If You Can't Trust Your Mother, Whom Can You Trust?

Soul Murder, Psychoanalysis and Creativity

Leonard Shengold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429914720
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The main theme of this book concerns the continuing psychic centrality of parents for their children. Several chapters examine an author and his works, outlining that author's relationships with parents, good-and-bad, and making descriptive comments about these based both on information gleaned from the author's life and writings as well as from observations found in autobiographies, biographies and critical works. Since these studies in part concern stories of child abuse and deprivation, the book predominantly illustrates bad parenting that seems to have contributed to the child's psychopathology. Yet in most cases there has also been an evocation by the trauma and deprivation of adaptive and even creative reactions--this positive effect also of course largely attributable to concomitant good parenting--and yet there are some cases where little of this seems to have existed and yet the children still turn out to be able to make something of themselves. The conditions that make for psychic health in a traumatized childhood are mysterious and can't always be accounted for.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Kaspar Hauser and soul murder

“The Bible speaks of a mysterious sin for which there is no forgiveness. I’ve never known before what that could be. Now I know. The great unforgivable sin is—to murder the love in a human being. You abandoned the woman you loved! Me, me, me! It’s a double murder you’re guilty of! Murder of your own soul and of mine! You’re the guilty one. You put to death all the natural joy in me” (Henrik Ibsen: John Gabriel Borkman, 1896).

Kaspar Hauser’s soul murder history illustrates the devastating effects of deprivation and cruelty suffered in childhood. One sees the child’s subsequent pathological reaction to feelings that were and can remain too much to bear in consciousness: murderous anger, guilt, and terror. There is an overwhelming need and craving for love and rescue. But the child has nowhere to turn but to the parents—or the parental substitutes—and if the parents are the ones responsible for the abuse and emotional deprivation, the child is left with the dilemma of wanting to murder the parents he or she cannot survive without. This organizes massive defenses: a distancing of all deep feeling and of meaningful relationships, with constant danger of the intense anger breaking through into feeling and action and of it turning inward toward great guilt and a need to be punished.

Kaspar hauser’s story

In the 1850s the fate and character of the foundling Kaspar Hauser aroused curiosity, indignation, and political controversy. Kaspar, his name as well known to European newspaper readers as Dreyfus’s was at the end of the nineteenth century, became one of the most famous people in Europe. During the few years between the discovery of the unfortunate boy tottering down a street in Nuremberg and his eventual murder, a visit to Kaspar Hauser was considered part of the Grand Tour for distinguished visitors to the kingdom of Bavaria. Kaspar’s story, despite the many books and thousands of publications¹ about him, has seldom been the subject of psychoanalytic investigation. His history demonstrates the effects of deprivation and separation from parents in early childhood—perhaps most strikingly bearing witness to the emotional deadness that can defend against the murderous anger and deep craving for love that lie beneath. Above all, Kaspar’s story illustrates that crime for which Ibsen declared there is no forgiveness: soul murder. Soul murder interferes with the sense of identity of another human being. It is primarily a crime committed against children (see Shengold, 1975a, 1975b, 1979).

The actual term “soul murder” (“Seelenmord”) was probably coined by the compassionate jurist Anselm von Feuerbach, who had close contact with the boy from his first appearance in Nuremberg and wrote a widely read book on the boy four years later (1832). Von Feuerbach was a distinguished judge who had drawn up a reformed penal code for the kingdom of Bavaria that was used as a model by many of the other German states and became popular in Germany and was also translated into many languages. It is likely that his book on Kaspar was read by the judge Daniel Paul Schreber, whose use of “soul murder” in his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) caused the term to become well known in psychiatric circles. Freud’s famous case study of Schreber’s psychosis (based on his reading of the Memoirs) appeared in 1911. The term “soul murder” should be understood to indicate the actuality of external traumata and traumatic deprivation that contribute to psychic pathology by influencing the basic motivating fantasies (conscious and unconscious) of the individual victim.

The comparative neglect of Kaspar Hauser by psychiatrists may be partly due to the facts of the case never having been completely established. Those critics who have accused Kaspar of being a liar and an imposter are in the minority, but they have not been, and perhaps never can be, completely refuted. Psychoanalysis requires that the patient will try (even if he seldom can succeed) to tell the truth and report what comes into his mind. And if Kaspar were a willful liar, then psychoanalytic understanding of his story would be compromised. I am aware of this risk, and of the weak position of psycho-historians and psychobiographers who are obliged to find their data not directly—as from patients in treatment—where it still is so difficult—but from the unprivileged distance of secondary written sources. In writing about Kaspar, I have proceeded under the assumption—which can be questioned—that his original story was, by and large, the truth as best he could tell it. This is my impression derived from reading source material (see the introduction to the English edition of Wassermann, 1908/1928); it is also supported by the fact that the actual witnesses of Kaspar in Nuremberg who first had the opportunity to study him, believed in him (see Singh & Zinng, 1939, pp. 276, 295). Handwriting experts and professional and amateur students of crime have defended Kaspar’s veracity, but there is also a considerable literature of disbelief. I fall back on the secondary assumption that if Kaspar Hauser were an impostor, he was an impostor of genius, and that his story has relevance to students of soul murder (as does the fiction of Dostoyevski, Ibsen, Proust, and other great psychologically minded literary geniuses).

