ABSTRACT
In this book, I am seeking to identify those conditions within human emotional psychology – one might better say, those emotional conditions – that motivate certain individuals to commit homicide, suicide, or both, and that govern the way these individuals express their feelings en route to such drastic choices. Beginning with the Preface and continuing through the Epilogue, readers will find themselves immersed in the psychology of the innate affects, which provide all human beings, both normal and disordered, with their primary motivations and the basis for all later differentiation of their emotions. As author, I have found it important to explain to readers this scaffolding from which the fresco delineating normal and pathological affects that I will be asking them to contemplate has been painted. Like my late elder brother, the Jungian analyst L. H. Stewart, with whom I was fortunate to collaborate for a number of decades, I have long worked on the problem of emotion, and learned from experience the importance of developing a notion of affect as having an archetypal substrate, innate in the human species.
