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 decline" and Gumb was remanded to foster homes from the age of two (Harris 357). When he was ten his grandparents took him away from an unsatisfactory home and two years later he killed them. He learned to be a tailor in his time in a psychiatric hospital. He had an extremely erratic job record but worked from time to time in the clothing industry. Dr. Lecter's patient, Raspail reported that Gumb had killed people during this period. His description of the ...