The Monsters of the Mind

Apr 19, 2015 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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Countryman – Stories about life, in and out of Guyana, from a Guyanese perspective

By Dennis Nichols      
Monsters abound in our world, and in our country, as I was reminded in a recent article by Adam Harris, and

a newspaper cartoon depicting one such ‘creature’ about to inflict unimaginable horror on an innocent child. So like nightmares that persist even on a bright and joyous day, two recent killings force me to return to crime scenes in my mind of undiluted terror and trauma.
The fiends we talk about, read about, and curse to the pits of hell, are no grotesque figures of fable; they are us, Homo sapiens with supposedly rational minds and humane hearts. But the psyche is subject to unimaginably contrary forces, over which few of us have absolute control. And Guyanese, whether perceived to be criminal or law-abiding, are generally no more inclined to acts of savagery than citizens of other countries.
It may be a good thing that we cannot read the minds or hearts of some murderers, lest a certain unsavory idea emerges and overwhelms us –one which accommodates the kind of dark thoughts and urges residing within that we would rather not dwell on. Collectively, they are sometimes called the ‘Shadow Self’, or the ‘dark side of the moon’ aspect of the personality, an aspect shrouded in secrecy.
Swiss psychotherapist, Carl Jung says. “It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but a positively dynamic demonism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him…it is incredible that he should ever, in any circumstance, go beyond himself.

But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster”; what the mind doctors call a sociopath, or a psychopath.
When certain extraordinarily heinous or macabre crimes are committed by seemingly normal people in our society, we perpetually hear comments like, “I don’t believe (whoever) do this” or “He/she would never do something like that”, even to “I would put my head on a block” that is, face death before dishonouring the alleged perpetrator.
Were the last one true, many would have literally lost their heads.
Samantha Benjamin lost hers. Perhaps she would have put it on a block attesting to the genuineness of her alleged killer, someone whom she evidently took into her home, and her confidence. The smiling and quite ordinary-looking young man (seen in recent photographs) reportedly confessed to not only biting the proverbial hand that fed him, but also having it severed it, as well as the other hand, both legs and the head.
In the other instance I alluded to, I was hit hard. I have a granddaughter of the same age, and I had lost a son on a kite-flying Easter Monday 20 years ago. Like the suspect in the first case, the alleged killer of Shaquan Gittens reportedly told the police the sordid story of the child’s abduction, sodomy, murder, and corpse mutilation. And like the other confessed killer, apart from his disheveled appearance, he doesn’t look like a rabid lunatic. According to a newspaper report, he appeared calm in court.

These two cases are among the most recent in a long list of sadistic killings in Guyana. Because of such, it would be easy to colour this country as one of the most murderous in the world. And so we may perceive. But the truth is that many of the most barbaric and devilish acts of homicide happened in relatively developed and so-called civilized countries at the time of their occurrence. Three instances will suffice.
Gilles de Rais was a 15th century French nobleman and an army officer who fought alongside the heroine, Joan of Arc. But he was also one of the most prolific serial killers in history. He confessed to killing hundreds of children in a seven-year bloodbath. It is said that he took great pleasure in torturing, sodomizing, and murdering them by decapitation and dismemberment, after which he pleasured himself sexually in his victims’ bloody remains. He was only 36 when he was hanged.
The crimes of Albert Fish, the ‘Brooklyn Vampire’, cannot be described in any detail in an

article like this because of their sub-human depravity. In synopsis, it can be revealed that he was a deviant pedophile, cannibal, and serial killer, a ‘nice’ old man who molested more than 400 children, and used ‘instruments of hell’ on his victims, including a 10-year-old girl whom he murdered and cannibalized. A psychiatrist who examined him said he lived a life of ‘extreme perversity’. He died by the electric chair at the age of 65.
The last example is not as ‘big’ as the others in terms of scope, but gruesome enough for inclusion.  The murderer is a woman and the crime has a perverse maternal twist to it. In 2012, in Kentucky, USA, 34- year-old Kathy Coy was spared the death sentence for carving the stomach of a pregnant woman with a knife, and ripping the fetus out her womb after disabling her victim with a stun gun, then slitting her wrists and throat. She had befriended 21-year-old Jamie Stice on Facebook. Coy had faked pregnancies, and was obsessed with having a baby. The fetus survived. Coy was jailed for life.
What causes apparently ordinary people to act this way? Mental illness seems an obvious culprit, but after decades of study, it is only partly understood. Some religious folk prefer to attribute such extreme criminality to demonic influences. I am more inclined towards mental illness, coupled with human greed and selfishness. But I cannot dismiss supernatural evil, and the purported efficacy of exorcism or ‘deliverance’.
This is of course a simplistic response  to the question, which brings me back to Jung’s Shadow Self and its relation to the Persona, normally the ‘nice’ image we project to the world, and present to ourselves. The Shadow Self, on the other hand, comprises primitive instincts, impulses, repressed ideas, perversions and embarrassing fears hidden or locked in the unconscious mind. These two aspects of the personality, he says, should be integrated, but largely remain separate.
Generally, people are constrained by the rules and norms of society to project the Persona, and repress the Shadow Self. But the latter is also part of us, Jung states, and we can’t have one without the other. (Good and evil; love and hatred) He implies that the Shadow Self may assert its existence innocently and often indirectly, for example in physical symptoms, mood shifts, tongue-slips etc… But sometimes it explodes, and is released in the mayhem perpetrated by the ‘monsters’ amongst us.
With regard to the two recent murders, I was struck by the calm manner in which both alleged killers reportedly spoke about what they did to their victims. Bludgeoning, strangling, dismemberment, sodomy, and necrophilia aren’t subjects people usually speak about with such equanimity. This, I understand, is a trait of the sociopath.
So what can we in Guyana do to recognize and intercept the potential sociopaths/killers in our midst?
First, I think, we should take a good ‘man-in-the-mirror’ look at ourselves, admit our imperfections and the existence of the ‘demons’ within, and become educated as to our role in this process.  Then we may be able to more easily identify the demons without. Knowing what to do after that is the domain of the courts, psychiatry, or exorcism!

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