The Second Coming of Psychoanalytical Criminology
Near the end of his life, Sigmund Freud advanced the claim that psychology ought “to take its place as a natural science like any other,” and that “psychoanalysis is part of the mental science of psychology…Psychology, too, is a natural science. What else can it be?” (Freud 1953, 23: 158, 282). For many decades, Freud’s theories on psychoanalytical theories enjoyed a widespread acceptance in the fields of psychology and criminology; indeed, psychoanalysis became the dominant paradigm. Its legitimacy began to dissolve as various theorists and methodological competitors came into the scene. Positivists attacked psychoanalysis for employing a methodology which was both empirically unverifiable and vulnerable to subjective misinterpretation. The other major criminological camps, including left realism, left idealism, right realism, feminist criminology, and administrative criminology criticized the psychoanalytical approach to criminology. At the end of the Twentieth Century, psychoanalysis had become a target for ridicule to both clinicians and academics. Yet in the last decade, criminologists and forensic psychotherapists have revived psychoanalytical readings of a variety’s issues, such as fear of crime, the act of punishment, and criminal motivation. Psychoanalytical criminology has taken a beating from numerous challenges from a theoretical, methodological, a practical standing and is finally re-emerging as a legitimate criminological approach.
In 1900, Sigmund Freud had published a book titled The Interpretation of Dreams and ushered in a century of theorists and clinicians attuned to the unconscious inner workings of the human mind. Freud continuously published his works until his passing in 1939; afterwards psychoanalytic ideal exploded through the work of Alfred Alder, Carl Jung, Erich Fromm, James Lacan, as well as many others. The discipline found grounding in many social science disciplines...