What, finally, do we need to understand about Seung-Hui Cho, the disturbed gunman of the Virginia Tech massacre? This recent school shooting is the most violent outburst yet in a country where even the most deranged somehow manage to fall between the cracks. So it’s essential that we learn from the regrettable tragedy as much as possible.

Makeup of a Killer

As a psychologist, to me the most important truths about what happened that fateful day must center on the personality and motives of the murderer. What inside him—and his family/social/academic environment—gave rise to the despairing rage that ultimately took 33 lives, including his own? And if everyone he slaughtered was an innocent victim, what can be said about the merciless assassin himself, who in his media manifesto righteously declared himself the victim?

Some of the facts that suggest the psychological dynamics of Cho’s desperate rampage might be briefly reviewed here:

From childhood Cho was ridiculed and bullied for his morbidly shy, distant manner; his emotional flatness; his quirkiness; and his strange, mumbling accent. For example, one former classmate at his high school stated that “there were . . . some people who were really cruel to him, and they would push him down and laugh at him. He didn’t speak English . . . well, and they would really make fun of him.” Cho’s own family struggled unsuccessfully with his sullen non-responsiveness (preferring his older sister, who reflected far more positively on them and later graduated from Princeton). And much has been made not only of his extreme introversion at Virginia Tech but also his near mutism, hostility, and offensively aberrant behavior. Consider, for example, the two female students who, repulsed by his socially inept and passive-aggressive overtures toward them, reported him to the campus police for “stalking.”

It is ironic that Cho’s parents, choosing to address his problems spiritually rather than psychologically, took him to church with them—where he was bullied by his youth group, especially by the “rich kids” (whom, at least indirectly, he alludes to in a note police found in his room after his killing spree). The church’s pastor, who spoke to his mother about Cho, speculated that perhaps he was “autistic”—a label that, while it doesn’t quite fit Cho, has been adopted on several occasions by the media. And this informal assessment appears to be the only one his parents ever received for their timid, woefully uncommunicative son.

But whether Cho was picked on because he was such a loner—or was such a loner because he was picked on—it’s not hard to appreciate how his marked incapacity to fit in with his family or be accepted by his peers led to painful feelings of rejection, as well as a gnawing sense of inferiority and shame. Nor is it difficult to imagine his acute sense of loneliness and isolation. And given how early and pervasively he revealed a pronounced tendency toward withdrawal, it’s reasonable to infer that his inability to appropriately reach out for love and connection was largely constitutional—particularly since these traits were evident even before his family moved to America from South Korea when he was eight.

Acutely Shy—or Severely Schizoid?

It’s hardly exceptional for a child to be shy. In fact, all introverts are to some degree shy as children. But in reviewing the news coverage of Cho’s troubled (and troublesome) behavior, as well as the descriptions by people who had contact with him, I’m convinced that from early childhood Cho wasn’t simply shy. So to better understand the precise nature of his disturbance, I’ve explored several related diagnostic possibilities, not only in what is generally considered the “diagnostic bible” of psychopathology—namely, DSM-IV-TR (2000)—but also in the more recent Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM), published in 2006.

This latter text complements and broadens the symptom-oriented scope of DSM-IV-TR by focusing more on the internal experience of those afflicted by the various mental disorders. As such, its more personalized characterizations offer fresh insights into a disturbed person’s thinking, feeling and relating. Capturing the uniquely subjective qualities of each disorder, PDM portrays the schizoid personality in functional terms that at times seem to describe Cho’s disturbance with almost surgical precision.

Reporters who have consulted with Cho’s relatives or former classmates have regularly remarked on his extreme detachment. PDM enables us to better comprehend such aloofness by addressing the extreme sensitivity of schizoids, which compels them to actively withdraw from interpersonal situations, exaggeratedly felt by them to represent threats of being controlled, engulfed or intruded upon.

From an early age Cho exhibited a widespread pattern of withdrawal from social stimulation that might be viewed (as PDM puts it) as a “hermit-like reclusiveness.” PDM goes on to postulate that whether because of “severe inhibition or lack of social skills, schizoid children cannot spontaneously interact appropriately with others.” And when such children are themselves queried about their withdrawal, they typically claim that “others do a variety of ills to them.” When Cho, in his vengefully belligerent videotape, asserts with hyperbolic bravado: “You had a hundred billion chances . . . to have avoided today,” he would appear to be justifying his imminent mass murders on the basis of innumerable hurts he had experienced from as far back as he could remember.

