‘J’: Life, murder
“…..J regards prison as a “waste of time”. The offence and the factors leading up to it are
seen as a “closed chapter”. He also described attempting to avoid becoming a “cabbage” by
not being rushed or influenced by others and by keeping his mind “active”. Part of keeping
his mind active is watching people on the wing and “psychoanalysing” them (his words, as
are the other terms in quotation marks).
The idea failed to penetrate that he could be wrong about other people (as he claims others
have been wrong about him) and that briefly weighing up a person from a distance might
contain at least as much assumption as insight. He has very definite views about life (“I like
to keep my own counsel”) and seems in his element with the sort of home- spun philosophy
often characteristic of the country and western music which he admires. He vows never to get
involved with a woman again, seeing himself as the injured party; yet he also dismisses his
wife’s apparent dissatisfactions the relationship as having been concerned with things that
were “irrelevant”. His inflexibility of beliefs, linked to a tendency to self- justification, is
likely to have been a major cause of difficulties in the relationship.
Much blame for the offence is attached to his in- laws. “They were murdering me……He (his
father in law) died in my place”. He still maintains, however, that his original intention was
to kill himself in front of them after an appropriate speech. When he arrived at their house,
however, things were different from how he had imagined them and everything became “a
haze”. He contended that he was very depressed at the time over the marital situation and
over an injury at work, coupled with resentment at his in- law’s interference, and that he had
made serious suicide attempts in the past, of which this was to be the final one.
Due to J’s capacity for rigid self- justification it is difficult to evaluate confidently aspects of
his account such as “the haze”. However people with an excessively rigid style of thinking
may be faced with a sense of chaos and unreality when events are not as anticipated and
suicidal intentions can be part of an attempt to pre-empt the collapse of understanding
(metaphorically speaking to go down with the ship, rather than have rethink one’s
fundamental approach to life). In his present state it is important for him to shore up his sense
of himself as competent by casting his in- laws as villains, informing people how active and
reasonable he was on the outside and keeping a heightened sense of his individuality……”