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A member of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, Claude Balier has run a prisonbased regional medical service providing psychiatric and psychological treatment for detainees who are often serving long sentences. The majority of his patients have committed criminal offences, murders, sexual assaults or other violent acts. For many years, this author, with substantial clinical experience, has been exploring both what forms of psychoanalytic and multidisciplinary care are possible in a setting of this kind and the psychic functioning of patients with a propensity for extremely violent behaviour. Balier has set up an association that specializes in clinical practice and discussion concerning the psychotherapeutic treatment of sex offenders (in groups and individual follow-up care).
His previous books (Balier, 1988, 1996) mainly proposed a clinical approach to patients of this kind, as well as some discussion of the methodological conditions of their follow-up care. At the same time, he presented his quest for working concepts to use in considering these pathologies: psychoanalytic practice, technique and theory today are closely interconnected.
At the end of Balier (1996), which examines the processes of disobjectalization and desubjectivization that operate in violent sexual behaviour, Balier emphasized