How I See Myself Seen

Fear of losing his loved ones but also of losing himself, of discovering that behind his social façade he was nothing.

— E. CARRÈRE, THE ADVERSARY

He smiled understandingly, much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced — or seemed to face — the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.

— F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, THE GREAT GATSBY

On January 9, 1993, in his house in the region of Gex, located between Switzerland and Jura, Jean-Claude Romand murdered his wife, his two children (ages five and seven), his parents, and their dog. He then tried to kill his mistress in the forest of Fontainebleau, where he had brought her for dinner, supposedly at the house of Bernard Kouchner, whom he did not know and who owns no house in Fontainebleau. Lastly, he set his house on fire, swallowed sleeping pills, and fell asleep, hoping never to wake up. Contrary to his plan, however, he regained consciousness, awakening unexpectedly from the coma induced by barbiturates and burns, and he survived. Charged with having committed these atrocious acts, he was subsequently convicted and imprisoned. According to the French prosecutor who argued the case, the motive for the crime was "the impostor's fear of being unmasked."

But how could confessing to having told a lie, even an extravagantly outrageous lie, ever become more difficult than exterminating one's entire family? How could Jean-Claude Romand's reputation have meant more to him than the life of his children? This book represents an attempt to answer these questions.

Romand's gruesome story was made famous by Emmanuel Carrère's book L'Adversaire (2000). The author tells the tale of a man who constructed for himself a bogus reputation as a successful doctor working at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva. He was purportedly a friend of important politicians and internationally renowned researchers. But the picture was fabricated from top to bottom. It was an enormous lie. In truth, Romand had never completed his medical studies and, for ten long years, rather than working as the doctor he pretended to be, he had been frittering away whole days inside his car in the WHO parking lot in Geneva or loitering in the woods or loafing in cafés until it was time to go home. He had meticulously cultivated his false identity, taking home fliers and brochures he had picked up at the WHO library that was open to the public on the ground floor of the organization's headquarters. When he claimed that he was away on "business trips," he instead stayed at a modest hotel near his home where he would watch TV and peruse guidebooks describing whatever country he was supposed to be visiting. He never neglected to call his family every day to tell them what time it was in Tokyo or Brazil, and he always returned from these absences with gifts that seemed to come from the countries where he had allegedly been. He carefully tended and honed his make-believe existence, his spurious reputation, as if it were the love of his life. He clung so implacably to his fictional identity that when the façade began to crumble due to money problems, his frantic urge to defend his palace of lies led him to murder his entire family lest they discover the scandalous truth.

Romand's story raises a paradoxical question: Which was his real life? The one that his family thought he lived, full of success, trips, and international recognition, or the one that he alone knew about, the insipid existence spent reading in his car or killing time in the squalid cafés of Bourg-en-Bresse or aimlessly hiking the Jura mountains? This second life existed only for Romand himself. So how real was it? Since no one else knew about it, it was socially invisible. Moreover, he apparently experienced it exclusively as a means to an end. It was significant only as a way for him to keep up his elaborate charade, to maintain the pretense of the dream life that his family imagined he was living. When, after the murders, friends from his village realized that Jean-Claude's entire life had been a fraud, he ceased to exist for them. He was no longer the man they thought they had known: "When they spoke of him, late at night, they couldn't manage to call him Jean-Claude any more. They didn't call him Romand either. He was somewhere outside life, outside death, where he no longer had a name."

All of us have two egos, two selves. These parallel and distinguishable identities make up who we are and profoundly affect how we behave. One is our subjectivity, consisting of our proprioceptive experiences, the physical sensations registered in our body. The other is our reputation, a reflection of ourselves that constitutes our social identity and makes how we see ourselves seen integral to our self-awareness. At the beginning of the twentieth century, American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley called this second ego the looking-glass self. This second ego is woven over time from multiple strands, incorporating how we think the people around us perceive and judge us. In fact, our understanding of this second self is not created simply by reflection but rather by the refraction of our image that is warped, amplified, redacted, and multiplied in the eyes of others. This social self controls our lives to a surprising extent and can even drive us to commit extreme acts. It does not really belong to us but is rather the part of us that lives in and through others. Yet the feelings that it provokes — shame, embarrassment, self-esteem, guilt, pride — are both very real and very deeply rooted in our emotional experience. Biology demonstrates that our body responds to shame as if it were aphysical wound, releasing chemical substances that provoke inflammation and a rise in the level of cortisol. A slap in the face does more harm to our self-esteem than to our stinging and reddened cheek.

In his work on the culture of honor, psychologist Richard Nisbett and his collaborators measured the level of cortisol in experimental participants before and after an experience where they felt their honor had been besmirched. The study was conducted as follows. A group of eighty-three students selected from southern and northern regions of the United States were invited to...