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I began reading Anne C. Dailey's Law and the Unconscious while writing the Call for Papers (CFP) of a conference I was organizing called “Literature, Law, and Psychoanalysis, 1890-1950” at the University of Sheffield. It was recommended to me initially by Dr. Ravit Reichman (Brown University), who I had asked to be one of our keynote speakers. Some years earlier, I had read Dailey's special issue of American Imago on “Legal Analysis” (published 2007) and had been intrigued by her identification of the seminal moment for law and psychoanalysis as the 1930 publication of Jerome Frank's widely read book, Law and the Modern Mind. She also argued that the “high water mark of law and psychoanalysis” was the 1967 book Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry, and Law by Jay Katz, Joseph Goldstein, and Alan Dershowitz (2007, pp. 291-292). Frank's 1930 book and Katz et al.'s 1967 book are still the key reference points for the thinking in her new Law and the Unconscious.
As I am a researcher based in the UK, I immediately wondered if equivalent paradigm-altering texts to Frank's book or Katz's were published in the UK. One landmark option I considered was Theodore Reik's polemic The Unknown Murderer (1932), which was promptly translated into English by Dr. Katherine Jones (wife of Ernest) and published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's influential Hogarth Press. Reik and Frank share a similar ambition not simply to deploy psychoanalysis, but to go beyond this aim to, as Dailey puts it, call attention “to the unconscious and irrational influences that permeated judicial decision making” (2007, p. 291). Reik (1961) goes further and says he will examine “a pathology of legal judgements,” as, for example, “one must not underestimate the influence of unconscious unfavourable impressions on judge and jury; they diminish suspicion against evidence which would otherwise