Engleby (43 page)

He exhibits a degree of anhedonia – viz., he takes little pleasure in life, even in the activities that he chooses. He evinces little emotion of a positive or negative kind. He exhibits a consistent flatness of response. He responds little to the facial expressions of others.

He declines to discuss his libido, but appears to have had only one sexual relationship of any kind. According to him, it was coming to an end at the time of his arrest. His partner/ex-partner has declined to be interviewed.

He admits to having been indifferent to the praise or criticism of colleagues, teachers or friends at any stage in his life. He has admitted that this was because he did not value their opinions.

Some of the defining symptoms of this disorder (e.g. anhedonia, flatness of affect) are associated with the so-called ‘negative’ symptoms of schizophrenia. However, the subject exhibits no positive symptoms of schizophrenia or psychosis in any form and I do not find that he is suffering from mental illness.

The subject has had a firm grasp of reality at most stages of his life. The exceptions are twofold. First, in the occurrence of occasional acute panic attacks, which are considered below. Second, there appears to have been occasional partial memory loss. These lapses in my view can be explained in simple psychological terms of defence mechanisms, stress and so on. It is ironic that they occur in someone whose memory is generally of an almost ‘savant’ or autistic order – but no more than ironic, and not in my view suggestive of psychotic illness or indeed of any neurological problem, such as local brain damage.

In my view, he suffers from a personality disorder, which amounts to abnormality of mind for the purposes of Section 2 of the 1957 Homicide Act. If pressed to answer, I would say that this disorder substantially impaired his responsibility for his offence, although I am mindful that this is properly a question for the jury.

Personality disorder diagnoses can cause problems because in many cases the crime is the first evidence we have of serious abnormality. However, in the case of Engleby we have the extraordinary advantage of his own written account of the formative years of his life.

2.

The following is a list of some notes I made while reading the journal.

Chapter One. His vanity while being interviewed for a university place. Contempt for his superiors. Fetishistic attitude to brands of drink and cigarettes. Persistent alcohol abuse. Drug abuse. (It is interesting that the ‘blue ten-milligram pill’ he takes is almost certainly diazepam, or Valium, whose tranquillising effect may have been helpful in the long term, but may also have distorted the diagnostic picture by removing a degree of anxiety that might otherwise have been present.)

He ‘does not like to think’ about his younger sister. I believe this is not because he dislikes her, but because he has a fear of emotional closeness. Significantly, she is the only person he can feel sorry for (when she comes to visit him in London later) or empathise with at all.

Chapter Two. Explicit preferences for solitude, particularly in his student travelling. Note also his reluctance to name either his university or his college. Also, the pub he calls the Kestrel is clearly the Eagle. Etc. This may not be significant, but is consonant with a fear of being ‘engulfed’ by a social context which he found intimidating.

Chapter Three. Schooldays. One notes that he is abused and becomes an abuser. Systematic thieving. Disregard of social norms. Fantasises about killing his tormentor.

Chapter Four. Memory loss could be attributed to marijuana abuse, but more likely to the selective repression necessary in his building of a pathological defence system.

There is almost no sexual content in his descriptions of the girl Jennifer, very unusual in a man of 20/21 years old. He appears more concerned about whether she has sex with her boyfriend than whether she has sex with him.

Chapter Five. His only friend or acquaintance, James Stellings (see witness statement), does not look him up in the vacation. ‘Mercifully’ is how M.E. describes this omission.

Chapter Six. His only friend in London appears to be the shopkeeper, a refugee from Amin’s Uganda. His account of buying pornographic magazines shows little libido. He is more interested in the imagined lives of the models and the homeland of the shopkeeper. His attempt to meet women in a wine bar is halfhearted and inept; his account of it is misogynistic. Note: his account of his father’s abuse. Lacks detail. Detail suppressed? Or gravity of episode(s) exaggerated?

Chapter Seven. He recoils from Jeffrey Archer’s mistress, or perhaps from the thought of sex when confronted with physical presence of two lovers. Although he doubtless interviewed people for his newspaper, the stories of his meetings with famous people are not always convincing. Creative fantasy?

His admission here to periodic rages, on the other hand, is extremely compelling. I think it is significant that it comes at a time when he feels his life is generally ‘improving’. He feels more confident and is able to look at himself with detachment and recall these episodes.

Elsewhere he typically sees no problem with himself, only with others – the teachers, colleagues, would-be friends, acquaintances and even shopkeepers. This is characteristic of personality disorders.

Chapter Eight. His vagueness about how to proceed with Margaret suggests sexual inexperience, perhaps even virginity. His description of sex with her – ‘We took a room and had it off’ – is, even allowing for natural modesty, rather unconvincing.

Chapter Nine. He is unable to deal with the intimacy of living with Margaret and is moving back to his preferred state of solitude.

Narcissism is continually present in the Engleby journal. It is evident in all his accounts of the intellectual processes of others, which he views with contempt. Any failings of his own, on the other hand, are attributed to the poor judgement or misinterpretation of others. He is dismissive of all politicians, of all scientists, of playwrights, of almost all cinema and most music, with only bizarre and partial exceptions.

