Abstract
A psychoanalyst and a detective share a common goal and methods: they interpret covert clues to reveal the truth(s). Some neo-Victorian detective novels show an awareness of this commonality when they combine psychiatry and detection. Yet, what is also apparent in these novels is a certain degree of anachronism: what we know about forensic psychiatry today is applied to fin de siècle contexts. The chapter provides a discussion of three texts—Caleb Carr’s The Alienist (1995), Frank Tallis’s Mortal Mischief (2005), and Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder (2006)—focusing on the figures of psychiatrist detectives who represent an anachronistic antipatriarchal and egalitarian perspective on the marginalised and impoverished classes in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society.
The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man needs only to live in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning—the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life—a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them.
(Rubenfeld 2006, 5, emphasis original)
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Notes
- 1.
This is a term coined by myself, as a shorthand used to describe detective novels where (forensic) psychiatrists, psychologists, mind-doctors, alienists, or psychoanalysts perform the role of a detective. Apart from the neo-Victorian novels discussed here, some other examples could include novels from the series written by Carr, Tallis, and Rubenfeld, as well as Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) (not strictly speaking a detective novel, but one which has some elements of the genre), David Pirie’s The Patient’s Eyes (2001), and Clare Dudman’s 98 Reasons for Being (2006). Non-historical detective fiction which features psychologists and psychoanalysts as detectives would include, for instance, Gladys Mitchell’s detective fiction series about psychoanalyst Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, who appears in her series of novels ranging from Speedy Death (1929) until The Crozier Pharaohs (1984).
- 2.
An Oedipal conflict is visible in several instances of the novels, for example in Stratham Younger’s attitude to his dead father in The Interpretation of Murder, or in The Alienist, in Laszlo Kreizler ’s attitude to William James, his “intellectual Dark Father” (Simpson 132). However, these are instances of a classic conflict between fathers and sons, similar to the anxiety of influence described by Harold Bloom, in which the younger generation has to fight the older one for intellectual primacy. This perhaps corresponds to the general theme of this chapter, that of the progressive potential of history, yet I would like to focus on the female characters and on the way the Oedipal theory is contested in the novels.
- 3.
Stevie Taggerd’s case, or generally the recurring motif of sexual abuse of male children in Carr’s novel, could have been influenced by the author’s biography. Caleb Carr’s father, Lucius Carr, was a member of the Beat poetic movement. In 1944, he murdered David Kammerer, a man who had stalked him and apparently sexually propositioned him (Garner 1997). Even though his parents divorced when Caleb Carr was young, his childhood was notoriously difficult: “[t]here was a lot of craziness in the family … and a lot of alcoholism among the adults” (qtd in Ellis 1994). He also admits: “Frankly, what interested me about serial killers … was that if I had gone four or five steps in another direction, I could have been one of these guys—the anger they had, the way they chose to embody it” (qtd in Dubner 1994, 60). Caleb Carr also claims that “elements of his life story are in the book” (Ellis 1994).
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Braid, B. (2017). A Psychiatrist as a Detective: Laszlo Kreizler, Stratham Younger, and Max Liebermann. In: Krawczyk-Żywko, L. (eds) Victorian Detectives in Contemporary Culture. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69311-8_7
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