When it comes to talking about the deep and unconscious motivations of those who commit atrocious crimes, psychoanalysis is the cornerstone within the disciplines that are dedicated to the hard work of trying to uncover antisocial and violent behavior.

Violent behavior from Psychoanalysis

Today we will review the psychoanalytic approach of some of the most significant figures in psychoanalysis with respect to antisocial behaviour, in an attempt to shed some light on this complex issue.

Sigmund Freud

The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, tried to study criminals by dividing them into two main categories:

A) Guilt offenders

In 1915, Freud published an article in which he declared that, paradoxical as it may seem, these criminals present a feeling of guilt prior to the crime , and therefore he concluded that the consummation of their act represents, for the criminal subject, a psychic relief linked to the need to mitigate the previous guilt. In other words, by committing the crime, the subject satisfies a need for self-punishment coming from an unconscious sense of guilt (and which, according to him, comes from the primordial guilt in the Oedipus complex: killing the father to keep the mother).

For Freud, guilt is the ambivalent manifestation of the instincts of life and death, since the guilt would come from the tensions between the superego and the it that manifest themselves in a latent need to be punished. He also makes it clear that guilt does not only surface in the conscious realm but is often repressed in the unconscious.

B) Guilt-free offenders

They are subjects who have not developed moral inhibitions or believe their behaviour to be justified by their struggle against society (psychopathic and psychopathological personalities) with a marked weakening of the superego, or with an ego structure incapable of preserving aggressive impulses and sadistic tendencies in it through defence mechanisms.

He also adds as characteristics of the delinquent two essential features: self-centeredness and a destructive tendency, but he also says that in all men there is a natural disposition or aggressiveness due to narcissism.

Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler was one of the first students and first dissident of Freud’s theories, creator of the so-called individual psychology . His work is based on three main postulates: the feelings of inferiority, the impulses of power and the feelings of community . For him, the feelings of community are those that attenuate the feelings of inferiority (which are also congenital and universal) and control the impulses of power.

Adler emphasizes that a strong feeling of inferiority, the aspiration for personal superiority and a deficient sense of community are always recognizable in the phase preceding the deviation in behavior. Furthermore, antisocial activity that is directed against others is acquired early on by those children who fall into the erroneous view that everyone else can be regarded as an object of their own. Their dangerous behaviour will depend on the degree of feeling towards the community. The delinquent, according to Adler, has a conviction of his own superiority, a later and compensatory consequence of his early childhood inferiority.

Theodor Reik

Theodor Reik devoted much of his theory and research to criminal behavior. An example of this is his book El psicoanálisis del crimina l , where Reik emphasizes that there must be a joint effort between psychoanalysts and criminologists to clarify the criminal facts, expressing that one of the most effective means to discover the anonymous criminal is to clarify the motive of the crime.

He pointed out that the criminal act must be the expression of the individual’s mental tension, arising from his state of mind to constitute the promised satisfaction of his psychological needs. According to psychoanalytic concepts, there are mechanisms of projection in crimes: the criminal flees from his own conscience as he would do in the face of an external enemy, projecting this internal enemy outwards. Under such pressure, the criminal self struggles vainly and the criminal becomes careless and betrays himself in a kind of mental compulsion, committing errors that in reality have been determined by the unconscious.

An example of this would be the inability of a subject to leave no trace of himself, but on the contrary, to leave clues at the scene of the crime. Another example that makes clear the unknown yearning of the “I” to surrender to justice would be the return of criminals to the scene of the crime.

Alexander and Staub

For these authors every man is innately a criminal and his adaptation to society begins after the victory over the Oedipus complex . Thus, while a normal individual succeeds in repressing the genuine criminal tendencies of his impulses during the period of latency and sublimating them towards a pro-social sense, the criminal fails in this adaptation.

He says that the neurotic and the criminal have failed in their ability to solve the problem of their relationships with the family in a social sense. While the neurotic externalizes symbolically and through hysterical symptoms, the criminal manifests himself through his criminal behavior. A characteristic of all neurotics and most criminals is that the incorporation of the Overself is incomplete.

