-ditch effort to break out of his despair and out of his fusional love-hate tie to Geulah by leaving his country (unconsciously, a symbol of his mother). In February 1995, Amir was examined by a Jewish Agency psychologist. The report of the examination was quite negative: “A compulsive personality ... unfit for team work, inflexible, and has a low sociomatic [sic] rating ... sending him abroad could harm the mission and the reputation of the state of Israel” (Yediot Aharonot, November 24, 1995, p. 3, author’s translation from the Hebrew). Yigal’s application to be sent abroad was rejected. Once more he had suffered a shameful and humiliating failure. Yigal’s sense of grandiosity had suffered blow after blow. He felt that he had failed in everything—as a soldier, as a student, as a lover, and as a political activist. He desperately wished to prove that he was a great hero rather than a worthless failure. Underneath his arrogance, Yigal hated himself (Tel Aviv District Court, 1996).

The court-appointed psychologist observed that Amir had been “walking about for a long time ... with pent-up rage because he was in his view like a prophet in the gates of the city, decrying evil and his activities had no effect, and he walked about with this feeling of rage in his belly” (Tel Aviv District Court, 1996, p. 243, author’s translation from the Hebrew). Though his many rejections, including the political ones, had been deep blows to his self-esteem, and no doubt provoked great narcissistic rage, the earlier and deeper object of his rage, and the author of the worst damage to his self-esteem, was in my opinion the domineering, aggressive, and ambivalent mother who could neither let him separate from her nor live with her, and who rejected him when he attempted to be independent from her. On the one hand, Yigal unconsciously identified with his “strong” mother, but on the other hand he was angry with her for dominating his father and for not letting him, Yigal, develop a separate and independent adult existence. As his self-esteem spiralled and he again regressed into his early childhood family dynamics, Amir’s disordered mind turned to political violence as a means of “rescuing” himself from his feelings of worthlessness and powerlessness; Yigal Amir’s feelings for his parents were so ambivalent and painful that he unconsciously denied them and displaced them onto political objects.

Let me suggest some alternative and complementary interpretations of the unconscious symbolism in Yigal Amir’s mind: many boys have rescue fantasies in which they save their mothers from their suffering or from their oppression by their fathers. By assassinating Rabin, Yigal Amir unconsciously fulfilled his mother’s wishes, as expressed in his name; as he himself tells it, by killing the evil prime minister he has redeemed the Land of Israel (his idealized mother) from her sufferings and rescued her from disaster. But his act also reflects his unconscious search for better parents than Shlomo and Geulah, which ended in his religious object world: the God of Israel became Yigal’s good father, the Land of Israel his good mother. As it is to many Israeli extreme-right nationalists, the Land of Israel is to Yigal Amir not the actual country but an abstraction, a sacred emotional object comprising all the territories of Israel and Palestine. During his trial, before the reading of the verdict, on March 27, 1996 Yigal said, “Everything I have done, I have done for Israel, for the Torah of Israel, for the people of Israel, and for the Land of Israel—it is a knot that will never be untied” (Yediot Aharonot, March 29, 1996, p. 2, author’s translation from the Hebrew). This sentiment dramatically and accurately—if unwittingly—reflects his impossible fusional bond with his mother.

At the same time, Yigal strongly identified himself with his suffering motherland. As the court-appointed psychologist testified, “the infrastructure [of Amir’s narcissism] is a very sharp national identification with the people, with the People of Israel” (Tel Aviv District Court, 1996, p. 240, author’s translation from the Hebrew). During the court proceedings concerning the extension of his arrest warrant he said that it was not just his own finger that had pulled the trigger, but the finger of the entire Israeli people. On one level, in Yigal’s unconscious mind, Yitzhak Rabin (the bad father) wanted to hand over parts of the Land of Israel (the good mother) to the Arab nation (the bad mother), which does not let the Israeli people (Yigal himself) live in peace. On another level, Yitzhak Rabin himself, who had dismissed his critics as “propellers” and would not listen to them, was the bad mother, who did not listen to Yigal, whom he hated, and who had to be killed because he had no other way of getting away from her.

