Select Page

Life Behind Bars: Psychoanalysis and Forensic Practice

by | Vol 30 (2) 2012

This article outlines the possibility of a psychoanalytic clinic within a forensic setting. It is difficult to provide treatment within a judicial discourse, which leaves no room for the subject of the patient but only for their status as defined by the law and its enforcement. However, psychoanalysis can still provide an opening for the patient to speak despite this prevailing discourse. The singular position of the analyst will be especially crucial. Firstly, transference as working tool is actively used via a treatment of the Other (l’Autre), to establish changes in the relationship of the patient to the other (l’autre). Secondly, the setting and the specificity of volatile patients within a clinic of the Real with accompanying acts, aggression and crises, require a creative form of intervention. A recognition of the suffering of the patient is thereby necessary. The casuistry throws light on the clinical as well as the forensic aspects of the patient.

Related articles

  • Psychoanalysis and Modernity

    This article gives a rough sketch of psychoanalysis as part of modern culture (modernity) and as participating in the problematic of modern culture (modernity). It starts from the present day lack of interest in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is minimally defined by its concern for human experience, dividedness and conflict and for the maintenance of a lack. Present day culture can be described by a prevalence of instrumentalism, narcissism and the practice of a culture of immediacy. It can be interpreted in…

  • Psychoanalysis: a symptomatic problem

    In this article the author explores why psychoanalysts are often seen as troublesome people and why they give so much critique. Foucault stated that in modernity the epistèmè changed: ‘man’ came in the thinking frame and human sciences were born. In his opinion psychoanalysis has in this epistèmè the position of a counter-science. In this article the author shows how psychoanalysis is different from human sciences in two aspects. First, psychoanalysis has another subject theory. The subject is not seen…

  • Psychoanalysis beyond good and evil

    The moral criticism of Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil puts the dogmatics behind the philosophy of utilitarianism and deontological ethics at stake. The philosophy of ‘living as art’ and the human rights philosophy are criticised. The subject of autonomy, or the ‘I’, the agent of most ethical theories, is seen as a grammatical fiction. The concept of the ‘will to power’ serves as a way to deal with the complexity of this subject, given as a field of influence.…