Mayhem

by Sigrid Rausing

  —

  Drug den is just an expression of course. Clothes all over the floor. Bottles, trash.

  The body wrapped in a tarpaulin and hidden under the top mattress, under a flat-screen TV.

  *

  Hans, at this stage, was taking enough morphine every day to kill a small horse, I was told. He had been on the floor of a police cell, in agony, offered a paracetamol for withdrawal. He was catatonic with withdrawal, shock and grief, and was soon moved to hospital for medically supervised detoxification.

  —

  Enough morphine to kill a small horse. It seemed an odd analogy to me, since animals react so differently to drugs. I didn’t understand what it meant—was that enough daily morphine to kill several people? I was confused by the analogy, my mind leaping to all the horses I have known; my grandfather and his racehorses, our stables, our past.

  —

  I genuinely wanted to know how horses react to morphine.

  —

  Try to think of something else. How many times have I heard my mother say that. Try to think of something else.

  *

  Revealing death. Telling the story.

  Telling children that their mother has died.

  They were so young.

  —

  Within hours the story had broken on the news. A stream of emails, with subject lines such as thinking of you, sending love, condolences, Eva, started coming in. Soon there were letters, too.

  There was an avalanche of media, journalists and photographers everywhere. We saw the vans from the house; the photographers with their cameras.

  For a brief moment Hans was suspected of murder. I remember saying to the children that this did not mean that he was guilty, or that anyone thought he was. They looked at me with blank eyes.

  As the world now knows, Eva Rausing’s dead body was discovered at her £70 million Chelsea mansion last Monday. She was 48 years old.

  Her husband, Hans Kristian, joint heir to the £4.5 billion Tetra Pak packaging fortune has been arrested on suspicion of murder.

  Daily Mail, July 14, 2012

  *

  Soon the children left, my son to visit his father, the others to America, to Eva’s sister and parents.

  The hares were boxing; the herring gulls were crying.

  Swirling clouds of starlings gathered at dusk, flying towards the marsh beyond the harbour. We watched the sunset evening after evening.

  Eric and I stayed in Sweden to be near my parents. They were in the house next door, in the old cottage.

  Eric cooked for me. We played chess over lunch and dinner at the kitchen table, as we do. I lost time after time. I lost twenty-three games in a row.

  We didn’t watch the news or read the papers.

  What did we do? I don’t remember. We sat with my parents.

  We watched The Battle of Algiers again, Gillo Pontecorvo’s epic 1960s film about the Algerian struggle for independence, terrorist bombs, and French repression and torture.

  Every few hours I cried until I couldn’t breathe. In between the waves of grief I was exhausted, still.

  Time distorted.

  —

  Leo followed me from room to room in the quiet house.

  —

  The eye of the storm. It was so peaceful there.

  11

  Eva died on May 7, 2012. The inquest took place in December of that year. Hans testified that he’d been there when she died. He had said to his psychiatrist that she looked peaceful. Also childlike.

  She had come back from a rehab in California a few days before she died. Later we heard that she had been asked to leave for bringing in drugs. That may not be true.

  The media published endless last pictures of her, claiming that she looked “gaunt” and “unwell.” I look at the photographs and think, to the contrary, how well she looked, compared with when I last saw her, in 2008. She had filled out, and her hair was long. Her legs were a little swollen, perhaps, but not obviously so.

  —

  I find the last recording of Eva online, incidental footage someone had taken on the street.

  It’s true that she is not quite steady on her feet. Hans had driven her, apparently, to the dentist. He—also not quite steady, and quite grey and stooped—gets out of the car and helps her out. She asks him a question. He points in response, possibly to show her the entrance to the dentist’s office.

  —

  I watch the clip again and again. I hadn’t seen either of them for four years.

