Understanding Dunblane and other Massacres

Forensic Studies of Homicide, Paedophilia, and Anorexia

Peter Aylward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429923524
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The book predominantly explores the psychic histories of patients who display their transgenerational conflicts/trauma through forensic acts. It establishes the need to consider the details of patient history in understanding the patient within both the therapeutic encounter and the treatment team milieu. There are many themes of contemporary interest including gang murders, sibling jealousy, fatal eating disorder, personality disorder, and the effects of exclusion and marginalization within group and community dynamics and the global prevalence of mass murder. The author describes the collapse into dyadic thinking and enactment that prevails when the third perspective, classically represented by the father within the Oedipal dynamic, is excluded or absent. Providing detailed case studies he shows how seemingly meaningless explosions of violence or perversion are attempts to master early experiences of trauma and/or exclusion, often passed down unconsciously through the generations. Using the theories of Matte Blanco and notions of the 'critical date' the chapters give unique insight into the timing and triggers of crimes, however apparently random.

CHAPTER ONE
Palindrome spotting within the calendar of the mind: detecting the re-enactment of original trauma in the crime*

“The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth have been set on edge.”

—Jeremiah 31:29

This chapter describes an understanding of a patient unconsciously re-enacting, through homicide, an original trauma, at a critical time in her life, by suddenly “giving birth” to a crime that at once symmetrically matched the unexpected presentation of a sibling, by her mother. The offence, standing for the baby, albeit in a psychotic and delusional form, was the perpetrator’s way of playing back to her mother what had been played out to her at a much earlier time. This draws attention to the crucial importance of the lateral sibling relationships in families, in relation to subsequent acting-out scenarios of homicide, which the psychoanalytic world has been remiss in not sufficiently triangulating with the significance of the vertical relationships with parents.

I allude in my title, and hope to present, the notion that a crime can be understood as representing an earlier trauma and that the trauma is being played back in the same form at an emotional level at a particular time. This reinforces the characteristic of the timelessness of the unconscious by suggesting that there is a calendar of the mind that may dictate the pertinence of both the timing and type of offence. “Palindrome” comes from the Greek palindromos meaning “running back again”, and is a word to describe something that is the same backwards as forwards. The sentence “Able was I ere I saw Elba” is the same when read forwards as when read backwards, and is therefore a palindrome. The traumatic experience I will focus upon will be the arrival of a sibling which, because of its ubiquity and ordinariness, is not always seen with its full psychotic and forensic possibilities. Juliet Mitchell in her publication on sibling relations and hysteria—Mad Men and Medusas (2000)— suggests that when a child is faced with the arrival of a sibling there is a protest against this by trying to become the only baby or favourite offspring: “By which time he is utterly dependent and helpless. The dread of the death-like experience of trauma, which is the equivalent of an absence of subject or ego, is warded off by a mimetic identification with another person” (Mitchell, 2000 p. 41).

The patient I will present demonstrates this mimetic (in mimicry) identification with her mother by giving birth to an offence (of murder) which symmetrically represents her mother giving birth to a sibling. The offence occurred at a time that matched a traumatic event experienced at the same point of time in her mother’s life. I shall refer to this as a “critical date”.

To give an example of critical dates:

Adolph Hitler, Dictator of Nazi Germany, was born on April 20th 1889. His father Alois was born in 1837 and was fifty-one when Adolph, his fourth child, was born. The next child, Edmund, was born in March 1894 when father was fifty-six. Alois had fathered three children, Gustav, Ida, and Otto before Adolph was born, when he was aged forty-eight, forty-nine and fifty, and they had all died in infancy. Adolph reached fifty-one in 1940, and having dealt with Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, France, Denmark and Norway he embarked on plans to subjugate the rest of the world … Adolph reached 56 in April 1945 and is said to have shot himself in a bunker ten days after his fifty-sixth birthday. As noted above fifty-six was his father’s age when the next baby Edmund was born. Adolph’s reign was over, as indeed in 1894 his reign as the only child had been when baby Edmund was born.

(Earnshaw, 1995, p. 108)

While I appreciate that there are considerable socio-political factors surrounding the story of Hitler, I want to draw attention to a time-linked factor of a killing off and displacement/replacement that represented a crime revisited.

