Our Wish to Kill: The Murder in All Our Hearts [Hardcover]

Herbert S. Strean (Author), Lucy Freeman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1991

A look into what turns ordinary citizens into psychopaths explores the crimes of such notorious serial killers and assassins as Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Squeaky Fromm, David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacey, and John Hinkley. Reprint.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"There is no emotion in any human being that is not in every single human being," said lawyer Clarence Darrow--and that includes the will to murder, claim the authors of this noteworthy study. Strean, director of the New York Society for Psychoanalytical Training, and Freeman, who previously collaborated 'with him'? (if not, it's fine as is.) aa/doesn't collaborated say that they collaborated together?gs on Behind the Couch and The Severed Soul, urgeto avoid repeating 'begin', in next sentence. aa us to be aware of our capacity for malevolence and our ability to convert that capacity into aggression. The authors demonstrate how the wish to murder can begin in infancy and childhood, emerging more frequently than not in abused children and those from single-parent homes, and how it can develop further in adolescence. They proceed to analyze murder within families, serial killingparallelism. aa and suicide, and conclude by showing how we can understand and overcome the murder "in our hearts." Revealing.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Strean and Freeman state in the prolog to this book that "the difference between the overt murderer . . . and the rest of us is only a matter of degree." Overall, they are optimistic that psychotherapy and mental health education can reduce the urge to murder. Unfortunately, their book has a terse style that is long on lurid details (Ted Bundy's childhood), unsubstantiated statistics ("50 percent of the women in this country are survivors of child sexual abuse"), glib Freudian analyses of the causes of crime (e.g., Adam and Eve's hostility to one another may have caused Cain to murder Abel), and short on documented analysis of this serious problem and its possible solutions. Recommended only for public libraries supporting avid readers of murder-related nonfiction.
-Lucy Patrick, Florida State Univ. Lib., Tallahassee
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 270 pages
• Publisher: St Martins Pr; 1st edition (March 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312054882
• ISBN-13: 978-0312054885
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 1.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,439,271 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars over-simplified AND over-analyzed, that takes work., April 27, 2005

By 

Louann Miller (TX United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Our Wish to Kill: The Murder in All Our Hearts (Hardcover)

To quote the Library Journal review above: 'Strean and Freeman state in the prolog to this book that "the difference between the overt murderer . . . and the rest of us is only a matter of degree."' This is indeed the central theme of the book. The difference _to the victim_ of 'covert' murder and the imaginary kind -- the part about not being dead -- rarely gets a mention.

This book, or at least its 1991 edition, sticks unswervingly to Freudian internal trauma as the cause and Freudian-style analysis as the cure for any and all mental and emotional illness. I realize Prozac and its cousins hadn't achieved their current prevalence at the time, but schizophrenia was well understood as chemically treatable and yet it too is treated in purely Freudian terms. The authors seem blissfully unaware that the brain, as an organ in the human body, can cause purely biochemical problems along with the mind causing cognitive problems.

No doubt there's a large grain of truth in the connection they draw between the horrific childhoods of some murderers and their later crimes. But the authors extend this thesis to the point of unfalsifiability by postulating 'soul murder' by repressive parents in the cases of killers without such documented abuse. Heads they win, tails you lose -- murderers must have rotten childhoods, because look, they've murdered.

The victim's point of view rarely gets a look in, possibly because it might interfere with sympathy for the murderers. Nor is there any attempt to define the differences (I'd think they would be clinically useful) between people who respond to bad childhoods with murder or suicide and those who deal with their problems without bloodshed. Instead, the theme of 'murderers, just like all of us' washes over and obscures any distinguishing details. The authors imply several times that every single one of us, covert murderers that we are, need extensive talk therapy. But that conclusion is never overtly drawn, either. No conclusion is; the book just circles around and around its starting point.

There's an old joke about a psychologist who (like in the parable of the good samaritan) finds a man on the road robbed and beaten and left for dead. He solemnly studies the situation and concludes, "The man who did this needs my help." Unfortunately, that very nearly sums up this book.

2.0 out of 5 stars Title promises more than the book offers, August 24, 2010

By 

M. Tully (Tucson, AZ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Our Wish to Kill: The Murder in All Our Hearts (Paperback)

While initially interesting, "Our Wish To Kill" posits a tunnel-vision Freudian thesis that all aggressive and violent tendencies stem from harm or lack of love shown to people by their parents as infants and children, ignoring many other complications of human behavior such as genetics, culture, etcetera. Examples seem cherry-picked, and the book's selective interest in the American middle-class white male is frustrating, as the book frequently assumes the viewpoints and actions of that group to apply to groups of differing cultures, income-levels, genders, etcetera, or brings up examples from these differing groups only to quickly resume its study of the first-mentioned group. Other psychological explanations are frequently ignored in favor of the thesis, which is adhered to even when the connection is tenuous at best. Frequently frustrating, as I, a student who only has Psychology 101 under their belt, should not be able to point out counter-examples and counter-psychologists in a book written by a certified psychotherapist.