ARTICLES

Theoretical Criminology
2003 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi. 13624806(200311)7:4 Vol. 7(4): 421437; 036925

From individual to social defences in psychosocial criminology

ALISON P. BROWN

University of Stirling, UK
Abstract
A psychosocial strand of criminology has emerged in recent years, which explores concepts such as fear of crime through analysis of individual biographies, and Freudian perspectives on punitive responses to offenders. It is possible to develop this psychosocial perspective further through an exploration of other central concepts such as conscience and reparation, and of a broader range of psychodynamic perspectives on the origins of anti-social tendencies. Inevitably, this leads beyond the intra-psychic to the interpersonal, with consequences for our view of conventional and restorative justice systems and penal institutions.

Key Words
psychoanalysis psychodynamics psychosocial restorative justice social defence systems

Introduction
In the late 1980s, to discuss the psychoanalytic theory of crime was curiously old-fashioned (Kline, 1987). Despite the inuence of psychoanalysis on the 20th-century history of criminology, each paradigm within criminology has its reasons to dismiss psychoanalytic ideas (Player, 1996). Although psychology has traced the origins of criminality to emotional disturbance in young children associated with a combination of lack of affection and erratic disciplinary practices (Raine, 1993), little practice or 421

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Theoretical Criminology 7(4) research on delinquency has retained a psychoanalytical focus on early experience. Several problems have been said to limit the potential for a psychoanalytic perspective on crime or social problems generally: that it tends towards correctionalism and conservatism (Rose, 1989; Taylor, 1999), or, alternatively, that it condones moral relativism and evasion of responsibility (Cohen, 2001). As an explanation, either it is mechanistic and imputes invisible causal forces (Katz, 2002), or, alternatively, it is unscientic (Blackburn, 1993; Feldman, 1993). Psychoanalysis has been associated with a retreat from politics and with support for, and construction of, individualism and alienation (Kovel, 1981; Cushman, 1995; Gordon, 2001). Today, discussions of counselling or therapy in criminal justice contexts (Wolfenden, 1997; Bentley, 1999; Devlin, 1999) are conned largely to counselling or therapy audiences. On the other hand, interactionist views of crime have long recognized the limitations of a rationalist, cognitive approach to motivations (Sykes and Matza, 1957). Recently, a concern with the emotional aspects of crime has emerged (De Haan and Loader, 2002; Karstedt, 2002). There is, within criminology, renewed interest in a psychosocial perspective, suggested initially in relation to masculinity and heterosexual violence (Jefferson, 1994, 2002; Connell, 2002) and the fear of crime (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000). In relation to fear of crime, Hollway and Jefferson adapt the two pillars of psychoanalytic techniques: free association as an interview method, and, for data analysis, interpretation of generalization, contradiction or avoidance in narrative as psychic defences. This work shows how life events and anxiety levels produce differential fear of crime not along simple age or gender lines; and takes us beyond the rational versus irrational fear debate. Although they concentrate on fear of crime, Hollway and Jefferson also apply a Kleinian approach to criminals. Those who acknowledge responsibility for their actions and exhibit concern for others are seen as capable of maintaining what is regarded in Kleinian terms as the depressive position. The origins of criminality are located in childhood deprivation and in solutions to such deprivations that make sense in both social and psychic contexts. Here we nd an example of how a psychoanalytical view of fear (anxiety) can enhance our understanding of a key criminological concept, fear of crime. Garland (1990, 2001) indicates the potential of psychoanalytic explanations of punishment, which link the motivations of actors in the system to broader socio-economic changes. Other scholars are exploring psychoanalytic and psychodynamic views of punishment (Valier, 2000) and of the origins of criminality (Costello, 2002) while acknowledging that these are diverse and are open to comparison. This article aims to extend this exploration of the diversity of psychoanalytic views, and in doing so to suggest ways in which a psychodynamic exploration of crime and criminalization can demonstrate the interconnectedness of the intersubjective and the systemic. First, this article considers how a psychosocial perspective might be

