Homicide

Homicide occupies a distinctive and under-examined position in the depth-psychology corpus, appearing not as a primary clinical category but as a boundary concept through which questions of moral responsibility, psychic pollution, intentionality, and the collective unconscious are negotiated. The most sustained treatment comes from classical scholarship — Adkins on Greek values, Plato’s Laws, Cairns on aidos — where homicide serves as the test case for distinguishing voluntary from involuntary transgression, and where the archaic concept of miasma (pollution) frames killing as a metaphysical contagion independent of intention. Hillman engages homicide at the edge of depth-psychological inquiry: in Suicide and the Soul he situates suicide within the legal taxonomy of homicide, noting that English common law alone among Western traditions treated self-killing as without justification; in The Soul’s Code he theorizes extreme violence — murder as access to the suprahuman — through the daimonic lens. Worden and Herman address homicide’s aftermath as a distinctive grief and trauma context, where traumatic imagery blocks mourning. Hari’s journalistic corpus renders homicide as the structural product of drug prohibition. Across these registers, the corpus persistently asks whether the killer is cause or instrument, whether pollution attaches to the act or the intent, and whether homicidal destruction expresses something archetypal rather than merely pathological.

In the library 17 passages

when Plato turns to accidental homicide, he says… The most significant words, however, are ‘with his own hand’. They imply that, in turning from the above-mentioned cases which carry no penalty we have now come to a new category in which the killer is considered to have killed with his own hand

Adkins argues that Plato’s homicide legislation, like the earlier Tetralogies, turns on the causality criterion of ‘killing with one’s own hand,’ revealing that moral intentionality is secondary to the metaphysical fact of physical causation.

Arthur W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis

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The legal tradition in England has held that of all kinds of homicide, suicide alone was without justification or excuse.

Hillman identifies the common-law classification of suicide as uniquely unjustifiable within the taxonomy of homicide, using this as evidence that Western law subordinates internal justice to social and theological authority.

Hillman, James, Suicide and the Soul, 1964thesis

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‘pollution’ in cases of homicide is related to the idea of the dead as near and malignant… ‘pollution’ is a much more complex phenomenon.

Adkins refines Rohde’s thesis that homicide-pollution derives solely from the dead man’s anger, insisting the phenomenon encompasses a broader psychic and social complex than vengeance alone.

Arthur W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis

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no distinction is drawn between deliberate homicide, homicide with provocation or without premeditation, accidental homicide, and (possibly) attempted homicide. The reason is clear.

Adkins establishes that Homeric society treated all modes of killing as equivalent in terms of social consequence, because the relevant fact was the disruption caused rather than the perpetrator’s intention.

Arthur W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis

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removing the responsibility for punishment in cases of homicide from clan to state, as Plutarch implies himself by connecting them with the Kylon affair and with Drakon’s homicide laws.

Alexiou traces how restrictions on women’s funeral lamentation were structurally linked to the transfer of homicide jurisdiction from kin-group vengeance to state law, implicating ritual in the political history of legal responsibility.

Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974supporting

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Justifiable or excusable homicide. Plato and Athenian law agree in making homicide justifiable or excusable in the following cases: (1) at the games; (2) in war; (3) if the person slain was found doing violence to a free woman; (4) if a doctor’s patient dies; (5) in the case of a robber; (6) in self-defence.

Plato’s Laws catalogues the legally recognized categories of excusable or justified homicide, revealing the normative moral architecture that determines when killing is culturally sanctioned.

Plato, Laws, -348supporting

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‘pollution’ incurred by homicide is a thing so terrible that anyone so ‘polluted’… What he has done, not his intentions, is all that is taken into account.

Adkins demonstrates through Oedipus that homicidal pollution in tragic discourse is entirely deed-based, making moral intention irrelevant to the metaphysical contamination that drives ritual and legal response.

Arthur W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting

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Draco was able to set limits on this non-moral phenomenon and restrict the field in which moral judgements did not apply.

Adkins reads Draco’s homicide legislation as the first successful juridical containment of the pre-moral pollution-concept, creating a bounded space within which intentional distinctions could begin to operate.

Arthur W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting

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Achilles’ reaction on first seeing Priam… is compared to that of those who received an exiled homicide into their presence. Both the homicide in the simile and Priam himself are suppliants, and some kind of awe or astonishment is the reaction they arouse.

Cairns shows that the exiled homicide functions in Homer as a figure of profound liminal ambivalence, eliciting the same aidos-charged astonishment as the royal suppliant, linking pollution, supplication, and the psychology of honor.

Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993supporting

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the institution of aidesis (pardon) in Athenian homicide law, by which an exiled homicide could be allowed to return, if granted the pardon of the relatives of the deceased.

Cairns connects the psychological concept of aidos as forgiveness to the formal Athenian legal institution of aidesis, showing that the affective and juridical dimensions of homicide-response were structurally intertwined.

Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993supporting

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the prosecution only asks that the jury should ‘exclude the homicide from those things from which the law excludes him’, and not allow the whole city to be ‘polluted’ by him.

Adkins analyzes the Tetralogies to show that the legal remedy for accidental homicide was communal purification through exclusion, not punishment per se, foregrounding pollution over penology.

Arthur W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting

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Certain deaths such as homicide, mass shootings, and other violent deaths can evoke trauma responses as well as grief responses… posttraumatic stress symptoms should be clinically addressed before the grief work can be done.

Worden establishes homicide as a clinically distinct category of sudden death in which traumatic imagery actively forecloses grief processing, requiring sequential rather than integrated therapeutic intervention.

J William Worden, ABPP, Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy A Handbook for the, 2018supporting

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Something fundamentally human is missing… principal and more basic is that erotic lacuna, that cold absence.

Hillman theorizes extreme violence, including murder, through Guggenbuhl-Craig’s concept of missing eros rather than the presence of shadow, locating homicidal behavior in a structural absence of human feeling.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting

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Breaking all commandments frees you from human bondage, opening a door to a suprahuman condition where devil and divinity are indistinguishable.

Hillman, drawing on Katz and Ricoeur, argues that ‘senseless’ homicidal acts carry archetypal meaning as transgressive rituals that collapse the boundary between the mundane and the sacred.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting

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Dick Hickcock, who killed the Clutter family in cold blood, said: ‘I thought a person could get a lot of glory out of killing. The word glory seemed to keep going through my mind.’

Hillman uses Hickcock’s confession to illustrate how the daimonic drive for recognition and glory can manifest in homicide when legitimate channels of individuation are absent.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting

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All states legislate under the idea that there are two classes of actions, the voluntary and the involuntary, but there is great confusion about them in the minds of men.

Plato articulates the foundational legislative problem — the voluntary/involuntary distinction — that underlies all ancient jurisprudence of homicide, though without naming it directly here.

Plato, Laws, -348aside

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