Abstract
Jonas, sixty-four, had never had a problem with the police and was reputed to be polite and calm. How then to explain the sudden outburst of violence when, on a given night, he shot a rifle at police officers? No one was harmed, but the perpetrator was arrested. It was in prison, a few hours after the incident, that Englebert, at the time a prison psychologist, met him. Englebert was also able to interview some of Jonas's family and friends, all of whom were astonished by the event. This book, written by Englebert in collaboration with philosopher Grégory Cormann, analyzes the case not so much to find an ultimate explanation for Jonas's act as to show the variety of ways in which one can frame the man and his actions.The most common way of framing the event, the one most of Jonas's acquaintances have employed, is to link the violence with madness, but temporary insanity is not really an explanation. To say that Jonas went mad is no more than saying that his violence was incomprehensible. Still, to assert that he was mad when he fired the rifle qualifies as an interpretation in that it splits the act from the rest of the man's life. By insisting on that separation, kin and friends unburden themselves of any feelings of guilt they may experience at not having been able to prevent the act.Jonas's wife has another version of the event. She connects it with the recent death of his mother. Jonas was very close to his mother: he had dined with her every night of his life, even after his marriage thirty years before she died. Indeed even after her death, a month before the episode with the police, he had continued to go every night to her house. He wanted to carry on his lifelong habit, without change. A dispute about the house with his twenty-year-old son led to the encounter with the police: Jonas had added to his will a provision that his son would inherit the house but would be prohibited from ever selling it. The son found this prohibition unacceptable, and their argument came rapidly to blows. Out of fear, Jonas's wife called the police. Jonas went to the attic and brought down his late father's rifle. The son fled, but Jonas remained on the doorstep, waiting for the police.All the data presented in this book appear to confirm that Jonas suffered from a “major depressive disorder with melancholic features,” characterized by strong attachment to order and regularity. In this interpretation, the shot was a desperate act, aimed somehow at precluding change. Hence the act marked not a break in the man's life but signaled continuation of a long-term disorder.Englebert and Cormann, however, advance a third version—the most audacious, the most original. They compare the shot (a moment of high excitation) to the electroconvulsive therapy sometimes used to treat manic depression. It seems that electroshock produces a temporary disruption in the brain that is followed by a higher neuroplasticity that can help patients to recover. By putting himself in a perilous situation, Jonas produced an excitation that could disrupt his neural circuitry. In the authors’ interpretation, the act suggests neither temporary insanity nor the symptom of a long-term illness, but a first step toward recovery. The rifle was an improvised instrument for self-treatment.The book reflects Jean-Paul Sartre's claim according to which “it is perhaps sufficient to seek the explanation for a crime in the social situation and the criminal's psychopathic makeup, but only a poet can elucidate its human meaning.” Englebert and Cormann prove to be poets by showing how Jonas could free himself from self-bondage.