Frank Farley, clueless expert, on the Casey Anthony verdict

I’m MORE speechless at Frank Farley than I am at the verdict!

Since I have no idea WHY the jury arrived at this verdict (and they’re not telling us why), I can at least speculate on several reasons for it. Those reasons could include naivety on the part of the jury themselves.

But Farley? This man is a MORON! And THIS clown was PRESIDENT of the American PSYCHOLOGICAL Association??? Unbelievable!

Quite seriously, I have to suspect there’s more behind this than a mere “lack of knowledge” on Farley’s part.

I don’t think his theory of “Type T personalities” is so far out. Whether his theory is valid or not, it’s still a perfectly reasonable speculation for such a man to make. What it demonstrates however is that he seems to have given a great deal of thought and study to the many and varied human personality types. When it comes to cold-blooded murder, how could such a man, moving within a community of psychologists, possibly have missed the existence of psychopaths among the human population? He seems to have a colossal blind spot on that topic.

That’s why I think there’s more to this. I suspect this is not so much about a gap in Farley’s education as about his belief system. This could well be a man who believes what he wants to believe, who prefers to believe what makes him “feel comfortable” rather than facing the unpalatable truth about some humans.

This is perfectly plausible. It’s amazing what nonsense some people succeed in persuading themselves to believe, flying in the teeth of the facts. It’s all about their own wishful thinking, their own paranoid fears, or something of the kind. Just try convincing a creationist of the true age of the earth, for instance, despite the overwhelming evidence! Then there are all those nutty conspiracy theorists who believe we’ve “never been to the Moon,” that it was “all a fake”! And it doesn’t matter how intelligent or accomplished some people are, how thoroughly sane in just about every respect; they can still have “out of kilter” beliefs in one sphere of life or another.

One example I’ve run across in a different area—though it’s still about “human nature”—was Stephen Jay Gould. Though people have challenged many of Gould’s theories (as experts always do), I’ve enjoyed reading his articles, and nobody could deny that he was a highly intelligent man. Yet I was amazed to see the mental block he appeared to have around certain topics such as human intelligence. I found it all the more surprising that an evolutionary biologist, of all people, should be so resistant to accepting the influence of those very factors on human development.

In the same way, I find it amazing that a psychologist like Farley, of all people, should have a mental block around the topic of psychopathy. It doesn’t even have to be about a specific personality disorder labeled “psychopathy” whose existence most experts agree on in general terms. It’s far simpler and less technical than that. It’s about the capacity of some humans, male and female, for cold-blooded murder and other cruelties, perpetrated in some cases for almost casual reasons.

Does this guy know nothing about serial killers? About the sadists in Nazi concentration camps—including women like the infamous Irma Grese? Did he never hear of the Manson murders, still talked of more than forty years later? Or, since this is about a mother killing her own daughter, does he know nothing about Munchausen syndrome by proxy? Whatever the explanation for that phenomenon, has he never heard of women like Waneeta Hoyt? Does he know that MORE mothers than fathers kill their own children? Has he ever looked at a Web site like badbreeders.net to see how many parents of BOTH sexes treat their children with the most callous neglect and abominable cruelty?

Farley’s error is not about being “taken in” by a psychopath. When that happens, it’s understandable that people have a hard time believing how someone who seems so “nice” and “normal” to them can be a predator. But this is simply about recognizing that there ARE monsters out there. Anyone can learn that from our everyday news reports!

So it’s not even about being familiar with the symptoms of some mental condition. It’s simply about COMMON KNOWLEDGE of the appalling way some humans—of both sexes—behave!

My guess is that Farley, like a number of people, does not want to look that reality full in the face! Some people would rather cling to the belief that all humans are, quote, “basically good”—whatever the heck that’s supposed to mean! Well, humans run the gamut from good to bad. A few humans really are close to being saints—but not many! Still, plenty of humans ARE “good,” without needing to be perfect. Overall, I don’t think humans are “basically” anything except “human”! But some of them are DEVILS. And it’s that reality some people don’t want to face. Especially with humans in certain hallowed roles. I think it frightens them stiff to realize that monsters CAN jump out on us from anywhere, including the places we least expect.

The parental role is particularly holy. Back in 1944 a radiologist named John Patrick Caffey noticed an unusual number of infants sent to him with bone fractures. After studying many such cases he decided this must be due to a hitherto unrecognized disorder that left babies’ bones fragile and easily broken, even in ordinary play. Caffey published an article on it in 1945.

