Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs

In Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs the pathology of the serial murderer Jame Gumb is slowly, suspensefully, revealed by a combination of hints from the mad psychiatrist Dr. Lecter, the memories of Lecter's patient Raspail, the deductive reasoning of the FBI characters, and sections of narrative that feature the actions and thoughts of the Gumb character. A brief outline of his "case" precedes critical analysis of the description of the disorder and a discussion of the author's theoretical bias as it emerges in the novel in the presentation of the disorder and the description of its causes. Harris' sources for the case of Jame Gumb appear, however, to range over news accounts of numerous cases, to touch on various psychological approaches, to try to incorporate pop-psychology about the beast within us all, and to include far too many different types of behavior to create a truly consistent character. When Gumb's behavior is compared with that of other serial murderers it becomes apparent that Harris has incorporated too many bits and pieces of different cases and tied them together with some notions about paranoid behavior based on psychoanalytic theory which do not support the variety of behaviors described.

Jame Gumb (the name was a mistake on his birth certificate but he insisted on being called Jame) was the son of a woman who was a failure in her attempt to establish herself in a career as a model or actor. Following her failure she went into "an alcoholic

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and he was driven by "a wish to recreate the form and presence of his dead mother" (Grixti 92). Others have argued that Gein's extreme hatred of his mother and abuse by his father reflected a humiliation that was transferred "into a later quest for power" (Hale 19). Gein was also remarkably meticulous in his approach to preserving skins and body parts -- a prominent feature of Gumb's behavior. These examples filled out many of the horrifying elements in Gumb's character. But the psychological explanations of his behavior, while they are rather diverse, appear to have been derived largely from classical psychoanalytic theory which treated paranoia as a narcissistic disorder. Such disorders were judged to be the result of fixation in early development "during which the self is its own love-object" (Rycroft 577). But later theorists believe that the over-estimation of the self that is a prominent feature of paranoid delusional states is "a compensatory reaction to humiliation in infancy and childhood" (Rycroft 577). As originally developed, the psychoanalytic theory of paranoia was based on Freud's analysis of the case of Daniel Paul Schreber. Schreber's extreme paranoia was susceptible to extensive study because Schreber w

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