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INT’L. J. PSYCHIATRY IN MEDICINE, Vol. 6(3),1975
JACK THE RIPPER AND DOCTOR-IDENTIFICATION*
SEYMOUR SHUSTER’
Mission, Kansas
ABSTRACT
It is possible that Jack the Ripper can be understood in terms of doctor- identification borne of one or more terrifying experiences he may have had with doctors during his childhood. The fantasies acted out by this primitive murderer are similar t o the fantasies experienced by people who have been surgically traumatized as children. The evidence suggests that the activities of Jack the Ripper resemble the acting-out of a horror story in which he, as the main character, played to the population of London as an actor plays to his audience, through the need to discharge anxiety and regain some kind of emotional balance. When his depredations failed to achieve the desired results for him, the Ripper probably committed suicide.
“Suppose we catch the Whitechapel murderer, can we not, before handing him over to the executioner or the authorities at Broadmoor, make a really decent effort to discover his antecedents, and his
*EDITOR’S NOTE-From time to time the Journal publishes articles which do not closely adhere to editorial objectives. Our interest, however, extends to the variety of personal meanings that illness can have for people and how such meanings may influence their view of the world. The author of this paper shows how his subjective experience of surgery as a child nurtured a curiosity that extends beyond what doctors do in their “forbidden rooms.”
The author is an engineer employed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency working in the field of air pollution control. While an “elderly” undergraduate (aged 36) at the University of Michigan, he became aware that the surgical trauma he had experienced as an eight year old child, and from which he was still suffering, was a fairly common phenomenon, widely reported in the psychiatric literature. The great respect he gained for both the depth and the destructiveness of surgically induced emotional trauma in children and the insights he acquired in trying to overcome its effects led him to suspect that a connection existed between this phenomenon and the origin of such classic horror stories as Dracula,Frankensteinand Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde. Mr. Shuster plans to write his autobiography, in which he hopes to present in more detail a fuller picture of the pervasiveness and depth of surgical trauma.
385
01976.Seymour Shuster
doi: 10.2190/BTBK-Q6QD-N88Y-82VA http://baywood.com
JACK THE RIPPER AND DOCTOR-IDENTIFICATION*
SEYMOUR SHUSTER’
Mission, Kansas
ABSTRACT
It is possible that Jack the Ripper can be understood in terms of doctor- identification borne of one or more terrifying experiences he may have had with doctors during his childhood. The fantasies acted out by this primitive murderer are similar t o the fantasies experienced by people who have been surgically traumatized as children. The evidence suggests that the activities of Jack the Ripper resemble the acting-out of a horror story in which he, as the main character, played to the population of London as an actor plays to his audience, through the need to discharge anxiety and regain some kind of emotional balance. When his depredations failed to achieve the desired results for him, the Ripper probably committed suicide.
“Suppose we catch the Whitechapel murderer, can we not, before handing him over to the executioner or the authorities at Broadmoor, make a really decent effort to discover his antecedents, and his
*EDITOR’S NOTE-From time to time the Journal publishes articles which do not closely adhere to editorial objectives. Our interest, however, extends to the variety of personal meanings that illness can have for people and how such meanings may influence their view of the world. The author of this paper shows how his subjective experience of surgery as a child nurtured a curiosity that extends beyond what doctors do in their “forbidden rooms.”
The author is an engineer employed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency working in the field of air pollution control. While an “elderly” undergraduate (aged 36) at the University of Michigan, he became aware that the surgical trauma he had experienced as an eight year old child, and from which he was still suffering, was a fairly common phenomenon, widely reported in the psychiatric literature. The great respect he gained for both the depth and the destructiveness of surgically induced emotional trauma in children and the insights he acquired in trying to overcome its effects led him to suspect that a connection existed between this phenomenon and the origin of such classic horror stories as Dracula,Frankensteinand Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde. Mr. Shuster plans to write his autobiography, in which he hopes to present in more detail a fuller picture of the pervasiveness and depth of surgical trauma.
385
01976.Seymour Shuster
doi: 10.2190/BTBK-Q6QD-N88Y-82VA http://baywood.com
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