A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology

While theory in the physical sciences has never really escaped from the requirement of internal coherence at the very heart of knowledge (connaissance), the human sciences, because they form themselves through the very behaviors that constitute their object, cannot evade the question of their meaning or pretend that the answer doesn't impose itself in terms of truth.

That human reality implies this process of revelation is a fact that has enabled some people to think of history as a dialectic inscribed in matter; indeed, no “behaviorist” ritual of protection of the subject in relation to its object can castrate this truth of its creative and mortal point, and this fact makes scientists, who are dedicated to “pure” knowledge, responsible in the first instance. No one knows this better than psychoanalysts who, in the awareness of what their subjects confide to them as well as in the handling of behaviors conditioned by analytic technique, act through a revelation whose truth determines its efficacy.

Moreover, is not the search for truth what constitutes the object of criminology in the realm of judicial matters, and also what unifies its two aspects: the truth of the crime under its police aspect and the truth of the criminal under its anthropological aspect?

The problem my presentation will be concerned with today is: what can the technique that guides our dialogue with the subject and the notions that our experience has defined in psychology contribute to this research? My presentation is less concerned with stating the contribution of psychoanalysis to the study of delinquency—discussed in the other presentations—than with posing the legitimate limits of our contribution. My purpose is certainly not to propagate the letter of our doctrines without concern for method, but to rethink our doctrine, as we are advised to do constantly, in relation to a new object.

On the Sociological Reality of Crime and of the Law and on the Re