Editorial

The field of forensic psychotherapy may appear to be comprised of uneasy coalitions between disciplines and paradigms with diverse and sometimes opposing principles – therapeutics and the law, forensic psychiatry and psychoanalysis, moral ethics and scientific empiricism. However, its distinct identity arises from its efforts to maintain a dialectic between the tensions and conflicts existing at its core, from which creativity and innovation may emerge. In this second volume of our Special Issue on Forensic Psychotherapy we offer an international perspective, with papers from the United States and Germany, as well as the UK, illustrating how these dilemmas are explored and addressed in different political, sociological and cultural contexts.

How can Freud’s ideas, originating in his discoveries of treating hysterical women in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Vienna, be applied to the forensic world of murderers and rapists? How can psychoanalysis, which traditionally considers antisocial and violent behaviour as serious contradictions for psychoanalytic treatment, be adapted to the therapeutic needs of offenders? James Gilligan, one of the foremost contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers on violence, proposes that psychoanalysis offers the most powerful cognitive and emotional understanding of the workings of the human psyche than any other method, shifting the philosophical and moral question ‘How should I live and what should I do?’ to the scientific question ‘How can I live?’ i.e. ‘What processes maintain life, and which forces lead to damage and death?’ He asserts that these questions can be empirically examined and tested by applying psychoanalytic theories and methods to the study of human behaviours, including those of extreme violence.

Gilligan relates his own personal and professional journey, starting as a recent graduate from Harvard Medical School taking a job as a prison psychiatrist to support his young family, where he discovered to his surpris