https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/09/12/gender-confusion-sex-change-idea-fueled-kaczynskis-rage-report-says/eb33b946-8595-427d-af4c-9ccaada45935/Sally Johnson, chief psychiatrist at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, N.C., conducted the evaluation in January after Kaczynski, frustrated that his defense attorneys planned to pursue a partial mental illness defense, requested that he be allowed to defend himself.
The psychiatric evaluation concluded that though Kaczynski suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, he was mentally competent to stand trial. The judge ordered that Kaczynski could not represent himself, however, a controversial decision that may still be challenged by Kaczynski.
In the psychiatric evaluation, Johnson reveals that Kaczynski had persistent and intense sexual fantasies about being a woman. While he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan in 1967, he went to a psychiatrist to discuss his wishes for a sex change operation. But in the waiting room, he decided he could not go forward. Instead, he told the psychiatrist he was depressed about the possibility of being drafted.
His near confession of his feelings so filled him with rage, in this case directed at psychiatrists, that he went through a major transformation.
"As I walked away from the building afterwards," Kaczynski wrote in documents released today, "I felt disgusted about what my uncontrolled sexual cravings had almost led me to do. And I felt humiliated, and I violently hated the psychiatrist. Just then there came a major turning point in my life. Like a Phoenix, I burst from the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope."
Kaczynski's new hope? To take his rage out on others, including the psychiatrist. "I will kill," Kaczynski wrote. "But I will make at least some effort to avoid detection so that I can kill again."
