From individual to social
defences in psychosocial
criminology

A L I S O N P. B R O W N

University of Stirling, UK

Abstract

A psychosocial strand of criminology has emerged in recent years,
which explores concepts such as fear of crime through analysis of
individual biographies, and Freudian perspectives on punitive
responses to offenders. It is possible to develop this psychosocial
perspective further through an exploration of other central
concepts such as conscience and reparation, and of a broader
range of psychodynamic perspectives on the origins of anti-social
tendencies. Inevitably, this leads beyond the intra-psychic to the
interpersonal, with consequences for our view of conventional and
restorative justice systems and penal institutions.

Key Words

psychoanalysis • psychodynamics • psychosocial • restorative
justice • social defence systems

Introduction

In the late 1980s, to discuss the psychoanalytic theory of crime was
‘curiously old-fashioned’ (Kline, 1987). Despite the influence of psycho-
analysis on the 20th-century history of criminology, each paradigm within
criminology has its reasons to dismiss psychoanalytic ideas (Player, 1996).
Although psychology has traced the origins of criminality to emotional
disturbance in young children associated with a combination of lack of
affection and erratic disciplinary practices (Raine, 1993), little practice or

A R T I C L E S

Theoretical Criminology

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London, Thousand Oaks

and New Delhi.

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research on ‘delinquency’ has retained a psychoanalytical focus on early
experience. Several problems have been said to limit the potential for a
psychoanalytic perspective on crime or social problems generally: that it
tends towards correctionalism and conservatism (Rose, 1989; Taylor,
1999), or, alternatively, that it condones moral relativism and evasion of
responsibility (Cohen, 2001). As an explanation, either it is mechanistic
and imputes invisible causal forces (Katz, 2002), or, alternatively, it is
unscientific (Blackburn, 1993; Feldman, 1993). Psychoanalysis has been
associated with a retreat from politics and with support for, and construc-
tion of, individualism and alienation (Kovel, 1981; Cushman, 1995;
Gordon, 2001). Today, discussions of counselling or therapy in criminal
justice contexts (Wolfenden, 1997; Bentley, 1999; Devlin, 1999) are con-
fined largely to counselling or therapy audiences.

On the other hand, interactionist views of crime have long recognized the

limitations of a rationalist, cognitive approach to motivations (Sykes and
Matza, 1957). Recently, a concern with the emotional aspects of crime has
emerged (De Haan and Loader, 2002; Karstedt, 2002). There is, within
criminology, renewed interest in a psychosocial perspective, suggested
initially in relation to masculinity and heterosexual violence (Jefferson,
1994, 2002; Connell, 2002) and the ‘fear of crime’ (Hollway and Jefferson,
2000). In relation to fear of crime, Hollway and Jefferson adapt the two
pillars of psychoanalytic techniques: free association as an interview
method, and, for data analysis, interpretation of generalization, contra-
diction or avoidance in narrative as psychic defences. This work shows
how life events and anxiety levels produce differential fear of crime not
along simple age or gender lines; and takes us beyond the ‘rational versus
irrational fear’ debate. Although they concentrate on fear of crime,
Hollway and Jefferson also apply a Kleinian approach to ‘criminals’. Those
who acknowledge responsibility for their actions and exhibit concern for
others are seen as capable of maintaining what is regarded in Kleinian
terms as the depressive position. The origins of criminality are located in
childhood deprivation and in solutions to such deprivations that make
sense in both social and psychic contexts. Here we find an example of how
a psychoanalytical view of fear (anxiety) can enhance our understanding of
a key criminological concept, fear of crime.

Garland (1990, 2001) indicates the potential of psychoanalytic explana-

tions of punishment, which link the motivations of actors in the system to
broader socio-economic changes. Other scholars are exploring psychoana-
lytic and psychodynamic views of punishment (Valier, 2000) and of the
origins of criminality (Costello, 2002) while acknowledging that these are
diverse and are open to comparison. This article aims to extend this
exploration of the diversity of psychoanalytic views, and in doing so to
suggest ways in which a psychodynamic exploration of crime and criminal-
ization can demonstrate the interconnectedness of the intersubjective and
the systemic.