  *

  When we were small, on long journeys or on walks, my father used to play a game with us: what would we do if humanity had died out, and we were alone in a post-apocalyptic world? How would we live, and where? Survival was the object, and there were dangers everywhere: starvation, infections, feral dogs. My father suggested scenarios with reference to ancient history and traditional methods of food preservation; to dogs hunting in packs; to wild sources of protein and vitamins. We tried to think of solutions, which suggested consequences, and other problems.

  My mind still sometimes wanders to that game, to fantasies of aloneness: scavenging in abandoned farmhouses and supermarkets, releasing horses trapped in stables, sailing across the channel, going south.

  —

  I think of Hans and Eva in their locked room, their decaying teeth.

  —

  Drugs dull the capacity to feel. And without emotions we can’t live. I read in the New Scientist or Scientific American that fruit flies get “unsettled” by shadows mimicking predator wings. Fear, of course, is critical to survival: flies with fear would have a tremendous evolutionary edge over flies without fear. Animals need emotions to survive. And so do we.

  Without emotions you can become a castaway in the heart of London. A scavenger in your own house.

  *

  May 7, early morning. The early hour was, I assume, in fact a late hour of the night before—Hans and Eva lived nocturnal lives, and she must have been jet-lagged from California, from that week in the rehab. May 6, then.

  A Sunday. Then a Monday.

  *

  After his arrest on Wandsworth Bridge, Hans ended up in hospital for detox and drug treatment.

  —

  The court hearing was on August 1. Hans spoke only twice, to confirm his name and to plead guilty to the charge of preventing the decent and lawful burial of his wife. He was essentially sentenced into care: a short suspended prison sentence and a two-year drug rehabilitation program.

  He had made a statement to the police which was read to the court. He was devastated and traumatised by Eva’s death, he said. He did not have a coherent recollection of the events leading up to her death. He had never wished her any harm, nor had he ever done her any harm, or supplied her with drugs.

  “I did not feel able to confront the reality of her death…I tried to carry on as if her death had not happened. I batted away inquiries about her. I took some measures to reduce the smell.”

  “I believe in the period since she died I have suffered some form of breakdown.”

  *

  I talk to my psychoanalyst about my brother’s ability to carry on as if Eva’s death had not happened. He interprets it as an extreme form of splitting. I hear him on the telephone, getting up and walking to the bookcase, getting a book out. He is looking for a particular case study, he says, by the analyst Herbert Rosenfeld, about a patient, Caroline, who was also in analytic training.

  Herbert Rosenfeld was born in Germany in 1910, and left for Britain, a Jewish refugee, in 1935. He was already a doctor, but had to retake his medical degree in Britain, and eventually specialised in psychoanalysis, trained by Melanie Klein. There is a photograph of him on the Melanie Klein Trust site: he sits, an old man, in a crumpled white V-necked sweater, a slightly wry smile. Why is this picture so compelling to me? Is it the sense that he could have made it right, this sorry story; that he could have rescued Hans and Eva and said wise and memorable things to all of us?

>   Rosenfeld’s 1987 book, Impasse and Interpretation, is about the problem of impasse in the psychoanalytic process, when the conversation between patient and analyst, and the interest, the spark, transference and countertransference, wane. This waning is really the subject of the whole book, and there are many other case studies in it, some of them as dramatic as the case of Caroline. Rosenfeld’s thesis is that these impasses can, if properly analysed, reveal something interesting about the patient’s psyche. Conversely, if the impasse is not dealt with carefully it can become dangerous, and detrimental to the patient’s mental health. The analyst must pay attention to an impasse, therefore, and handle it with care.

  Caroline was in analytic training, both a patient and a student. She seemed happy and stable, though she was perhaps, he writes, “slightly manic,” and arrived with a self-diagnosis of “schizoid personality.” There were really only two incidents that worried him: Caroline thought that the nurses in the clinic where she worked spied on her, suspecting her of drug taking, and she was dismissed from her work in the clinic, because, she said, of some “misunderstanding” or “misrepresentation.”

