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This book has been written by forensic psychotherapists whose concern it is to develop a psychodynamic understanding of the offender patient and, in this context, the crime becomes the means of a behavioural enactment by the patient, which uniquely demonstrates something of their internal object relations.
The psychotherapy of those with criminal tendencies and a history of catastrophically dangerous behaviour has its historical roots in this country in the appointment of visiting psychotherapists to the prisons under the auspices of the Home Office. This practice goes back prior to World War II and to the setting up of the Portman Clinic in 1931. This formed the clinical wing of the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency and was co-founded by Edward Glover, who was a pioneer in the combined field of psychotherapy and criminology.
Emotionally, the horror of murder is one of the most perplexing and chilling subjects to think about, and some of the chapters in this book need close and careful reading and reflection - as neither a socio-political, psychodynamic, nor psychiatric perspective alone can provide any conceptual basis for understanding the aetiology of violence and murder.
The aim of this series is an attempt to understand the origins of murder, as well as describing the highly complex reactions the treatment process generates in both patient and therapist.
The editor explores the history of murder using the concept of Hyatt-Williams's (1998) death constellation - a split-off and encapsulated mental structure that attacks life, when it is triggered by external stressors, breaking loose from its cordon and likely to end in homicidal or suicidal behaviour, or both. Although the aim of psychodynamic psychotherapy with this particular patient population is to gain a greater understanding of their internal world and object relations, the main object of analytic work is described as being