When it comes to talking about the deep and unconscious motivations of those who commit heinous crimes, psychoanalysis is the cornerstone within the disciplines that are dedicated to the arduous work of trying to reveal antisocial and violent behavior.
In today’s day We will review the psychoanalytic approach of some of the most significant figures of psychoanalysis regarding antisocial behavior, to try to shed some light on this complex issue.
Sigmund Freud
The father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud tried to study criminals by dividing them into two categories, mainly:
A) Guilt-based offenders
In 1915, Freud published an article in which he declared that, paradoxical as it may seem, these criminals They have a feeling of guilt prior to the crime so he comes to the conclusion that the consummation of his act represents, for the criminal subject, a psychological relief linked to the need to mitigate the previous guilt. In other words, by committing the crime the subject satisfies a need for self-punishment coming from an unconscious feeling of guilt (and which, according to him, comes from the primary guilt in the Oedipus complex: killing the father to keep the mother).
For Freud, guilt is the ambivalent manifestation of the life and death instincts since guilt would come from the tensions between the superego and the id that manifest themselves in a latent need to be punished. He also clarifies that only guilt does not surface in the conscious field but is often repressed in the unconscious.
B) Criminals without feelings of guilt
They are subjects who They have not developed moral inhibitions or believe their behavior is justified due to their fight against society (psychopathic and psychopathological personalities) with a marked weakening of the superego, or with an ego structure incapable of preserving the aggressive impulses and sadistic tendencies in the id through defense mechanisms.
He also adds two essential traits as characteristics of the criminal: egocentrism and a destructive tendency, but he also says that in all men there is a natural or aggressive disposition due to narcissism.
Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler was one of the first students and first dissident of Freud’s theories, creator of the so-called individual psychology. It shapes all of his work based on three main postulates: feelings of inferiority, impulses of power and the community feelings. For him, feelings of community are what attenuate feelings of inferiority (which are also congenital and universal) and control impulses of power.
Adler emphasizes that a strong feeling of inferiority, the aspiration for personal superiority and a deficient sense of community are always recognizable in the phase preceding the deviation of behavior. Besides, antisocial activity that is directed against others is acquired early by those children who fall into the erroneous opinion that all others can be considered objects of their belonging. Their dangerous behavior will depend on the degree of feeling for the community. The delinquent, according to Adler, has a conviction of his own superiority, a subsequent and compensatory consequence of his inferiority from early childhood.
Theodor Reik
Theodor Reik dedicated much of his theory and research to criminal behavior. An example of this is his book The psychoanalysis of the criminalwhere Reik emphasizes that there must be joint work between psychoanalysts and criminologists to clarify the criminal acts, expressing that one of the most effective means to discover the anonymous criminal is to specify the motive for the crime.
He pointed out that the criminal act must be the expression of the individual’s mental tension, arising from his mental state to constitute the promised satisfaction of his psychological needs. According to psychoanalytic concepts, projection mechanisms exist in crimes: the criminal flees from his own consciousness as he would from an external enemy, projecting this internal enemy outward. Under such pressure, the criminal self struggles in vain and the criminal becomes careless and betrays himself in a kind of mental compulsion, making mistakes that have actually been determined by the unconscious.
An example of this would be the inability of a subject not to leave traces of himself but on the contrary, leaving clues at the crime scene. Another example that makes clear the unknown desire of the self to surrender to justice would be the return of criminals to the scene of the crime.
Alexander and Staub
For these authors Every man is innately a criminal and his adaptation to society begins after the victory over the Oedipus complex. Thus, while a normal individual manages in the latency period to repress the genuine criminal tendencies of his impulses and sublimate them towards a pro-social sense, the criminal fails in this adaptation.
It states that the neurotic and the criminal have failed in their ability to resolve the problem of their relationships with the family in a social sense. While the neurotic externalizes symbolically and through hysterical symptoms, the criminal manifests himself through his criminal behavior. A characteristic of all neurotics and most criminals is the incomplete incorporation of the superego.