First, this article considers how a psychosocial perspective might be

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developed further through the study of other key criminological concepts
such as conscience and reparation, and the implications of psychodynamic
views of conscience and anti-social tendencies. It considers whether such an
approach can extend beyond individual biographies of offenders or victims
to help us understand processes and systems of criminalization and conflict.
In so doing, it argues for acknowledgement of the diversity of psychody-
namic views, and in particular of intersubjective perspectives that are of
direct relevance to our understanding of the social and structural location
and construction of crime. A distinction will be maintained between
psychoanalysis as a specific practice; and a psychodynamic perspective that
adapts the theories that followed Freud—particularly those of Klein and
object relations—for use in any field of human activity. First, this article
will take another look at Kleinian theory and the implications for its
alternative views of conscience.

Conscience and reparation

Psychologists have argued against deterrence as the basis for criminal
justice on the grounds that deterrence has no effect where the conscience is
under-developed as a result of poor parenting (Kline, 1987; Blackburn,
1993). In Freudian terms, criminality is a manifestation of an under-
developed conscience resulting from incomplete psychosexual development
(e.g. unresolved Oedipal conflicts). The broad assumption is that of a weak
superego (conscience) unable to control a strong id (instinctual drive).
Kleinian theory, however, suggests an alternative to lack of conscience or
feeling of guilt as the origin of criminality. Klein pursued one of Freud’s
alternative suggestions; that crime might arise from excessive guilt rather
than lack of a conscience. Klein proposed that, rather than a weak
conscience, disturbance can be a manifestation of a persecutory con-
science.

Klein’s attention to criminality was part of her conceptualization of the

centrality of aggression in early life. Klein proposed that every child suffers
in the first years of life from jealousy of parents or siblings. Destructive and
sadistic fantasies bring the threat of punishment from the sadistic superego,
the internalization of the parents. Guilt over this destructiveness is re-
pressed, but is acted out unconsciously: ‘The desire for punishment, which
is a determining factor when the child constantly repeats naughty acts,
finds an analogy in the repeated misdeeds of the criminal’ (Klein, 1927:
179). Children behave so as to be punished because ‘the real punishment,
however severe, was reassuring in comparison with the murderous attacks
which they were continuously expecting from fantastically cruel parents’
(Klein, 1934: 258). Although all children go through this phase, abnormal
development may occur where children experience in reality abandonment
or persecution that reinforces fantasy. Besides Oedipal dynamics, therefore,
Klein identifies the causes of delinquency in her cases as sexual abuse,

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violence between parents and loss of parents. Here we can see that
although Klein is concerned largely with intra-psychic events, she acknow-
ledges the impact of the interpersonal and social environment.

As a prime influence on restorative justice practices, the theory of

reintegrative shaming suggests that the offender makes choices, within
societal constraints. In contrast to the traditional arguments for deterrence
as a basis for criminal justice, it recognizes that in making such choices the
disapproval of significant others is a greater deterrent than the prospect of
punishment. For behaviour against which there is a strong consensus,
society can build on this aversion to disapproval to shame offenders, that
is, to induce guilt. But this view of emotional responses is not compatible
with a psychodynamic approach. Based on cognitive learning theory, the
‘shaming’ thesis assumes that morality must be learned and conscience
acquired. Shaming is ‘the societal process that underwrites the family
process of building consciences in children’ (Braithwaite, 1989: 72). A
Kleinian view of the persecutory conscience, therefore, poses a fundamental
challenge to such cognitive assumptions. How, then, might a Kleinian
analyse restorative justice practices?

Reparation is a central concept in restorative justice practices. Repara-

tion is also a key psychoanalytic concept, linked principally with the work
of Klein and Riviere (Sayers, 2000). Klein’s key observation was that
reparative tendencies emerge only when overwhelming anxieties and feel-
ings of persecution have been resolved. According to Blatier (1999), the
reparation order seeks to repair not just external damage, but also internal
damage to the offender’s sense of responsibility. Reparation aims at the
acknowledgement of harm and forgiveness, and at ‘internalization of the
law’. A lasting change in behaviour will result only from a restoration of
the latent capacity to feel guilt and from support for the ‘tendencies
towards good’. Reparation moves the person away from the sense that they
are the victim of the system’s persecution and therefore have no choice but
to retaliate. The transformation is one from sadistic to a regulatory
superego (symbolized in the judge), and from enactment to symbolization
(language).

