Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Strange Case of Thomas Quick, The: The Swedish Serial Killer & the Psychoanalyst Who Created Him
Author: JOSEFSSON DAN
Illustrator: PATERSON ANNA (TRANS)
Format: PAPERBACK
Publication date: 01/10/2015
Imprint: GRANTA
Price: $33.00
Publishing status: Active
In 1991 Sture Bergwall, a petty criminal and drug addict, botched an armed robbery so badly that he was deemed to be more in need of therapy than punishment. He was committed to Sater, Sweden’s equivalent of Broadmoor, and began a course of psychotherapy and benzodiazepines. During the therapy, he began to recover memories so vicious and traumatic that he had repressed them: sickening scenes of childhood abuse, incest and torture, which in turn inspired a series of brutal murders in his adult years. He eventually confessed to raping, killing and even eating more than 30 victims…Embracing the process of self-discovery, he took on a new name: Thomas Quick. He was brought to trial and convicted of eight murders…In 2008, his confessions were proven to be entirely fabricated and every single conviction was overturned…In this gripping book, Dan Josefsson uncovers the tangled web of deceptions and delusions that emerged within the Quick team. He reveals how a sick prisoner and mental patient, addled with prescription drugs and desperate for validation, allowed himself to become a martyr figure for a sect-like group of analysts who practised the controversial method of ‘recovered’ memory therapy. The group’s leader, psychoanalyst Margit Norell, hoped that her vast case study of Thomas Quick would make history… And the more lies Quick told, the better he was treated: the supposedly most dangerous serial killer and sexual predator in Sweden was practically free to come and go as he wanted…This is a study of psychoanalytic ambition and delusion, and the scandalous miscarriage of justice that it led to, written by one of Sweden’s foremost investigative journalists.
ISBN: 9781846275760
Dimension: 234mm X 156mm
Pages: 528