Law: Law's Appropriations of Psychoanalysis

The discipline of law is consciously interdisciplinary these days—the named sub-disciplines of law and economics, women and the law, law and religion, law and literature (or language, or interpretation), law and medicine (or psychology), and law and society are well-established, and all have their own associations and journals. Of course, law has always been interdisciplinary, not only in the obvious sense that jurisprudence, legal history, and the sociology of law necessarily involve philosophers, historians, and sociologists, but also in the sense that legal processes and institutions reproduce, sometimes unwittingly, particular views of politics, religion, interpretation, women, the economy, and science. Now that the links between law and other disciplines are being acknowledged and discussed with greater frequency, some theoretical frameworks, like economics, are decisively influential (e.g., in policy debates and judicial opinions), many, like literary theory, are recognized as the source of minor insights (e.g., in debates over interpretation of legal texts), and a few, like radical feminist theory, are viewed with predictable suspicion.

The degree of influence and acceptance of psychoanalysis within contemporary legal theory, education, and practice parallels the influence and acceptance of psychoanalysis within social theory and clinical psychology or psychiatry generally. That is, since clinical psychoanalysis is in crisis (Chalfin & Rosenblitt), seen by many psychiatrists as a thing of the past, that state of affairs is mirrored in legal processes and institutions. When courts require up-to-the-minute scientific expertise on questions of mental capacity, an argument claiming that certain knowledge was repressed will be ridiculed, and “Law and Psychiatry” textbooks (e.g., Spring et al.) will no longer include a chapter on psychoanalysis. On a happier note, since the use of psychoanalytic theory is alive and well in critical social theory and cultural studies