"He's trying to murder my mind," she said. Then she began to cry softly.

At the time, a decade ago, I wasn't certain what my thirty-two-year-old patient meant by her description of her husband's bahavior. Nothing she had told me about him seemed to justify a word like murder. And what exactly did she mean by "mind murder"? Her explanation at the time went something like this: "My husband says one thing, but I can tell by his tone of voice that he means just the opposite."

I wrote in my notebook, "Two messages seem to be involved in mind murder. One is explicit and says one thing. The second message is subliminal, conveyed primarily by tone, and negates the first."

In the intervening years I've been on the alert for mind murder, and I've found it all around me.

An eight-year-old girl: "Mommy, why can't I go to the movies with the other kids? You're so mean sometimes!"

Mother: "Now, that's not a nice thing to say to your mother. I've only got your best interests at heart. You know that I love you." But the word love in the last sentence comes out sounding as if the girl's mother had said hate.

The child wants to believe her mother loves her, but the tone, for reasons she can't explain, makes her uneasy and nervous.

Another example from a rather seriously disturbed patient. "You should have the Congressional Medal of Spit," a schizophrenic woman said to her psychiatrist, who wrote in his notes, "The first seven words of that eight-word sentence conveyed heartfelt admiration, but the last one, said with no break at all in the rhythm of her speech, was uttered in unalloyed contempt."

In recent years neuroscientists have made discoveries about the brain that have shed light on the dynamics of mind murder. The brain's right hemisphere, we now know, is important for providing emotional tone and timbre.

Certain patients with brain injury in their right hemisphere can't generate the emotional state appropriate to what they say. Others can generate their own appropriate emotions but can't respond properly to the emotional ambiences of other people's words. "You're a real genius" convinces them that the speaker is flattering their intelligence, but they remain unaware of the contemptuous way genius was said implying, instead, something like nitwit.

Communication depends only partially on the words that are said. Equally important are the ways things are said, thus making possible irony, humor, flattery, admiration, and other subtleties of expression. Such subtleties also provide psychological sadists with a method for murdering another person's mind. Remember that old movie Gaslight? The title has been turned into a verb. If you want to "gaslight" somebody, you wait until he or she says something mildly controversial in front of other people and then you do things like raise your eyebrows, roll your eyes, or make sudden gestures of embarrassment. You can suggest, without saying a word, that your intended victim is, well, unstable, not at all reliable. Milder forms of the same technique can be used for social purposes.

"We'd love to have you visit," I said two days ago to a person who, if he had visited me here on Martha's Vineyard, would have so skewed my writing schedule that the essay you're now reading would never have been written. Earlier in the evening I had practiced inflecting the word love so that the disparity between message and delivery would be obvious enough to be effective but not so obvious as to offend.

How do I justify doing what I have just so clearly criticized in others? Simple. I think it makes a good deal of difference whether word-emotional dissonances are deliberately created with full knowledge of what's going on or whether they occur outside the conscious intent of the speaker. It also is important that mind murder not be deliberately used for destructive means. But even making that distinction isn't always easy. In fact, that is a problem with mind murder. Often the perpetrator cannot be confronted because the processes are occurring outside his awareness. But in instances involving conscious intent, such as my lukewarm invitation, communication is still possible if a listener is perceptive enough: "Listen, Richard . . . you don't sound very excited about my coming. If you don't want me to visit, then just say so and let's dispense with the games." "Okay, Roger. If you want it straight, please don't come to visit; I've got too many things to do."

Mind murder exists because some people have a need to try to make life simpler than it usually is. The mother mentioned in this essay loves her child in her own way but resents the child's restrictions on her freedom. Her brain can't seem to process this conflict, so she chooses to express only one side of it by a subliminally hostile tone of voice, thus murdering her child's mind.

From the book, "The Brain Has a Mind of Its Own" by Richard Restak, M.D.