Science: Freudian on Murder

Nobody loves a murderer — but almost everybody loves a good murder story. To find out why people are so interested in murder, Psychoanalyst Theodor Reik, a fan himself, probed the subconscious of detectives, criminologists, judges, juries. His report, published this week (The Unknown Murderer; Prentice-Hall; $3), indicates that the line between murderers and the rest of the population is narrower than most people like to think.

Hanged for a Thought. Viennese Dr. Reik, whom Freud considered one of his most brilliant pupils (he is now a practicing psychoanalyst in Manhattan), in general agrees with Goethe, who confessed: “There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable.” Psychoanalysts, Reik observes, have a saying which means the same thing: “The girl was poor, but clean; her fantasies were the reverse.” At one time or another, says Reik, nearly everybody has strong motives for murder. And courts habitually and unconsciously mistake the thought for the deed; “. . . many people have in fact been hanged for a thought.”

To the average criminologist, says Reik contemptuously, the mind is “a minutely mapped-out police district.” Reik thinks that the symptoms which a detective usually takes for signs of guilt — e.g., agitation, blushing, stuttering, lying — may be nothing more than the natural reactions of an innocent man with an ugly subconscious or a sensitive endocrine system. The psychoanalyst believes that detectives generally would be more successful if they let psychology alone and concentrated on material clues.

Urge to Self-Punishment. A murderer, he observes, almost invariably leaves at least one revealing clue. This is no accident: every murderer, however brutal, seems to be driven by an unconscious compulsion to betray himself, to punish himself for his crime. The more cautious he is, the more certain he is to make a misstep; some criminologists say that the hardest murder to solve is a completely impulsive one.

Reik cites several common happenings, well known to the police, which seem to symbolize the murderer’s urge to self-betrayal : murderers often defecate at the scene of the crime (detectives call it “the visiting card”) and in some cases have been caught by chemical analysis of the feces; they usually return to the scene; they frequently blurt their knowledge of the murder to total strangers. In one famous case the urge to self-punishment went so far that the murderer, trying a noose with which he intended to hang a child who had witnessed the murder, fell and hanged himself.

Impulse to Kill. But Dr. Reik’s chief concern is another urge: the public’s urge to find and convict a murderer. He analyzes, as especially revealing, the famous murder of a servant girl, Juliane Sandbauer, in the Austrian town of Finkbrunnen in 1886. Her axed body was found in a barn one morning. The whole town at once guessed that her murderer was a tanner named Gregor Adamsberger, by whom she had had four children, with a fifth on the way. She had repeatedly blackmailed him, they had often quarreled publicly, he had threatened to kill her, his ax fitted her wounds, there was much other circumstantial evidence. Adamsberger was quickly convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. The judges and town paid no attention to his assertion that the real murderer was a well-behaved, 16-year-old boy named Franz Kunz. But three years later Kunz confessed that he was indeed Juliane’s lover and murderer.

Why were the townsmen and judges so eager to convict Adamsberger? Ordinary observers might consider the overwhelming circumstantial evidence a reasonable explanation. But Dr. Reik believes that the reasons lay much deeper than public hysteria and the superficial logic of the evidence. They rejected Kunz as the murderer, he thinks, because of an unconscious refusal to accept the suggestion of a quasi-incestuous relationship between the boy and a woman more than twice his age. And the case against Adamsberger was built up inexorably by sadistic motives very like those that actuate a murderer.

Mankind, says Reik, is made very uneasy by an unsolved murder, partly because of a carryover of the primitive fear of magic, partly because it must find a culprit to quiet its own repressed impulse to kill.