Jessica Davies’s heady cocktail of sex and pain

Jessica Davies, 30-year-old niece of Britain's junior defence minister Quentin Davies, was sentenced this week to 15 years in jail for fatally stabbing Olivier Mugnier, a 24-year-old unemployed graduate nicknamed 'Funtime', whom she picked up at an Irish pub in Paris for a night of drugs and sex on 11 November 2007. When she realised what she had done, she telephoned emergency services and was found covered in blood, cradling Mugnier's dead body. She told police, "It's me who did it. I don't know why, but I did it... I am a monster."
 
During her trial in Versailles, Davies made no attempt to deny the murder but told the jury that she had no memory of her attack except "the sensation of the knife going in".

The story unfolded that after inviting Mugnier back to her flat, they tried to have sex but were unable to do so because of the drugs and alcohol they had both consumed. Davies then took a knife from her kitchen and while Mugnier was sitting naked on her bed, she thought of cutting him but lost control. "I just wanted to cut him a little, but (the blade) went in by itself," she explained to the court. Mugnier suffered multiple stab wounds to his throat and upper body.
 
While experts told the court that Davies's consumption of alcohol, various anti-depressant pills and cannabis would have made her aggressive, this is only a partial explanation of her behaviour.

In court, Monique Henry, Davies's mother, described her daughter as "an adolescent who was disturbed by family difficulties" and who was, as an adult, "unable to face day-to-day life".

Davies was clearly depressed. She had split up with her boyfriend of four years, she had failed at her modelling career, she "mechanically changed friends every year", she was unable to control her drinking, and prior to Mugnier's death she had started cutting her arms and legs and had attempted suicide with the same knife she used in her attack on Mugnier.
 
Davies was also described as having had a troubled and dysfunctional childhood. Her mother seems to attribute much of her daughter's distress to the fact that her father had been absent through much of her childhood, eventually leaving the family to live abroad with his mistress.

However, Davies's symptoms suggest that she may well have a personality disorder, as her defence argued, that has its roots in infancy and difficulties in her primary relationship with her mother. Davies, on her own admission confessed, "I don't know how to bond with other people".
 
Cutting indicates a serious disturbance and is usually associated with extreme alienation and dissociation of feelings. Cutting and feeling pain is a way of confirming that the person exists in the world. The pain, even though it is self-inflicted, alleviates the stress of being alone. The pain becomes linked with the pleasure of existing and provides an illusion of love as well as a necessary discharge of anxiety.
 
The profound insecurity that is evident in this form of self-destructive behaviour invariably points to a relationship between the mother and infant that is inconsistent and experienced as unbearably painful by the infant.

This may happen, for example, if a mother is unable to understand or respond to her baby's emotions to such an extent that the baby is left having to manage overwhelming feelings of anger, distress and fear on her own. For a baby this can be equivalent to what we can imagine as being left in the middle of the ocean at the mercy of the elements.
 
In order to survive this early trauma, the baby begins to take refuge in physical sensations of pain that not only provide a kind of life raft but are a channel for the baby's angry and aggressive feelings that are also overwhelming.

The traumatised baby will direct anger against herself in order to ensure that she does not destroy or damage the mother. In the baby's mind, her mother's emotional unavailability has been caused by her and this creates a powerful sense of unconscious guilt and badness in the baby. As Davies declared when she lost control and killed Mugnier, "I am a monster".
 
But how does this painful enactment, stemming from infancy, become linked to sexual excitement?

A complex scenario is established in the baby's mind with its love object. In order to deny an awareness of the pain that the baby experiences from her mother, the anger and frustration is turned into something exciting and stimulating. In later life this excitement is expressed sexually and this early scenario is played out in sexual relationships. Love is confused with hate and suffering becomes a way of holding onto the love object. Better to be in pain with someone than to have no one there at all.
 
We know very little about Davies's relationships with men except that in the case of Mugnier she picked him up with the intention of having sex. What is interesting is that when he proved to be impotent, Davies's mind turned to cutting him. Being unable to get rid of her emotional pain and anger through sex, she may well have found herself - in her mind - back with a mother who failed to respond to her.

In her heightened state of aggression, this failure may have been the last straw for Davies. The aggression that she had previously directed against herself ­ her cutting and her suicide attempts ­ came out against Mugnier.

Unfortunately for Mugnier, it is very likely that he was playing the part of Davies's mother ­ the mother whom she felt so murderous towards. When Davies cut Mugnier, instead of herself, she exposed the real monster in her mind. ·