I am here considering that something, in this case a trauma, is repeating itself, and that there is a “compulsion to repeat”, a phrase coined by Freud to describe what he believed to be an innate tendency to revert to earlier conditions (Freud 1920, pp. 18–22). Through the repetition compulsion, the unconscious tries to master earlier traumatic experience, repeating or re-enacting it, without actually bringing it into conscious awareness in the form of a recollection (Freud, 1914). This is particularly relevant to the opportunity for repeat enactments in the transference, which may then be consciously understood and worked through in the clinical setting (Freud, 1914). Moreover, I wish to explore the observation that there is a correspondence between the dating of events which constitute repetitions and the dating of an original traumatic event. I shall illustrate this theory by using some clinical material in which the crime of murder was used by a patient to play back to her mother in a palindromic form what she felt was played out to her at an earlier time and that this occurred at a critical time in her own mind. I shall show that the dating of the two correspond to each other. The clinical tools that I shall use will include Klein’s (1946) projective identification, Segal’s (1978) symbolic equation, and Freud’s (1900) ideas on the characteristics of the unconscious. Furthermore I shall make use of the important theories of the Chilean psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco (1975). For those unacquainted with his work I intend to offer a rudimentary introduction to the man and his thinking as I believe it will help in providing some clarity to what appears to be the illogical mind of the unconscious, and more exceptionally, the psychotic. For those more familiar with Matte Blanco’s work the following will offer a little revision.

Before doing so, I want to briefly comment upon the recent completion of the genome project/the DNA (deoxyribonucleic) profile. Originally it held out the fantasy that it would provide an understanding of how humans function. It is now a much more complex picture involving the production of proteins and their propensity to be affected by, amongst other things, intense emotional states. This raises the question about the capacity to inherit “time-tagged” DNA/protein, an issue to which I will return in the final chapter of this book. It was proposed that trans-generational factors are as relevant to the unfolding of trauma as they are to the present internal calendars that dictate when our teeth might erupt from our gums or whether and when our hair begins to go grey.

I will now lean extensively on the efforts of Eric Rayner, whose book Unconscious Logic (1995) provides a good introduction to Matte Blanco’s ideas. Matte Blanco’s thinking is a blend of classical psychoanalysis with mathematical logic, which at first sight appears esoteric and forbidding. While Matte Blanco is quite clear that psychoanalysis could not be practised based on bi-logic alone, once his ideas have been grasped, they add a new dimension to our thinking. In short, borderline/psychotic levels of thought are rendered more comprehensible. Of particular importance has been Matte Blanco’s new theoretical vision about “emotionality” and how strong affect acts as a bridge between psychoanalytic forms of theory and those of other disciplines.

A brief biographical picture might help to place Matte Blanco in context. He was born in 1908 in Chile and graduated in medicine at the University of Chile in Santiago. His interests soon turned towards psychiatry, particularly psychoanalysis, concentrations which led him to London in the mid-1930s. He undertook his first analysis with Walter Schmideberg, a classical Freudian psychoanalyst and son-in-law of Melanie Klein. He went on to study under many of the best-known analysts at the time, including Klein, Anna Freud, and Ernest Jones, the founder of the British Psychoanalytic Society and one of the first and most faithful disciples of Freud himself. In 1940 he moved to America, where he was employed as an analyst and pursued his mathematical interest by attending weekly seminars with the esteemed mathematician Richard Courant. In 1948 he returned to Chile as chair of psychiatry at the University of Santiago in Chile. His work with psychotic patients was particularly notable at the time. “Psychosis”, being a term that encompasses many of the most severe and disturbed forms of mental illness, had been found to have been almost inaccessible by conventional psychoanalytic techniques and Matte Blanco’s interest focused on its phenomena. A desire to pursue his own theories led to another move in 1966 when he arrived in Rome as chairman of psychiatry at the Catholic University of Rome, and in 1975 he published the first of his two major works, entitled The Unconscious as Infinite Sets. In 1988 a sequel was published called Thinking, Feeling and Being. In 1990 an accident caused him severe brain damage and his health declined rapidly until his death in 1995.

In short, Matte Blanco found the germ of his theory of the logic of the unconscious when dealing with psychotic patients. He discovered that the apparent irrationality of these patients was not a wholly arbitrary chaos, but one that exhibited certain patterns. The basis of the pattern was what he termed “symmetry”, using that word in its mathematical sense.

It was the application of this mathematical interest to which I now want to turn. The pattern is at odds with common-sense logic, which was first codified by Aristotle (384–322 BC) and involves the clear distinction between true and false. This common-sense logic underlies most of the ordinary transactions of life and also underlies most of humanity’s scientific descriptions.

However, Freud’s (1900) brilliance in uncovering the characteristics of the unconscious was to indicate that the unconscious does not conform to these known logical rules and that it has its own system of rules, its own mode of thinking. So that while the conscious logical thinking usually works within a framework of distinguishing things, the unconscious that Freud investigated tends to unite and fuse everything. The former is regarded as rational at a precise and impersonal level, whereas the latter is in every respect its reverse.

