A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

eactions of the others: a young mother with her daughter who has got up to leave the room but
cannot drag herself away, the men pretending to be indifferent and trying to hide excitement.
Barbusse, like Freud, is implying that such crimes are the conscious expression of ‘monsters’ from
the unconscious, and that the monsters can be found in every one of us. Such a statement will strike
most of us as a partial truth that has been made untrue by gross exaggeration. (For example, if a
young mother feels compelled to listen, this is surely because she feels anxiety about the safety of
her own child and is trying, so to speak, to forearm herself against disaster.) But this is to overlook
the real point: that man has created a civilisation for which he is not fully prepared. He could be
compared to a polar bear placed in a centrally heated cage and suffering from a sense of
suffocation. He is ‘safe’ but uncomfortable. Unless we understand this, we shall not be able to even
begin to understand the increase in sheer sadism in so many of the crimes that have taken place
since 1960. Civilisation increases our mental experience - books, television, conversation - but
decreases our physical experience, our contact with nature and with necessity. Most of us have
accustomed ourselves to these conditions; but there are a few who would not admit to an obscure
sense of ‘something missing’. It is as if ordinary experience had become slightly dream-like and
unreal. This is one of the basic conditions of civilised man.
A case cited by the Los Angeles psychiatrist Paul De River in The Sexual Criminal (p.74)
underlines the point. A school guard, aged thirty-two, had lured three children to a ravine and
strangled and raped them. The girls were aged seven, eight and nine. The man was married, and
had an active sex life with his wife; he had even practised wife-swapping with a neighbour. But he
assured De River ‘that he had never had a complete fulfilment of his sexual desires’. He was
convinced that what he needed for ‘complete fulfilment’ was a narrow vagina, ‘something tight and
young’. He persuaded the girls to go with him on the pretence of showing them ‘bunnies’, and led
them off one by one, claiming that more than that would frighten the bunnies; then he strangled
each child with a rope and committed rape - and, in two cases, sodomy. He was in a state of intense
excitement and experienced ejaculation in all three cases. Afterwards he knelt by the bodies to pray
for the children’s souls, and asked God to forgive him. But he admitted that, during the attacks, ‘he
felt that he was very powerful and that they were but his slaves, he being the master’. The next day
he felt ‘drunk with his own importance’. He fantasised about the murders as he made love to his
wife and experienced deep satisfaction.
De River comments: ‘We must remember that here we are dealing with a sexual psychopath who
has at last achieved his end and fulfilled his sexual desire, and in this case for the first time his
sexual tension has been reduced to the normal limits.’ Yet this is to some extent contradicted by the
killer’s own statement that he had obtained the greatest satisfaction from the eldest girl, who was
the best developed - and therefore closest to a grown woman. This suggests that his belief that he
needed a child for total satisfaction was a misinterpretation of his urge. What really gave him the
satisfaction, as we have seen, was the sense of power, the feeling that ‘they were but his slaves, he
being the master’. What he wanted was ego satisfaction; he was misinterpreting Ernest Becker’s
desire for ‘primacy’ as sexual desire.
Now we can begin to see why the horrific Black Dahlia case inspired so many imitative crimes and
confessions. It was not necessarily that these fantasists would have enjoyed such extreme sadism -
in fact, none of the imitative crimes was as violent. What was attractive was the idea of total ego
satisfaction, being the ‘master’. Barbusse’s males were not necessarily lusting to commit a sex
murder; what they - and the mother - were responding to was the element of ego-satisfaction, of
‘primacy’.