Sabtu, 04 Juni 2011

Freud and Holmes: Psychoanalysis and Crimes


Artikel ini merupakan tugas akhir mata kuliah writing 1, dan sayangnya ini merupakan tugas terakhir writing saya. Sebenernya saya agak kecewa sama bapak dosen  yang ngasih nilai C di akhir semester... Karena Mr. S*d*rya gak tau seberapa besar usaha saya buat bikin tugas akhir semester ini. Tulisan ini saya buat dalam keadaan masih dalam masa penyembuhan pascaoperasi mata.. Dan akhirnya... saya harus cukup puas dengan nilai C. Okay, never mind!

What is psychoanalysis? You may hear about psychoanalysis theory in case of psychology study, or may find that word in books, novels, and movies. The general description of psychoanalysis is the study of human psychological functioning and behavior. It was Sigmund Freud, a neurologist and physician, who developed the idea of psychoanalysis in Vienna in the 1890s. That’s why this theory also known as Freudian psychology. There are three points how psychoanalysis works. First, it examines in detail the human thoughts, the second is about the organized set of theories related to human behavior, and the last is that it is used for psychological sufferer treatment. Afterwards, how can it related to crimes?
I begin interested in psychoanalysis at the first time when I was reading a novel by Frank Tallis. He is a clinical psychiatrist and a psychologist from London who is expert in obsession subject. The title of the book is The Liebermann Papers: Vienna Blood, published in 2005. It carries the genre of psychoanalytic thriller. The story begins with a series of inhuman murder in Vienna that must be settled by Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt. Assisted by Dr. Max Liebermann, a psychoanalyst who is a Freudian, they investigate the complicated mystery of inhuman murder to find out the prime suspect. The investigations guide them to a secret association, the underground movement made up of Germany elite persons, instigators of racialism, and scientists who are inspired of neo-Evolution theory from England.

The mutilated corpse, weird symbols, and the random victims are the attitude and traces of the murderer. Although at first, the figure of the murderer seems cannot be broken through by psychoanalysis interpretation, it gradually becomes clear that unpredictable background stands for the murderer’s actions. Olbricht, a character of the story, killed an anaconda that truncated into three fragments. Then, in the case of Spittelberg homicide, he killed one pimp and three Galician girls in a whorehouse with splitting their throats and cutting one’s genital. The other ruthless homicides are he puts a door latch into the throat of a Czechoslovakian merchant, and cuts a Moor’s throat. Also, he kills a Catholic honorable man in tidy way. In the last chapter, Dr. Liebermann as psychoanalyst makes the murderer confessing his crime, revealed the truth of his motivation killing many people.

The book told that Olbricht is a hater of Mozart, so he kills his victims based on the characters of a play titled The Magic Flute, which is one of Mozart’s famous artworks. He also becomes a member of Freemason, secret association related to an ideology, in order to get more information about symbols used in The Magic Flute, so he can describe the characters of that play and determine who the victims he wants to kill. The interesting part of this case is the reasons why Olbricht becomes a quite hater of Mozart. Psychoanalysis proves that his hate feeling comes from his traumatic childhood. When he was a child, he lived near the rural theatre with his mother. And the rural theatre always played The Magic Flute, an impressive play at that moment. His mother is actually a whore and becomes an “entertainer” for foreigner. It evoked an emotion of jealous feeling that belongs to young Olbricht. He saw his mother entertaining those bastards while The Magical Flute playing all the time. Therefore, he got a traumatic experience of hearing the play of The Magical Flute. So, he released his bad feeling and expressed his hate of Mozart by killing people brutally based on the plot of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

Then, do you know how can Dr. Liebermann make those correct analyses about the actor of this case? He said on book that he realized the abnormal symptom was shown on Olbricht’s art painting titled Pipara: The Germanic Woman in the Purple of the Caesars. Because of his precision, he found that the woman’s hood in picture, which should be colored with purple, was red colorings. According to psychoanalysis, it is called optical illusion that happen to person as if there is a push to present certain color represented his emotions. The other symptom was indicated on Olbricht body. He was born with syphilis, a venereal disease that came from his mother and it caused the deviant structure of his face. Also in psychoanalysis, syphilis can attack the main neurological system and bring person into paralysis, lunacy, or both. Therefore, a series of brutal murder represents Olbricht’s lunacy.

Those short descriptions may become a reference of how psychoanalysis related to the crime case, especially for the high level case that needs a brain thoughts rather than an action to solve. Standing before mental sufferers may be difficult to handle because they often have abnormal behaviors and thoughts about unmoral way to do crime, and they do it for some unpredictable reasons. To be satisfied, to release emotions, to do revenge, and to express feelings are plenty of doing crime backgrounds. As Freud stated in this book that insanity comes when the human mental system gets a power from a particular source, or a specific origin. Thus, if I were Holmes, I would need someone like Freud to be my partner in solving cases.

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