When he first appeared in court, Yigal’s worst charge against Rabin was that the man he had murdered had groveled before the Americans and the Arabs and had abandoned the Land of Israel to them. Avishai Raviv, the former IGSS agent provocateur mentioned earlier, told his IGSS interrogators that Yigal had hated Rabin’s contempt and arrogance toward the settlers. In Yigal’s unconscious mind, then, on the one hand Rabin played the role of Yigal’s narcissistic and overbearing mother whom he hated and wished to kill, and, at the same time, Rabin was also Yigal’s weak and passive father. Without knowing it, Yigal was saying: “My father was weak, he did not stand up to my mother, I had to kill him.” Since his conscience and his religion did not allow him to kill his father, nor his mother, all his rage was displaced to Rabin, who became his bad father image (Shavit, 1998, p. A5).

As Rothstein concluded in the case of Lee Harvey Oswald, when Yigal Amir assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, he was unconsciously murdering his mother as well as making a suicidal attempt to unite with her. He was also making a desperate attempt to repair his devastated self-esteem. Though the court-appointed psychologist believed that Yigal placed a great emphasis on rationalization and intellectualization among his unconscious defenses, these are not in my view the key ones. I believe that his key defensive processes are more archaic and primitive: projection, externalization, and denial. In his unconscious mind, the world is his mother, and he has to fight the world to feel that he exists. On the one hand, he is stubborn like his mother, thinking that he is doing only what he wants and what he believes right. On the other hand, he was powerfully influenced by mavericks, fringe people and fanatical rebels—such as Avishai Raviv, the controversial Israeli military historian Uri Milstein, extreme-right rabbis like Shlomo Aviner who thought that Rabin was subject to din rodef, and Margalit Har-Shefi, a young woman with whom Yigal fell in love after he was abandoned by Navah, and who has in the meantime been sentenced to a long prison term for not acting to prevent the assassination that she knew Yigal to be planning30 (Karpin and Friedman, 1998, pp. 144-145, 169 ff.; Peri, 2000, pp. 124 ff.). In Yigal’s fantasy, by killing the prime minister he became a very important person and cured himself of unbearable feelings of failure. His “important statement” to his judges that he did not regret what he had done was an attempt to preserve that illusion of omnipotence, fame, and significance (Maariv, January 3, 1996, p. 5 and Yediot Aharonot, January 24, 1997, p. 2, author’s translations from the Hebrew).

Postscript:  Can Political Assassination be Prevented?

I have tried to show that Yigal Amir’s assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was over-determined—that is, it resulted not from a single emotional motive (let alone a single rational, ideological motive), but from several very powerful unconscious motives acting at once: his murderous rage at his rejecting mother, displaced to the prime minister (the mother, not the father, was “the prime minister” at home); his rage at his father, also displaced to Rabin; his longing for love and recognition by his parents; his wish to break away from his mother by means of a violent and dramatic act that would get him out of her home; his wish to perform an act that would make him great and famous and restore his shattered self-esteem; and his wish to win back his girlfriend with an act of heroism that would make him very special and dear to her. Ultimately, however, assassinating the prime minister removed Amir from his mother’s home only physically and put him into another prison. Though inwardly he has still not broken away from his mother—they regularly talk on the phone and she continues to treat him like a child—only by getting himself arrested and jailed could he at least literally break out of his mother’s house. As Geulah said in one of her first interviews after the assassination, apparently without realizing the deeper meaning of what she was saying, “By his act he has left this house.”

