r sexual abuse. Some of these horrendous childhood experiences took place in the family. Others took place in the public institutions into which, in Britain, children are (in the euphemistic phrase) “taken into care”. Of course, perhaps not all these stories are true. Those with Antisocial personality disorder have a reputation for being skilful deceivers. But the psychiatrists in the hospital think that perhaps eighty per cent of the patients had terrible childhoods.
I will not quote any of the patients I have interviewed. To discuss the issues raised, I will take the case of someone who, while never actually given a diagnosis of psychopathy or of Antisocial personality disorder, would fit one of these categories. This is a real case, and the person in question had a childhood not unlike that of many of my interviewees.
C. The Case of Mr. H.
Mr. H had an unhappy childhood. His father was strict and had a terrible temper. He was a “demon” about punctuality. He insisted on silence in the family. The children never dared speak in his presence unless spoken to, and were not allowed to call him anything less formal than “Father”. When he wanted his son, he never called him by name, but always whistled for him in the same way he called for the dog. The father often beat the dog, his wife, and each of his children. As a child, Mr. H was once given 230 strokes of the cane by his father. In later life, he said he remembered seeing his drunk father rape his mother.
Mr. H grew up with a very rigid personality. As an adult, he was obsessed with cleanliness, passionately hating any untidiness or dirt. He was also obsessed with wolves, sometimes thinking of himself as a wolf, and calling his Alsatian dog “Wolf”. He took the dog for exactly the same walk every day, throwing a stick for it at exactly the same place. Any suggestion of varying such routines made him agitated and angry. He hated being left alone at night, and hated the moon because he thought it was dead. He was obsessed with his own possible death from cancer, which 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.