The Intimate Longings of a Solitary Self

Cho’s grievances against society for his emotional suffering (or deeply felt ostracization) would seem almost incompatible with what DSM-IV-TR explicitly contends—namely, that a schizoid such as Cho would not have desired close friendships, or even had an interest in pursuing a sexual relationship. For though Cho was totally friendless in middle school, high school and college—and apparently never dated a girl (let alone had an intimate experience with one)—his final rant about society’s rejection of him suggests obliquely, as PDM characterizes it, a “deep yearning for closeness.”

How pathetic, then, that this is the same person who intimidated female classmates by leaning below his desk to take cell phone pictures of their legs. To approach girls more “normally” would have been much too scary for him, so to lessen feelings of vulnerability he needed to objectify them—and by so doing succeeded only in frightening and offending them. Compare this to Cho’s making an unannounced dorm room visit to a girl with whom apparently he had become obsessed, and identifying himself as “Question Mark.” Here again are the behaviors of someone desperate to cultivate a relationship without having developed the slightest aptitude to do it.

PDM also reflects on how schizoids, with their counterbalancing fear of—yet keen yearning for—closeness may substitute for actual human ties “elaborate fantasies about emotional and sexual intimacy.” In this respect, it’s certainly telling that in the one instance that Cho’s roommates at Virginia Tech persuaded him to go drinking with them, he actually ended up confiding that he had an imaginary girlfriend, “Jelly”—a supermodel who lived in outer space and traveled by spaceship. Further, his fantasized girlfriend called him “Spanky”—hinting at Cho’s sexualization of suppressed sadistic impulses. These impulses, or closely related ones, are finally what must have exploded in his almost orgiastic act of brutality, a ruthless slaughter also forecast in the macabre writings that made his instructors so uneasy.

PDM comments on how schizoids may only be able to communicate their feelings indirectly, through metaphor. And Cho’s “fictions,” clumsy and artless as they were, do tell us something vital about his inner turmoil. Here it is worth noting that PDM contests DSM’s viewpoint that schizoids “rarely experience strong emotions” by arguing that the clinical literature on such individuals indicates, conversely, that “they often feel pain at a level so excruciating as to require [a] defensive detachment . . . to endure it.” As will be described later, the unmitigated rage finally unleashed in Cho’s media diatribe was his ultimate defense against the most burdensome feelings of hurt buried inside him for virtually all his tortured lifetime.

The Externalization of Shame

Cho must at last have concluded that the gulf between him and others was unbridgeable. He didn’t simply feel unwanted and unloved but, finally, unlovable. And to regard himself as an irretrievable misfit, unable to be part of anything outside his lost, solitary self, must have become (as he himself suggests in his videotaped “confession”) increasingly intolerable to him.

Such thoughts of futility and failure can be seen as culminating in an emotional pain tantamount to suicidal depression. But holding himself in such contempt as to become obsessed with taking his own life, Cho’s perverted intellect seized upon a solution that we psychologists understand only too well. He discovered that he could mitigate his burden of shame by externalizing (or projecting) his deeply felt inadequacies onto others—seeing them as inferior and contemptible. (Note his final media rant against the “Christian Criminals,” who had “vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience.”) And such hateful attributions, however paranoid or delusional, helped inoculate him against further assaults to his overly fragile ego.

Having for many years a clinical specialty in anger control, I know how this blaming, self-justifying emotion can assuage, camouflage or obscure the most distressful feelings. These feelings can relate to almost anything—whether it be anxiety, guilt, depression, inferiority, rejection, powerlessness, or humiliation. Cho, taking advantage of anger’s ability to help him escape the unbearable agony of self-loathing and -contempt, was able to find refuge in diffuse feelings and fantasies of hostility—and some of the most outrageous forms of violence and abuse. Witness here his sinister writings, which teachers and classmates alike found grotesque or downright alarming.

