THE LURE OF THE MORBID.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 27 September 1924, Page 16

THE LURE OF THE MORBID.

PRIMITIVE INSTINCT

(By F. Aveling, Ph.D., D.Sc., D.D., deader m Psychology, King’s; College, University of .London, in tlie Daily Mail.;

Most people are interested in murders, aim especially in murders of the type in wiiicn sex elements are involved as motives. The more gruesome and revolting tne details of the crime, the stronger is the ' terribie fascination exerted on the mind, and this has apparently been true from tne earliest days oi our civilisation.

But some murders stand out from the rest in a very excess of fascination. The Bywaters-Thompson case gripped the imagination of the public; Manon’s statement of the manner of the death and disposal of the remains of Emily Kaye in the sheer horror of its detail compelled and riveted attention. The Vaquier trial fixed’nearly every eye in England on the court room at Guildford, and set every ear astrain to hear the sordid evidence as it was unfolded.

What is the reason of this? What have we within us that awakes and responds so readily to a recital of such crimes? For it is not the brutal among us only who are affected in this way. Indeed, the brutal are the least affected, if at all. On the contrary, it is the highly civilised, the refined. The courts where such trials take place are besieged by cultured and educated people. The presence of many women is evidence of the hor'rible attraction which obsesses them. The newspapers print reports in full—and, indeed, the essential sanity of the human race demands such reports. THE PRIMITIVE BRUTE*.

It is not mere interest in crime that it the reason, for other crimes leave people cold. Nor is it the intellectual enjoyment of seeing scraps of evidence fitted together and the ultimate detection of the criminal, since there are other trials in which the evidence is vastly more intricate and the piecing together of it more ingenious, which no one ever attends and of which no one ever reads. No; it is the crude, unadulterated craving for details of violent death sexually motivated.

This is due to the two most profound instincts at least of human naiture—the instinct of self-assertion, which is a form of self-preservation, and the instinct of self-continuation or racial reproduction. Together they constitute the urge of vital continuity. They are the Will to Live, both in the individual and in the race.

Most of us, and especially the mom refined, live in a world of convention, in which the wild upsurging of instinctive impulse is repressed. But .the primitive brute is still deep down within us, chafing at the fitters with which our social 'codes and we ourselves have bound him. And he finds in a recital of such crimes the vicarious enjoyment of committing them. MURDER, AND LOVE. Everyone nas unconsciously committed mental murder so often that he, or she, wants to see a real murderer. Indeed, it might be urged that interest in crimes of this kind is not altogether morbid or unhealthy; but that it serves the purpose of securing a certain emotional discharge, and thus relieving mental tension.

It may be, too, that a principle of “beneficent comparison” has its place in the mentality of. those who crave for the morbid. Each of us is capable of much savagery and evil; but at least we are not yet so evil and so savage as those in whose crimes we are interested.

Moralists, may debate whether the details of sex murders ought to be published or not. They are a dreadful warning, on the one hand, of the possible issue of courses of action often lightly entered upon. But, on the other hand, have we not reason for thinking that the satisfaction obtained by reading the accounts in itself may be ethically wrong? And is there not always the danger of stimulating the tendency to imitation ? But, however the moralists may conclude, human nature will doubtless remain always much the same. And, in the meantime, it is in the common interest that the law and its working should be widely understood, so that men may come to realise the fundamental justice of the community protecting' itself and its members against anarchy. M e are reminded by the actual perpetration of such deeds, and by an analysis of the instinctive springs of action within us that account for our interest in them, that the tragic is infinitely higher than the comic from the point of view of art. Sophocles’ play “Oedipus Tyrannus” is a case in point. It is woven around a double theme of murder and of sex. It is one accumulation of horror upon horror. Yet it is magnificent. And of our own <rreat dramatist’s finest work it is not Romeo and Juliet, which deals with love alone, nor Macbeth, the plot of which is murder alone, but Hamlet, in which both themes are combined, which grips us most.