Yigal Amir, however, remains convinced that God ordered him to kill Rabin. He does not regret his act and has repeatedly said so to the courts during his rare appearances since he was imprisoned. He is unaware of the fact that the feelings that moved him to murder the prime minister originate with his parents: he is convinced that he has acted rightly out of just motives and at the command of God. Though many political assassins do not have such lofty justifications for their crimes, the powerful unconscious motives that push them to commit their acts are such that it is hard to see how their murderous acts could be foreseen or prevented. More often than not, the assassination is the last desperate act of a young man who has no other way of salvaging his self-esteem and of breaking out of an impossible symbiosis with an overwhelming internalized image of his mother. Added to this, as Rothstein’s landmark study implied, not every failed adolescent suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, or from a borderline personality disorder with narcissistic features, or even from Rothstein’s own “presidential assassination syndrome,” is certain to attempt to murder a significant political figure. In short, like war and other major plagues of humankind, while political assassination can be better understood, it cannot necessarily be predicted or prevented.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to many people in different lands for assistance in the preparation of this article. In the United States, Dr. J. Anderson Thomson and Ms. Joy Boissevain of the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction at the University of Virginia have provided me with invaluable helpful comments and suggestions. Danielle Pelfrey Duryea of the Department of English at the University of Virginia and Ms. Boissevain edited my manuscript very skillfully. Dr. Vamik D. Volkan, my old friend and the Center’s director, encouraged me along the way. Dr. David Rothstein of Chicago gave me valuable elucidations and encouragement. In Israel, Dr. Yaacov Margolin, the Tel Aviv District Psychiatrist, Dr. Yair Bar-El, the Jerusalem District Psychiatrist, Dr. Aubrey Zabow, the former Southern District Psychiatrist, and Dr. Gabriel Weil, the clinical psychologist who examined Yigal Amir, corrected several key facts. Dr. Margolin, especially, was interested in the case and drew my attention to some publications of which I had not been aware. To all of them, my heartfelt thanks.

Endnotes

1.     In 1933 the Palestinian Jewish labor leader Khayim Arlozorov (1899-1933) was assassinated on a Tel Aviv beach by right-wing Jewish fanatics. In 1944 two right-wing Palestinian Jewish members of the Israel Freedom Fighters, which the British called “the Stern Gang,” assassinated Lord Moyne (Walter Edmund Guinness, First Baron Moyne, 1880-1944), the British minister of state in Cairo. In 1957 the wartime Hungarian Jewish leader Rudolf Kastner (Rezsö Kasztner), who had been publicly accused by a bizarre concentration-camp survivor of having cooperated with the Nazis and who had lost his libel suit against his accuser in an Israeli district court, was murdered by self-styled “avengers” before his appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court was heard (Lentz, 1988, p. 95). An Israeli ambassador had been assassinated in Turkey in 1971, and eleven Israeli athletes had been murdered at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

2.     Marco Polo’s claim that hashish was used to stimulate the Nizaris to kill their enemies is unconfirmed in Ismaili sources (Lewis, 1967; Nanji, 1979; Critchley, 1993; Wood, 1995).

3.     See Byas, 1942; Bornstein, 1950; Sparrow, 1968; McConnell, 1969; Hurwood, 1970; Crotty, 1971; Lutaud, 1973; Hook, 1976; Wilkinson, 1976; Ford, 1985; Lentz, 1988; Chevallier, 1989.

4.     The Kennedy assassination has, of course, spawned a host of conspiracy theories, as has the more recent Rabin assassination. Many people naturally find it hard to accept that a lone gunman has killed their beloved leader. In the Israeli case, such theories have been fed by the fact that a portion of the report issued by the statutory commission of inquiry into the assassination headed by former Israeli Supreme Court president Meir Shamgar was kept secret “for security reasons.” Both assassinations, however, are best understood as basically the acts of lone murderers, despite the contributing factor of right-wing incitement and the practical involvement of the assassin’s brother in the Rabin case.

5.     As the portrait of Israeli assassin Yigal Amir presented later in this paper will indicate, this pattern is not culture-specific.

