Countess Erszebet Bathory was a breathtakingly beautiful,
unusually well-educated woman, married to a descendant of Vlad Dracula of Bram
Stoker fame. In 1611, she was tried - though, being a noblewoman, not convicted
- in Hungary for slaughtering 612 young girls. The true figure may have been
40-100, though the Countess recorded in her diary more than 610 girls and 50
bodies were found in her estate when it was raided.
The Countess was notorious as an inhuman sadist long before her hygienic
fixation. She once ordered the mouth of a talkative servant sewn. It is rumoured
that in her childhood she witnessed a gypsy being sewn into a horse's stomach
and left to die.
The girls were not killed outright. They were kept in a dungeon and repeatedly
pierced, prodded, pricked, and cut. The Countess may have bitten chunks of flesh
off their bodies while alive. She is said to have bathed and showered in their
blood in the mistaken belief that she could thus slow down the aging process.
Her servants were executed, their bodies burnt and their ashes scattered. Being
royalty, she was merely confined to her bedroom until she died in 1614. For a
hundred years after her death, by royal decree, mentioning her name in Hungary
was a crime.
Cases like Barothy's give the lie to the assumption that serial killers are a
modern - or even post-modern - phenomenon, a cultural-societal construct, a
by-product of urban alienation, Althusserian interpellation, and media
glamorization. Serial killers are, indeed, largely made, not born. But they are
spawned by every culture and society, molded by the idiosyncrasies of every
period as well as by their personal circumstances and genetic makeup.
Still, every crop of serial killers mirrors and reifies the pathologies of the
milieu, the depravity of the Zeitgeist, and the malignancies of the Leitkultur.
The choice of weapons, the identity and range of the victims, the methodology of
murder, the disposal of the bodies, the geography, the sexual perversions and
paraphilias - are all informed and inspired by the slayer's environment,
upbringing, community, socialization, education, peer group, sexual orientation,
religious convictions, and personal narrative. Movies like "Born Killers", "Man
Bites Dog", "Copycat", and the Hannibal Lecter series captured this truth.
Serial killers are the quiddity and quintessence of malignant narcissism.
Yet, to some degree, we all are narcissists. Primary narcissism is a universal
and inescapable developmental phase. Narcissistic traits are common and often
culturally condoned. To this extent, serial killers are merely our reflection
through a glass darkly.
In their book "Personality Disorders in Modern Life", Theodore Millon and Roger
Davis attribute pathological narcissism to "a society that stresses
individualism and self-gratification at the expense of community ... In an
individualistic culture, the narcissist is 'God's gift to the world'. In a
collectivist society, the narcissist is 'God's gift to the collective'".
Lasch described the narcissistic landscape thus (in "The Culture of Narcissism:
American Life in an age of Diminishing Expectations", 1979):
"The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety. He seeks not to
inflict his own certainties on others but to find a meaning in life. Liberated
from the superstitions of the past, he doubts even the reality of his own
existence ... His sexual attitudes are permissive rather than puritanical, even
though his emancipation from ancient taboos brings him no sexual peace.
Fiercely competitive in his demand for approval and acclaim, he distrusts
competition because he associates it unconsciously with an unbridled urge to
destroy ... He (harbours) deeply antisocial impulses. He praises respect for
rules and regulations in the secret belief that they do not apply to himself.
Acquisitive in the sense that his cravings have no limits, he ... demands
immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually
unsatisfied desire."
The narcissist's pronounced lack of empathy, off-handed exploitativeness,
grandiose fantasies and uncompromising sense of entitlement make him treat all
people as though they were objects (he "objectifies" people). The narcissist
regards others as either useful conduits for and sources of narcissistic supply
(attention, adulation, etc.) - or as extensions of himself.
Similarly, serial killers often mutilate their victims and abscond with trophies
- usually, body parts. Some of them have been known to eat the organs they have
ripped - an act of merging with the dead and assimilating them through
digestion. They treat their victims as some children do their rag dolls.
Killing the victim - often capturing him or her on film before the murder - is a
form of exerting unmitigated, absolute, and irreversible control over it. The
serial killer aspires to "freeze time" in the still perfection that he has
choreographed. The victim is motionless and defenseless. The killer attains long
sought "object permanence". The victim is unlikely to run on the serial
assassin, or vanish as earlier objects in the killer's life (e.g., his parents)
have done.
In malignant narcissism, the true self of the narcissist is replaced by a false
construct, imbued with omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. The
narcissist's thinking is magical and infantile. He feels immune to the
consequences of his own actions. Yet, this very source of apparently superhuman
fortitude is also the narcissist's Achilles heel.
The narcissist's personality is chaotic. His defense mechanisms are primitive.
The whole edifice is precariously balanced on pillars of denial, splitting,
projection, rationalization, and projective identification. Narcissistic
injuries - life crises, such as abandonment, divorce, financial difficulties,
incarceration, public opprobrium - can bring the whole thing tumbling down. The
narcissist cannot afford to be rejected, spurned, insulted, hurt, resisted,
criticized, or disagreed with.