BrownFrom individual to social defences developed further through the study of other key criminological concepts such as conscience and reparation, and the implications of psychodynamic views of conscience and anti-social tendencies. It considers whether such an approach can extend beyond individual biographies of offenders or victims to help us understand processes and systems of criminalization and conict. In so doing, it argues for acknowledgement of the diversity of psychodynamic views, and in particular of intersubjective perspectives that are of direct relevance to our understanding of the social and structural location and construction of crime. A distinction will be maintained between psychoanalysis as a specic practice; and a psychodynamic perspective that adapts the theories that followed Freudparticularly those of Klein and object relationsfor use in any eld of human activity. First, this article will take another look at Kleinian theory and the implications for its alternative views of conscience.

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Conscience and reparation

Psychologists have argued against deterrence as the basis for criminal justice on the grounds that deterrence has no effect where the conscience is under-developed as a result of poor parenting (Kline, 1987; Blackburn, 1993). In Freudian terms, criminality is a manifestation of an underdeveloped conscience resulting from incomplete psychosexual development (e.g. unresolved Oedipal conicts). The broad assumption is that of a weak superego (conscience) unable to control a strong id (instinctual drive). Kleinian theory, however, suggests an alternative to lack of conscience or feeling of guilt as the origin of criminality. Klein pursued one of Freuds alternative suggestions; that crime might arise from excessive guilt rather than lack of a conscience. Klein proposed that, rather than a weak conscience, disturbance can be a manifestation of a persecutory conscience. Kleins attention to criminality was part of her conceptualization of the centrality of aggression in early life. Klein proposed that every child suffers in the rst years of life from jealousy of parents or siblings. Destructive and sadistic fantasies bring the threat of punishment from the sadistic superego, the internalization of the parents. Guilt over this destructiveness is repressed, but is acted out unconsciously: The desire for punishment, which is a determining factor when the child constantly repeats naughty acts, nds an analogy in the repeated misdeeds of the criminal (Klein, 1927: 179). Children behave so as to be punished because the real punishment, however severe, was reassuring in comparison with the murderous attacks which they were continuously expecting from fantastically cruel parents (Klein, 1934: 258). Although all children go through this phase, abnormal development may occur where children experience in reality abandonment or persecution that reinforces fantasy. Besides Oedipal dynamics, therefore, Klein identies the causes of delinquency in her cases as sexual abuse,

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Theoretical Criminology 7(4) violence between parents and loss of parents. Here we can see that although Klein is concerned largely with intra-psychic events, she acknowledges the impact of the interpersonal and social environment. As a prime inuence on restorative justice practices, the theory of reintegrative shaming suggests that the offender makes choices, within societal constraints. In contrast to the traditional arguments for deterrence as a basis for criminal justice, it recognizes that in making such choices the disapproval of signicant others is a greater deterrent than the prospect of punishment. For behaviour against which there is a strong consensus, society can build on this aversion to disapproval to shame offenders, that is, to induce guilt. But this view of emotional responses is not compatible with a psychodynamic approach. Based on cognitive learning theory, the shaming thesis assumes that morality must be learned and conscience acquired. Shaming is the societal process that underwrites the family process of building consciences in children (Braithwaite, 1989: 72). A Kleinian view of the persecutory conscience, therefore, poses a fundamental challenge to such cognitive assumptions. How, then, might a Kleinian analyse restorative justice practices? Reparation is a central concept in restorative justice practices. Reparation is also a key psychoanalytic concept, linked principally with the work of Klein and Riviere (Sayers, 2000). Kleins key observation was that reparative tendencies emerge only when overwhelming anxieties and feelings of persecution have been resolved. According to Blatier (1999), the reparation order seeks to repair not just external damage, but also internal damage to the offenders sense of responsibility. Reparation aims at the acknowledgement of harm and forgiveness, and at internalization of the law. A lasting change in behaviour will result only from a restoration of the latent capacity to feel guilt and from support for the tendencies towards good. Reparation moves the person away from the sense that they are the victim of the systems persecution and therefore have no choice but to retaliate. The transformation is one from sadistic to a regulatory superego (symbolized in the judge), and from enactment to symbolization (language). The role of the judge, Blatier explains, is to set boundaries to aggression and to ensure that the offender is not in turn persecuted by the victim. Similarly, in one of his addresses to lay audiences in the 1940s and 1950s, the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Winnicott explained to magistrates that the task of the courts is to protect the offender from the publics unconscious revenge feelings. Klein described two positions, paranoid-schizoid and depressive, between which we all move to differing degrees. The former is characterized by splitting, where only bad or good parts of the self or other people are experienced, and other parts projected into others, which leads to the sense of self as omnipotent or persecuted. On the other hand, the depressive position is characterized by experience of responsibility, guilt, ambivalence and recognition of the needs of the other. As Marsh (1996)

