You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I define soul murder as a deliberate attempt to interfere with another person's separate identity, joy in life, and capacity to love.1 It usually takes place in childhood: the child's almost absolute dependence upon an adult, most frequently a parent, makes possible a regimen of cruelty and seduction (overstimulation) alternating with indifference and neglect (deprivation) that provides the environmental matrix for soul murder. An identification with and a submission to the tormentor is forced upon the child. The victim needs to be rescued from the overstimulation and to have the deprivation undone. In more fortunate circumstances, the child can turn from the psychotic, narcissistic, or psychopathic parent to another nurturing figure who has enough power and who cares enough to provide another model for identification, a situation described in this communication. Sometimes, however, the child can seek redress only from the very parent who is responsible for the trauma.
Soul murder is maintained by interfering with the child's ability to experience and to register what is happening and has happened. This brainwashing, carried on by the children themselves later in life, is not difficult to achieve under conditions of tyranny, as we know from the political life of our time (see Nadezhda Mandelstam's [1970] memoir showing the cultivation of denial in a whole generation of intellectuals). The need for a good parent, so intense when there is the necessity of alleviating the fear and rage experienced under conditions of trauma and neglect, leads to the delusion of a good parent (a delusion with which the child must then struggle), and a life-long, symbiotic bond with the tormentor may ensue.