disowning our shadow: a psychoanalytic approach to understanding punitive public attitudes

Abstract

Punitive public attitudes cannot be easily explained by pointing to instrumental concerns (e.g., fear of crime, personal victimization, or real or perceived levels of crime). Instead, numerous observers have suggested that public punitiveness is more a symptom of free-floating anxieties and insecurities resulting from social change than a rational response to crime problems. We argue that these public concerns might be better understood by drawing on the insights of psychoanalytic theory, and we review relevant theoretical work to that effect.

The authors wish to thank Bruce Arrigo, David Garland, Loraine Gelsthorpe, Nicole Hahn Rafter, Claire Valier, and Veronique Voruz for their comments and criticisms.

Notes

¹Indeed, this argument is made explicit in theoretical work in evolutionary psychology (e.g., Fehr and Gachter 2002), in which support for the punishment of wrongdoers is considered an almost universal human trait, crucial to the evolution of civilization.

²Methodologically, the Freudian interpretive framework has been described as something like “a blank check” (Smith 1971; 192). After all, even the individual being analysed has no great access to the unconscious without the analyst's help. Freud ([1935]1990: 49–50) writes: “As far as the patient is concerned this sense of guilt is dumb; it does not tell him he is guilty; he does not feel guilty, he feels ill.” Therefore, only analysts can diagnose things like “unconcious guilt” and they are likely to see evidence of these invisible processes everywhere, even under contradictory circumstances. (If a patient claims to feel guilty, it may be evidence of guilt; if they claim not to feel guilty, it may also evidence of this underlying guilt being projected outward).

³Published in 1912, Totem and Taboo was the first of Freud's five works with social and cultural themes. This paper will focus primarily on the fourth of these, Civilisation and Its Discontents ([1930]2002).

⁴Additionally, we should warn that ours is a selective reading of the massive and highly diverse psychoanalytic canon. It is also an amateur one; we are not trained psychoanalysts, nor do we consider our scholarly orientations to be psychoanalytic in any general sense. To compensate for this, our essay over-relies on quotations from original and secondary sources, but we are still in peril of playing a little fast and loose with some incompletely digested Freudian concepts.

⁵This is especially so for the efficacy of Melanie Klein's (1985) psychoanalytic theory, in particular, for such understandings has been argued for and demonstrated on several occasions in contemporary criminological work (e.g. Hollway and Jefferson 2000; Valier 2000).

⁶In The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), Freud provides a useful introduction to his theory by borrowing the discursive technique generally associated with Plato to explain the tenets of psychoanalytic practice.