6.     The most important psychoanalytic theorists of the narcissistic and borderline personality disorders have been Heinz Kohut and Otto F. Kernberg. Unfortunately, not only do Kohut and Kernberg have different ideas about these severe personality disorders, but there are also various diagnostic schemes for the narcissistic and borderline personality disorders. Kohut was more concerned with the unconscious emotional dynamics of the patient, whereas Kernberg paid much attention to careful differential diagnosis. Kohut rarely used the term “anti-social personality,” perhaps thinking that it was not a very useful descriptive category. Kernberg defined the anti-social personality as a subgroup of the narcissistic personality disorders, characterized by self-destructive and anti-social behavior, and always having an underlying borderline personality organization. In Kernberg’s view, the anti-social personality disorder, severe hysterical disorder, borderline personality disorder, inadequate personality disorder, and other severe personality disorders all share an underlying borderline personality organization. (Kohut, 1960, 1971, 1972, 1977, 1978-1991; Kernberg, 1975, pp. 13, 228; 1984, 1985, 1992; Glassman, 1987; Akhtar, 1992; Post, 1986, 1993). The American Psychiatric Association’s standard definitions have been influenced by both Kohut and Kernberg. I shall not overly concern myself here with subtle diagnostic distinctions, as I am more interested in the emotional dynamics of the political assassin than in his precise clinical psychiatric diagnosis (Thomson et al., 1997).

7.     Of course, Oswald was himself murdered soon after assassinating President Kennedy and therefore could not be studied psychiatrically, but we have substantial biographical information and clinical studies of other psychiatric patients resembling Oswald in family background and emotional makeup on which to depend.

8.     Because they serve similar symbolic functions among those they lead, the unconscious meaning of, for example, kings, prime ministers, or popes for their subjects, citizens, or followers would be similar to that of the President of the United States for his fellow citizens.

9.     See also Freedman, 1965; Hastings, 1965a, 1965b, 1966; Oswald, 1967; Weisz and Taylor, 1969; Weinstein and Lyerly, 1970; Rothstein, 1973, 1975; Sargent, 1975; McMillan, 1977; Socarides, 1979; Ward, 1982; Davison, 1983; Hamilton, 1986; Mailer, 1995; Holland, 1995; Weinberg and Windholz, 1997; Thomson et al., 1997; Piers and Singer, 1953; Lynd, 1958; Jacobson, 1964; Levin, 1971; Lewis, 1971, 1987, 1992; Kohut, 1972; Nathanson, 1987, 1992; Wurmser, 1981, 1987; Miller, 1985; Morrison, 1989; Broucek, 1991; Lansky, 1992.

10.   Only the last of these—Dr. Zabow—had any prior clinical experience with political assassins. In 1966, Dr. Zabow had examined Dimitrios Tsafendas, the Greek-born assassin of South African prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd. Though Lentz (1988) believed that “Tsafendas was declared mentally deranged and sentenced to a mental institution” (p. 154), Zabow told me that Tsafendas was committed to Pretoria Central Prison (Zabow, 1998).

11.   That written record, however, contains many omissions and distortions, probably due to computer keyboard operator errors.

12.   The Court had asked Dr. Weil and the three state psychiatrists to determine whether Yigal Amir was responsible for his actions, psychotic, or temporarily insane, whether he could be said to have “diminished criminal responsibility,” and whether he suffered from mental illness or personality disorder under the terms of DSM-IV and Israeli law. Dr. Weil solved the problem by referring to two different clinical viewpoints. He has told me that from the point of view of the “non-dynamic” DSM-IV Amir did not suffer from a personality disorder, but from a “dynamic” point of view, he did (American Psychiatric Association, 1994; Weil, 1998).