Matte Blanco’s (1975) genius was in bringing the two together creatively. He argued that the unconscious must obey some rules. As we go about our business the human mind continuously classifies, whereby constant acts of recognition are made all the time so that an experience, when repeated, is not treated as new. This classifying involves the registration of sameness or identity.

Relating to the world also entails discriminating the relationships between things. Again, without such discrimination it would be impossible to negotiate the environment. Matte Blanco coined the registration of sameness as “symmetry” and difference as “asymmetry”. “A is to the left of B” has the converse “B is to the right of A”. Here the converse is not identical to the original; this is asymmetrical. However, “A is near B” has the converse “B is near A”; it is reversible and thereby symmetrical. Matte Blanco proposes that ordinary logical thought, which is primarily scientific logic about the physical world, must entertain asymmetrical relations. The mind must be able to conceive of relations whose converses are not identical to them. In such asymmetrical thought, since recognition is essential, symmetry (sameness) must be registered, but only in strict accordance with the discrimination of difference. The functioning of this logic is dominant within secondary process, that is, in thinking which is governed by conscious reality. In primary process, however, we often find the converse of a relation treated as identical; for example, regardless of external evidence, a baby may think “I need my mother” and therefore “my mother needs me”.¹ This is not a deduction that ordinary commonsense/asymmetrical logic would necessarily make, but such descriptions of unconscious symmetrical logic are the keystones to Matte Blanco’s work. He called this “illogical” pattern of thought “symmetrised logic” and this often entails the simultaneous use of symmetry and asymmetry (Matte Blanco, 1975, p. 11).

The apparently inappropriate mixing or insertion of symmetrical thought into asymmetrical relations is called “symmetrisation”. Matte Blanco gives an example of symmetrisation: “Prison windows have bars. The windows of my room have bars and my pyjamas have stripes like bars of the windows. Hence, I am in prison” (1975, pp. 162–163). At first this may be perceived as mad and Matte Blanco himself, studying schizophrenic thought, was aware of this impression. However, he took pains to show that such madness uses symmetrised logic when asymmetrical logic is appropriate to the conscious sane mind. Let me here cite a more immediate example. Allow me for a moment to be arrogant and suggest that in writing this chapter I am giving something good to you. In ordinary logic, I could conclude that you are being given something good by me. But if this then becomes suffused by unconscious process and we slip in to what Matte Blanco would call symmetrisation, I might say that I am giving something good to you, so you are giving something good to me. Ordinarily this is not a very logical conclusion, but affectively this is in fact the experience. Here subjects and objects would become less differentiated so that there is more of a diffuse feeling, akin to “goodness is happening”. So, in this example, subjects and objects tend to be fused, merged, or reversible. The same can be applied to a time relation. In ordinary logic we might say “Event B follows Event A so A precedes B”. If symmetrisation intervenes, then we might say “B follows A so A follows B”, and there then becomes no awareness of time sequence, so time as we know it disappears.

In this way, Matte Blanco begins to provide a handle on the momentousness of the idea of timelessness in the unconscious that Freud established (Freud, 1915). Moreover, Freud was more than aware that he himself had made little progress in this area when he wrote a few years before his death:

Again and again we have had the impression that we have made too little theoretical use of this fact established beyond any doubt of the unalterability by time of the repressed. This seems to offer an approach to the most profound discoveries. Nor unfortunately, have we made any progress here.

(Freud, 1933, p. 74)

Moving on, let us next take the notion of an object and its parts. We are all familiar in our clinical work with a part equating to a whole and vice versa. This symmetrisation can become exaggerated into classes of things. This is an area to which prejudice is germane. For instance: “[I]t must be a man that lives here—it’s in such a mess.” Here the classes of “men” and “messiness” are equated. Symmetrisation has changed any asymmetrical perception that some men are tidy. Rayner and Wooster state:

We think it would be right to say that Matte-Blanco considers his most fundamental contribution to be the demonstration that Freud’s main characteristics of the unconscious can be understood in terms of symmetrisation of ordinary logical thought.

(Rayner & Wooster, 1990, p. 428)

A further point to add regarding the part equalling the whole, is in the application of the question in mathematics: “[W]hen is a part of a set (of numbers) equivalent to the whole set?” The answer, mathematically, is when the set is infinite. Take the set of all whole numbers—1, 2, 3, 4, etc.; this is an infinite set. Now take a part of this set, for example, the sub-set all even numbers—2, 4, 6, etc.; this sub-set is also infinite, so for every whole number there corresponds one and only one even number: 1 corresponds to 2, 2 corresponds to 4, 3 corresponds to 6, and so on ad infinitum. This whole–part equivalence is a paradox that characterises infinite sets, but not finite ones.

