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Is it possible for the offender to be psychoanalyzed?
My various experiences bring this question to the fore in my consideration of therapy for the offender.
If we use Eissler's (7) overview of a two-phase approach, the answer is—Yes, theoretically. Eissler suggests that Freud's technique “should be considered as a kind of model treatment and that deviations necessary for extending the range of psychoanalytic treatment to disorders outside of the neuroses be kept to a minimum.” Freud, in a foreword to Wayward Youth, (1) points out that when the conditions required for the analytic situation are lacking, “as a rule in criminals dominated by their instincts, the psychoanalytic method must be adapted to meet the need.”
Eissler suggests that the minimum deviations in technique required to extend the range of psychoanalytic treatment to disorders outside of the neuroses be called parameters. He terms “psychoanalytic” that technique which achieves its purpose with the smallest possible parameter, (8) despite the awareness that the deviations may be so great as to make the original model almost unrecognizable.
In this paper, I will discuss the factors involved in the initial or preparatory phase and how the achievement of this phase, in and of itself, can be seen as a realistic and valuable goal
in the majority of cases. (Phase 2, in Eissler's opinion, is essentially the same as a classical analysis.)
The understanding of the sociopath or offender constitutes perhaps one of the most difficult of psychiatric categories, creating a major problem because areas of morality and legality are directly or indirectly involved. This becomes most evident in the area of “treatment” where vengeance and the old laws of “an eye for an eye” still dictate the approach to the problem overtly or covertly.
One finds in a prison the gamut of inmates with psychiatric disorders manifested by one of its symptoms—commission of an offensive act for which the person was caught. The three basic approach