The role of the judge, Blatier explains, is to set boundaries to aggression

and to ensure that the offender is not in turn persecuted by the victim.
Similarly, in one of his addresses to ‘lay’ audiences in the 1940s and 1950s,
the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Winnicott explained to magistrates
that the task of the courts is to protect the offender from the public’s
unconscious revenge feelings.

Klein described two ‘positions’, paranoid-schizoid and depressive,

between which we all move to differing degrees. The former is charac-
terized by ‘splitting’, where only bad or good parts of the self or other
people are experienced, and other parts projected into others, which leads
to the sense of self as omnipotent or persecuted. On the other hand, the
depressive position is characterized by experience of responsibility, guilt,
ambivalence and recognition of the needs of the other. As Marsh (1996)

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explains, bringing together victim and offender in reparation is an ‘alter-
native’ form of justice in that, in Kleinian terms, it negotiates the depressive
position: victim and offender see each other directly and as whole objects.
This can be contrasted to the traditional system of splitting the ‘bad’
(offender) from the ‘good’ (victim, state).

An alternative view of conscience therefore has implications for our

views of ‘mainstream’ and restorative justice systems. Examination of
reparation, as a concept central to both psychodynamics and criminal
justice systems, challenges accepted cognitive views of such systems, and
suggests that a psychodynamic analysis can extend beyond the intra-
psychic to the social and systemic. Similarly, envy is another key psycho-
analytic concept that can explain how progressive justice systems come to
lack popular support because of the envy ‘conforming’ people, under
conditions of social insecurity, feel for any care or attention given to
offenders (Rustin, 2001). Further exploration of the phenomenon of envy
could create another psychosocial connection. In relation to the practice of
restorative justice, for example, research could examine the assumptions
made about conscience, and how ‘shame’ might be induced in more or less
persecutory ways. Otherwise, the ‘new’ restorative justice practices may fail
as the old system has done.

Furthermore, the Kleinian insight into the persecutory conscience high-

lights a contradiction of punishment; that it may in some way be sought or
needed by the person punished. Although Klein’s original concern was
largely with intra-psychic events, she acknowledged the impact of the
interpersonal and social environment, and subsequent applications of
Kleinian ideas have taken this further to the study of groups or systems. For
a greater engagement with the social and interpersonal, we can turn to the
work of psychoanalysts who gave less priority to life and death instincts,
and more to other intersubjective processes such as the search for bound-
aries and the ‘anti-social’ withdrawal from relationships.

Anti-social tendencies

From the 1930s, psychoanalysis moved away from the primacy of sexual
(life) and death instincts or drives, to a view of relationships as the basis for
psychodynamics (Fairbairn, 1952; Suttie, 1988; Winnicott, 1991). A paedi-
atrician and psychoanalyst at the forefront of mid-20th-century medical-
welfare expertise, Winnicott was engaged in tackling social problems,
particularly delinquency. Winnicott explained delinquency as a normal
process by which a child tests the reliability of significant relationships. The
‘anti-social’ child is looking to society to provide boundaries when the
family or school has failed. Despite his emphasis on the control of
aggression, Winnicott places stealing (or its substitute, buying) at the centre
of the anti-social tendency. Winnicott also had a different vision of the
therapeutic process from that of traditional psychoanalysis. Provision of

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425

‘good enough’ parenting is sufficient to deal with normal anti-social
tendencies. If required, therapy operates at a deeper unconscious level to
heal dissociation through feeling-contact with the early deprivation and
thereby halts the compulsion to ‘act out’.

Winnicott’s work demonstrated how concern for oneself and others

develops within protective early relationships. The development of the
capacity for concern (his preferred term, but similar to Klein’s ‘reparation’)
comes when the early environment provided by the parent, along with the
innate maturational process, allows the infant to see the parent as a
separate person and to take responsibility for instinctual impulses. When
the parent fails to ‘survive’ the child’s aggression, and retaliates or with-
draws, the child turns its aggression inward. When the parent gives in, the
child continues to attack, seeking a boundary. Unreliability in parental care
leads to an absence of concern and a sense that constructive effort is futile.
Without sufficient reflection of the infant’s experience by parental respon-
siveness, the process of integration of the self is incomplete so there is no
‘whole’ person to feel responsible.