  Caroline’s ambition, in which she eventually succeeded, was to become director of a clinic for drug addicts. But her assistant there reported her to the police: she had, he claimed, sold drug prescriptions to addicts for large sums of money. Her solicitor investigated and found the charge to be true. He approached Rosenfeld, asking him to support a defence of schizophrenia in court. Caroline, meanwhile, claimed to be both sane and innocent in letters from detention—a tricky defence in the face of the overwhelming evidence. “This put me in a difficult position,” Rosenfeld writes, with beguiling frankness.

  Then, astonishingly, Caroline tried to hire a hitman from prison to kill the assistant who had reported her to the police. She was placed under psychiatric observation at a mental hospital, where she was found to be sane. After being found guilty in the subsequent court case, however, feelings of acute persecution and disturbance developed. Schizophrenia was eventually diagnosed after all, and Caroline was detained, potentially indefinitely, in a mental hospital.

  Rosenfeld came to believe, he wrote, that Caroline had a “destructive, murderous, and criminal part of her personality which was both so completely split off, and, eventually, so powerful and so serious that I came to know about it (along with her husband, and, indeed, in some ways Caroline herself) only through a newspaper story and the intervention of the police.”

  —

  If Caroline was a drug addict, Rosenfeld doesn’t say so, but whether or not she was, drugs play a part in this story. His ambivalence about the degree of Caroline’s moral culpability is of course inherent in psychoanalysis, but it also reflects our confusion about innocence or guilt in the context of drugs. We haven’t agreed, as a society, how far drug addicts are guilty of their many and varied trespasses against the law, their families, and social norms. You can’t be found both insane and guilty—you are one or the other. Insanity rules out culpability; culpability rules out insanity. But addicts have a foot in each camp, and in that confusion, that fog of mental shrugs, that bleak no man’s land between our perception of individual self-determination and the mental illness of cravings and compulsion, people die, children are neglected, and families split apart.

  I am not suggesting that defining the border between innocence and guilt, or compulsion and free will, is easy, either philosophically or legally. I support the principles of human rights, and I am aware of the dubious history of many psychiatric diagnoses and treatments, some of them forced. Homosexuality was regarded as a serious mental disorder in the United States until 1973. More recently, the discredited school of therapy which was based on excavating “recovered memories” of sexual abuse from patients (mainly women), who exhibited symptoms which had come to be strongly associated with sexual abuse, led to the prosecution of more than a hundred alleged abusers (mainly men), most or all of whom were probably innocent.

  Note the “most or all.” I wrote it automatically, in case some of them in fact were guilty. This is why the stigma will be with them for life. No one will ever know whether their innocence has been, or can be, established beyond doubt. All one can know is that the methodology of recovered memory therapy has been discredited. But haven’t we all learnt, don’t we all believe, that the absence of evidence is not the same as the evidence of absence?

  I was a member of an NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) fundraising board when the Cleveland case happened. When I expressed concern about the case to a staff member—the dawn raids, the intrusive and uncertain tests—he said that there was no smoke without fire.

  No smoke without fire. No matter that according to law people are innocent until proven guilty. No matter that whether the parents were guilty or not the state also abused the children by subjecting them to dawn raids and the dilatation test.

  Recovered memory therapy ended (or should have ended) in the early 1990s, when professor Elizabeth Loftus at the University of Washington devised a series of psychological experiments which showed how easy it is to implant false memories by suggestion. But the idea of repressed memories lingers on.

  —

  Perhaps there can be no true criminal guilt in the psychoanalytic context. Most references to guilt in the psychoanalytic literature are about neurotic preoccupations with forgotten (or repressed) childhood observations or transgressions. People who feel that kind of guilt are innocent by definition. What makes Rosenfeld’s case study of Caroline so interesting is that she really was guilty, and he didn’t quite know what to make of that guilt. He had to decide whether or not to support a schizophrenia defence, but he was also facing the broader question of how you diagnose and treat someone who seems sane, and who claims to be innocent, while acting so criminally.

