Dr. Satten's Analysis of Perry

After the article of Dr. Satten’s analysis for how to categorize murderers “without apparent motive”(301), there is a section explaining that at some point the murder sees his victim as a past figure of some “past traumatic configuration”(301), receiving an overwhelming amount of anger that eventually leads to the murder itself. On page 302 there was the passage relating this article to Perry Smith and his reason or lack of reason for why he murdered the Clutters;
“But it is Dr. Satten’s contention that only the first murder matters psychologically, and that when Smith attacked Mr. Clutter he was under a mental eclipse, deep inside a schizophrenic darkness, for it was not entirely a flesh-and-blood man he ‘suddenly discovered’ himself destroying, but ‘a key figure in some past traumatic configuration’ : his father? The orphanage nuns who had derided and beaten him? The parole officer who had ordered him to ‘stay out of Kansas’? One of them, or all of them”(302).
In this quote Dr. Satten is saying that he thinks that it was a past traumatic figure that Perry saw Mr. Clutter as being, someone who he actually did have in his life, and someone who he personally hated, weather it was one of them or all three of the figures spoken of above. It could be argued though that, although Perry killed Mr. Clutter out of anger, the figure that he was seeing Mr. Clutter as wasn’t a “real” figure that he had physically encountered before, but rather a figure not as real to us as it is real to Perry: the yellow bird, or better the lack of the reality of the yellow bird and the love and sense of direction it symbolizes to Perry’s life. “Throughout his life—as a child, poor and meanly treated, as a foot-loose youth, as an imprisoned man—the yellow bird, huge and parrot-faced, had soared across Perry’s dreams, an avenging angel who savaged his enemies or, as now, rescued him in moments of mortal danger”(266), the bird is continuously mentioned throughout the book, each time revealing a little more of the lack of leadership, love, and compassion Perry had in his life. Perry is looking for love and easily attaches to any person who shows the slightest bit of compassion to Perry. Dick, although using him, he was nice to Perry’s dreams of moving to Mexico and treasure diving; Don Cullivan wrote to Perry once he found out that he was in jail and Perry said “you’ve done more for me than any what you call God ever has. Or ever will. By writing to me, by signing yourself ‘friend.’ When I had no friends”(291), so a simple act of Don and Perry calls him a friend, and the shortest relationship that Perry quickly fell to liking was Dr. Jones, which in the ending of Perry’s memoire he says “would like to speak to you again”(276), and of course, Perry was compelled by Dr. Jones because Dr. Jones although it was part of his job, he listened to what Perry had to say, something that seems Perry didn’t get to experience with much of his life. It is the exact lack of love and sense of direction that gets Perry into the Clutter house with Dick, and it is the amount of love and sense of direction that Perry sees in Mr. Clutter that sets off Perry so that he kills Mr. Clutter. Perry says “they [the Clutters] never hurt me. Like other people. Like people have all my life. Maybe it’s just that the Clutters were the ones who had to pay for it”(302), this could support that Mr. Clutter was not a figure of one of his past traumatic configurations, but was indeed the physical figure of his yellow bird that he only saw in his life during his dreams. Why kill the yellow bird, the figure that was supposed to be his savior? Perry does not seem to know, as he doesn’t know why he killed Mr. Clutter, but could it possibly that Perry was angry at the bird for not being there, and for only showing up when he wanted the courage to stick up to Dick, (Dick symbolizing all the past traumatic configurations)? Maybe the love and sense of direction that Perry saw in Mr. Clutter, as he saw in the yellow bird, was there for a tool of courage to stick up to Dick, and to prove to him that he was the “tough brass boy”(290) figure.