Les Mutilés de Hermann Ungar : approche psychopathologique et criminologique

Abstract

Published in 1923, The Maimed by Hermann Ungar (1893–1929) is an expressionist work inspired by Freudian thought. The novel is set around three principal male characters. The first, Franz Polzer, is a modest bank clerk who suffers from serious obsessional–compulsive disorder and severe sexual aversion. A bachelor, Polzer lives in a lodging house and lives a solitary existence with ritualization of his dialy life. The second person in the drama, Karl Fanta, suffers from a terrible skin disorder that covers him in purulent abscesses and leads to the amputation of three limbs. A member of a rich Jewish family, he is a childhood friend of Franz Polzer. The third character, Sonntag, is a former butcher who has become Karl Fanta's personal nurse. A robust man, Sonntag is full of original religious ideology and propounds perpetual expiation and right and wrong in his quest to approach Christ. The perpetrator of two premeditated homicides in women, Sonntag proves to be a dangerous perverse sadomasochist, in whom crime justifies penitence and the need for punishment induces criminal acts. In this analysis of The Maimed, the authors offer an interpretation based on the psychoanalysis of the mental disorders and behavior of the three characters in the story: incest, obsessive–compulsive disorder, fear of the female sex, homosexuality, criminal sadism, masochism, homicide and criminal recidivism.