Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
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New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright 1972 by Colin Wilson
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For more information, email
First Diversion Books edition August 2015
ISBN: 978-1-68230-011-4
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Roger Staples, for sending me press cuttings of the Collins case, Steve Geller, for press reports of the Manson case and for the loan of the typescript of his book Musical Impressions of Murder, Henk Van Gelre for securing me details of the Hans van Zon case, Brian Marriner for practical and theoretical help on the pornography chapter, Alan Brooke for valuable help and suggestions, Dan MacDougald (of Atlanta, Georgia) for sending me material on his attitude psychotherapy (see ), A. E. Van Vogt for permission to quote his unpublished essay on The Violent Male, and The Observer and Sunday Times for permission to quote material published in their respective colour supplements. My wife Joy prepared the bibliography.
C.W.
Contents
Assassination: murder committed for its own sake. The new type of murderer. The crime explosion. The Outsider as killer. The will-drive.
Hasan bin Sabbah and the Order of Assassins at Alamut. Origin of the Ismailis. Hasans conversion. The resistance movement in Persia. Assassination of Nizam al-Mulk. Assassination as a political weapon. The Assassins in Syria. Assassins and Crusaders. The fascination of the Assassins. The legend of human monsters. The Thugs of Indiadescendants of the Assassins? Thug methods. Their ceremonies. The Ismailis in India. Mighty Mahmud. The origin of sadism. The dark mother. Mr. Evans and his worm of violence. Dualism. Krten. Jack the Ripper. The Axeman of New Orleans. The Ratcliffe Highway murders. Assassination of Lord Mayo. The murder of the Niebels.
Norman Fooses motiveless murder of two children. The difference between assassination and murder. Nietzsches insight. Prados murder. Paretos lite. The dominant five per cent. The philosophy of the will: Schopenhauer. Nietzsche. Freud. Monkeys and aggression. Sexual dominance is a sub-department of the will to power. Rape of Jane Shore. Sadism as defiant self-assertion. The new psychology: William James, Abraham Maslow, Viktor Frankl, William Glasser. Edmund Husserl. Intentionality. My own self-image psychology. The robot. Machados Looking Glass. Sanity depends on the strength of the self-image. Lindsays Arcturus and sexual dominance. James Bond and sadism. Carlos Evertsz, the Dominican assassin. De Sade and sadism. Sades Nietzschean inversion of values. Nietzsches Antichrist. Sades life. His work. The power fantasy.
The Pearl and its schoolboy dirt. My Secret Life: Walters rape complex. Apollinaires Debauched Hospodar and Memoirs of a Rakehell. The limits of sex. The Story of O. LImage. Power mania. Anne and her masters. The law of frustration. Jerry Brudos. Blue film advertisements. Increased sadism of pornography. The Man Who Raped San Francisco. The New Girlsick sadism. The desire to disgust.
Sartre and his theory of emotions as magic. The connection between sex crime and motiveless murder. Sergeant Bertrand. Jack the Ripper. The Christie murders. Increased lack of purpose. The Thames Nude murders. Obsession, the dehydration of the soul. Sexual murder as magical behaviour. Ed Gein, the necrophile. Frederick Ducharme. Moonlight murderer of Texarcana. Harvey Glatman, rapist. Mack Edwards, the child killer. Evolutionary blockage.
Self-esteem and the will to power. Charles Guiteau and the assassination of President Garfield. Ruth Ellis. The Zodiac murders. Van Vogts theory of the Violent Man. Compulsive need to be in the right. The rapist as woman-worshipper. Gorkys Twenty-Six Men and a Girl. The changing patterns of murder. The crimes of Hans von Zon. The Krays and Richardsons. Arthur Hosein and the kidnapping of Muriel McKay. Raymond Morris, the Cannock Chase murderer. Norman Collins, the Ann Arbor sex killer.
Outsiders and violence. Changing patterns of murder in the past hundred years. The Ypsilanti burning car case. Jerry Thompson, the Peoria rapist. The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. The Black Dahlia murder. The Raymond Carney rape-murder. The murder of Ethel Little. Patrick Byrne. Vandalism. H. P. Lovecrafts Call of Cthulhu. Lovecrafts anti-semitism. Houston Stewart Chamberlains racism. C. M. Eddys The Loved Dead. Melvin Reess murder of the Jackson family. The problem of beauty starvation. A botched civilization. The Wimbledon queer-bashing murder case. Boredom as a motive for murder. The need for interesting stimuli. The Moors murder case.
The need for adventure. When life fails. Dostoevsky and the psychology of violence. The House of the Dead. His masochism. Displacement activities. Stavrogin: Irrational Man. Consciousness is a device for registering meaning. Stavrogins confession. The appetite for beauty. Stavrogin and Lovecraft. The need for the impersonal Escape from personality. Svidrigailovs room with cobwebs. Verkovensky and the murder of Shatov. The Ivanov murder. Sergei Netchaev: an entirely negative plantotal annihilation. The philosophy of Marcuse. Death to pigs. The Charles Manson case. The Beat generation. The murder of Gary Hinman, Sharon Tate, the LaBiancas. The love and death cult.
No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Freuds theory of the death instinct. The Maslovian analysis of Charles Manson. Gorky and the Merkouloff case. Andr Gide and the psychology of the gratuitous act. Sartre and the psychology of irrational behaviour. The need for violence springs from depressurized consciousness. Sherlock Holmess boredom. Edgar Lee Masterss Colonel Pritchard. The passive fallacy. Society does not exist. The political assassin. Aldous Huxley on schizophrenia. Schizophrenia induced by city life. The need for a filter. Mans cut-out mechanism. The age of Dickensian humanism. Scrooge. The age of defeat: the new pessimism. The climate of fear and hate: the legacy of Darwin and Marx.
Maslows revolution. The will to health. Theory Z: Maslows industrial psychology. MacDougald and the Yonan Codex theory. Crime due to faulty blocking. The success of the method in the Georgia penitentiary. Maslows problem-solving monkeys. The need for a creative civilization. Beyond Maslow and MacDougald. The I and the robot. The psychology of the self-image. Tuning out and tuning in. Steppenwolf. Wellss amphibians. Conclusion.
Appendix:
Jack the Ripper and the Duke of Clarence
Introduction
The present book completes my murder trilogythe first two volumes of which were An Encyclopaedia of Murder and A Casebook of Murder.
The Encyclopaedia was intended as a basic reference book; its index classifies murderers under method, weapon and motive. The Casebook was a study in the social history of murder, the changes in the styles and motives of murder since the fourteenth century. This volume is concerned primarily with the psychology of murder. Or rather, of assassination, which might be defined as murder committed for its own sake.
