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We would expect the analyst's occupational familiarity with feelings of guilt and the need for punishment to qualify him to offer some educated opinions on crime and punishment. Yet, to judge from the psychoanalytic literature, criminal acts—especially acts of violence—are among the most rarely studied of all the varieties of human behavior and social problems that have been investigated by psychoanalysts.
Most of the more recent psychoanalytic work in this area deals with “delinquency,” an artificial category comprising the various antisocial acts that have been committed by pre-adults. But delinquency is only one very particular aspect of the problem of crime, and involves many factors that are significantly different from those we face with the adult criminal.
Freud's contribution to criminology consisted of four articles. Of two of these, which were short pieces of jurisprudence (1931; Jones, 1957), Strachey (1959) comments, “In both of these instances he wrote to deprecate any half-baked application of psychoanalytic theories in legal proceedings” (p. 102). In a similar vein Freud (1906) wrote “Psychoanalysis and the Establishment of the Facts in Legal Proceedings,” in which he disparaged the value of word-association tests for the establishment of guilt or innocence. In his 1916 paper, “Criminal Out of a Sense of Guilt,” he did make a valuable contribution to criminology, which I shall discuss in more detail later.
There is also a marked dearth of analytic comment on
Systems of punishment,1 despite the fact that society's punishments of crime have become not only increasingly expensive and cumbersome but, even more disturbing, increasingly ineffective.
On the surface, there may be some justification for the almost negligible involvement of analysts in these areas: we are usually not consulted in such situations; we tend to have personal biases against engaging in such work; and, of course, we must remain alert to the dangers inherent in applying findings in ind