The condition he’d spotted in some babies did turn out to be real enough, and after a while it was dubbed “infantile cortical hyperostosis,” or “Caffey syndrome” after himself. However, it was not a common condition, and could only have accounted for a few such injuries. By the early 1950s, physicians such as Frederic N. Silverman were noting that many of these injured infants had entirely normal bone structure. Their fractures could not be explained by an unusual medical condition. Then in 1955 two more doctors, Woolley and Evans, published a limited study in the Journal of the American Medical Association citing evidence that in the children they examined, it was only the parents or other caregivers who could be to blame for their injuries. Still it wasn’t until 1962 that Kempe, Silverman, Steele, Droegemueller and Silver really woke the world up with their groundbreaking paper titled The Battered Child Syndrome.

So it took the better part of two decades between the time somebody noticed how many tiny children were having bones broken, and the time professionals really started to make a big noise about it. In the meantime, it was easier for many people to believe these fractures were due to an “unusual bone disorder” than to face the more obvious fact that parents and other so-called “care”-givers were brutalizing these babies.

Incidentally, I’m sure there was nothing the slightest bit “new” about child abuse. This cruelty did not represent any kind of “epidemic.” We only have to look at history to realize the shockingly callous way many children have been treated in past centuries—during the Industrial Revolution, for instance—and the fact that cruelty has always been endemic in human cultures. That applies most of all to humans struggling to survive in harsh conditions, which was universally true in the past. I dare say the only reason doctors like John Caffey were noticing more fractures in the 1940s was that more people could afford to take children to a hospital at all—the war and new policies had broken the stranglehold of the Depression on the economy—and that X-rays were becoming more widely used.

Thanks to the genius of our technology, it’s only because we’ve created more secure conditions for ourselves in the developed world that over the past few centuries we’ve slowly become a “kinder and gentler” society than was ever true in the ages before. One irony of this “progress” is that too many people have taken human “kindness and gentleness” for granted, as though it were a fundamental trait of every human. I don’t imagine anyone in the seventeenth century or earlier, with its tortures, public burnings at the stake, and crime and street violence so widespread that personal weapons were an everyday necessity, would have any trouble crediting the notion that a woman like Casey Anthony could coldly consign her own little daughter to a dumping ground like so much household trash. I think it’s mostly in the twentieth century and later that some people have developed this Pollyanna view of human nature, shutting their eyes to how awful some humans can be.

The noted British pathologist Professor Keith Simpson, who had to deal with cases of lethal child abuse in the mid-twentieth century, remarked that “nobody wanted to believe” parents or guardians would do such terrible things to their own children. It’s a reality many people did not want to face. I suspect it’s a reality Frank Farley still doesn’t want to face.

In the Anthony case there’s yet another obvious factor: that the killer was female, a “mother.” If parents are “holy” (a belief debunked by Alice Miller among others), “mothers” are the “holy of holies.” It seems very difficult to wean some people away from the irrational belief that just because somebody is lacking a Y chromosome, they must be somehow incapable of ever doing serious harm to anybody, much less their own children. Real-life experience proves the opposite.

I’ve never completely understood what was behind this irrational belief about the supposed “goodness” of all women (or all mothers). On the one hand it may again be a matter of believing what makes people “feel comfortable.” And women—“mothers” most of all—are “supposed” to be “kind,” “gentle,” “nurturing” and all the rest of it. That some women, mothers even, are not that way at all seems to be a reality too disturbing for some people to face. I suspect it frightens them. It’s all the more disturbing to reflect that due to these very beliefs about women’s supposedly “nurturing” (or anyway “innocuous”) nature, women are more likely than men to be trusted in certain roles—especially as caretakers of children. The reality that a woman could betray that trust in the most ghastly fashion may be too frightening for someone like Frank Farley to deal with. So he invents myths to thrust this unpleasant reality away from his consciousness.

At the same time, I think it’s clear that humans overall have built-in tendencies to protect females more than to protect males. (With exceptions, naturally.) This has made evolutionary sense in the past. But it becomes problematic when females like Casey Anthony are dangerous and need to be dealt with firmly. I cannot ignore the human propensity for doing things in obedience to mere emotional (or “instinctive”) urges, then “rationalizing” this behavior by inventing some reason to “justify” the behavior. That could be exactly what Farley is doing here. He’s indulging his “chivalrous” instinct to “protect the female”—in this case to protect the very “image” of the female as a “nurturing mother”—by fabricating nonsense about how no “sane” mother could possibly do what Casey Anthony was accused of doing.

It’s bad enough when a man with the reputation of an “expert,” purely in the role of commentator, spouts such rubbish in public,. What’s more worrying is that the jury might also have been influenced by irrationality of this kind, and let a killer walk free.