I have to admit, I do struggle to understand when a professional uses the term 'monster'.
I'm genuinely curious - do you not see the person behind the monster? Not saying she's not but it just seems so cut and dried using the term. Are you not interested in what drives these women to commit these horrendous acts?
I would also love to hear your take on mothers' who have killed their children due to postpartum psychosis? Yes, a monstrous act, but still a monster?
Of course I see the person. And I've spent a great deal of my life trying to understand why people, in general, commit violent acts.
Every culture on the planet has a concept of Monster. The Monsters are all masks for forces that are terrifying and beyond the comprehension of ordinary humans. They can take almost any form, but they are a cultural universal and a metaphor that every human has deep in their psyche, IMO.
I am very interested in Jungian approaches to cross-cultural psychology. I believe that most tales about monsters are really about ourselves and our relationship to our own nature.
I am a member of human society, just like you are. I think the guy who shot 5 people in Texas yesterday is a different kind of monster, but a monster nonetheless. Monsters have a paralyzing force, and almost no one understands them. Their consciousness is alien to those they terrify and victimize.
I will go out on a limb and say that,
from the point of view of the children killed by their mothers (and the children are often painfully awake and aware during the murderous event),
yes, the mothers are Monsters. Sometimes I need to enter into the crime from the perspective of the victims, and in fact, I will admit I have a victim-centered approach. Same goes for children killed by their fathers (Chris Watts is a monster in this paradigm).
Medea and Agamemnon both have qualities of the Monster archetype. They wear a human form, but they embody the darker, impulsive, chaotic nature of Humanity. There are not many other species who kill their own family members at the rates that we do. Certainly, we are the only primate species who does so (chimps will kill
other chimp troop's infants but chimp mothers will actually remove an infant from the care of a neglectful chimp mother whose failure to care is way below the bar of murder).
The revenge motif (Medea) is present in this one. And I regard Medea as both a wronged woman and a monster, yes - one in the form of a beguiling and intelligent woman. Revenge against a lover/spouse by murder of a child is monstrous and in the moment that a person takes on that role, they are a monster, in my view.
(Great questions, btw). Since I have never found an adequate explanation for Why People Kill Children in the psychiatric literature (indeed, spent most of yesterday reviewing literature on that very question - there are no mental illnesses that are specifically related to child murder; child murderers cannot be predicted by mental health research or expertise), I turn to our species nature and to the narratives we humans have about such matters. While the concept of Monster is a universal, the concept of Evil is not (all cultures have a concept of the Sacred, but not of Evil). Some of the most peaceful cultures, btw, use the Monster concept actively; ritually containing human behavior by reference to the monstrous side of human nature. Without that containment, we are doomed to have what we have (and in the US, it's very concerning that we have such an overall high homicide rate and perhaps the highest rate of child murder in the world - those statistics are not readily available; more research needed).
IMO.
Glad the title of this thread got changed!
