According to Greek mythology, Medusa, a Gorgon, was a beautiful maiden who was raped by the Greek god Poseidon, in a temple of the goddess Athena. Athena punished Medusa by turning her hair into snakes and anyone looking at her was petrified and turned into stone. Theseus, a Greek hero, managed to trick Medusa by using a mirrored shield gifted to him by Athena, so he saw only her reflection when he decapitated her. Theseus used her head to petrify his enemies and then gave it to Athena to put it on her shield. The gorgoneion, representations of the Gorgon face framed with snakes, had the power to ward off evil and instil great fear in any enemy and could literally petrify them. Gorgon blood was said to have both the power to heal and harm. Holding up a mirror to reveal the snakes inside our own heads, can be so petrifying that most people avoid it at all costs. People are reluctant to face their own Shadow.
Memoirs of a Sociopath
“As a child, while other kids in my neighbourhood were riding bikes and having playdates with friends, I was reading mysteries. True crime, mostly. I was fascinated by the darkness in people. What is it that makes them evil? What is it that makes them capable? I wanted to know,” writes Patric Gagne in her 2024-autobiography, Sociopath, A Memoir. Patric presents the following bio of herself: “I am a criminal without a record. I am a master of disguise. I have never been caught. I have rarely been sorry. I am friendly. I am responsible. I am invisible. I blend right in. I am a twenty-first-century sociopath. And I have written this book because I am not alone!” Dr Patric Gagne has a doctorate’s degree in psychology and is a successful therapist.
Of course not all people who are fascinated with True Crime are sociopaths! But why are people so fascinated with True Crime? Is it because they need to know more about it so they can protect themselves from it not happening to them? Do they believe if they know about it, it cannot happen to them? Has a fascination with True Crime become a modern gorgoneion to ward off evil? Or is it because they can safely proclaim, “at least my little fantasies or indulgences are not as bad as that?” These are rather superficial explanations. It begs consideration: Do they disappear down a rabbit’s hole, searching for a rabbit’s foot amulet to protect them from becoming victims or to prevent them from becoming perpetrators?
My own interest in crime happened by accident, due to an interest in psychology, specifically, but not exclusively, in the theories of Sigmund Freud, which led to my theory on the origins of serial killers. However, since I often get asked why people are fascinated by True Crime, I find the answer may lie in the theories of Carl Gustav Jung, a contemporary of Freud, initially his pupil and eventually an adversary.
As the father of Analytical Psychology, one of Jung’s most profound theories is that of the Shadow. The Shadow embodies those aspects of one’s personality that people deny and project onto others. “When an individual makes an attempt to see his Shadow, he becomes aware of – and often ashamed of – those qualities and impulses he denies in himself but he can plainly see in others. (C Jung, 1964. Man and his Symbols)
J’Accuse
Some people have an ability not to take criticism from others seriously, other struggle more with it and are rejection sensitive and harbour resentment and revenge thoughts, but these are all reactions to external criticism. What happens when the attack on the ego comes from an internal source, long supressed to the abyss of the subconscious, ignored for years, where it festers, broods and periodically breaks free from the dungeons to manifest in dreams, fantasies, secret indulgences, or a morbid fascination with the dark side of humanity, safely sublimated and projected onto “others”? In psychology, sublimation is a defence mechanism that involves channelling unwanted or unacceptable urges into an admissible or productive outlet.
J’Accuse…!” is an open letter, written by Émile Zola and published on 13 January 1898 in the newspaper L’Aurore, accusing the President of France, Félix Faure, and his government of antisemitism. J’accuse! is one of the best-known newspaper articles in the world and since then it has become a term for public denunciation in response to a perceived injustice. What if the finger pointing, to the accused, is one’s own, pointing at the Self? Jung says: “Unfortunately, there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”
People can easily become voyeurs to the dark abyss of murder, yet they shy away and resist entering their own abyss, fearful of encountering their own Medusa. Says Jung: “To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition of any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance”.
Sublimating Violent Urges
Dr Patric describes how she used to steal as a child. She confessed these transgressions to her mother. When asked by her mother whether she was sorry, she said she was. But she admitted to herself she was sorry she had to steal to stop fantasizing about violence, not because she had hurt anyone. One day she stuck a pen in another girl’s head. She felt that violence replaced apathy with euphoria.
Dr Patric knew that hurting others could not be a long-term solution to relieving apathy, and that acts of violence – although quite effective in reducing the urge to act against apathy – went against self-preservation. This is selfish behaviour – regarded as typically sociopathic – the concern is only with self-preservation, not with insight into the suffering and pain caused to others.
Dr Patric also realized she was more prone to violent fantasies after extended periods of being alone with herself. This makes sense when considering that serial killers should never be paroled after extended periods of solitary confinement in prison – like the Marquis de Sade and Moses Sithole, (see a previous article) extended isolation only leads to excessive violent fantasies, which they act out once they are released.
Dr Patric devised non-violent ways of releasing the urge such as stealing, taking illegal joy-rides and silently stalking adversaries. She felt proud that she was doing “the right” thing and expected her mother to praise her for it, especially when she resisted the urge to do “the wrong thing”. When her mother was not impressed, she was conditioned into believing lying was a better option in future. Dr Patric was quite candid about being a sociopath and did not try to hide it. She tried dealing with it, making sense of it.