  This case has all the ingredients of addiction: drugs, denial, paranoia, greed, and criminality. Addiction is nearly always situated in that borderland between criminality and disease; between sincerity and insincerity; between honesty and lies; between pleasure and pain.

  Rosenfeld’s implication is that Caroline herself was partially unaware of her actions: he trusted her story. But how can you trust anyone’s story? Every story, including mine, is an enactment of what we wish to be true, an edited version of our selves.

  I think of Madame Bovary’s feverish talks with her lover, Léon, about death, about illness and suffering, about how they both long for “the quiet of the grave.” Emma and Léon, Flaubert wrote, devised for each other “…an ideal rearrangement of their past. Language is indeed a machine that continually amplifies the emotions.”

  —

  Language is indeed a machine that continually amplifies the emotions.

  —

  Psychoanalytic theory postulates that sons harbour a concealed wish to kill (actually or symbolically) their fathers. In popular culture, this is turned on its head: successful fathers are said to doom their sons to failure. “In the shadow of greatness God takes a rest,” the cruel joke goes. It’s a harsh concept, either way.

  Fathers and sons. Think of Hamlet, perpetually in psychic motion, leaning towards acting, double meanings and mixed messages. The play is about generational clashes, surveillance of the young, uncertainty of culpability, loss of mind, suicide. We know those issues. They are as current now as they were then.

  Freud, conflating text and life, analysed Hamlet’s ambivalence as a concealed identification with his father’s murderer. His own repressed desire to kill his father has been realised:

  Thus the loathing which should drive him on to revenge is replaced in him by self-reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish.

  The French psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham wrote a sequel to Shakespeare’s play, The Phantom of Hamlet or The Sixth Act, about the riddle of the ghost—he saw a complex hidden political drama in the play, which Hamlet, unconsciously mot
ivated by filial duty and respect, refused to see.

  But what if Shakespeare didn’t intend us to believe in the device of the ghost? What if Hamlet’s uncle and mother did not conspire to kill his father? Assume their innocence, read the play, and watch Hamlet wreak havoc with his delusions.

  Or take Thomas Vinterberg’s film, Festen, about wealth, power, and sexual abuse. Someone told the story on an emotional call-in radio show, and Vinterberg assumed that it was true. But it turned out it wasn’t true. The caller had created a fictional narrative. In real life, his father was innocent. The father protagonist in the film—conservative, racist, abusive—was a figment of the imagination. We know the type. But watch Festen knowing the father to be innocent, tweak the script, and see a troubled son destroying a family.

  —

  Most people believe that mental pain must have a cause which is proportional to the pain. But that may not be so—our psyches are not necessarily so finely balanced in terms of cause and effect. And yet behind any story of compulsion and addiction, there is still a hinterland of suffering. For one thing, to act in secret, as almost all addicts do, is to fear exposure and some form of intervention. But the secrecy and fear of consequences is only part of it. You can trust the fact of suffering, even if you can’t necessarily trust the particular narrative crystallising around the suffering. Only the subtext is reliable, that which is not stated, the distress which is so obvious even as it is denied by the addicts and sometimes also denied by those around them who are blinded by their own powerful psychological mechanisms, their own leanings towards enabling and collusion.

  That tendency to look the other way when it comes to addiction, the tendency to call it and then not call it, to diagnose it and then undiagnose it, is so pervasive. Addiction is a sensitive subject. Even DSM-5, the American diagnostic handbook of mental disorders, ties itself up in knots about language:

  Note that the word addiction is not applied as a diagnostic term in this classification, although it is in common usage in many countries to describe severe problems related to compulsive and habitual use of substances. The more neutral substance use disorder is used to describe the wide range of the disorder, from a mild form to a severe state of chronically relapsing, compulsive drug taking. Some clinicians will choose to use the word addiction to describe more extreme presentations, but the word is omitted from the official DSM-5 substance use disorder diagnostic terminology because of its uncertain definition and its potentially negative connotation.