The Monsters Lurking In Our Heads
As children, they always told us that monsters only existed in fairy tales. No one told us they were real people and walked around in the middle of the day. As the person who first and foremost captures you, abuses you and destroys your self-esteem. As parents who deny love to their children. And also the terrorist who takes innocent lives or the politician who starts an unnecessary war.
If there is one thing we all know, it is that words are important. They make labels that are not always completely true. The term “monster”, for example, has both a fictional and literary connotation. However, this does not prevent us from being able to legally use it to describe actions which, in our opinion, can only be explained and are merely evil.
However, it must be said that there is no scientific basis for this concept. There are no textbooks with a chapter on “How to Interview an Evil Person or a Monster”. There are also no manuals to help us identify them. But let us face it, it is almost impossible not to use this word when describing behavior that seems to be completely devoid of our concept of “humanity”.
Experts in forensic psychology say that the first time the term “monster” was used to describe a person by the police was in 1790, in London. Authorities searched for a killer they had never met before. Something perverse and inconceivable that had caused panic in London’s neighborhoods for almost two years. We’re talking about Jack the Ripper, of course.
Monsters of flesh and blood, people without humanity
The word “monster” still retains its original implications. The supernatural is combined with evil to harm us. Therefore, every time we use this term about someone, what we are actually doing is stripping them of all human qualities.
At the beginning of the article we said that this word is nothing more than a simple label with no scientific substance behind it. However, some experts in creating crime profiles have made this mistake on occasion. An example is what happened in the 1970s in the United States with Ted Bundy.
In the world of crime, Bundy is the most ruthless serial killer in history. In the interviews, he said that he had killed 100 women. The authorities believed him, simply because of his cold cruelty, even though they found only 36 of his victims.
Bundy was a glorious and admirable man in appearance. He had a bachelor’s degree in psychology, was an aspiring politician and was constantly involved in social activities. He seemed like a perfect example of a winner, someone who had a life of success ahead of him.
But after the disappearance of dozens of college students, it was discovered that the name Ted Bundy was behind these and many more barbaric acts that were impossible to understand. Brutal murders that left even the authorities speechless. They marked him as a “monster”, not only because of the atrocities he committed, but because of the complex results of the various psychological tests he was sent to.
They came to the conclusion that Bundy was not a psychotic or a drug addict, nor an alcoholic. He did not suffer from a brain injury or any mental illness. Ted Bundy just liked to carry out the evil.
There’s another place where monsters live – in our heads
We know that our world is sometimes like the disturbing paintings of Brueghel the Elder. In his paintings, the evil is hidden in the everyday life of the masses in the city and in the side streets. However , the monsters that can harm us do not live only in our surroundings. The place where they are more frequent is in our own heads.
Sometimes our fears, our emotions and our thoughts can catch us in a very dark place. A place where we are lost and suffocated by our own demons. There are authors who have managed to represent the journey where you make contact with your own monsters. They seek to get to know them, defeat them and return to the surface again, free from their shackles.
Dante did it with Virgil in The Divine Comedy , Lewis Carroll did it with Alice, and Maurice Sendak did it with Max in Til Huttetuenes land .
Sendak’s book is a little gem in children’s literature. His story invites us to make many different reflections regardless of our age and background. Everyone can at some point be a victim of the “inner claws”, where the monsters drag us to strange places.
To the land of Huttetuenes
This short book allows us to take a journey that holds the child’s hand. The fairy tale reminds us that we sometimes have to visit the wild surreal realm where our strange creatures live. But we must not let it stay there, we must pass it. But not until we have let out cries, played without rules, become angry, laugh, cry and everything else we need to do to defeat these monsters.
We will leave our footprints and rusty crowns in the monster land, and we will rise again. We will feel free from falling into the darkness. Feel cleansed and happy to come back to life again, strengthened. Because the monsters they told us about when we were children did not really exist. We can not always control those around us – the monsters disguised as “angels”. But let’s be brave enough to scare away the monsters that pop up in our heads from time to time.
