Insights into Adam Lanza's psychopathology.

It is clear that Adam Lanza's mother, as well-intentioned as she was, smothered him to the point where she felt she needed to accompany her 20 year old boy to the bathroom. She utterly robbed her son of his own sense of control and self-worth. It was during this time she sought to transfer her boy, who was reportedly brilliant, to a different college. This case is strangely reminiscent of British Brian Blackwell (2004) who slaughtered both his parents, and then went on a nice date that evening. Brian's mother smothered him to such a degree, that she bathed him through his teens, totally demasculating and depersonalizing him. He was diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, making NPD the first diagnosis used in a court of law to excuse the insanity of an unfeeling, unempathic. chronically self-absorbed criminal. Adam Lanza was reported to feel a lack of emotion or physical feeling to such a degree that college football coaches sincerely warned team players to be careful falling on him, since he was known not feel pain. It was told that if a fire hit him, he wouldn't feel it.

This smart Aspergers autistic boy had symptoms comorbid with Cluster A and B personality disorders, Antisocial and Avoidant exacerbated by an Adjustment disorder. By the fact that he was in a public school system indicates he was forced to adjust his disordered genetic disposition to a norm, one that clearly traumatized him. The traumatic force of adjustment and enculturation was most probably his mother's will, one that he slaughtered. The root of this pervasive, unresolved, residual trauma occurred when he was around the age of 5, which is the group of kids he also slaughtered. During puberty, during the critical and potent Oedipul mechanisms operating to assert his masculine aggression, he was exposed to terrible, turbulent interactions between his parents, that consequently resulted in a nasty divorce when he was 17. During, before and after, his dominating mother exposed him to many guns she collected as a hobby. His mother's "gun" hobby, he internalized together with the rejection he experienced from his peers, the trauma he underwent in integrating himself with society, and the volcanic aggression he had toward his rejecting mother, for failing to value and prize his differentness in first stages of life. The violence he externalized is an expression of pervasive rejections he experienced from the beginning of life coupled with exposure to acceptable violence modeled by his parents and media. The event's painful externalization reflects a painful internal fracture within his personality, rooted in a desperate desire to annihilate his existential torture, hence an externalization of violent annihilating mechanisms projected onto children around the age his own development was traumatically arrested. 

His core was surrounded by a core belief that he was absolutely worthless rooted in the first stages of life, first precipitated by a mother failing to prize him, and instill in him a firm foundation for the development of a solid and healthy autonomous personal identity, and second, pervasively by people around him affirming his self-loathing beliefs. Absolutely tragic on many levels.

Sha-Ron Kushnir

MS Clinical & Counseling Psych. (2013)

Capella U.