Sandor Ferenczi

Sándor Ferenczi observed through the psychoanalysis of various anarchist criminals that the Oedipus complex was still evolving, that it was still unresolved, and that his acts symbolically represented a displaced revenge against the primitive or oppressive tyranny of his progenitor. He finds that the criminal can never really explain what he has committed, for it is and will always be incomprehensible to him. The reasons he gives for his misdeeds are always complex rationalizations.

For Sandor, personality is made up of three elements: instinctive self , real self and social self (similar to the second Freudian cliché: it, self, and superyó) when the instinctive self predominates in the subject, Ferenczi says that it is a genuine criminal; if the real self is weak, the delinquency takes on a neurotic character and when the expressed weakness is centered in the hypertrophy of the social self, there is crime as a result of a feeling of guilt.

Karl Abraham

A disciple of Freud, Karl Abraham argues that individuals with delinquent characteristics are fixed in the first oral sadistic stage : individuals with aggressive traits governed by the principle of pleasure (as we shared in a previous article, antisocial personalities tend to project traits of oral aggressiveness in Machover’s human figure test).

He also pointed out similarities between war and totemic festivals based on the works of his teacher, as the whole community comes together to do things that are absolutely forbidden to the individual. Finally, it should be noted that Abraham conducted numerous investigations to try to understand criminal perversions.

Melanie Klein

Melanie Klein found that children with social and antisocial tendencies were most afraid of possible parental retaliation as punishment. She concluded that it is not the weakness of the Overself, but its overwhelming severity that is responsible for the characteristic behaviour of asocial and criminal people , as a result of the unrealistic projection of their fears and persecutory fantasies in the early sadistic phase against their parents.

When the child manages to dissociate the unreal and destructive imagery that the child projects to his parents and the process of social adaptation is initiated by the introjection of values and desires to give back the projected aggressive fantasies, the more the tendency to correct his guilt for the false image he had of his parents increases and his creative capacity grows, the more the superego will be appeased; but in cases where, as a result of strong sadism and destructive tendencies, the strong superegoic structure prevails, there will be strong and overwhelming anguish so that the individual may feel compelled to destroy or kill. We see here that the very psychological roots of personality can develop into paranoia or criminality.

Jacques Lacan

Without a doubt, Jacques Lacan is the most outstanding figure within current psychoanalysis . What most interested Lacan in terms of criminological issues were the crimes committed by paranoid psychotics, where delusional ideas and hallucinations are the cause of their behavior. For Lacan, the aggressive impulse that is resolved in the crime thus arises, as well as the condition that serves as the basis for the psychosis, can be said to be unconscious, which means that the intentional content that translates it into consciousness, cannot manifest itself without a commitment to the social demands integrated by the subject, that is, without a camouflage of the motives that constitute the crime.

The objective characteristics of the crime, the choice of the victim, the criminal effectiveness, its triggering and execution vary continuously according to the significance of the fundamental position. The criminal drive that he conceives as the basis of paranoia, would simply be an unsatisfactory abstraction if it were not controlled by a series of correlative anomalies of socialized instincts. The murder of the other represents nothing more than the attempt to murder ourselves, precisely because the other would represent our own ideal. It will be the task of the analyst to find the forlorn contents that cause the psychotic delusions that lead to homicide.

Erich Fromm

Humanistic psychoanalyst, proposes that destructiveness differs from sadism in the sense that the former proposes and seeks the elimination of the object, but is similar in that it is a consequence of isolation and impotence. For Erich Fromm, sadistic behaviors are deeply rooted in a fixation on the anal sadistic stage . The analysis carried out by him considers that, the destructiveness is a consequence of the existential anguish.

Moreover, for Fromm, the explanation of destructiveness cannot be found in terms of animal or instinctive inheritance (as proposed, for example, by Lorenz) but must be understood on the basis of the factors that distinguish man from other animals.

Bibliographic references:

  • Marchiori, H. (2004). Criminal Psychology .9th edition. Editorial Porrúa.
  • Fromm, E. (1975). Anatomy of human destructiveness . 11th edition. Editorial siglo XXI.