BrownFrom individual to social defences explains, bringing together victim and offender in reparation is an alternative form of justice in that, in Kleinian terms, it negotiates the depressive position: victim and offender see each other directly and as whole objects. This can be contrasted to the traditional system of splitting the bad (offender) from the good (victim, state). An alternative view of conscience therefore has implications for our views of mainstream and restorative justice systems. Examination of reparation, as a concept central to both psychodynamics and criminal justice systems, challenges accepted cognitive views of such systems, and suggests that a psychodynamic analysis can extend beyond the intrapsychic to the social and systemic. Similarly, envy is another key psychoanalytic concept that can explain how progressive justice systems come to lack popular support because of the envy conforming people, under conditions of social insecurity, feel for any care or attention given to offenders (Rustin, 2001). Further exploration of the phenomenon of envy could create another psychosocial connection. In relation to the practice of restorative justice, for example, research could examine the assumptions made about conscience, and how shame might be induced in more or less persecutory ways. Otherwise, the new restorative justice practices may fail as the old system has done. Furthermore, the Kleinian insight into the persecutory conscience highlights a contradiction of punishment; that it may in some way be sought or needed by the person punished. Although Kleins original concern was largely with intra-psychic events, she acknowledged the impact of the interpersonal and social environment, and subsequent applications of Kleinian ideas have taken this further to the study of groups or systems. For a greater engagement with the social and interpersonal, we can turn to the work of psychoanalysts who gave less priority to life and death instincts, and more to other intersubjective processes such as the search for boundaries and the anti-social withdrawal from relationships.

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Anti-social tendencies
From the 1930s, psychoanalysis moved away from the primacy of sexual (life) and death instincts or drives, to a view of relationships as the basis for psychodynamics (Fairbairn, 1952; Suttie, 1988; Winnicott, 1991). A paediatrician and psychoanalyst at the forefront of mid-20th-century medicalwelfare expertise, Winnicott was engaged in tackling social problems, particularly delinquency. Winnicott explained delinquency as a normal process by which a child tests the reliability of signicant relationships. The anti-social child is looking to society to provide boundaries when the family or school has failed. Despite his emphasis on the control of aggression, Winnicott places stealing (or its substitute, buying) at the centre of the anti-social tendency. Winnicott also had a different vision of the therapeutic process from that of traditional psychoanalysis. Provision of

