Strongly drunk Z. met a 60-year-old woman. I asked what time it was. She looked at her watch and answered. And she made a remark to him: so young and you drink so much. This phrase turned out to be fatal for the lady. In the psyche of a young man, a switch seemed to have worked, and he instantly turned into a savage. He grabbed the knife he carried with him and stabbed the woman in the stomach. She tried to run. But he caught up with her and began to hack the unfortunate back. He hid the corpse in the bushes, and returned to the crime scene a few hours later - already sober and with a sled. He carefully took the body to a safe place, butchered it, and then (sorry for the details) with an ax and a knife cut out part of the chest, muscles, thighs and put it in a backpack. Returning home, he froze the contents of the backpack, and then boiled, fried and ate for several weeks … From the point of view of psychiatrists, Z. turned out to be sane.
This quite barbaric story was told by Anatoly Tkachenko, who heads the laboratory of forensic sexology at the Serbian Center for Forensic Psychiatry. According to him, for physicians there is no such disease as cannibalism, but there is a certain behavior that can be caused by completely different reasons and only sometimes by psychopathology.
According to Tkachenko, it was with cases of cannibalism that forensic psychiatry began. In 1825, when famine broke out in France, a lady who worked as a servant waited for her master to leave the house, killed, and then boiled and ate his child. Since she did not show signs of mental disorder, it was very difficult for the judges to make a decision: her behavior looked too incredible from the point of view of generally accepted norms. After a long debate, the judges still decided that she was healthy, and therefore guilty.
Anatoly Larenok told a peculiar story of this plan in the article "In Ice Captivity" ("Trud", 08.24.96). The main character of this material, being separated from the people after the plane crash, had to eat two of her children who died of hunger. That, however, did not prevent her from getting married again in the future, giving birth again and leading a prosperous family life.
There are many known cases when prisoners, escaping from prison, took a companion with them in order to use it later as a means against starvation. Such plots, by the way, are reflected in the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov.
Similar stories that happened in the last century forced scientists to seriously tackle the problem. First of all, they found out that eating their own kind is widespread in the animal kingdom. Seagulls, for example, if their nests are closer than 1.5–2 meters from each other, begin to use their chicks as food. Indeed, the nature of the female praying mantis has endowed with terrible deceit. Very often they eat the male right during copulation and thus receive food for bearing offspring.
Ethnographic evidence suggests that cannibalism was widespread among ancient people. In some African cultures, it is still found today.
Humanity, civilizing, gradually got rid of barbaric needs. In the mythology of Ancient Egypt it is said that the god Osiris has the honor of bringing people out of the "semi-wild state when they ate each other." The well-known psychoanalyst K. Jung believed that the so-called initial rites of ancient people, symbolizing the transition from adolescence to adulthood, also carried an element of awareness and overcoming the animal, cannibalistic, in fact, the beginning. The natives of the East African coast still perceive men who have not undergone circumcision as semi-animals. In their view, there is something similar to modern psychologists, who believe: if a person has not realized his animal nature (which includes cannibalism),then it ultimately turns out to be predominant and is fraught with a breakthrough in the most "inadequate" forms. It is believed that cannibalistic elements are present in human nature, but in civilized culture they are not realized, but, so to speak, are symbolized. The simplest example of symbolization is the widespread appeal to a child: "So cute, I would have eaten you …"
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As practice shows, even people with high moral qualities usually have a hard time choosing between unnatural cannibalism and the desire to survive. The feeling of hunger happens to win. In some cases, mental illness is the reason that throws a person "down" the evolutionary ladder. For example, many schizophrenics have passed through the Serbsky Center, convinced that if they eat a person, they will acquire some special qualities. That is, guided by the same motives as the aborigines who once ate Admiral Cook …
But the greatest danger, according to experts, is represented by those people around us who, due to their emotional underdevelopment, are completely incapable of seeing in others the same people as themselves. The risk group includes homeless people living next to us, alcoholics. For many of them, the line that separates man from animal has already been crossed.
Let us return to Z. In principle, his pathological danger to others could well have been "calculated" earlier, believes A. Tkachenko. Our "hero" was born and raised in an unfavorable family, his parents practically did not raise him. He was expelled from the sixth grade for academic failure. Among his peers, he did not enjoy authority, he began to drink bitter early. Perhaps even then he had a strong sense of his own inferiority and the need to vent his anger “to the whole world” on someone. As he himself admitted, already in adolescence he loved to strangle cats, first infuriating them. At the same time, he liked to look them in the eyes and "see how the soul flies away", while experiencing a "feeling of power."
Family life has failed. According to his wife, he never worked anywhere. He brought money from his mother, which he knocked out of her with his fists, and gave it away for wages. As soon as the spouse found out about this, she immediately filed for divorce. Well, Z. gradually turned into a bum. Albeit with an apartment. With a drinking companion, they would catch dogs and then roast and eat them.
Neighbors characterized him in a sober state as withdrawn, calm and even kind, but as soon as he drank it began: from time to time he appeared on the street completely naked, ran "like an animal", squatting on the sidewalk. There was an episode when he pestered the girl with the demand: "Give me your liver!.." I think that even the savages who have seen such a subject would not have aroused sympathy. But our contemporaries, to some extent coming into contact with him, somehow endured …
People like Z. are not so isolated. No organized measures are being taken against them. Therefore, just in case, it is worth asking sometimes the question: is it a savage hiding in a homeless person peacefully sleeping on your staircase?
From the book: “XX century. Chronicle of the inexplicable. Opening after opening Nikolay Nepomniachtchi