Toward a Lacanian Criminology

The recent publication of an English translation of Lacan's “A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology” is a long awaited and much needed initiative for the development of a Lacanian-informed critical criminology. Lacan's paper is composed of some well established material interspersed with some significant and novel contributions for a critical criminology. One such contribution is that of Renata Salecl, who uses Lacan's work, to postulate three types of crimes: crimes of the ego, crimes of the self, and crimes of the superego. Crimes of the ego are those directed toward simple profit accumulation; those of the self are “pure instinctive crimes which are reactions to some aggression”; and crimes of the superego are those with which psychoanalysis, according to Salecl, has the most interest. These are crimes where a split exists between the ego and the superego causes a subject to try to resolve the split through committing some criminal act. Here crime is subject-conferring; it is a “mode of subjectivization.”

For Salecl, psychoanalysis is interested only in the crimes of the superego. For Mark Bracher, psychoanalysis is also concerned with crimes of the self, with various forms of narcissistic and alienating identifications. Aggression, for Bracher, cannot be reduced to purely psychological functioning. Bracher situates aggressivity and crime in the interplay of social and psychological forces. His is not a psychological reductionism, for he follows Lacan literally when the latter says that “neither crime nor criminals are objects that can be conceived outside of their sociological reference” (13). Lacan tells us that there does not exist a “criminal instinct” (24), for if there existed a “law of the jungle,” why are there not also “impulses to dig, to plant, to cook, and even to bury the dead”?

For both Salecl and Bracher, a certain amount of an excess in aggressivity finds its source in societal development, an insight generated