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Theoretical Criminology 7(4) good enough parenting is sufcient to deal with normal anti-social tendencies. If required, therapy operates at a deeper unconscious level to heal dissociation through feeling-contact with the early deprivation and thereby halts the compulsion to act out. Winnicotts work demonstrated how concern for oneself and others develops within protective early relationships. The development of the capacity for concern (his preferred term, but similar to Kleins reparation) comes when the early environment provided by the parent, along with the innate maturational process, allows the infant to see the parent as a separate person and to take responsibility for instinctual impulses. When the parent fails to survive the childs aggression, and retaliates or withdraws, the child turns its aggression inward. When the parent gives in, the child continues to attack, seeking a boundary. Unreliability in parental care leads to an absence of concern and a sense that constructive effort is futile. Without sufcient reection of the infants experience by parental responsiveness, the process of integration of the self is incomplete so there is no whole person to feel responsible. Winnicott did not stop at the parentchild dyad, but aimed to inuence the criminal justice system away from retribution and deterrence. He argued that the threat of punishment is irrelevant to the persistent offender, who has too much at stake to give up their well-established defence against despair. Society seeks admission of guilt, but gains no benet when such admissions are obtained articially in order to keep the system working, when guilt is admitted but not felt. In his view, society fails to see the positive side of the search for safe, containing relationships that may be seen in anti-social activity. On the other hand, Winnicott supported the use of institutions if this was the only way in which a young person might receive the rm boundary-setting their development required. Thus Winnicotts work has several implications for a psychosocial criminology; for example it offers a new way of looking at acquisitive crime; it may explain why people somehow seek the boundaries of an institution; and how certain holding functions of institutions may be positive; but it also suggests that criminality is to an extent normal and that systems based on retribution and deterrence are bound to fail. In addition, other strands of psychodynamic theory are relevant to a fully psychosocial criminology. Fairbairn, a contemporary of Winnicott, rewrote Kleins theory of splitting in terms of interpersonal rather than intrapsychic relationships (Fairbairn, 1952). Moving away from duelling life and death instincts, Fairbairn differed from Klein (and Winnicott) in that for him, aggression was a reaction rather than a primary phenomenon. Trauma arises from the childs love and need to relate not being accepted, as a result of which the child comes to feel that its love is bad, and retreats from relationships. When rejected, the child splits experience into tolerable and intolerable parts, and represses the needy and angry parts of the self. The result of repression of the need for relationship is the schizoid experience of emptiness, futility and indifference or contempt for others.

BrownFrom individual to social defences Following Fairbairn, Guntrips study of schizoid phenomena (Guntrip, 1992) focused on the inability of people to form relationships of genuine closeness and responsiveness to the needs of the other. Disturbance such as crime or delinquency from this perspective is one way of evading ones own weakness and escaping the fundamental fear of being a nobody (most people would rather be a bad somebody than a weak nobody). In Guntrips view, psychoanalysis, and society generally, persist in explaining disturbance in terms of guilt and badness; thus legal controls and moral preaching fruitlessly conspire to discipline recalcitrant instincts (1992: 136). Contemporary analysts elaborate on schizoid tendencies in relation to phenomena that are central to criminology; for example locating the origins of perversions, self-harm and drug abuse in our attempts to combat the schizoid inner deadness (Ogden, 1999). Guntrip, Fairbairn and Winnicott each acknowledged the relevance of social change to psychic phenomena. Thus in their view, the late 20th century was more productive of schizoid phenomenainsecurity and disconnectionthan the guilt of the morally and socially more restrictive society in which psychoanalysis originated. Psychotherapy has long recognized the relationship between social change and psychic disturbance. Reecting on the success of group therapy with young offenders in the 1960s, Slavson (1965) attributes their selfdestructiveness to the combination of abusive families and abusive culture. More recently, attachment theory, which links Kleinian and object relations theory with ethology, has highlighted the benets of social and economic policies that offer security rather than competition (Rutter, 1981; Kraemer and Roberts, 1996; Holmes, 2001). In Kleinian terms, a more competitive and insecure society strengthens paranoid-schizoid states such as xenophobia (Rustin, 2001). Following Guntrip, we can see that, through the dynamics of parenting, the schizoid condition is ultimately a product of a society that has a taboo on weakness. Thus a psychodynamic perspective demonstrates the social origins of criminality and challenges the punitive basis of criminal justice systems. Having shown the relevance of a psychodynamic understanding of the differences between restorative and mainstream justice systems, it is possible to examine the relationship between the offender and the mainstream criminal justice institutions. From the above analysis of Kleinian concepts, we can conclude that the separation of victim and offender is part of the social defence system against anxiety in legal institutions and practices, which makes reparative alternatives so potentially radical and slow to be accepted. Furthermore, from object relations theory come possible explanations of why criminal justice systems based on deterrence do not succeed, but why people may seek the boundaries provided by penal institutions; and how lack of concern for others develops through social taboos on weakness and conditions of social insecurity. Bringing these two strands together, through an examination of social defence systems it will be

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Theoretical Criminology 7(4) possible to apply, at the level of institutions, the explanation for the origins of violence in taboos on weakness.