The Ego Strengthening Power of Rage

In an article I wrote for The Independent Practitioner on anger (“If Anger Helps You Feel in Control, No Wonder You Can’t Control Your Anger!”—Winter 2001), I described the emotion as highly seductive because it’s an easy though “low road to self-empowerment.” However illusory such power may be, it’s yet extraordinarily tempting, for its potent ego-rescuing effects are virtually immediate. Clearly, this is anger as antidote, a “cure” for frustrating (at times, torturous) feelings of personal impotence. Cho, feeling so helpless and hopeless about his life, was desperate to cultivate some redeeming belief in himself—namely, the belief that he was good enough, even morally superior, and it was everybody else who was bad, corrupt, or evil. In his final “broadcast” to the world, he talks about being sodomized, humiliated and crucified, aggrandizing himself as an avenging Christ figure.

As Michael Stone, M.D., a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and authority on personality disorders and murderers, reflects: “For 23 years he was a powerless, impotent cipher [but] for two hours of his life, he was a powerful man” (New York Times, 04/20/07). Or, as the renowned forensic psychiatrist, Michael Welner, M.D., comments (after studying the multimedia package Cho sent to NBC): “These videos do not help us to understand him. They distort him. He was meek. He was quiet. This is a PR tape of him trying to turn himself into a Quentin Tarantino character” (ABC, 04/19/2007). Or finally, as Sharon Begley, senior editor of Newsweek, succinctly sums it up: “A failure in life, famous in death” (Newsweek, talk transcript on Web: “What Makes a Man Snap?” 04/25/07).

By the end, Cho was so dissociated from his own self-hatred that in his decompensating mental state he could no longer feel anything other than scorn for those he experienced as persecuting him. All capacity for empathy and compassion was totally extinguished. Feeling irreversibly cut off from humanity, he was thoroughly prepared to take his life. And compelled to retaliate for what in his distorted thinking had been perpetrated upon him, he was also ready to take down as many of the “enemy” as possible.

It is tragic that in his deepening paranoia he was completely shut off from any outside influence. Consider the utter futility that professors at Virginia Tech experienced in trying to get him to share what was going on with him—or at least to seek counseling. By then he had become so “sealed off” from others that he was plainly unreachable, having defensively chosen to insulate himself from a world increasingly seen as menacing.

The Moral?

The above characterizations reflect, I think, something of the essence of what drove Cho to kill so many innocents in cold blood. There is, of course, still much to be learned about this truly pathetic young man—already being reduced, because of his heinous act of wanton cruelty, to an “evil monster.” But in his story there is also much to be learned about ourselves—as a people who, in our collective insensitivity to those with innate barriers to blending in, subject ourselves to horrendous deeds that we have unwittingly been complicit in creating.

No doubt whatever national dialogue that takes place in the wake of this disaster will center on increasing security and tightening gun control laws to prevent such calamities in the future. But the discourse our country may need most right now is one that focuses on parental, teacher and public education; listening skills and empathy training; and, without question, more accessible and effective mental health services.

Hopefully, new medications will also better address the disturbed mood and mind of someone like Cho. Yet the deepest roots of his ultimate derangement need to be viewed not just as biochemical but psychological and psychosocial as well.

In the most general sense, if the great individualist divide currently separating us is ever to be traversed, we must find a way to restore the lost emphasis on communal responsibility. There was a time in our history when almost everyone experienced themselves as part of their community. And this “communal bond” virtually ensured that no member would ever have to deal with such isolation and estrangement that they would actually want to take their own life and—in rageful retaliation—as many other lives as possible. This nation’s increasingly “diseased” celebration of individualism and the materialistic ethic has sorely undermined the far more spiritual values of compassion, community and caring.

This latest human catastrophe is just one more reminder that if we continue to focus on object-oriented strivings and our personal and family (vs communal) welfare—allowing the most psychologically vulnerable among us to become broken beyond repair—we do so at our own peril. Doubtless, Cho’s final denunciation of his adopted country may be seen as the ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic. For in the end his schizoid personality disorder had fragmented into nothing less than this. All the same, we might take his final words as a warning sign of the dire costs of our society’s becoming less and less able—or willing—to find a place for deeply troubled misfits such as Cho.

Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D., who holds doctorates in both English and Psychology, is the author of The Vision of Melville and Conrad (Ohio U. P.,1970) and Paradoxical Strategies in Psychotherapy (Wiley, 1986), as well as over a dozen articles in literature and psychology. Dr. Seltzer is in private practice in Del Mar, and can be contacted at 14195 Mango Drive, Del Mar, CA 92014; 858-259-1190; or at lseltzer@san.rr.com.