Sandor Ferenczi observed through the psychoanalysis of various anarchist criminals that the Oedipus complex was still in full evolution, that is to say, that it had not yet been resolved and that His actions symbolically represented a displaced revenge against primitive tyranny. or oppressor of his parent. He finds that the criminal can never really explain what was committed, since it is and will always be incomprehensible to him. The reasons he gives for his misdeeds are always complex rationalizations.
For Sandor, personality is made up of three elements: instinctive me, real me and social self (similar to the second Freudian topic: id, ego and superego) when the instinctive ego predominates in the subject, Ferenczi says that he is a genuine criminal; If the real self is weak, delinquency takes on a neurotic character and when the expressed weakness centers on the hypertrophy of the social self, crimes arise as a result of a feeling of guilt.
Karl Abraham
Freud’s disciple, Karl Abraham argues that Individuals with delinquent characteristics are fixed in the first oral sadistic stage : individuals with aggressive traits governed by the pleasure principle (as we shared in a previous article, antisocial personalities tend to project traits of oral aggressiveness in the Machover human figure test).
He also pointed out similarities between war and totemic festivals based on the works of his teacher, as the entire community comes together to do things that are absolutely forbidden to the individual. Finally, it should be noted that Abraham carried out numerous investigations to try to understand criminal perversions.
Melanie Klein
Melanie Klein found that children with social and antisocial tendencies were the most fearful of possible retaliation from their parents as punishment. She came to the conclusion that it is not the weakness of the superego, but The overwhelming severity of this is responsible for the characteristic behavior of asocial and criminal people. this as a result of the unreal projection of their fears and persecutory fantasies in the early sadistic phase against their parents.
When the child manages to disassociate the unreal and destructive imago that the child projects to his parents and the process of social adaptation begins through the introjection of values ​​and desires to repay the projected aggressive fantasies, the more the tendency to correct his guilt for the false image he had of his parents and his creative capacity grows, the more the superego is appeased; but in cases where as a result of strong sadism and destructive tendencies the strong superego structure prevails, there will be a strong and overwhelming anxiety about which the individual may feel compelled to destroy or kill. We see here that the same psychological roots of personality can develop into paranoia or criminality.
Without a doubt, Jacques Lacan He is the most prominent figure in current psychoanalysis. What interested Lacan most in terms of criminological topics were the crimes committed by paranoid psychotics, where delusional ideas and hallucinations are the cause of their behavior. For Lacan, the aggressive drive that resolves in crime arises in this way, like the condition that serves as the basis for psychosis, it can be said to be unconscious, which means that the intentional content that translates it into consciousness cannot manifest itself without an commitment to the social demands integrated by the subject, that is, without camouflage of the constituent motives of the crime.
The objective characteristics of the crime, the choice of the victim, the criminal effectiveness, its unleashing and execution vary continuously according to the significance of the fundamental position. The criminal drive which he conceives as the basis of paranoia, would simply be an unsatisfactory abstraction if it were not controlled by a series of correlative anomalies of socialized instincts. The murder of the other represents nothing more than the attempted murder of ourselves, precisely because the other would represent our own ideal. It will be the analyst’s job to find the foreclosed contents causing the psychotic delusions that lead to homicide.
Eric Fromm
A humanist psychoanalyst, he proposes that destructiveness differs from sadism in the sense that the former proposes and seeks the elimination of the object, but is similar in that it is a consequence of isolation and helplessness. For Erich Fromm, sadistic behaviors are deeply rooted in a fixation on the anal sadistic stage. The analysis carried out by him considers that destructiveness is a consequence of existential anguish.
Furthermore, for Fromm, the explanation of destructiveness cannot be found in terms of animal or instinctual inheritance (as proposed, for example, by Lorenz) but must be understood based on the factors that distinguish man from the rest of the animals.
