agitated the boss, the comment about Travis’ conscience being clear, was a tangential digression, another symptom to which people with STPD are prone (Gilles, 2003).
Travis’ only uneventful verbal communication occurs in his living environment where he is alone and writes in his diary.
When Travis is asked if the taxi driver job would be “moonlighting” for him, Travis does not know what the term “moonlighting” means.
This may be due to verbal episodic memory deficits, a well-established feature of the schizophrenia spectrum that has been found in individuals with STPD. In an NIMH Grant supported study comparing individuals with STPD to individuals with other personality disorders and a group of healthy volunteers those with STPD learned verbal and visual-spatial information at a reduced rate and recalled fewer words and objects after a long delay (McClure, et. al., 2006). Another explanation may be that people with STPD may have speech patterns that appear strange in their structure and phrasing…and some may verbalize their responses by being overly concrete. Thus, Travis may use such a term to mean “lighting the moon” (Gilles, 2003).
Travis, however, does get the job. One may speculate that it was not because of his interview behavior but, rather, because the interviewer appears to feel some camaraderie with a fellow marine and because Travis is willing to do what the interviewer needs, i.e., someone who is willing to drive on Jewish holidays and to drive nights and work uptown, South Bronx and Harlem.
Travis sees the world as dirty and “venal”:
Thank God for the rain, which has washed away the garbage and the trash off the sidewalks…All the animals come out at night. Whores, skunk-pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies. Sick, venal. Someday a real rain’ll come and wash all this scum off the streets…
The DSM-IV-TR criterion A(4) for STPD, which is placed on Axis II (see next paragraph), asserts that metaphorical speech is often found in people with STPD. Other speech patterns that may emerge include overelaborate, circumstantial, stereotyped, and as mentioned earlier, vague (APA, 2000, p. 701; Sperry, 2003, p. 244).
The DSM-IV-TR (APA, 2000, pp.27-35) provides the following multi-axial system for categorizing mental disorders which guides clinical practice, research and education:
Axis I
Clinical Disorders
Other Conditions That May Be a Focus of Clinical Attention
Axis II
Personality Disorders
Mental Retardation
Axis III
General Medical Conditions
Axis IV
Psychosocial and Environmental Problems
Axis V
Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF)
Axis I disorders include, but are not limited to, Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders, Mood Disorder, Anxiety Disorders and Substance-Related Disorders.
Axis II disorders include Mental Retardation and Personality Disorders which are grouped into three clusters, i.e., Cluster A (odd and eccentric) Paranoid, Schizoid, Schizotypal, Cluster B (dramatic, emotional or erratic) Antisocial, Borderline, Histrionic, Narcissistic, and Cluster C (anxious and fearful) Avoidant, Dependent, and Obsessive-Compulsive.
Axis III is for reporting current general medical conditions that are potentially relevant to the understanding or management of the individual’s mental disorder.
Axis IV includes problems with one’s primary support group, social environment, educational, occupation, housing, economic issues, access to health care services, interaction with the legal system/crime, and other psychosocial and environmental problems such as exposure to disasters and difficulty with caregivers and social agencies.
Axis V is a rating determined by the GAF Scale that considers psychological, social, and occupational functioning and symptom severity on a hypothetical continuum of mental health-illness from 0 (inadequate information), 1(persistent danger of severely hurting self or others) through 100 (superior functioning in a wide range of activities, life’s problem’s never seem to get out of hand, is sought out by others because of his or her many positive qualities. No symptoms.)
There appears to be a “disconnect” between Travis’ inferred message of his morality by the way he sees the world and his own immoral behavior of drug use, probably speed, which keeps him from sleeping and, thus, sends him to pornographic movie houses at various hours during the day and night.
Travis’ only way of connecting with the world is when he drives people around in the taxi cab and when he sits in the pornographic movie house and watches the films.
After he begins working as a taxi cab driver he says:
All my life needed was a sense of some place to go. I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention. I believe that someone should become a person like other people.
Travis wants to connect with others, as exemplified by his two failed conversations discussed earlier and by the following metaphorical journal entry about Betsy that ends the scene:
I first saw her at Palantine campaign headquarters at 63rd and Broadway. She was wearing a white dress. She appeared like an angel out of this filthy mass. She is alone. They cannot touch her.
People with STPD are more comfortable turning inward, away from others, than learning to have meaningful interpersonal relationships. This preferred isolation contributes to distorted perceptions about how interpersonal relationships are supposed to happen (Gilles, 2010).
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