Penal institutions and social defence systems

At the interpersonal level, individual defended subjects coming together in groups form social defence systems (Menzies Lyth, 1990; Obholzer and Zagier Roberts, 1994). From a psychodynamic viewpoint, the social defence system of a prison is comparable to that of any institution such as a hospital or factory. Individuals psychological defences against anxiety are supported by collective agreements (largely outside awareness) to perform the work task in certain ways. Concepts such as projection can explain, for example, the cruel treatment of sexual offenders and the inherent sadism of the culture of some penal institutions (Temple, 1996: 27). A psychodynamic analysis shows how the conict between the prisons functions of incapacitation-retribution and rehabilitation leads, via splitting and projection of certain characteristics, to a culture based on toughness triumphing over weakness (Hinshelwood, 1996). Hinshelwoods example shows that while prisoners project weakness and guilt onto others and maintain a feeling of strength based on trickery, ofcers display toughness in controlling such trickery, are required to suppress their sensitivity and are thus defended against their fear of violence. A nondominant culture of sloppy weakness is a necessity for the dominant culture to survive (Hinshelwood, 1996: 471). This is projected into therapists and other soft or weak groups of staff or prisoners. Similarly, Smiths (1999) Kleinian analysis of the social defence system in a prison shows how it deals with the basic anxieties of staff about violence and of prisoners about being trapped. From the most obvious splits inside/outside, ofcer/prisonerradiate many more, such as soft/hard staff, normal/sex offender. The social defence system ensures the splitting off of any tenderness. Ofcers, moreover, can disown their own criminality and locate it in the prisoners. Prisoners, in turn, need to deny that anything good can come from ofcers if the ofcers are to continue to be the receptacles for the prisoners projected feelings of being cruel and depriving (Smith, 1999: 437). Therefore ofcers are reluctant to make any small concession, knowing that they would only be treated with contempt, and this further fuels the cycle of projections. This offers a new way of interpreting Foucaults insight that prison persists not despite but because it does not work: as Smith (1999) puts it, prison is a social system that requires prisoners not to attain the depressive position, which conicts with the conscious requirement to demonstrate remorse. An analysis of social defence systems is inseparable from the psychodynamic view of the individual. Thus, forensic psychotherapists have suggested that all of us from our earliest years, as well as later, commit

BrownFrom individual to social defences crimes within our unconscious and conscious minds which we do not necessarily, however, enact (Cordess and Hyatt-Williams, 1996: 13). Thus, rather than pathologizing, a psychodynamic perspective refuses to see criminals as other by acknowledging the existence of the same processes of projection, aggression and rejection of relationship in everyone, whatever their relationship to the criminal justice system. Although not the focus of this article, the structural Jungian perspective makes a similar suggestion: we all are repressed criminals, our shadow selves denied conscious expression because they are incompatible with the chosen conscious attitude (Costello, 2002). As a result, the criminal acts as a moral scapegoat for the community and is accorded the dignity of legal rituals by virtue of this social role. A Kleinian view, however, rather than being soft on crime, takes seriously the depths of destructiveness, and the difculties of bringing about change once a personality is unconsciously dominated by hatred (Rustin, 2001). Despite the difculties of bringing about change, there are indications of practical possibilities. Relationships between prisoners and staff in a prison are open to inuence from outside their own system of projectionsfrom the social context and the political imperatives placed upon prisons. For example, changes in the level and nature of organized degradation and deprivation in turn affect the relationships of hatred between prisoners and staff (Emery, 1990). Although the Kleinian approach may be seen as pessimistic, it can be combined with Winnicotts more optimistic view of the potential for change. Winnicott saw the experience of transitional space, in which the infant can play in security but without interference, and experiment with the boundaries of me and not-me, as the basis for creativity and the capacity for symbolization in adulthood. Asser (2002) suggests that as a consequence of incarceration, prisoners are prone to use the defence of omnipotence; that is self-idealization, and denial of their own losses and of the pain they have caused. If the negative projections of the staff are mobilized, this in turn gives prisoners a psychological free ride to project all that is negative into other prisoners or staff. Applying Winnicotts observations about the anti-social tendency and transitional spaces, Asser argues for arrangements to bring together prisoners and staff to overcome the systems of mutual projection that operate to increase violence and reoffending. Based on his experience of running discussion groups, Asser argues that they provide a transitional space in which prisoners and staff can take back their mutual projections, to see themselves and others as whole objects that are both bad and good. Furthermore, in this transitional space, prisoners can renegotiate their potency and learn to think instead of act violently, that is to engage in symbolizationsimilar to the process identied in reparation hearings. The therapist-facilitator has to be available to be identied with as a thinker; and has to attend to management of the clients, while providing (inevitably, by their human limitations)

