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Delightful to read and clinically precise, this volume demonstrates with penetrating clarity the applicability of Karen Horney's psychoanalytic perspective to understanding the motivation for murder.
This is a storybook about murderers or near-murderers whose behaviors are governed by definable unconscious mythic structures, idealizations of self, and the entire panoply of defensive operations that protect idealization. As each story unfolds, Dr. Ruotolo introduces the murderer's life history and social background with detail sufficient to satisfy both professional and lay readers. In his review of the forensic aspects of each of the eight cases he reports, he shows how the psychiatrist as an expert witness before a jury needs to present the evaluation of his interviews with accused murderers. What remains fascinating, however, is Dr. Routolo's exploration of the individual's mental configuration at the moment of murder, of how situation and circumstance together with pathological personality organization logically demand that murder occur. Remarkably, it may appear to the uninitiated that the act of the murder itself was incidental. But far from being incidental, the murderers presented are often analyzable as acting from an unconscious imperative to restore deeply wounded pride by eliminating whomever had become a repository for the murderer's own externalized self-hate.
Nevertheless, this formula is not uniformly applied by the author in an effort to fit facts to theory. On the contrary, the often complex psychodynamic forces operating in each murderer are presented in his or her own words as elicited by the author during his interviews with them. It is his striking technical mastery of the clinical interview that enables Dr. Ruotolo to apply Horney's theories so usefully and so effortlessly. The murderers themselves, not the analyst, say who they are. The skill of the analyst-as-clinician is in creating for them the opportunity to bare themselves; the skill of the