ich his mother had died from.
Mr. H had difficulties in his love life. As a boy he had been terrified of being kissed. His first love affair came when he was 37. It was with a teenage girl, who tried to kill herself after he abruptly broke off the relationship. He then fell in love with his niece, who did not reciprocate his feelings. She killed herself with his pistol. At the age of 41, he had another affair, this time with an 18 year old girl, who made an unsuccessful suicide attempt early in their relationship. Mr. H seems to have been disgusted by normal sexual intercourse, saying he did not want it because he would become infected. His niece said that his main sexual pleasure was in getting her to urinate on his face.
Much of his emotional life seems to have been diverted to patriotism and politics. He fought in a war, with great patriotic enthusiasm. He was temporarily blinded during a gas attack, which seems to have left him with great resentment against those who did not fight in the war. He took up extreme right wing politics and was passionately anti-Semitic. He was highly successful at appealing to the public. He became leader of his country. He started a world war. He ordered the systematic murder of millions of his fellow-citizens. He killed himself when his country lost the war.
Now that Mr. H’s identity has emerged, there are questions about how, if at all, his childhood and character and personality are relevant to our reaction to him and to what he did.
Nothing in Mr. H’s story does much to suggest that he was ill. Rigidity, sexual problems, racism, anger and resentment, obsessions about dogs and the moon –they are all things people are better off without, but they are not obvious symptoms of illness. Nor is there much mileage in the idea that they do not reflect the real Mr. H, whose real but unexpressed personality was quite different. The anger and the anti-Semitism were characteristics as genuinely his as it was possible to find.
Mr. H raises in acute form the problem of personality disorder. It is not an illness. The excuses that defend someone’s character from criticism all fail. There is no conflict in which a set of higher-order desires or deeper values are defeated. There is no alternative “real” self obscured or distorted by a medical condition. We are confronted by someone whose real self, or character, is itself misshapen. If blame is a negative evaluation of character on the basis of actions, it is hard to see how Mr. H can escape it.
And yet, as with my interviewees, this seems not to be quite the whole story. When interviewing patients, I deliberately do not know what offences they have committed, although sometimes they tell me and afterwards I find out. As I hear in the interview about their childhood of pain, rejection and humiliation, it is natural to see them as themselves victims, to glimpse their life from the inside and to feel sympathy. Sometimes, going back from the hospital after hearing about the terrible things they have done, I struggle to get the two perspectives into one coherent picture. It is hard to reconcile the emotional response to what they have suffered with the emotional response to what they have done.
With some of the interviewees, as with Mr. H, part of the complex emotional response is linked to some secular version of the thought that, there but for the grace of God go I. This is not to endorse some form of environmental determinism. Many people have had childhoods comparable to those of the interviewees without committing crimes on their scale. Many people had childhoods comparable to that of Mr. H without committing genocide or starting world wars. The causal story must also involve things other than child abuse. But, because we do not know exactly what other factors –genetic, environmental or other- play a role, we cannot be confident that we would have responded to that kind of upbringing differently from the interviewees or differently from Mr. H. Of course we all hope that, given that terrible childhood, we would still not have been like Hitler. And no d