Winnicott did not stop at the parent–child dyad, but aimed to influence

the criminal justice system away from retribution and deterrence. He
argued that the threat of punishment is irrelevant to the persistent offender,
who has too much at stake to give up their well-established defence against
despair. Society seeks admission of guilt, but gains no benefit when such
admissions are obtained artificially in order to keep the system working,
when guilt is admitted but not felt. In his view, society fails to see the
‘positive’ side of the search for safe, containing relationships that may be
seen in anti-social activity. On the other hand, Winnicott supported the use
of institutions if this was the only way in which a young person might
receive the firm boundary-setting their development required. Thus Winni-
cott’s work has several implications for a psychosocial criminology; for
example it offers a new way of looking at acquisitive crime; it may explain
why people somehow seek the boundaries of an institution; and how
certain holding functions of institutions may be positive; but it also
suggests that criminality is to an extent ‘normal’ and that systems based on
retribution and deterrence are bound to fail.

In addition, other strands of psychodynamic theory are relevant to a fully

psychosocial criminology. Fairbairn, a contemporary of Winnicott, rewrote
Klein’s theory of splitting in terms of interpersonal rather than intra-
psychic relationships (Fairbairn, 1952). Moving away from duelling life
and death instincts, Fairbairn differed from Klein (and Winnicott) in that
for him, aggression was a reaction rather than a primary phenomenon.
Trauma arises from the child’s love and need to relate not being accepted,
as a result of which the child comes to feel that its love is bad, and retreats
from relationships. When rejected, the child splits experience into tolerable
and intolerable parts, and represses the needy and angry parts of the self.
The result of repression of the need for relationship is the schizoid
experience of emptiness, futility and indifference or contempt for others.

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Following Fairbairn, Guntrip’s study of schizoid phenomena (Guntrip,

1992) focused on the inability of people to form relationships of genuine
closeness and responsiveness to the needs of the other. Disturbance such as
crime or delinquency from this perspective is one way of evading one’s own
weakness and escaping the fundamental fear of being ‘a nobody’ (most
people would rather be a ‘bad somebody’ than a ‘weak nobody’). In
Guntrip’s view, psychoanalysis, and society generally, persist in explaining
disturbance in terms of guilt and badness; thus legal controls and moral
preaching fruitlessly ‘conspire to discipline recalcitrant instincts’ (1992:
136). Contemporary analysts elaborate on schizoid tendencies in relation
to phenomena that are central to criminology; for example locating the
origins of perversions, self-harm and drug abuse in our attempts to combat
the schizoid ‘inner deadness’ (Ogden, 1999).

Guntrip, Fairbairn and Winnicott each acknowledged the relevance of

social change to psychic phenomena. Thus in their view, the late 20th
century was more productive of schizoid phenomena—insecurity and
disconnection—than the guilt of the morally and socially more restrictive
society in which psychoanalysis originated.

Psychotherapy has long recognized the relationship between social

change and psychic disturbance. Reflecting on the success of group therapy
with young offenders in the 1960s, Slavson (1965) attributes their self-
destructiveness to the combination of abusive families and abusive culture.
More recently, attachment theory, which links Kleinian and object relations
theory with ethology, has highlighted the benefits of social and economic
policies that offer security rather than competition (Rutter, 1981; Kraemer
and Roberts, 1996; Holmes, 2001). In Kleinian terms, a more competitive
and insecure society strengthens paranoid-schizoid states such as xeno-
phobia (Rustin, 2001). Following Guntrip, we can see that, through the
dynamics of parenting, the schizoid condition is ultimately a product of a
society that has a taboo on weakness. Thus a psychodynamic perspective
demonstrates the social origins of criminality and challenges the punitive
basis of criminal justice systems.

Having shown the relevance of a psychodynamic understanding of the

differences between restorative and mainstream justice systems, it is poss-
ible to examine the relationship between the offender and the ‘mainstream’
criminal justice institutions. From the above analysis of Kleinian concepts,
we can conclude that the separation of victim and offender is part of the
social defence system against anxiety in legal institutions and practices,
which makes reparative alternatives so potentially radical and slow to be
accepted. Furthermore, from object relations theory come possible explana-
tions of why criminal justice systems based on deterrence do not succeed,
but why people may seek the boundaries provided by penal institutions;
and how lack of concern for others develops through social taboos on
weakness and conditions of social insecurity. Bringing these two strands
together, through an examination of social defence systems it will be

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427

possible to apply, at the level of institutions, the explanation for the origins
of violence in taboos on weakness.