I remember very typical of some serial killers, like the psychopath Brandon Brandt, was that he was adamant in trying to convince me that I should believe he was a “good person.” Usually, the ploy of many criminals is to try to convince others how good ‘Christians” they are. By holding up a “good person” Persona, they try to deflect from the gorgoneion staring at them in the mirror. “I love to sing and give sweets to children, I just want to make people happy,” Brandt told me – he was convicted of four brutal murders.
Dr Patric used to attend parties just to study people and learn to mimic their behaviours and emotions. “They were always charmed – not with me, but by my reflection of them. All I had to do was mimic behaviour”. She says she “is invisible and blends right in”. People are so often deceived by sociopaths and psychopaths, because they believe what they want to, not what is staring them in the face.
Evil Monsters?
About evil, Dr Patric writes: “Pop culture, primarily based on sensationalized composites and secondhand stories, repeatedly describes sociopaths as “evil” “terrible” people. They were said to have no conscience. They were said to have no soul.” “ Everything I read indicated I was a sociopath… And yet I knew I wasn’t the monster the media described.” And she is not. Dr Patric realized she was often just as guilty of having repetitive negative thoughts about sociopathy as the media and the people around her. Confronting her own Shadow she realized she needed to be more conscious of the way she perceived herself: “it was the only way I would ever be able to reframe my adult sense of identity.
Jung observes: “With a little self-criticism one can see through the Shadow – so far as its nature is personal. But when it appears as an archetype, one encounters the same difficulties as with anima and animus. In other words, it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil.”
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you,” wrote the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. This was also the title of veteran FBI profiler Robert Ressler’s book, probably warning against encountering one’s own Medusa in the abyss.
Yet as I have said on numerous occasions, serial killers are not monsters and to reduce them into comic book villains, is dangerous, for it masks their absolute ordinariness with a red superhero cloak – they hide in plain sight.
Sports fans often watch experts re-examine a game. Arm-chair postmortem analysis of a game does not change its outcome, and neither will superficial discussion of True Crime change the outcome, but crime is not a game. Crime and murder are committed by real people, death is not staged. Is it possible to replace a morbid fascination with the synthetic sensationalism often attached to True Crime with a more academic, scientific understanding of the phenomenon? Could that perhaps lead to a pre-emptive pro-action, rather than a morbid reaction?
Conquering the Dragon
Jung says: “A man likes to believe he is the master of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control his moods and his emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master.” Confronting Medusa in one’s own subconscious, facing and admitting to the treachery, ability to deceive and aggressive or even murderous impulses, does not mean one has the right to act out on them. Being aware of them means one can curtail them.
Dr Patric says: “darkness is where you least expect it.” But darkness and light form a balanced eco system – a yin and yang, forming a whole. Dr Patric turned from her childhood fascination with True Crime to become an adult, studying psychology to find real answers, not rabbit’s feet and subsequently she makes a most valuable contribution to society. She turned pathos into ethos – a cohesion of society, rather than the destruction thereof. Imagine if more people can follow her example.
Like Yin and Yang, the Shadow also embodies the supressed positive, not just the negative. Medusa was a beautiful woman and Gorgon blood has the power to harm but also to heal. Many people tend to underplay their “goodness” and only focus on their “badness”. Dr Patric writes in Bold capitals: ATTENTION ALL SOCIOPATHS AND ANTI SOCIAL OUTLIERS! DON’T PANIC ! DON’T HURT ANYONE! YOU ARE NOT ALONE! YOU AREN’T CRAZY. She became a therapist and a trauma counsellor for victims of violence.
Jung says the Shadow can be black and dense – I am not the only one who has entered dense black Shadows of serial killers and my own Shadow in the process – so have many of my colleagues, profilers, psychologists, criminologists and detectives. We emerged not unscathed from the darkness, and often suffered from post-traumatic stress and burn-out. But I wonder if, according to the Yin-Yang principle, the density of the darkness we encountered can match the brightness of the light we shine into it with equal intensity? Therefore, if we stand together, we shine not one little candle that can burn out, but rather we form a strong lighthouse that shines so much deeper into the blackness of the abyss.
If we, as individuals can have the courage to explore our own Shadows, facing the reflections of our own Medusa, instead of being self-righteous denialists projecting our own shortcomings on to others, can we also then as a society, take responsibility for breeding serial killers? And I literally mean breeding them – they are not spawned from aliens – they are born and bred from parents, children raised by societies. Can people, so fascinated by True Crime, a literary or movie genre, make a difference in Real Life?
Facebook: Why are people so fascinated with True Crime? Dr Patric Gagne’s autobiography, Sociopath, gives an insight into one woman’s courageous journey into the Shadow, to meet her own Medusa gorgoneion. If more people face their own “badness” and cease from projecting it onto others, a lighthouse can illuminate the abyss.
Featured image: Perseus Confronting Phineus with the Head of Medusa by Sebastiano Ricci (1705) (Public Domain)