His own intellectual processes, by contrast, pass unchallenged. His social inadequacies and embarrassments are blamed on others. It never occurs to him that he is unattractive in any way or that his behaviour could be adjusted. His problems do not appear to him as problems because they are so deeply entrenched that they are
ego-syntonic
– i.e. they seem normal to him.

My belief is that he suffers from schizoid personality disorder (following criteria of DSM III-R) with elements of narcissism and antisocial personality disorder. This is a complicated picture for the court, however, and I note that in the latest figures we have from one Special Hospital (Broadmoor) only two per cent of personality disorder patients have schizoid PD as their primary diagnosis.

However, more than 80 per cent of these non-psychotics have psychopathic or unspecified PD as their main diagnosis. The worse the crime, the vaguer the diagnosis, on the latest figures; and I can therefore see no problem with Engleby being put in this looser category.

Although he has suggested otherwise, I am not convinced that the patient is responsible either for an assault on a schoolmate that may have led, indirectly, to his premature death many years later, or the murder of a German woman in London, in which case no forensic evidence survives, the victim’s body having been flown home and cremated.

I suspect that the patient believes that a diminished responsibility plea stands a better chance of succeeding if there is more than one crime.

(Philippa: this next bit is technical. You can leave it till later if you on’t have time now, as I may need to revise it anyway.)

Winnicott (1965) characterises extreme aggression as arising at the moment at which a ‘deprived’ character tries catastrophically to revert to the instant before deprivation led him to erect morbid defence systems. It is a moment of hope: of asserting that, despite entrenched patterns, he can still
take
something from his environment.

Well, there were six more pages of this baloney and I will spare you the details. Old Exley really liked to beef up his argument by referring to previous shrinks, mostly American, as though they gave his own amateur meanderings some heft and authority.

In the fog of his prose, there were just a few moments of light. (Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.)

Here are the brighter bits.

Consensus in the literature is that rage is closely linked to fear of exposure, shame and damage to the narcissistic self. It is essentially
defensive
. The feared annihilator must be annihilated (Kohut, 1972); though it is not the object him/herself that is to be eliminated, but the
danger he/she poses to the very existence of the fabricated self
.

Violence in defence of a coherent sense of identity under intolerable threat must include gender and sexuality issues, most commonly fear of the exposure of sexual inadequacy (argued in US by Bromberg, Abrahamsen and others).

Perhaps also relevant is the notion of ‘dissociative murder’, which entails an altered state of consciousness in which there is no knowledge of motive. The murder in fact takes place at a moment of total ‘ego disintegration’.

This is a frightening and difficult concept to grasp. But Engleby gives us two or three previous descriptions of something similar happening when he is under extreme pressure, e.g. something like: ‘It is unusual to feel oneself come apart in such a molecular way.’

Engleby claims partial or ‘snapshot’ memory of the deed, which is consistent with dissociation. (Total amnesia is a highly suspect defence, unless there is evidence of brain damage or neurological deficits, which there is not in Engleby.)

The patient’s behaviour after the crime is also consistent with this kind of dissociation. He feels no remorse because his emotion of relief at having eliminated the threat to himself and thus being able to reorganise his defence systems is so great that it leaves no room for other emotions.

This goes right back to Freud’s ‘constancy principle’, which argues that the mind tends always to bring itself back to minimal stimulation by ridding itself of emotions that threaten its equilibrium. Great is the relief when stasis is restored – though
remorse may follow
.

The American psychologist Bromberg (1961) argues that explosive murders are usually connected to fears of being exposed as sexually inadequate. It is not hard to see how this may have been the catastrophic moment in Engleby’s narcissism. Arkland’s offer to ‘do what [Engleby] wanted’ may indirectly have cost her her life. It seems bizarre, but Ruotolo (1968) argued: ‘some personalised value was found to take precedence over the ultimate crime of murder . . . This unique image of oneself had to be maintained
at any price
.’

4. Conclusion

I don’t suppose that the detail above will be necessary, but court/counsel may need background on idea of personality disorders.

In lay terms, they arise as a result of an adverse reaction at the meeting place between, on the one hand, a child’s temperament and character and, on the other, its family and social environment.

This meeting brings us close to the key moment of human life: the moment at which a child becomes self-aware. The Adam and Eve myth dramatises it plainly. Few people find this extraordinary moment and all that it subsequently entails to be frictionless.

‘Temperament’ may be defined as a person’s innate disposition, and this has a biological substrate in the chemistry of the brain. Sensitivity to light or noise, for instance, ability to relate to others, even ‘adventurousness’ may well have a molecular and/or genetic base. (In his important work
The Mask of Sanity
, H. Cleckley (1976) even found a possible neurological site for basis of psychopathy in the temporal lobe.)

If ‘personality’ is then defined as the sum of attitudes, responses and behaviours acquired by the developing child as it struggles to adapt to its environment, then a disorder may result if the child’s temperament forces it to develop a ‘personality’ which, while successfully surviving in the short term, is chronically maladapted.

In adult life, there are then the further normal psychological pressures of life events on the individual which will affect his behaviour.

As I understand it, a plea of diminished responsibility can succeed only if the court takes the view that the accused is or was suffering from such abnormality of mind as substantially impaired his mental responsibility for his actions at the time of the killing (Section 2, Homicide Act, 1957).