The story of Jean-Claude Romand, especially atrocious, was material to fascinate authors and screenwriters. In 1993, this man has killed his wife, his two children, his parents, after having claimed, for 18 years, working as a doctor at the world Health Organization. His wife seemed on the point of discovering the truth. He was sentenced in 1996 to life imprisonment, with a safety period of 22 years and requested 2018 parole.
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first, the writer Emmanuel Carrère was literally “possessed” during the seven years that the psychologists are passionate about them also in this tale of madness ordinary, the extraordinary events that have marked the collective unconscious of france, called “narcissistic criminal”. He wrote to him in 1993 for the first time. It receives a response two years later. “I heard that he counted on me more than on the psychiatrists to make understandable his own story,” explained the writer.
He published finally in 2000, The Adversary , text, turning the back to the fiction but not literature, and which was a bestseller. The Adversary , it is first, said the writer, “which was in French-speaking switzerland and who, at one time, has burst”.
Jean-Claude Romand, a opponent tough to drill
But Jean-Claude Romand has also revealed an adversary tough to drill because, at the end of the story, its mystery remains whole. How do you explain this madness? What traumas intimate transformed it from being a good student, a childhood without the story, later a good father and a good husband, a relentless killer? No one knows, not even him. “It is impossible to think of this story without saying that there is a mystery and an explanation hidden. But the mystery is that there is no explanation and that, if, unlikely as it may seem, this is exactly what happened,” says Carrère.
His book has been adapted for the theater in 2016 and the cinema in 2002 by Nicole Garcia, with Daniel Auteuil. “We built all of an image in order to please others, she said. Fortunately, we had the opportunity to go back and forth, but he is lost in this ideal image. He took a shell that it can’t bear that we remove”.
Another feature-length film shot this story, time (2001) by Laurent Cantet, with Aurélien Recoing, between social realism and emptiness unreal of a life of fantasy. The director insists less on the murders than on the double life of Romand and “everything she could leave us to imagine the character”.
many Of the documentaries or feature stories tv and radio
tv and French radio have aired many documentaries and feature-length stories on this case. Episodes of television series such as Profiling or on The day where everything changed are also referred to. It has even surpassed the borders of france, which inspired the Spanish director Eduard Cortés, author of La vida de nadie ( The life of person ), as well as the writers of series such as New York, criminal division and New York, special unit .
This story, in part, reflected in the novel Ysa Dedeau Rouge, pair, impasse and in other parts of the theatre, could not fail to be of interest to psychiatrists and psychotherapists who have analyzed in studies or collective works, like the freedom to know, to Open the eyes of our own story Alice Miller.
Many have drawn a parallel between Roman and Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès, suspected of killing 5 members of his family to Nantes in 2011 and still not found. Thus, the psychiatrist Denis Toutenu, who has studied Jean-Claude Romand, told (Obs) : “these are what we call narcissistic personalities, great invalid psychic”.
