At this time of year, the river that runs close to where I live often becomes a raging torrent. I love it and walk by the side it more often than in the summer when it is rather still and boring. A few days ago, I as I walked by its raging side, just in front of me a woman with a young child, no more than three years old, was doing the same. At some point she became distracted, reached into her bag, pulled out her phone, started talking to someone and at the same time started rummaging around in her bag. As I passed them, the child wandered off. The women seemingly oblivious. I wondered if the women would notice that the child had wandered and looked back just in time to see the child step into the violently turbulent river. The child immediately disappeared beneath its raging surface. Gone.
The child had gone! I stood still and watched the mother as she put her phone away and started to look for the child but strangely without looking into the river. I turned and carried on my walk. I found myself wondering at what stage would the mother realise? Grinning, in fact laughing to myself, I decided not to tell her. I continued walking……
It was my laughter that eventually woke me from this dream. As often so in the aftermath of a vivid dream, I found myself wondering and thinking as if the event had really occurred. For quite some time the images did not diminish from my mind. What would I have done in the hours, days, weeks, months, years knowing that I had not acted to warn the women? to rescue the child? and to not tell the mother the truth of what I had witnessed? How would have I lived with myself? was the question I was the overriding question I was left with.
Our prisons are full of people who live, often across decades, asking themselves the very same question. They who have taken a life by murder. They who, in a moment of time, have killed, often with much less sadism than I in my dream. All face the challenge of needing to continue to live life and live with themselves. For them it’s not a dream.
With exception to the few psychopathic personalities, most men and women who have murdered, as well as the need to talk about having to live with themselves, they are also eager to let me know that prior to their deadly act, they have held a view of themselves as someone not capable of murder. Indeed, so shocked and horrified by their own actions are they that many develop an authentic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The trauma of the murderer is seldom recognised. The traumatised killer is yet another paradox of the human condition. It is a paradox that confronts all of us who work with those deemed mad, bad, or sad. In real life, as well in the arts, these extremes of paradox do not sit in isolation. Fred West was described by many of his neighbours as a friendly soul willing to do anything for you. Beverley Allitt a dedicated caring nurse. Mary Bell blossomed into a successful loving mother. Paul Spector a popular bereavement counsellor. Steven Gallant, convicted of murder himself, wrestled another murderer to the ground on London Bridge, saving other lives. Each one reminding us again and again that no one is just their offence.
Last week I visited the Southbank Centre to view the Koestler Arts Exhibition ‘Freedom’. As ever it declares though outstanding creativity its annual message of the same truth; no one is ever just their offence. Lining the walls of the exhibition for the last fifteen years have been literally hundreds of stunning works of art all created by those in our prisons. The paradoxes if you will of the human condition. Their artwork alone also revealing exactly that.
But those isolated in prison do not in fact exist in isolation. As evidenced in my dream, we all exist with them. We may not be in prison, but we are in, part of, the same human condition. My dream is evidence of that. My unconscious ability to be callous, to turn away and to sadistically enjoy doing so, was not in consciousness acted out but those human abilities were as much part of my mind as those who at a specific moment in time have done just that.
My dream caused me concern, caused me unrest, removed me from my comfort zone about myself. It was a powerful reminder that within me lies the capacity to be all I would rather not be. Life, professional and otherwise, has taught me not to believe so readily those who righteously claim that they could never kill. I’m not seduced by this denial of the primitive capacity we all innately hold. No, just like; Fred, Bev, Mary, Paul, Steven and the Stephen who dreams, we all, given the right conditions, can suddenly find we no longer have resource to our righteous mind or indeed any mind at all.
For me as a clinician, I view the criminal act as a consequence of a state of mind, full of conscious and unconscious material, all holding meaning. The ‘thought crimes’ of Orwell, the New Testament ‘adultery of the heart’, the ‘secret thoughts of the heart’ referred to by Sir Edward Coke, may not have a place in law, but in the human condition they are all incredibly present without exception.
The unexamined life is not only not worth living, but it is also highly dangerous. The invitation of the exhibition, like the invitation of my dream is for us all to have a mind. To hold in consciousness our own callous and murderous abilities. For if we, if I can do this, the killer within won’t need to kill!
Br Stephen Morris fcc.
