Who Killed Julius Caesar?
Psychoforensic Analysis of Decisionmaking Under Stress
The American Psychoanalyst, November 2003
Harold J. Bursztajn
Psychoanalysis has had a long tradition of informing psychohistorical
inquiry. Forensic neuropsychiatry has experienced a rebirth and resuregence
of interest in the courtroom.
Two somewhat pioneering applications of psychoanalysis—psychoanalytically
informed decision analysis and psychoanalystically informed neuropsychiatry—can
deepen understanding of such phenomena as leadership, political decisionmaking,
and courtroom processes. Given the chasm between private and public settings,
this may seem paradoxical.
Psychoanalytically informed decision analysis modifies the assumption
of traditional decision analysis—that under conditions of uncertainty,
humans choose based on rational self-interest—with the psychoanalytic
perspective that "rational" and "irrational" in
a given context may not be obvious, commonsensical, or universal.
I use the term "psychoanalytically informed neuropsychiatry" to
refer to similar applications of psychoanalysis to reconsider "closed" questions
reopened by advances in modern neurobiology.
I was born in Poland just after World War II. As a child strolling with
my father in Lodz I saw strangers rush up to thank him once again
for saving their lives as a leader of the Shoah resistance. Thus
early on I was inspired by the wonder of leadership and decisionmaking
in times of uncertainty, conflict, and crisis.
As an undergraduate of Princeton, I was introduced to the work of Freud
by historian Carl Scherske and to the emerging discipline of neurobiology
by several pioneers in that field. After graduating in 1972, I entered
Harvard Medical School. There I was introduced to the work of Amos
Tversky and Danny Kahneman on the heuristics of judgment and decisionmaking
under conditions of uncertainty. (Kahneman, a psychologist, last
year received the Nobel Prize in economics).
Psychoanalysis and the cognitive psychology of social judgment and decisionmaking prima
facie are complementary approaches. Each recognizes that human beings
regularly make choices that might no be rational from a decision-analytic
standpoint. People who make unwise or unproductive decisions are not
necessarily stupid, uninformed, or neurotic. Rather, they are applying
strategies shaped by the evolution of the mind, culture, personal history,
and circumstance.
It seemed natural to integrate both psychoanalysis and the study of decisionmaking
heuristics into my clinical and consulting practice, as well as into
my teaching and research. I also wanted to make these methods accessible
to a wider public. To that end, I have worked with talented documentary
producers and directors on historical investigations, serving in
a variety of roles ranging from confidential advisor to on-screen,
psychodynamically informed decision analyst.
As a working psychoanalyst, I exercise curiosity in the most private
of settings about an analysand's received truths and accepted "absolute" wisdom,
to help free the analys and to ask previously unthinkable or unspeakable
questions. As a forensic psychiatrist, I work in interdisciplinary
settings exploring the validity of potential translations between
the clinical world of meaning and the legal world of objectivity,
to understand the choices people make under conditions of uncertainty,
conflict, ambiguity, or adversity.
Although much of my work has been as a confidential off-screen advisor,
the following example of some on-screen work illustrates how a psychoanalytically
trained forensic psychiatrist can further public education by working
with the media.
NEW PERSPECTIVE ON OLD DECISIONS
After I had served as an on-screen forensic psychiatric analyst for Anthony
Geffen's London-based Atlantic Productions on a program for the Discovery
Channel, "The Assassination of King Tut," Ruth Sessions
of the same production company approached me with an intriguing request:
Could I participate in their investigation to help a TV audience
understand how and why Julius Caesar was killed? Our findings would
be telecast in the documentary (also for Discovery)"Who Killed
Julius Caesar?" The team included internationally distinguished
forensic investigator Luciano Garofano of Italy's carabinieri and
several highly talented classical historians.
What made this project particularly satisfying was that everyone was
open to my developing and exploring with them questions that had
been overlooked by many historians. For example, did Julius Caesar,
a genius and perhaps history's greatest military tactician, a general
who never lost a battle, really walk blindly into a trap? He had
access to high levels of intelligence. He had a warning note clutched
in his hand at the time of his death. Why did he dismiss his bodyguard
shortly before his murder? How could such a wellinformed man come
to be killed in front of hundreds of witnesses at a senate gathering?
Garofano also welcomed the opportunity to explore questions regarding
Caesar's physical and mental condition.Why was his behavior so strange
in the weeks leading up to his death? Could Caesar's epilepsy, well
documented in ancient texts, have affected his behavior and led to
his death?
We contemplated an instance of Caesar's strange behavior when he failed
to rise to greet the senate—a deep insult to that body— a
few weeks before his death. One early historical analysis gave the
excuse of diarrhea; another, epilepsy. Considering other details
in available descriptions of his behavior, the question as to whether
Caesar's choices were influenced by temporal lobe epilepsy seemed
well wor th exploring. Symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy, which
become more common as the seizures progress and become more generalized,
include increased dissociation and incontinence of bladder and bowel.
Might Caesar, driven by narcissistic concern with his own image and
dignity, who had risen to become the most powerful man in his world
(and who could easily be said to have suffered from grandiosity),
have found it deeply humiliating, frightening, and frustrating to
lose control of both his sense of continuity in space and time and
his body in public? It is reasonable to infer that for Caesar, it
was far more painful to be seen as pitiable and incontinent than
haughty and rude. It is not a stretch to imagine that the life choice
he faced was especially stark: old age and increasing fits, temporal
lobe–influenced loss of autobiographical memory that he so
valued, and even public diarrhea, versus a dramatic exit.
I next raised the question whether Caesar's dramatic exit was not simply
a narcissist's suicide, but also a consciously chosen strategic act
designed to ensure his succession. Cornell University professor Barry
Strauss, of our classical historians team, explained that Caesar
effectively gave the conspirators a deadline when he announced he
was about to leave for war in Persia. Garofano noted that Caesar
changed his will to name his successor, his nephew Octavius, six
months before his death. Just before his death, Caesar left every
citizen enough money to live on for three months, guaranteeing a
groundswell of mourning and adulation and the historical immortality
of a famous death that he so craved in writing about his life.
ET TU, JULIUS?
While we worked to educate the public, we also were able to pose a previously
overlooked question in Julius Caesar scholarship. In the words of
the London Sunday Times Magazine cover article on the investigation, "Et
Tu, Julius?" (March 9, 2003):
Bursztajn's [working hypothesis] is startling. [What if] the
godfather who directs and controls the events of March 15, 44 BC, is
not hot-headed Cassius or scheming Brutus[?] They are, as they always
have been, far out of their depth, minnows in a political ocean patrolled
by sharks. No: the man pulling the strings, the orchestrator of his own
death, [could be] none other than Julius Caesar himself. The outcome
is exactly as he had planned it. In every particular, he gets what he
wants. The naive and foolish conspirators, on the other hand, go away
empty-handed, beaten by superior tradecraft and the poverty of their
own imagination. In defending the republic they ensured its demise. In
fighting dictatorship they have guaranteed its victory. By killing Caesar
they have made him immortal.
In this exploration I used psychoanalytically informed decision analysis
and forensic neuropsychiatry as ways to open other paths of inquiry,
rather than to come to a definitive conclusion. Such analyses are
not to be confused with a formulated forensic psychiatric opinion,
as is offered in the courtroom, or a psychoanalytic interpretation,
as is constructed with a patient in the consulting room. But by drawing
from each, one is able to question received wisdom, creating a context
of discovery in which new hypotheses can be explored while continuing
to acknowledge the ubiquity of both intrapsychic and interpersonal
conflict.
