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This book is the third volume in a series entitled ‘Forensic Focus’. The declared aim is to present theoretical and clinical issues in the field of forensic psychotherapy. The editor of the series was Dr Murray Cox, a distinguished clinical practitioner and author who died shortly after this volume appeared. Dr Cox, together with Dr Christopher Cordess, was the editor of the first volume in the series, Forensic Psychotherapy: Crime, Psychodynamics and the Offender Patient. That substantial volume was the first of its kind.
The Foreword to this book makes clear that it takes the form of essays on the ‘intricacies and complexities encountered in working with the forensic patient’. Apart from Murray Cox's brief introductory Foreword, all the other contributors to this volume, nearly forty of them, happen to be women. Is this an accident?
An introduction makes a number of points, emphasising that forensic psychiatry (psychiatry in relation to the law) and its offspring, forensic psychotherapy, is not ‘soft’ on offenders.
‘The aim is to help locate responsibility by means of understanding within a person rather than in the environment.’
‘Forensic patients uniquely demonstrate their internal worlds as with their crime they act out something of their internal object relations.’
The other parent discipline of forensic psychotherapy is psychoanalytical psychotherapy. In the first part of the book a chapter from Estela Welldon provides a brief overview of a practical approach; and in a second chapter on management and treatment, Cecelia Taylor deals with the wider aspect of how forensic psychotherapy plays a part in the overall strategy of the management and treatment of offender patients.
In Part 2, the main body of this book, short essays by many authors address case-studies in an illuminating way. For this reader, an experienced forensic psychiatrist with an interest in psychoanalytic ideas but little by way of formal training, each of