Abstract
On July 11, 2011, a monstrous act took place in an area widely considered to be one of the safest in the city of New York. That Monday, Liebby Kletzky, an 8-year-old from an ultra-Orthodox hassidic community in Brooklyn, lost his way while walking home from a day camp. He ran into Levi Aron, a 35-year-old hardware store clerk, who abducted the child, then drugged and smothered him. Police found dismembered parts of Liebby’s body in Aron’s refrigerator as well as in a dumpster more than 2 miles away. Public response to the heinous crime was strident, as the following comments from an NBC.com article attest:
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As in all moral panics, an accusation is enough to destroy a person’s life. Hysteria trumps evidence.
Carol Tavris
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It is interesting to note the similarity between the hysteria exhibited by young girls that precipitated the Salem witch-hunts in the late seventeenth century with the hysteria exhibited by women during the nineteenth century that led to Freud’s development—and later recantation—of his Seduction Theory. During the nineteenth century, a number of researchers studied hysteria, a catch-all term used to describe emotional disturbances among young women. Women suffering from what was diagnosed as hysteria complained of anxiety, hallucinations, fear, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. In 1896, Freud published his paper “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” in which he advanced the Seduction Theory, which pointed to childhood molestation as a leading cause of hysteria in later life. However, as Judith Herman notes, “Hysteria was so common among women that if his patients’ stories were true, and if his history were correct, he would be forced to conclude what he called ‘perverted acts against children’ were endemic” (1992, p. 14). “[Freud] went on to develop a theory of human development in which the inferiority and mendacity of women are fundamental points of doctrine” (Herman 1992, p. 19).
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Douard, J., Schultz, P. (2013). The Sex Offender: A New Folk Devil. In: Monstrous Crimes and the Failure of Forensic Psychiatry. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 53. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5279-5_5
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