        Could the state psychologist and psychiatrists who examined Yigal Amir for the Court and found that he “did not suffer from any mental or personality disorder” be objective and impartial? Psychiatrists and psychologists who testify in court about a defendant’s legal sanity or insanity often find themselves contradicting their colleagues, if not themselves, and making a laughing stock of their profession. Diamond (1959) believed that there was no such thing as impartial expert opinion in psychiatry, even if the psychiatrist serves the court rather than the one of the adversaries in the case. I (1971, 1982) have argued that the legal and psychiatric viewpoints conflict with one another in such cases. Katz (1992) thought that not only the adversaries in the case but “the judge, the jury, and witnesses—expert and lay—also are partisans in the morality play that unfolds during the trial” (p. 143). Working for the state, the psychiatrists and psychologist may have feared that their employer would lose its court case if the assassin were judged mentally ill or suffering from a serious personality disorder.

        Since no Israeli psychiatrist or psychologist was prepared to testify that Yigal Amir did not know what he was doing, his attorneys wanted to import an American psychiatrist and psychologist who would examine him for the defense. Amir’s parents, however, either could not or did not wish to finance such an expensive enterprise (Yediot Aharonot, January 18, 1996, p. 9). In any event, the more interesting question to me is not the legal one of whether Amir was legally fit to stand trial, but what the unconscious motives of the act were.

13.   There is some disagreement between the psychiatrist and the psychologist about Yigal Amir’s “delusions of persecution:” Dr. Bar-El believes that Amir is not paranoid and does not have feelings of persecution, though he does feel rejected by everyone, while Dr. Weil does think that Amir displays persecutory ideation. (Bar-El, 1998; Weil, 1998).

14.   The New York Times and other US newspapers compared Yigal Amir’s “arrogant smile” to Lee Harvey Oswald’s “cold smirk.”

15.   One angry left-wing Israeli politician, Ran Cohen, called upon the Justice Minister to remove Yigal from the public eye by ordering TV cameras to stay away from him (Maariv, December 21, 1997, p. 3). This call was repeated in 2000 when Amir showed up in court again for a hearing of his High Court appeal on the conditions of his imprisonment and the media people flocked to the courtroom to talk to him. We can only speculate what the emotional effect of such an order on the defendant would have been, but one can imagine that it might have prompted additional depressive symptoms.

16.   Dr. Yoram Bronowski, a prominent Ha’aretz columnist who was struck by the assassin’s mother, told me personally that he had wished to entitle his newspaper piece Bnah shel Geulah (Geulah’s Son) but had desisted from doing so fearing that it would hurt the family (or get him in trouble with them).

17.   Though I will quote approvingly from some Israeli journalistic analyses of the episode, such demonizing was in fact the norm. One of the few public figures who refused to call Yigal Amir a monster or a devil, and who had the courage to admonish his countrymen not to do so, was Israeli Jewish historian Yekhiam Weitz. In an article entitled “He is No Monster,” Weitz (1995) wrote that Rabin’s assassination must not change the principle of equality before the law, that Amir was a murderer and must be judged as murderers are judged, and that there was no law in the state of Israel for monsters, only for human beings.

        In fact, viewing the assassin as a monster or a devil was the product of the infantile unconscious defensive processes of projection and splitting. Every one of us at times feels murderous rage at someone who we feel has injured us deeply. When we feel that rage, we want to kill that person, but most of us never do so, because we have the inner controls that keep us from such a violent and self-destructive act. At the same time we are fascinated by murders committed by others. We avidly watch television murder stories and read all the gory details in the press. Our deep unconscious fear that we too might have killed someone makes us distance ourselves from him by thinking of him as monstrous, inhuman, quite unlike us.

18.   As the Amirs at first lived in a poor neighborhood under cramped conditions in a small apartment, one may well wonder whether young Yigal witnessed sexual intercourse between his parents as a boy. If he did, how did it affect him? Gewirtz reports that Yigal Amir was hardly at home as a child. He studied the Torah or prayed with his father in the synagogue. Yigal attended an ultra-orthodox Jewish grade school. In sixth grade he switched to a higher-level yeshiva [rabbinical school] in his neighborhood. Then he moved to an ultra-orthodox yeshiva high school. He left home in the morning and returned after dark. Already then Yigal seems to have been introverted, pensive, stingy with his feelings, and taciturn like his father.

