Perspectives on Indirect Matricide in Male Violent Offenders
- 1. Secure Care Services, Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne & Wear NHS Foundation Trust, United Kingdom
Abstract
The infant’s earliest relationship with the mother is associated with comfort, feeding and love. In writing this paper, we consider the developmental failure in integrating such inner experiences in the violent offender’s mental functioning and suggest an association with displaced matricidal urge - so-called indirect matricide. We believe this offers a more nuanced approach in the risk analysis of future violent offending. We review and consider literature on matricide in the context of male offenders who commit inexplicable violent acts. We argue that this compulsion to violence may be traced to early unprocessed anxieties manifest in a personality retreat that defends the self against psychotic breakdown. We advocate a consistent multi-disciplinary approach to contain the patient’s paranoid anxiety, and gradual therapeutic exploration of multiple layers of traumata that allows the patient to view his violence with more realistic and depressive concern. We argue for the case of developing shared clinical and risk formulations that trace a patient’s early anxieties with the development of personality defences that repeat cycles of traumata.