Penal institutions and social defence systems

At the interpersonal level, individual defended subjects coming together in
groups form social defence systems (Menzies Lyth, 1990; Obholzer and
Zagier Roberts, 1994). From a psychodynamic viewpoint, the social de-
fence system of a prison is comparable to that of any institution such as a
hospital or factory. Individuals’ psychological defences against anxiety are
supported by collective agreements (largely outside awareness) to perform
the work task in certain ways. Concepts such as projection can explain, for
example, the cruel treatment of sexual offenders and ‘the inherent sadism
of the culture of some penal institutions’ (Temple, 1996: 27).

A psychodynamic analysis shows how the conflict between the prison’s

functions of incapacitation-retribution and rehabilitation leads, via split-
ting and projection of certain characteristics, to a culture based on tough-
ness triumphing over weakness (Hinshelwood, 1996). Hinshelwood’s
example shows that while prisoners project weakness and guilt onto others
and maintain a feeling of strength based on ‘trickery’, officers display
toughness in controlling such trickery, are required to suppress their
sensitivity and are thus defended against their fear of violence. ‘A non-
dominant culture of sloppy weakness is a necessity for the dominant
culture to survive’ (Hinshelwood, 1996: 471). This is projected into
therapists and other ‘soft’ or weak groups of staff or prisoners.

Similarly, Smith’s (1999) Kleinian analysis of the social defence system in

a prison shows how it deals with the basic anxieties of staff about violence
and of prisoners about being trapped. From the most obvious splits—
inside/outside, officer/prisoner—radiate many more, such as soft/hard staff,
normal/sex offender. The social defence system ensures the splitting off of
any tenderness. Officers, moreover, can disown their own criminality and
locate it in the prisoners. Prisoners, in turn, ‘need to deny that anything
good can come from officers if the officers are to continue to be the
receptacles for the prisoners’ projected feelings of being cruel and depriv-
ing’ (Smith, 1999: 437). Therefore officers are reluctant to make any small
concession, knowing that they would only be treated with contempt, and
this further fuels the cycle of projections.

This offers a new way of interpreting Foucault’s insight that prison

persists not despite but because it does not work: as Smith (1999) puts it,
prison is a social system that requires prisoners not to attain the depressive
position, which conflicts with the conscious requirement to demonstrate
remorse.

An analysis of social defence systems is inseparable from the psycho-

dynamic view of the individual. Thus, forensic psychotherapists have
suggested that ‘all of us from our earliest years, as well as later, “commit

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crimes” within our unconscious and conscious minds which we do not
necessarily, however, enact’ (Cordess and Hyatt-Williams, 1996: 13). Thus,
rather than pathologizing, a psychodynamic perspective refuses to see
‘criminals’ as ‘other’ by acknowledging the existence of the same processes
of projection, aggression and rejection of relationship in everyone, what-
ever their relationship to the criminal justice system. Although not the
focus of this article, the structural Jungian perspective makes a similar
suggestion: we all are repressed criminals, our ‘shadow’ selves denied
conscious expression because they are incompatible with the chosen con-
scious attitude (Costello, 2002). As a result, the criminal acts as a moral
scapegoat for the community and is accorded the dignity of legal rituals by
virtue of this social role. A Kleinian view, however, rather than being ‘soft
on crime’, takes seriously the depths of destructiveness, and the difficulties
of bringing about change once a personality is unconsciously dominated by
hatred (Rustin, 2001).

Despite the difficulties of bringing about change, there are indications of

practical possibilities. Relationships between prisoners and staff in a prison
are open to influence from outside their own system of projections—from
the social context and the political imperatives placed upon prisons. For
example, changes in the level and nature of organized degradation and
deprivation in turn affect the relationships of hatred between prisoners and
staff (Emery, 1990).

