The role of the Moon in psychopathy.
Are you familiar with Winnicott’s description of the mother who is alternatively too possessive and then too detached?[5] This aptly fits Moon opposite Uranus-Pluto. The child is first smothered and then abandoned, and then smothered and then abandoned again. This is not necessarily because the mother is “bad” or unloving. It may be due to circumstances or her own insecurity. And we also need to remember that this configuration describes something within the child: an inherent tendency to alternate between extreme neediness and extreme independence. But it is experienced first through the mother, and the child feels repeatedly swallowed up and repudiated: engulfed and then abandoned. This creates enormous anxiety, aggravated by the tension occurring in the collective. If there is “good enough” bonding with the mother, such a pattern may, at worst, generate cyclical anxiety states and various kinds of relationship problems. But it does not “cause” psychopathy. However, it is likely that McVeigh’s early bonding was severely disrupted or non-existent. In such a case, the chemical mix can become lethal. From this picture, you can begin to get a sense of the nature of this man’s inner landscape. There was nowhere safe, nowhere to hide, nowhere to go, and eventually that extreme anxiety – combined with the resentful isolation of Venus-Saturn, the frustration of Saturn and Chiron in Aries, the inflation fantasies of Jupiter in Leo, the sense of impotence of Mars-Neptune, and the reformist zeal of his Uranus-Pluto generation group – led to the flowering of a callous and enraged terrorist. Timothy McVeigh, the “Oklahoma Bomber”, was just executed in the USA.