The first English translation of von Feuerbach’s (1832) book has a long title summarizing its contents: Kaspar Hauser. An Account of an Individual Kept in a Dungeon, Separated From All Communication With the World, From Early Childhood to About the Age of Seventeen. Kaspar “came into the world” (p. 40), as he put it, on May 26, 1828, when he was discovered stumbling along on a street in Nuremberg, carrying a letter addressed to a Captain of Cavalry stationed in the town. Kaspar could neither stand nor walk properly. He appeared to be about sixteen years old. He didn’t seem to understand the questions asked him and kept repeating a few barely intelligible phrases or words of jargon. (It was later discovered that he usually attached no particular meaning to his few sentences, yet expected them to convey whatever he wanted to express.) The boy’s words were interspersed with groans, tears, and unintelligible sounds. Here is von Feuerbach’s description: “He appeared neither to know nor to suspect where he was. He betrayed neither fear, nor astonishment, nor confusion; he rather showed an almost brutish dullness. His tears and whimpering, while he was always pointing to his tottering feet, and his awkward and, at the same time, childish demeanour, soon excited the compassion of all present. His whole conduct seemed to be that of a child scarcely two or three years old with the body of a young man” (pp. 3–4). The boy showed aversion to all food but bread and water. He astonished the observers, when pen and paper were brought to him, by being able to letter out the name Kaspar Hauser; it seemed to be the only thing he could write. (This ability did make several of the policemen think the boy might be trying to deceive.) The official and casual observers had the definite impression that the boy was not insane, but a kind of “human savage” (p. 5)—a “natural man;” Rousseau was still fashionable, and tales of children brought up by animals were common and found credible. Von Feuerbach, who saw the boy shortly after the first observers in 1828, described him as seeming “to hear without understanding, to see without perceiving, and to move his feet without knowing how to use them for the purpose of walking” (p. 4). Kaspar appeared to be “mild, obedient and good-natured” (p. 71). He passively complied with the teasing and pestering of the hordes of visitors who came to stare at him (as if he were a zoo animal) when he was first lodged in the tower of the municipal jail. Kaspar kept his good humor even when subject to the “not very humane experiments” (p. 71) of citizens who set out to be amateur psychologists. Indeed, Kaspar appeared to be incapable of anger.

The boy seemed unable to differentiate between animate and inanimate objects; he had no sense of distance or perspective. He didn’t recognize himself in the mirror and kept looking for a person concealed behind it. He was bothered by light and habitually looked away from it—usually at his feet. His sleep had the quality of deep hypnotic unconsciousness; it was almost impossible to awaken him. All this aroused the curiosity and compassion of the citizens of Nuremberg, who flocked to see the boy.

Kaspar had, when “found,” been dressed in old, ill-fitting clothes. He wore a white kerchief marked in red with the initials K. H. The letter that he had carried was badly spelled; the writer called himself “a poor day-labourer with ten children. The mother only put him in my house for the sake of having him brought up. But I have never been able to discover who his mother is.” The writer claimed that the boy had been with him for sixteen years, since he was six months old, and that he had never been allowed out of the house. “I have taught him to read and write” (p. 12). He had taken Kaspar to Nuremberg “to become a cavalry soldier as his father was”—when he was first found, Kaspar had kept repeating a phrase like that. The letter concluded: “If you do not keep him, you may kill him, or hang him up the chimney” (p. 13). There was another note, written in Latin but by the same hand, asking the laborer to bring up and educate the child and then send him to Nuremberg to the Sixth Regiment of Light Horse, to which his father had belonged. This note ended: “I am a poor girl and cannot support him. His father is dead” (p. 13). Handwriting experts have concluded that these two notes had not been written by Kaspar.

The family romance

The discovery of Kaspar became notorious and a political issue because of the legend that grew from an investigation into his origins—a widely believed legend that still has not been definitively disproved. Kaspar was alleged to have been the victim of an evil plot—perhaps the illegitimate son of a highborn lady or a priest. But what most took hold of the popular imagination was the story that Kaspar was the legitimate Crown Prince of Baden, son of Grand Duchess Stephanie Beauharnais, the adopted daughter of Napoleon. This niece of Josephine Bonaparte had been married to the then reigning Grand Duke Charles of Baden. It was said that the child’s kidnapping had been arranged by Charles’s morganatic second wife, the Countess of Hochberg, in order to get the throne for her own offspring. This seemingly wild romantic tale (hinted at by von Feuerbach) was taken up by anti-monarchists, and Kaspar’s assassination in 1833 was widely believed to have been politically motivated. The crime was attributed to the iniquity of the nobility of Europe. The Austrian eminence grise, Prince Metternich, an inveterate persecutor of anyone connected with Napoleon, was said to be one of the instigators of the plot. (The morganatic line of Hochberg did ascend to the throne of Baden shortly before Kaspar Hauser’s 1828 release from confinement [see Singh & Zinng, 1939, p. 276].)