Although the Kleinian approach may be seen as pessimistic, it can be

combined with Winnicott’s more optimistic view of the potential for
change. Winnicott saw the experience of transitional space, in which the
infant can play in security but without interference, and experiment with
the boundaries of ‘me’ and ‘not-me’, as the basis for creativity and the
capacity for symbolization in adulthood. Asser (2002) suggests that as a
consequence of incarceration, prisoners are prone to use the defence of
omnipotence; that is self-idealization, and denial of their own losses and of
the pain they have caused. If the negative projections of the staff are
mobilized, this in turn gives prisoners a psychological ‘free ride’ to project
all that is negative into other prisoners or staff. Applying Winnicott’s
observations about the anti-social tendency and transitional spaces, Asser
argues for arrangements to bring together prisoners and staff to overcome
the systems of mutual projection that operate to increase violence and
reoffending.

Based on his experience of running discussion groups, Asser argues that

they provide a ‘transitional space’ in which prisoners and staff can ‘take
back’ their mutual projections, to see themselves and others as ‘whole
objects’ that are both bad and good. Furthermore, in this transitional
space, prisoners can renegotiate their potency and learn to think instead of
act violently, that is to engage in symbolization—similar to the process
identified in reparation hearings. The therapist-facilitator has to be avail-
able to be identified with as ‘a thinker’; and has to ‘attend to management’
of the clients, while providing (inevitably, by their human limitations)

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opportunities where prisoners can gradually learn to manage themselves.
Besides prison staff, Asser advocates including judges and police in discus-
sion groups, as the other main combatants in ‘the war of projections’.
Although such measures are resisted, Asser argues that ‘treating prisoners
as whole objects actually enhances security rather than diminishing it,
because it is the self-idealisation of criminals which makes them dangerous’
(2002: 17, emphasis in original).

Asser’s work demonstrates the potential for combining Kleinian analysis,

which remains dominant in the group relations literature, with a wider
range of psychodynamic approaches such as that of Winnicott. It requires
considerable imagination to envisage such activities taking place, which
suggests the importance of researchers engaging with such innovative
practices. Research may challenge both retributive and welfarist assump-
tions; for example to consider the impact of programmes that prioritize the
building of relationships of trust between staff and ‘clients’; and the extent
to which the boundary-setting function of institutions and rules is necessary
to these relationships. This suggests the potential for a combination of
Foucauldian and Kleinian perspectives to offer a theoretical basis for the
emergence both of resistance to social norms and of people’s participation
in their own domination (Lupton, 1997).

Much of the work cited above comes from psychotherapists within

institutions such as prisons. As practitioners, they have to negotiate the
opposite views of the world between which forensic psychotherapy is
caught: the penal system, based on absolutes, rules, ‘facts’ and retribution;
and therapeutic practice, based on speculation, reflection and the prisoner’s
ultimate self-determination (Williams Saunders, 2001). Forensic psycho-
therapists acknowledge Foucault’s critique of the alliance between penal
institutions and psychiatry (Cordess and Hyatt-Williams, 1996). Despite
this, they form a specific and isolated community outside, or on the fringes
of, ‘mainstream’ criminology. This may be another aspect of the split
within the penal system between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ approaches, manifested
also in the splits between ideas and practice and between prison and
outside.

In the main, psychodynamic analyses of social defence systems have been

restricted to visible institutions such as prisons. Besides total institutions,
however, the perspective can be applied to any socio-legal system or
practice. Marsh (1996) explains how the anxieties of lawyers, such as the
fear of making mistakes, compounded by those projected by clients, are
defended against through the procedures and formalities of the law. Marsh
identifies a range of defences against anxiety in both individuals and
institutions, such as dissociation (the impersonal approach, separation of
oneself from one’s function); specialization (so as not to have to deal with
whole persons); standardization and the emphasis on certainty (strict forms
of words, ways of presenting cases). This explains why the problems of the
system, cost, delays, injustices, are so intractable—change can only come
when the defence mechanisms and underlying anxieties are acknowledged.

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But the force of anxiety weighs against this acknowledgement. Lawyers,
according to Marsh, are taught to take words and actions at face value; the
legal is thus the antithesis of the psychodynamic approach. Similar studies
of regulatory agencies, courts, police (see Watson, 1999 for a more
Lacanian analysis of policing) are likely to prove valuable.