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Theoretical Criminology 7(4) opportunities where prisoners can gradually learn to manage themselves. Besides prison staff, Asser advocates including judges and police in discussion groups, as the other main combatants in the war of projections. Although such measures are resisted, Asser argues that treating prisoners as whole objects actually enhances security rather than diminishing it, because it is the self-idealisation of criminals which makes them dangerous (2002: 17, emphasis in original). Assers work demonstrates the potential for combining Kleinian analysis, which remains dominant in the group relations literature, with a wider range of psychodynamic approaches such as that of Winnicott. It requires considerable imagination to envisage such activities taking place, which suggests the importance of researchers engaging with such innovative practices. Research may challenge both retributive and welfarist assumptions; for example to consider the impact of programmes that prioritize the building of relationships of trust between staff and clients; and the extent to which the boundary-setting function of institutions and rules is necessary to these relationships. This suggests the potential for a combination of Foucauldian and Kleinian perspectives to offer a theoretical basis for the emergence both of resistance to social norms and of peoples participation in their own domination (Lupton, 1997). Much of the work cited above comes from psychotherapists within institutions such as prisons. As practitioners, they have to negotiate the opposite views of the world between which forensic psychotherapy is caught: the penal system, based on absolutes, rules, facts and retribution; and therapeutic practice, based on speculation, reection and the prisoners ultimate self-determination (Williams Saunders, 2001). Forensic psychotherapists acknowledge Foucaults critique of the alliance between penal institutions and psychiatry (Cordess and Hyatt-Williams, 1996). Despite this, they form a specic and isolated community outside, or on the fringes of, mainstream criminology. This may be another aspect of the split within the penal system between hard and soft approaches, manifested also in the splits between ideas and practice and between prison and outside. In the main, psychodynamic analyses of social defence systems have been restricted to visible institutions such as prisons. Besides total institutions, however, the perspective can be applied to any socio-legal system or practice. Marsh (1996) explains how the anxieties of lawyers, such as the fear of making mistakes, compounded by those projected by clients, are defended against through the procedures and formalities of the law. Marsh identies a range of defences against anxiety in both individuals and institutions, such as dissociation (the impersonal approach, separation of oneself from ones function); specialization (so as not to have to deal with whole persons); standardization and the emphasis on certainty (strict forms of words, ways of presenting cases). This explains why the problems of the system, cost, delays, injustices, are so intractablechange can only come when the defence mechanisms and underlying anxieties are acknowledged.

BrownFrom individual to social defences But the force of anxiety weighs against this acknowledgement. Lawyers, according to Marsh, are taught to take words and actions at face value; the legal is thus the antithesis of the psychodynamic approach. Similar studies of regulatory agencies, courts, police (see Watson, 1999 for a more Lacanian analysis of policing) are likely to prove valuable.

