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 well informed 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 worth 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.


The American Psychoanalyst, November 2003
Harold J. Bursztajn, MD

That is fucking awesome. Very interesting indeed.