PEP | Article - A masterpiece on murder - Williams, A. Hyatt
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spent six and a half years in the Royal Army Medical Corps in which he had become an Army Psychiatrist in a forward area. He took a Diploma in Psychological Medicine and an MD, with a thesis on breakdown patterns of Indian soldiers in Burma. He trained as a psychoanalyst in 1948-52, then worked as a psychoanalyst with part-time NHS appointments in psychotherapy. He was a visiting psychotherapist to one of HM Prisons for many years, worked at the Tavistock Clinic for 17 years and was Chairman of the Adolescent Department for nine of those years.
The Tavistock Centre
120 Belsize Lane, London NW3 5BA
Abstract
Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen. With a Postscript by Anthony Storr, by Brian Masters, Cape, 1985, xvi + 336 pages, hardback £10.95; Coronet, paperback £2.95.
Brian Masters has written a remarkable book. In his detailed account of the puzzling history of Dennis Nilsen and his murderous activities, there is a convincing portrayal of the known facts, including Nilsen's own honest account of what he knew of the forces that compelled him to do what he did in the way he did it. The account of Nilsen's earlier life — the austere background with the constant battle against poverty on the one hand and the cruel sea on the other: the uncompromising determination and adherence to truth on the one hand and the inexorable erosion of it by desire, need and determined defiance on the other — sets the stage for a drama at once frightening and fascinating. A passage from one of Keats's poems seems appropriate:
The fierce dispute
Betwixt damnation and impassioned clay
Must I burn through.
It occurred to me several times during my reading of this book.
What could make a person so willing and able to tell the awful truth, the truth about fifteen murders and seven other attempts to kill, and yet unable to develop more effective controls within himself? My first conjecture is that there was a most severe degree of splitting between the cold honest scientist Nilsen and the perverse life-destroying Nilsen. Could one postulate the existence of a split-off, perverse, life-destroying encapsulation expressed in a masturbation fantasy to which
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