Likewise, the serial killer is trying desperately to avoid a painful
relationship with his object of desire. He is terrified of being abandoned or
humiliated, exposed for what he is and then discarded. Many killers often have
sex - the ultimate form of intimacy - with the corpses of their victims.
Objectification and mutilation allow for unchallenged possession.
Devoid of the ability to empathize, permeated by haughty feelings of superiority
and uniqueness, the narcissist cannot put himself in someone else's shoes, or
even imagine what it means. The very experience of being human is alien to the
narcissist whose invented False Self is always to the fore, cutting him off from
the rich panoply of human emotions.
Thus, the narcissist believes that all people are narcissists. Many serial
killers believe that killing is the way of the world. Everyone would kill if
they could or were given the chance to do so. Such killers are convinced that
they are more honest and open about their desires and, thus, morally superior.
They hold others in contempt for being conforming hypocrites, cowed into
submission by an overweening establishment or society.
The narcissist seeks to adapt society in general - and meaningful others in
particular - to his needs. He regards himself as the epitome of perfection, a
yardstick against which he measures everyone, a benchmark of excellence to be
emulated. He acts the guru, the sage, the "psychotherapist", the "expert", the
objective observer of human affairs. He diagnoses the "faults" and "pathologies"
of people around him and "helps" them "improve", "change", "evolve", and
"succeed" - i.e., conform to the narcissist's vision and wishes.
Serial killers also "improve" their victims - slain, intimate objects - by
"purifying" them, removing "imperfections", depersonalizing and dehumanizing
them. This type of killer saves its victims from degeneration and degradation,
from evil and from sin, in short: from a fate worse than death.
The killer's megalomania manifests at this stage. He claims to possess, or have
access to, higher knowledge and morality. The killer is a special being and the
victim is "chosen" and should be grateful for it. The killer often finds the
victim's ingratitude irritating, though sadly predictable.
In his seminal work, "Aberrations of Sexual Life" (originally: "Psychopathia
Sexualis"), quoted in the book "Jack the Ripper" by Donald Rumbelow,
Kraft-Ebbing offers this observation:
"The perverse urge in murders for pleasure does not solely aim at causing the
victim pain and - most acute injury of all - death, but that the real meaning of
the action consists in, to a certain extent, imitating, though perverted into a
monstrous and ghastly form, the act of defloration. It is for this reason that
an essential component ... is the employment of a sharp cutting weapon; the
victim has to be pierced, slit, even chopped up ... The chief wounds are
inflicted in the stomach region and, in many cases, the fatal cuts run from the
vagina into the abdomen. In boys an artificial vagina is even made ... One can
connect a fetishistic element too with this process of hacking ... inasmuch as
parts of the body are removed and ... made into a collection."
Yet, the sexuality of the serial, psychopathic, killer is self-directed. His
victims are props, extensions, aides, objects, and symbols. He interacts with
them ritually and, either before or after the act, transforms his diseased inner
dialog into a self-consistent extraneous catechism. The narcissist is equally
auto-erotic. In the sexual act, he merely masturbates with other - living -
people's bodies.
The narcissist's life is a giant repetition complex. In a doomed attempt to
resolve early conflicts with significant others, the narcissist resorts to a
restricted repertoire of coping strategies, defense mechanisms, and behaviors.
He seeks to recreate his past in each and every new relationship and
interaction. Inevitably, the narcissist is invariably confronted with the same
outcomes. This recurrence only reinforces the narcissist's rigid reactive
patterns and deep-set beliefs. It is a vicious, intractable, cycle.
Correspondingly, in some cases of serial killers, the murder ritual seemed to
have recreated earlier conflicts with meaningful objects, such as parents,
authority figures, or peers. The outcome of the replay is different to the
original, though. This time, the killer dominates the situation.
The killings allow him to inflict abuse and trauma on others rather than be
abused and traumatized. He outwits and taunts figures of authority - the police,
for instance. As far as the killer is concerned, he is merely "getting back" at
society for what it did to him. It is a form of poetic justice, a balancing of
the books, and, therefore, a "good" thing. The murder is cathartic and allows
the killer to release hitherto repressed and pathologically transformed
aggression - in the form of hate, rage, and envy.
But repeated acts of escalating gore fail to alleviate the killer's overwhelming
anxiety and depression. He seeks to vindicate his negative introjects and
sadistic superego by being caught and punished. The serial killer tightens the
proverbial noose around his neck by interacting with law enforcement agencies
and the media and thus providing them with clues as to his identity and
whereabouts. When apprehended, most serial assassins experience a great sense of
relief.
Serial killers are not the only objectifiers - people who treat others as
objects. To some extent, leaders of all sorts - political, military, or
corporate - do the same. In a range of demanding professions - surgeons, medical
doctors, judges, law enforcement agents - objectification efficiently fends off
attendant horror and anxiety.
Yet, serial killers are different. They represent a dual failure - of their own
development as full-fledged, productive individuals - and of the culture and
society they grow in. In a pathologically narcissistic civilization - social
anomies proliferate. Such societies breed malignant objectifiers - people devoid
of empathy - also known as "narcissists".