AN ASSASSIN TYPOLOGY Type I - Assassins view their acts as a probable sacrifice of self for a political ideal. They are fully cognizant and accepting of the meaning, implications and personal consequences of their acts. Inherently personal motives, such as a neurotic need for recognition, are secondary to their primary political purpose. Type I's may or may not attempt to escape, but the sacrificial them that characterizes their zeal and commitment suggests that capture, like death, is an acceptable, if not preferred, risk. Emotional distortion is present only to the extent that political ideals supersede survival instincts. If captured, the Type I does not recant on his or her motivating principles or seek clemency or personal publicity. Unlike Types II, III, and IV, their extremism is rational, selfless, principled and without perversity. Type II - Assassins are persons with overwhelming and aggressive egocentric needs for acceptance, recognition and status. There is none of the cognitive distortion associated with psychoses. Emotionally they are characterized by moderately high levels of reality-based anxiety that exerts a strong influence on their behavior. Without delusion, they fully appreciate and accept the personal consequences of their acts. The primary characteristic they share is called a "political" personality. That is, a personality which is inclined to project personal motives on public objects and rationalize them in terms of some larger public interest. Such persons seek power in order to compensate for low estimates of self are most frequently a result of a deprivation of love and affection in their personal lives. Thus there are always significant others in the personal lives of Type II subjects. Under these circumstances, in every instance, the exercise of power in a public manner generates the attention that had been denied in the past. In some cases, the act may serve to place the burden of guilt on those persons in their disturbed personal lives who have denied or rejected them. Assassins of this type anticipate capture or death and prepare for it. The neurotic Type II assassin is an anxious, emotional and ultimately depressed person who is primarily concerned with her/his personal problems and frustrations and only secondarily with causes or ideals. Type III - Assassins are either psycho-paths or socio-paths who believe that the condition of their lives is so intolerably meaningless and without purpose that destruction of society and themselves is desirable for its own sake. Unlike ordinary psychopaths whose rage is usually directed at specific segments of society, this type of killer strikes at persons who personify the majority, or those who represent a cross-section rather than any particular segment. Type III subjects possess no positive political values and are belligerently contemptuous of morality and social convention. The amorphous rage and perversity that characterizes the lives of these persons may finally take form in some extreme act like suicide, mass murder, or assassination; but in the case of assassination, there is no political motive. Except for their perverse anger, they are emotionally dormant; the pendulum swings of emotion associated with some psychoses are absent. They also differ from Type I assassins in that they are rational in a negative and perverse Dostoyevskian sense and thoughtfully aware of their motives and the consequences of their acts. Feeling neither joy nor sadness and indifferent to death, they are unable to relate to others. Thus, unlike Type II's, there are no significant others in their empty lives. The Type III subject accurately perceives reality but is limited in his capacity to respond to it emotionally. He is not someone who has lost his reason, rather someone who has lost everything but his reason. Type IV - Assassins are characterized by severe emotional and cognitive distortion that is expressed in hallucinations and delusions of persecution and/or grandeur. Their contact with reality is so tenuous that they are usually unable to grasp the significance of their actions or understand the response of others to them. Their acts are mystically or divinely inspired. They are simply irrational or insane. Source - James W. Clarke, American Assassins: The Darker Side of Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, l982. pp. 14-17.