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The interpretation of penality

By drawing attention to the split between insiders and outsiders views of prisons, perhaps the above review exaggerates the degree to which psychoanalysis has been neglected in the study of crime and punishment. Garland (1990, 2001), for example, draws our attention to Freudian explanations of punishment as a socially acceptable outlet for aggression and repressed sexuality, or a guilty response to ones own fantasies and identication with the criminal. Garland supports Elias conclusion, that the civilizing process has brought little amelioration of punishment because of the fundamental conict between the id and the superego that results from repression. Thus, the behaviour of criminals, particularly where it expresses desires which others have spent much energy and undergone much internal conict in order to renounce, can thus provoke a resentful and hostile reaction out of proportion to the real danger which it represents (Garland, 1990: 239); and an unconsciously punitive attitude towards ones own anti-social wishes may carry over into a projected punitive attitude towards those who have actually acted out such prohibited desires (1990: 240). In The Culture of Control, Garland (2001) employs psychoanalytic concepts to structure his discussion of the political response to the predicament of crime control in late modern societies. In combination, the normality of high crime rates and the limitations of the states capacity to control crime lead to a situation where policies appear deeply conicted, even schizoid, in their relation to one another (2001: 110). While administrators adapt to the reality principle, by strategies such as rationalization of justice and dening deviance down, politicians evade reality. Instead, almost hysterical in the clinical sense (2001: 131), they engage either in denial, or in acting outimpulsive and unreective action that brings expressive relief. In denial of the evidence that punitive approaches do not work, they reassert the myth of the sovereign state. Acting out is apparent when the show of punitive force against individuals is used to repress any acknowledgement of the states inability to control crime to acceptable levels (2001: 134). As the policies are schizoid, so late modern criminology becomes schizophrenic, seeing the offender both as normal and as other. On a broader societal level, the middle classes succumb to the emotional consequences of neo-liberalism: the risk of insecurity and the temptation to respond with repression (2001: 157). One aspect of this is that parents may project onto the predatory criminal other their guilt

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Theoretical Criminology 7(4) about the ways their life choices increase their childrens vulnerability (2001: 263, n. 64). Despite their attraction, Garland is ambivalent about psychoanalytic explanations of social phenomena, warning that Freudian interpretations carry little weight outside of individual case histories based upon reliable clinical evidence (1990: 65). Terms such as denial, hysteria and acting out, he explains, are used to suggest the underlying conicts and ambivalence that shape institutional action, but with the caveat: No strict application is intended (2001: 253, n. 71). It is not clear why Garland uses psychoanalytic terms as if they were metaphors, which can be used only loosely in social critique, but which have a literal (strict) meaning elsewhere (in reliable clinical psychiatry?). It is perhaps related to the restrictive Freudian framework. Contemporary psychoanalysis, however, is highly diverse and has moved beyond the hydraulic theory of instincts and drives and the static tripartite model of the unconscious. In the study of organizations and individuals alike, there is no single psychoanalytical voice (Anderson and Whyte, 2002: 500). Criminology can benet from a broader psychodynamic view that presents alternatives to Freudian Oedipal conict to explain the capacity of people to behave without regard for others, and which prioritizes the unscientic intersubjective search for shared meaning. For example, psychotherapy can be seen as a process whereby the micropowers of the therapeutic relationship, with negotiation of interpretations, form a signicant part of what is brought to awareness (Bollas, 1987; Casement, 1991; Lomas, 1994; Ogden, 1999).

