Soul Murder

Soul murder is neither a diagnosis nor a condition. It is a dramatic term for circumstances that eventuate in crime—the deliberate attempt to eradicate or compromise the separate identity of another person.

The child’s mind is split into contradictory fragments to separate the bad from the good… the establishment of isolated divisions of the mind in which contradictory images of the self and of the parents are never permitted to coalesce. This compartmentalized “vertical splitting” transcends diagnostic categories. Feeling and thinking are compromised; registration of what has happened and what is happening is divided into “compartments” and therefore is inadequate.

The child [has] contradictory mental splits, or fragments of impulse and identity—reflecting the confusion between victim and tormentor, good and bad

Need enforced the preservation in the child’s mind of a delusional place in which the father must be good and right, the boy bad and wrong. Yet some registration that the father was bad was made somewhere, as it were in an other compartment (One patient said: “I am not a human being—I live in compartments."). These mental compartments are walled off and their contents cannot be blended; this is part of the defensive isolation brought about by brainwashing.

A young man in analysis for several years complained of having difficulty with his memory and of disruptions in his thinking that interfered with his professional achievements. … So much was disavowed that his functioning sometimes suffered because of a discontinuity in his memory; this affected his sense of identity, and he had little awareness of himself as a child—only dim feelings about a little person with his name who seemed like everyone else. … D. described his childhood with few specific memories but generally thought of it as quite happy. During one session when he seemed to be integrating past and present more than was usual, he commented with poignancy, “It is sad. I am not really a whole person. I live in compartments, in fragments”.

The not knowing is accomplished by massive isolation, transient ego splits (“She is naughty, I am good,” said one nonpsychotic patient about herself), and chronic autohypnotic states. Frequently a combination of these is present, with a resultant (partial) impairment of intellectual functioning that remains in part instinctualized (Keiser 1962). The brainwashing that creates denial implies a compromised identity.