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In a recent bestselling novel, The Absent One , Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen creates a group of four apparently psychopathic characters who, with excitement that approaches orgiastic dimensions, take great pleasure in hunting and killing large numbers of animals, especially ones that are members of an endangered species. But this is not always
sufficient to satisfy their lust for hurting and killing. Periodically and compulsively, they don masks and gloves, search out random human victims, and mercilessly beat them until they are so bloodied and broken that they have to spend months in hospital to recover from their injuries. Now and then, they shoot and kill their human prey. Other than this gruesome hobby (with one important exception), they are well-known, highly successful, rich, and powerful pillars of their society. Their pleasure in brutally beating and killing both animals and people began when they were highly privileged youngsters whose parents—all of whom lavishly provided material possessions, but offered virtually no love or affection—had sent them away to an elite, exclusive boarding school, at which they inevitably gravitated toward one another. It is a marvelous book, and I highly recommend it.
“What?” you say. “Why do you begin a book review that will appear in a serious, stodgy psychoanalytic journal by talking about a crime novel? After all, that's only fiction—it could never happen in real life.”
Well, it has. There is wisdom in Oscar Wilde's well-known quip that “life imitates art.”1 Vamik Volkan has spent a lifetime studying and writing about the human propensity for the destruction, carnage, and bloodshed, the delight in raping and pillaging, that characterize war and international conflict. In Animal Killer, he has written a book about a single analysis, which he supervised, of just such an individual.
Peter, who began analysis when his wife threatened to leave him if he did not do so, was an extremely avid hunter and taxidermist when not w