The Psychopathology of Paranoia [excerpt]

     It seems highly desirable, with the knowledge of the parricidal type of inspiration of Case AN-3, to review the personalities and acts of Booth and Guiteau. An unprejudiced account of Czolgosz’s personality, unfortunately, is not accessible.
     In Case AN-3 many facts show that the man became “inspired” to kill his director because the latter, through transferring him from working in “pure science,” prevented him from ever possibly solving his biological obsessions thereby compensating for the inferiorities of masturbation and the sexual affairs that caused the loss of his love-object, who was a mother image. The director, by his act, unconsciously became the equivalent or image of the domineering, hateful father who had disastrously suppressed the patient’s youthful, vital, spontaneous aspirations, which necessarily needed encouragement and freedom of functioning in order that the personality should later develop to a comfortable, healthful maturity, and overcome its homosexual and autoerotic tendencies. This case is of the utmost value, in that it explains the origin of the inspiration that the suppressive superior must be killed in order that the freedom of manhood might be realized; hence, the reader should be familiar with it.
     The cases of Booth, the assassin of Lincoln; Guiteau, the assassin of Garfield; and Czolgosz, who shot McKinley, were not considered from this point of view by the psychiatrists who advised the court; hence, essential details are lacking which would convincingly fix the impression that these men were all obsessed with inspirational compulsions to “remove” the suppressive fac- [439][440] tor, father-image. There is sufficient reliable data, however, to be had in W. W. Godding’s “Two Strange Cases” and A. M. Hamilton’s “Recollections of An Alienist,” to make it worth while to reconsider these crimes from this new point of view—namely, that the preadolescent affective repressions finally tried to destroy the repressing influences in order to attain freedom from sexual inferiority and acquire the functions of maturity.