RB 76

the explanations of the acts during…? Or…? The case of Frances Cheek illustrate well that we cannot for certain know a motive or the thinking of an individual. Also, as been described here, to link the psychiatric perspective to the psychiatric profession could be unnecessary limiting. The problems might well have existed earlier. One can wonder if the result was suicide or murder followed by execution when Andreas Celichius describes how somebody could be so depressed by melancholy that no spiritual help cured it, and finally the murder-devil arrived to become the executioner of the depressed?931 A similar frontier has been presented in several articles by Reeh and Hemmingsen. Choosing a sample of the cases Krogh understood as suicide murder, they studied twenty-one murderers of children, of which twenty were women, finding that sixteen of them could be understood psychiatrically, while four others may have been cases of ”existential death wish” – their name for what Jansson, Krogh, and others have called ‘suicidal murder’.932 One can to this wonder if these, or even all, psychiatric explanations totally impede the possibility of the individual to form the wish, the plan, the motive of oneself? An although not quite psychiatric, but interesting approach to the problem, is taken by Nilsson when trying to understand the murderer Brita Maria Andersdotter. He uses a model of the sociologist Michel Wieviorka and finds Andersdotter displaying an extreme form of floating subject in that life seems to have no meaning for her. Amore ordinary such floating subject cannot find any goal for her existential aim. A lack of meaning, justice or recognition defined her situation and fuelled feelings resulting in anxiety and frustration and maybe violence. Nilsson also suggests that this model fits many women in the nineteenth–century society such as wives in unhappy marriages and young daughters and maids finding it hard to find security and prosperity.933 Interesting is that this model could give some answers to why there are so many women and 931 Celichius 1578AVIII v–Br. 932 Reeh and Hemmingsen 2018 p 121 sq, 130, Reeh and Hemmingsen 2019b p 115 sqq. 933 Nilsson 2017 p 10, 26. 260

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