Conclusion: beyond the intra-psychic

Can this diversity of psychoanalytic perspectives be useful to criminology? The limitation of recent work on anxiety and fear of crime is that although it contains an awareness of the social context of crime (how individuals nd solutions that make sense in both psychic and social terms), its psychodynamic analysis remains at the level of individual defences. Other recent psychoanalytical discussions of crime remain at the intra-psychic. Costellos critique of the psychiatric model of personality disorders (Costello, 2002) is a structural but intra-psychic analysis. In Lacanian terms, according to Costello, criminality can be understood as a rejection of the symbolic order and of the paternal function. This explicitly challenges the notion of social deprivation as the cause of crime. But more useful for a psychosocial criminology, perhaps, are psychodynamic perspectives that do not force a choice between the psychic and the social but which link the two. Moreover, the more conservative tendencies of psychoanalysis can be contrasted with the critical and feminist praxis of psychoanalysts such as Kovel (1981), Benjamin (1988) and Chodorow (1999). This body of work maintains the interconnections between the intra-psychic, the interpersonal

BrownFrom individual to social defences and the structural. Benjamin and Chodorow challenge the gendered assumptions about childrearing that taints the work of Winnicott. Kovel argues for a revolution at both the material level and that of relations between persons, in order to replace with individuation the alienated individualism of capitalism. Similarly, Benjamin (1988), who presents a feminist reworking of the psychoanalytic ideas of Winnicott, seeks social change to reverse the loss of mutual recognition under bureaucratic control, in which violence thrives, and which is characterized by legal rules that refer to the hypothetical interaction of autonomous individuals. This loss of mutual recognition is the predicament of solitary connement being unable to get through to the other, or to be gotten through towhich is our particularly modern form of bondage (Benjamin, 1988: 83). There are several starting points for this psychosocial study of criminalization. Diverse psychodynamic ways of thinking can broaden our views on, for example, conscience and reparation, just as has already been done for anxiety and fear of crime. In particular, the object relations approach illuminates the reasons for lack of concern for others, presenting an alternative view of guilt and conscience to that assumed by both retributive and restorative justice practices. One contention is that it is not the absence of conscience that leads people to behave in harmful ways, but a persecutory conscience; in other situations, a better explanation may be withdrawal and damage to the capacity to relate. Each has implications for our view of criminal justice systems. The proposed approach challenges the boundaries of criminology in several ways. It acknowledges that anti-social tendencies do exist, but are not conned to the less powerful in society, nor to a minoritya familiar theme of criminology. Persecutory anxiety in the form of murderousness (fantasies or thoughts about killing which may or may not be acted upon) may result from a fear of being killed, and is therefore experienced as selfdefence (Hyatt-Williams, 2000). This suggests a signicant relationship between deliberate killing and other risks to life often found close by (other deaths, accidents, suicide, self-harm, death-defying acts and psychosomatic illness) which can form a further criminological research agenda. Violence is not the only theme of interest, however; as noted above, the analysis extends to acquisitive activities, criminal or not. An approach that links the psychodynamic to social and structural change can refuse the claim that psychoanalysis deals with one side of the rationalirrational split (and cannot account for rational crimes such as white collar crime; Blackburn, 1993). Kleinian ideas have been developed beyond individual motivations to examine the life of groups and institutions. This highlights the signicance of reparative justice, and the importance of such alternative systems to maintain boundaries, to contain feelings of revenge and protect the offender. It also helps explain why retributive approaches both persist and fail, and why restorative alternatives are resisted. Alternative systems might also restore the capacity to feel guilt that retributive systems, which sever

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Theoretical Criminology 7(4) the connection between admissions of guilt and feelings of guilt, inhibit. Specic research questions may challenge assumptions from all sides of the retribution/welfare debate; for example, the need for holding and whether people choose or need to be institutionalized. At each level, individual, institutional and structural, a wealth of psychodynamically informed research literature exists which could be brought into the fold of criminology. In particular, analysis of the social defence system can be taken further, particularly to parts of the criminal justice system outside the prison. Psychodynamic ideas can assist us to examine the processes of criminalization, to examine violent institutions and the pervasiveness of retribution and punitiveness. Such an approach extends beyond the realm of family and intimate relations, beyond individual biographies and beyond the sociology of the emotions. Moreover, it opens up for exploration the relationship between criminality, social taboos on weakness and fear and the nature of security offered (or not) by the institutions of late modern societies.

References
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