Matte Blanco went on to introduce the notion of infinity in emotional experience. We are all familiar with a patient’s sense of omniscience, omnipotence, and idealisation. There is infinity contained in all; for example, in omniscience we can know everything that it is possible to know. This is always recognisable in feeling states, easily seen in feelings of being in love. Extreme emotional states therefore display a quality of irradiation and maximalisation. If the assumption is then made that extreme emotions are contained as nuclei in any feeling, then Matte Blanco concluded that all affects contain elements of infinite experience, which involves symmetrisation. Both affects and unconscious processes thus involve infinities.

Both Rayner and Wooster suggest that this conclusion is new (1990). In thinking about psychotic processes, the psychotic sees symmetry where the normal person does not and emotion may be accompanied, therefore, by inflation to an infinite degree. The stronger the emotion the greater the door is opened to such symmetric deductions.

Turning now to the clinical material, a murder was committed in the vicinity of my patient Cherie’s home when she was fourteen. It remained an unsolved crime. When Cherie was sixteen she was convicted of an offence of grievous bodily harm (GBH) and received a minimum detention of two years. While detained for this offence (at the age of eighteen) she began to disclose details about the murder that took place two years prior to the GBH offence (when fourteen). Cherie was subsequently charged and convicted of the murder and received a life sentence. She was dealt with under the Mental Health Act (1983) and diagnosed with mental illness and psychopathic disorder alongside borderline personality disorder and sexual paraphilia (approximating to a morbid craving or attraction for sex). I have been meeting with her for the past two years.

Her family circumstances at the time of her birth were that she was the fourth born to her mother, who had conceived her first three children with two separate men. Cherie’s conception was with a third man. Her mother and father (both French) apparently stayed together for the first year of Cherie’s life before her father left. By the time Cherie was two, her mother had met and married another man, called Draiveur. Cherie and her elder brother were fostered out to a relative in France, while her mother and new husband moved to England (a work posting). During that same year, in England, Cherie’s next youngest sibling was born and when Cherie reached four years of age her mother returned to France (almost exactly two years following her departure) and introduced Cherie to her new stepfather and new half-brother. It was this early experience, as well as trans-generational factors, that I believe created the template for Cherie’s subsequent behaviour. Not only did there appear to be an insecure and dysfunctional attachment to her mother, but this was exacerbated by her mother’s abandonment of her at two, as well as her mother’s subsequent return two years later when Cherie was unexpectedly faced with a new stepfather and half-brother. We might reasonably speculate that feelings of envy were rekindled and were inflamed by jealousy, provoked by the experience of being displaced by the new sibling. Cherie’s mother had one further child, later in that same year, which was to become her sixth.

Cherie’s mother had fluctuating periods of mental illness which often necessitated hospitalisation. Care orders were implemented for the children. Cherie often became the mother figure for her younger siblings, taking responsibility during her mother’s absence through illness and/or working and socialising. However, as Cherie approached puberty, self-harming, sniffing solvents, drug-taking, and promiscuity became features. By the age of ten or eleven, having been monitored for several years by social services, Cherie was showing signs of disturbance at school. At the same time Cherie’s mother had met another man whom she was to subsequently marry. He brought with him two daughters from a previous relationship. The imposition of stepsisters was to adversely influence Cherie in the following years. As the stepfamily moved into Cherie’s home, Cherie was put in the care of a friend, apparently to prevent her being badly influenced by her new stepsisters. Again, Cherie was displaced (mirroring the events when she was two) at fourteen years of age and this was the year the murder took place. A picture emerges of Cherie’s deteriorating behaviour and involvement with the police.

I will now turn to the GBH that Cherie committed aged sixteen. The background to this offenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE Palindrome spotting within the calendar of the mind: detecting the re-enactment of original trauma in the crime
• CHAPTER TWO Perverse triangulation
• CHAPTER THREE Murder: persecuted by jealousy
• CHAPTER FOUR Crossing the divide
• CHAPTER FIVE The revenge involved in diagnosing untreatability
• CHAPTER SIX Boy do I exist! The avoidance of annihilatory terror through paedophilic acts
• CHAPTER SEVEN Digesting history as a lifesaver
• CHAPTER EIGHT In defence of the realm ... of emotion
• CHAPTER NINE Understanding the Dunblane Massacre
• POSTSCRIPT
• REFERENCES
• INDEX