What is it about?
This article aims at a fusion of psychoanalytic theory, attachment theory and existential phenomenology in conditions first explored by Jean-Paul Sartre and Margaret Mahler. The topic describes the genesis of the sadistic killer, when considered as a once-abused infant, and attempts a subject-oriented existential account prioritising ontology as notionally revealing. A main contention is that the infant once confronted a fundamental existential terror threatening his own being, occasioned by an abusive mother and transformed, via an early emotion-driven construction of an unfulfilled partial-self—a self with holes—into a destructive hatred exercised in later encounters with females.
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Why is it important?
This article presents a fusion of existential phenomenology with developmental psychoanalysis - a rather different approach to most contemporary studies in the theory of violent sexual offenders.
Perspectives
Existential phenomenology is gaining ground concerning an empathetic approach to understanding mental disorders. With developmental psychoanalysis, a continental approach is still of relevance, though perhaps more so in Europe than the US. For other articles by John G Wilson on phenomenology as applied to prereflective experience, ontological insecurity, sexuality and the imagination, adolescent self-consciousness and consumerism, see https://johnwilson.academia.edu/research#papers
John Graham Wilson
Assumption University of Thailand
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This page is a summary of: Being and nonbeing: The existential foundations of the sadistic killer., Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, November 2018, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/teo0000096.
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