The interpretation of penality

By drawing attention to the split between insiders’ and outsiders’ views of
prisons, perhaps the above review exaggerates the degree to which psycho-
analysis has been neglected in the study of crime and punishment. Garland
(1990, 2001), for example, draws our attention to Freudian explanations
of punishment as a socially acceptable outlet for aggression and repressed
sexuality, or a guilty response to one’s own fantasies and identification with
the criminal. Garland supports Elias’ conclusion, that the civilizing process
has brought little amelioration of punishment because of the fundamental
conflict between the id and the superego that results from repression. Thus,
‘the behaviour of criminals, particularly where it expresses desires which
others have spent much energy and undergone much internal conflict in
order to renounce, can thus provoke a resentful and hostile reaction out of
proportion to the real danger which it represents’ (Garland, 1990: 239);
and ‘an unconsciously punitive attitude towards one’s own anti-social
wishes may carry over into a projected punitive attitude towards those who
have actually acted out such prohibited desires’ (1990: 240).

In The Culture of Control, Garland (2001) employs psychoanalytic

concepts to structure his discussion of the political response to the predica-
ment of crime control in late modern societies. In combination, the
normality of high crime rates and the limitations of the state’s capacity to
control crime lead to a situation where policies ‘appear deeply conflicted,
even schizoid, in their relation to one another’ (2001: 110). While admin-
istrators adapt to the reality principle, by strategies such as rationalization
of justice and defining deviance down, politicians evade reality. Instead,
‘almost hysterical in the clinical sense’ (2001: 131), they engage either in
denial, or in acting out—impulsive and unreflective action that brings
expressive relief. In denial of the evidence that punitive approaches do not
work, they reassert the myth of the sovereign state. Acting out is apparent
when the ‘show of punitive force against individuals is used to repress any
acknowledgement of the state’s inability to control crime to acceptable
levels’ (2001: 134). As the policies are schizoid, so late modern criminology
becomes ‘schizophrenic’, seeing the offender both as ‘normal’ and as
‘other’. On a broader societal level, the ‘middle classes’ succumb to the
emotional consequences of neo-liberalism: ‘the risk of insecurity and the
temptation to respond with repression’ (2001: 157). One aspect of this is
that parents may project onto the predatory criminal ‘other’ their guilt

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about the ways their life choices increase their children’s vulnerability
(2001: 263, n. 64).

Despite their attraction, Garland is ambivalent about psychoanalytic

explanations of social phenomena, warning that Freudian interpretations
‘carry little weight outside of individual case histories based upon reliable
clinical evidence’ (1990: 65). Terms such as ‘denial’, ‘hysteria’ and ‘acting
out’, he explains, are used ‘to suggest the underlying conflicts and ambiva-
lence that shape institutional action’, but with the caveat: ‘No strict
application is intended’ (2001: 253, n. 71). It is not clear why Garland uses
psychoanalytic terms as if they were metaphors, which can be used only
‘loosely’ in social critique, but which have a literal (strict) meaning
elsewhere (in reliable clinical psychiatry?). It is perhaps related to the
restrictive Freudian framework. Contemporary psychoanalysis, however, is
highly diverse and has moved beyond the ‘hydraulic’ theory of instincts and
drives and the static tripartite model of the unconscious. In the study of
organizations and individuals alike, there is ‘no single psychoanalytical
voice’ (Anderson and Whyte, 2002: 500). Criminology can benefit from a
broader psychodynamic view that presents alternatives to Freudian Oedipal
conflict to explain the capacity of people to behave without regard for
others, and which prioritizes the ‘unscientific’ intersubjective search for
shared meaning. For example, psychotherapy can be seen as a process
whereby the ‘micropowers’ of the therapeutic relationship, with negoti-
ation of interpretations, form a significant part of what is brought to
awareness (Bollas, 1987; Casement, 1991; Lomas, 1994; Ogden, 1999).

Conclusion: beyond the intra-psychic

Can this diversity of psychoanalytic perspectives be useful to criminology?
The limitation of recent work on anxiety and fear of crime is that although
it contains an awareness of the social context of crime (how individuals
find solutions that make sense in both psychic and social terms), its
psychodynamic analysis remains at the level of individual defences. Other
recent psychoanalytical discussions of crime remain at the intra-psychic.
Costello’s critique of the psychiatric model of personality disorders
(Costello, 2002) is a structural but intra-psychic analysis. In Lacanian
terms, according to Costello, criminality can be understood as a rejection
of the symbolic order and of the paternal function. This explicitly chal-
lenges the notion of social deprivation as the cause of crime. But more
useful for a psychosocial criminology, perhaps, are psychodynamic per-
spectives that do not force a choice between the psychic and the social but
which link the two.