The Baden story was supposedly disproved in 1875 by the publication of the records of baptism and of post-mortem examination, dated 1812, of the infant crown prince who had allegedly been kidnapped. But supporters of the legend maintained (based on “documents” that can no longer be verified—see Evans, 1982) that a dead baby of a peasant girl was substituted for the true heir of the Grand Duke Charles, and that the stolen baby (the Kaspar Hauser to-be) was then put in the care of a wet-nurse. She was told he was the illegitimate son of an aristocratic lady. The nurse kept him until he was three or four years old, after which he was brought up in the cellar that he remembered and described in 1828. (I discuss later the psychological basis for believing that there were three or four years of relatively adequate mothering for Kaspar.) In proof of the boy’s aristocratic descent, supporters cited Kaspar’s fine, fair skin, and his delicate and beautifully formed hands and feet—the latter showing no signs of calluses (“as soft as the palms of his hands” [von Feuerbach, 1832, p. 14]) or, beneath the bleeding welts caused by the recently acquired shoes, any trace of previously having worn footgear. He had a vaccination scar on his right arm (vaccination was an aristocratic distinction in the early nineteenth century). A series of publications in the 1880s and 1890s (chiefly in England and Germany) revived the story of the stolen Baden heir. The truth seems beyond any establishment and, says the Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1910, p. 70), “[T]he evidence is in any case in complete confusion.”

Kaspar’s history

With the help of others, but especially due to the efforts of prison-keeper Hiltel’s eleven-year-old son Julius (a constant companion in the prison tower where Kaspar was first kept), Kaspar soon learned to speak and became able to tell his story. Mayor (Burgomeister) Binder of Nuremberg had Kaspar brought to his home almost every day; he extracted a history from the boy that was later supplemented by Kaspar’s own written narration. Binder’s account² was used by von Feuerbach: “[Kaspar] neither knows who he is nor where his home is. It was only in Nuremberg that he came into the world” (p. 46; my emphasis). Von Feuerbach calls this an expression that Kaspar “often uses to designate his exposure in Nuremberg, and his first awakening to the consciousness of mental life. Here he first learned that beside himself and ‘the Man with whom he had always been,’ there existed men and other creatures. As long as he can recollect, he had always lived in a hole, which he sometimes calls a cage, where he had always sat upon the ground, with bare feet, and clothed only in a shirt and a pair of breeches” (pp. 41–42). Apparently Kaspar had been unable to stretch out to his full length (confirmed by the peculiar configuration of his knees) and had slept sitting up with his feet extended on a bed of straw. It was discovered that he had been habitually drugged with opium since Kaspar recognized the taste when given a few drops in his water by his guardian. He never saw the face of the man who brought him his food and water, cleaned him, changed his clothes and cut his nails while Kaspar was in his stuporous sleep. In the “hole” he had two wooden horses, a toy dog, and several ribbons; playing with these was his main occupation. The “hole” had been his womb, his universe, a timeless narcissistic world: “How long he continued to live in this situation he knew not; for he had no knowledge of time. He knew not when or how he came thither. Nor had he any recollection of ever having been in a different situation, or in any other than in that place” (pp. 42–43).

Kaspar, while in the “hole”, had not had his narcissism attenuated by contact with reality. He had considered himself “as it were the only being of his kind” (p. 138). He declared that some time before he was taken to Nuremberg, the “Man with whom he had always been” had, standing behind him, taught him to spell out his name on paper by repeatedly guiding his hand. After that, Kaspar spent much time lettering out his name. The man also tried to teach him to walk. Formerly the man had almost never spoken to him, but then he began to make Kaspar repeat the phrase about wanting to become a horseman like his father. Recounting this story evokes the moral indignation of the good Feuerbach. He calls it an account of: “… the criminal invasion of a human soul. Kaspar’s mental condition, during his dungeon life, must have been that of a human being immersed in his infancy in a profound sleep, in which he was not conscious even of a dream. He had continued in this stupor until, affrighted with pain and apprehension, he suddenly awoke, stunned with the wild and confused noises and unintelligible impression of a variegated world, without knowing what happened” (p. 47; my emphasis). Von Feuerbach’s “stupor” is more than a metaphor: “Kaspar sinks, even yet, whenever he rides in a carriage or waggon, into a kind of death sleep from which he does not easily awake and, in this state, however roughly soever it may be done, he may be lifted up or laid down, and packed or unpacked, without his having the least perception of it. When sleep once has laid hold of him, no noise, no sound, no ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Epigraphs
• Acknowledgements and Explanations
• Part One
• Part Two
• Notes
• References
• Index