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In the introduction to her new book, IAFP member Anna Motz notes that “human truths accompany every criminal story”. She has written this book to “probe the roots and psychological geography of the crime” in order to “uncover and reconstruct the meaning of the offence”. This approach will be taken as a given to readers of this journal and indeed, our founder of the IAFP, Estela V. Welldon, is one of the three women to whom the book is dedicated (the other two being Motz's daughter and her late mother).
A Love That Kills beautifully exemplifies the rewards and effectiveness of forensic psychotherapy's approach to working with patients who have committed terrible and appalling crimes, whilst not shying away from the disturbing consequences of doing so. Motz points out that the crimes of women who are labelled “monsters” by red top tabloids when their cases come to court are driven not by madness or evil but by emotions we all share and struggle with, such as the longing to love and be loved, the frustrations and fear of parenthood, and the corrosion of shame and self-loathing. Her experience, no doubt shared by many readers of this journal, is that those who commit violent crimes do so attempting to escape the horror of their own childhoods but end up tragically re-enacting them in subtle or not so subtle ways.
The strength of this book is how deftly the author manages to illustrate this point. Comprising ten chapters, each of which follows one woman's story exploring one particular kind of crime, Motz weaves together their past and present to show how the offences these women committed have their roots in complex and tragic childhoods. I suppose the message she conveys at its simplest is that damaged people are damaging. But I think she would agree with the premise that how damaging these women remain to society at large, having committed shocking and appalling offences, depends on whether they can be helped (with therapy) to understand why they did what they did.
Motz