Moreover, the more conservative tendencies of psychoanalysis can be

contrasted with the critical and feminist praxis of psychoanalysts such as
Kovel (1981), Benjamin (1988) and Chodorow (1999). This body of work
maintains the interconnections between the intra-psychic, the interpersonal

Theoretical Criminology 7(4)

432

and the structural. Benjamin and Chodorow challenge the gendered as-
sumptions about childrearing that taints the work of Winnicott. Kovel
argues for a revolution at both the material level and that of relations
between persons, in order to replace with individuation the alienated
individualism of capitalism. Similarly, Benjamin (1988), who presents a
feminist reworking of the psychoanalytic ideas of Winnicott, seeks social
change to reverse the loss of mutual recognition under bureaucratic
control, in which violence thrives, and which is characterized by legal rules
that refer to the hypothetical interaction of autonomous individuals. This
loss of mutual recognition is ‘the predicament of solitary confinement—
being unable to get through to the other, or to be gotten through to—which
is our particularly modern form of bondage’ (Benjamin, 1988: 83).

There are several starting points for this psychosocial study of criminal-

ization. Diverse psychodynamic ways of thinking can broaden our views
on, for example, conscience and reparation, just as has already been done
for anxiety and fear of crime. In particular, the object relations approach
illuminates the reasons for lack of concern for others, presenting an
alternative view of guilt and conscience to that assumed by both retributive
and restorative justice practices. One contention is that it is not the absence
of conscience that leads people to behave in harmful ways, but a perse-
cutory conscience; in other situations, a better explanation may be with-
drawal and damage to the capacity to relate. Each has implications for our
view of criminal justice systems.

The proposed approach challenges the boundaries of criminology in

several ways. It acknowledges that ‘anti-social’ tendencies do exist, but are
not confined to the less powerful in society, nor to a minority—a familiar
theme of criminology. Persecutory anxiety in the form of murderousness
(fantasies or thoughts about killing which may or may not be acted upon)
may result from a fear of being killed, and is therefore experienced as self-
defence (Hyatt-Williams, 2000). This suggests a significant relationship
between deliberate killing and other risks to life often found close by (other
deaths, accidents, suicide, self-harm, death-defying acts and psychosomatic
illness) which can form a further criminological research agenda. Violence
is not the only theme of interest, however; as noted above, the analysis
extends to acquisitive activities, criminal or not. An approach that links the
psychodynamic to social and structural change can refuse the claim that
psychoanalysis deals with one side of the rational–irrational split (and
cannot account for ‘rational’ crimes such as ‘white collar’ crime; Black-
burn, 1993).

Kleinian ideas have been developed beyond individual motivations to

examine the life of groups and institutions. This highlights the significance
of reparative justice, and the importance of such ‘alternative’ systems to
maintain boundaries, to contain feelings of revenge and protect the of-
fender. It also helps explain why retributive approaches both persist and
fail, and why restorative alternatives are resisted. Alternative systems might
also restore the capacity to feel guilt that retributive systems, which sever

Brown—From individual to social defences

433

the connection between admissions of guilt and feelings of guilt, inhibit.
Specific research questions may challenge assumptions from all sides of the
retribution/welfare debate; for example, the need for ‘holding’ and whether
people choose or need to be institutionalized. At each level, individual,
institutional and structural, a wealth of psychodynamically informed re-
search literature exists which could be brought into the fold of criminology.
In particular, analysis of the social defence system can be taken further,
particularly to parts of the criminal justice system outside the prison.

Psychodynamic ideas can assist us to examine the processes of criminal-

ization, to examine violent institutions and the pervasiveness of retribution
and punitiveness. Such an approach extends beyond the realm of family
and intimate relations, beyond individual biographies and beyond the
sociology of ‘the emotions’. Moreover, it opens up for exploration the
relationship between criminality, social taboos on weakness and fear and
the nature of security offered (or not) by the institutions of late modern
societies.

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