Question

What made the Mike Tyson evaluation so unique?

Answer 1

Mike Tyson, a boxer by profession once made a big headline about his psychological state. There were many remarks made against him. People called him a serial killer, a psychotic, and even as mad man. However, there is a reason as to why his evaluation was so unique. He had a rough childhood. He was abused, traumatized and neglected. He never had an opportunity to learn to handle his emotions, his emotions were mishandled. As he moved towards the adult phase, these untapped situations gave rise to criminal tendencies. But however, he was also sympathetic, especially when his trainer and surrogate father had passed away there were tears in his eyes. Which showed that there was a room for soft corner in his heart. But most of his adult life was spent with rude inhibitions, highly inflated ego, and arrogant behaviors that would also put an end to his career for sometime. As a psychologist myself, I could say that he used a defense mechanism called reaction formation, where he diverted all of his negative emotions into more legalized form of expression. He became a boxer and was even called as an animal because of his exuberant skills of boxing, his expressions of anger and his inflated ego. This however gave many a feeling that he was a serial killer perhaps or was psychotic. It so happened that he even bit his opponent while fighting. Inspite of several warnings, he was focused on biting the opponents ear, which put an end to his career as well.

He was then evaluated by a team of psychologists and psychiatrists and were perplexed at his array of characters. He had all the qualities of a criminal, a serial killer. But, there was also something about him which nullified his traits of being a serial killer. He was also sympathetic, nice and a good man. This gave the evaluation a new twist, and made it very unique, one of a kind. Towards the end of his trial session, he was quiet, calm, relaxed and dint show any exuberant behaviour which was aggressive, but rather was complacent, this changed the course of his diagnosis, and made it unique.