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This book is about three issues. It is the result of Professor Schreiber's painstaking and sympathetic research, including long interviews with Joseph Michael Kallinger, an infamous and chronically psychotic murderer. Kallinger was convicted in 1977 of several murders and subsequently imprisoned for life. It is in one way a personal history of Kallinger and the development of his paranoid psychosis. It is also an attempt at a detailed analysis of savage torture and murdering, including a sometimes-gruesome exposition of the crimes which Professor Schreiber explains on the basis of the exceptional cruelty shown to Kallinger by his adoptive parents.
Finally, the book graphically portrays how, by getting caught up in a moralistic attitude about whether Kallinger was mad or bad, the professionals failed to recognize the gravity of his psychosis. Kallinger was detained for assaulting his daughter but his dangerousness was underestimated and he was freed. It was after this that he murdered. Even at his trial his psychosis was missed and it was only on hospitalization following an inexplicable murderous assault towards another prisoner that his paranoid delusions were recognized and appropriate treatment administered.
Joseph Kallinger was the second illegitimate child of a deprived Jewish mother. Her ambivalence is apparent from the outset when, having decided before his birth