19.   Interestingly, female Israeli journalists generally seemed to understand Geulah Amir better than their male counterparts.

20.   Such verbal violence is common in Israeli public life, and is sometimes followed by physical violence.

2.1   The Legal Counsel to the Government, Dr. Elyakim Rubinstein, took no action against Haber in response to this complaint.

22.   In modern Israeli Hebrew, as in ancient Biblical Hebrew, each name is a meaningful word, and among Hebrew-speaking Israeli Jews, the naming of children typically expresses the deepest feelings and wishes of the parents (Falk, 1975-1976).

23.   It may be that, by unconsciously identifying with the children in her care, Geulah tried to give herself maternal care that she herself did not receive as a child.

24.   In Israel, all young people are required to serve in the military except for Jewish women who are orthodox or married and male orthodox Jewish yeshiva students. Shlomo Amir had not wanted his second son to serve in the Israeli army, but Yigal did so nonetheless, by which Gewirtz thought that Yigal had “knocked down the future planned for him by his father” (Gewirtz 1996, p. 2, author’s translation). Yigal enrolled in a yeshiva whose students do serve in the army. He was drafted on July 1, 1990, served in the Golani fighting brigade, and was discharged three years later, on June 29, 1993.

25.   Ironically, the course he took with the Shabak acquainted him with the practices of their security guards and enabled him three years later to fool them when he assassinated Rabin.

26.   In Israel, as in Europe, law school and medical school usually begin in the first year of  college, rather than after college, as in the US.

27.   One journalist who claims to have read the psychologist’s report related that Yigal Amir was found to have an IQ of 144, indicating a very high level of intelligence.

28.   After being active for some years as a right-wing agitator, Raviv was recruited in 1987 by the Israeli Sherut haBitachon haKlalee (General Security Service), known by its Hebrew acronyms as Shabak (earlier the Shin Bet). His handlers used him to get information on dangerous extreme-right-wing activists, but Raviv often got out of hand, carrying out violent acts against Arabs, whom he hated, and inciting others to do so. He typically informed his handlers only after the fact, yet they kept him on their payroll. Though both are crimes under Israeli law, each time Raviv had broken the law, the police had detained him for questioning, then released him under pressure from his Shabak handlers. The powerful Shabak, which feared losing its other right-wing collaborators if one of them were punished, opposed prosecution, and the Government’s Legal Counsel was reluctant to prosecute. Raviv continued to walk free (Beyer, 1997; Shavit, 1998).

        Many Israelis, including Geulah Amir, believed that Raviv, who had founded a violent extreme-right terrorist group called Irgun Yehudi Lokhem (Fighting Jewish Organization) and known by its Hebrew acronym of Eyal, had incited Yigal Amir to murder the prime minister. On November 7-8, 1995, three days after Rabin’s assassination, Raviv admitted that Amir had told him several times about his intention to murder Rabin. Knowing of a person’s intention to murder and failing to prevent it or to report it to the police is a crime under Israeli law. In 1996, Geulah Amir petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to order the Government’s Legal Counsel to prosecute Raviv as an accomplice to her son’s murderous act. In 1997 and 1998 several other concerned Israelis petitioned the High Court to order the government to prosecute Raviv for perjury and other offenses. In late 1998 the Legal Counsel announced his intention to prosecute Raviv, and in April 1999 he finally filed criminal charges against him.

29.   During the trial, Geulah blamed Israeli Jewish settlers in the occupied Arab territories, orthodox rabbis, and the entire Israeli religious and nationalist right wing for having abandoned her family (Haaretz, January 11, 1996, p. 1, and Maariv, January 11, 1996, p. 16).

30.   Har-Shefi claimed that she had no idea that Amir would really carry out the murder that he had told her he would commit, but she was found guilty. Yigal angrily called Margalit and his elder brother Haggai traitors for talking to the police, even though he did so profusely himself.

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