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The ‘pale criminal’ is a term and concept originally taken from the title of a chapter of Nietzsche's philosophical work Thus spake Zarathustra (1961). It was developed by Freud in his short paper ‘Criminals from a sense of guilt’ (part of ‘Some character types met with in psycho-analytic work’), as well as elsewhere, to refer to those criminals whose ‘unconscious guilt’ precedes and—so it is maintained—causes their later crimes. ‘Pale criminals’ are ‘pale’ because they suffer unconscious guilt for an idea, or phantasy, which is traced to an unresolved Oedipus complex; they are in Jung's phrase ‘slain by their own ideas’, and ‘do not feel well in their skin’: they are ‘criminal’ in order to provoke punishment. By seeking and achieving punishment the pale criminal is said to rationalise and purge his/her sense of unconscious guilt. In the words of Stephen Costello, the author of this volume, ‘this is the motive of their misdeeds, after which they (supposedly) become quiet and content’. In brief, their conscience is not too weak but, rather, it is too strong. Freud (1924) later replaced the usage of the term ‘unconscious guilt’, since feelings cannot properly be described as unconscious; he, along with Theodore Reik, substituted the term ‘need for punishment’. Costello contrasts the pale criminal to the ‘rosy criminal’, a term also borrowed from Nietzsche, who is said to possess neither conscious nor unconscious guilt—although he/she may, apparently, feel shame. The distinction lives on in muted form in contemporary positivist psychiatry and psychology in the terms