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Anna Motz, Maxine Dennis, and Anne Aiygebusi are three women who are all highly respected in their fields, known for their outstanding individual contributions to forensic and personality disorder services through their applied psychoanalytic work. I expected this jointly authored book to be good, but it is quite exceptional. The collaboration between them has led to a volume which is full of thought-provoking facts, clearly explained theory, and powerful clinical case descriptions. It is simultaneously impassioned, scholarly, and accessible. All three authors draw on their own extensive experience of providing and observing mental health services, drawing on a psychoanalytic/psychotherapeutic perspective.
The book is concerned with women in the criminal justice system, and the way in which, by breaching traditional stereotypes of femininity, women who commit violent or criminal acts may be perceived to be monstrous or demonic. A theme throughout the book is the way that such women are “hyper-visible”, representing a shocking breach of social expectations, whilst simultaneously their history of trauma and vulnerability may be “invisible”. The book specifically examines how women from Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds may be particularly prone to be the object of dehumanising and destructive projections; thus the intersection of gender with race and ethnicity can lead to a multiplication of misperceptions and misattributions.
The authors argue persuasively that women who act out through harming others, and often themselves, tend to be seen as “mad” or “bad”, as suffering from severe psychopathology or being terrifyingly dangerous; the social, political, transgenerational, and traumatic contexts of their lives are often overlooked. Motz (chapter 7), writing on female psychopathy and sexual offending against children, argues that rather than labelling women “psychopathic” it is more helpful to think in terms of psychopathic states of mind and to consid