Freud and the Psychodynamic Explanation of Crime

Two problems.

The first is the problem of the unmotivated crime — the offence that produces no gain, that the offender cannot explain, and that no account of rational choice will reach. Explanations built on ends fail here, because non-criminal behaviour is driven by the same ends.

The second is the problem of control. If every human being has appetites, why do most people not act on them? Freud's answer is that the impulses have to be tamed, and that the existence of the unconscious and of repression is already a step towards that taming, implying the development of other levels of, and a split in, the psyche. As far as psychoanalysis is concerned, we are not simple agents but constantly divided in, and against, ourselves. To live in the world with an unconscious alone would be impossible: we would be gabbling wrecks taking no account of other people except in so far as they could satisfy our needs.

Personality is controlled by unconscious mental processes grounded in early childhood, and is made up of three structures.

Freud's earlier division of the mind into unconscious, preconscious and conscious levels was insufficient. It gave no way of understanding how ideas were transformed as they moved from one level to the next, and it could not grasp the dynamic processes of repression or the way the repressed can reappear in consciousness. The reorganisation into three structures — the id, the ego and the superego — came in the paper on The Ego and the Id, where the real theoretical work is the rational conceptualisation of underlying structures. Freud did not himself use the Latin terms when developing the theory. The three may equally be called internal agencies, since they stand in a dynamic relationship with one another.

• The id is the primitive part of a person's mental make-up, present at birth. It represents the unconscious biological drives for food, sex and other necessities over the life span. Most important is that it is concerned with instant pleasure or gratification while disregarding concern for others. This is the pleasure principle, and it is often paramount in discussions of criminal behaviour.
• The ego develops early in life. When children learn that their wishes cannot be gratified instantaneously they often throw a tantrum; the ego compensates for the demands of the id by guiding the individual's actions to keep him within the boundaries of society. It is guided by the reality principle.
• The superego develops as a person incorporates the moral standards and values of the community, of parents, and of significant others such as friends and clergy. Its focus is morality, and it passes judgment on the behaviour and actions of individuals. The ego mediates between the id's desire for instant gratification and the strict morality of the superego.

The criminological conclusion. Advocates of psychodynamic theory suggest that where a crime is committed, the individual committed it because he has an underdeveloped superego. Criminal offenders are frustrated and aggravated, constantly drawn to events that occurred in early childhood; because of a negligent, unhappy or miserable childhood, most often characterised by a lack of love or nurturing, the offender has a weak or absent ego. Research suggests that having a weak ego is linked with poor or absent social etiquette, immaturity and dependence on others, and that individuals with weak egos may be more likely to engage in drug abuse.

The point of contrast with Lombroso. Where Lombroso distinguished born criminals from other people, Freud saw everyone as a potential criminal, in the sense that all human beings are born with amoral and antisocial instincts. Criminality is a mixture of inherited factors and the effect of external experiences: although all humans are born with criminal designs, most learn to control them, and it is those who do not learn such control who end as criminals. The inability to learn social habits is partly hereditary and partly related to upbringing. Freud's successors often argue that personality is shaped by the social environment alone and that heredity plays no part; Freud places a large part of his argument on heredity.

Freud's theory of female crime is the part most often examined, and the part most heavily criticised.

The central tenet is sexual: the explanation or motivation for the female criminal is largely sexual neurosis. Due to the lack of a penis the female feels inferior and better suited to the less demanding destiny of wife and mother than to that of breadwinner. She recognises as a child that she has inferior sexual organs, believes this to be a punishment, and grows up envious and vengeful. The feminine behaviour of most women is traced to that lack: they become exhibitionist and narcissistic, trying to be well dressed and physically beautiful in order to win love and approval from men, and their sexual role, being receptive and passive, leads to passivity in other areas of life.

Women, on this account, generally do not develop a strong conscience. Men develop one by controlling the Oedipal complex — the boy's incestuous love for his mother, repressed for fear of a jealous father who may ultimately castrate him, which is the most feared punishment — so that boys generally develop a very strong super-ego by about the age of five. Girls and women cannot be castrated, so they do not possess the fear necessary to overcome the Electra complex, their desire for their father and hatred of their mother. That should produce a higher crime rate for women; it does not, because passivity and a very strong desire for love and affection, particularly from fathers or other men, control them. They do not break men's laws, for to do so would lead to disapproval and a withdrawal of male love.

The deviant woman, in Freud's world, is one who attempts to become more like a man, who competes or seeks acclaim in masculine spheres, or who refuses her natural passivity. Such women are driven by the desire to claim a penis, which leads to aggressive competition; the desire is hopeless and they end by becoming neurotic. They need help to adjust to their intended sex role, and the birth of a child is seen as particularly therapeutic, the baby being a substitute for a penis.

Thomas acts as a stepping-stone between physical and psychological explanations. He moved away from Lombroso's idea that female criminality is due to masculine tendencies, and towards the view that in civilised cultures female criminality is an unacceptable use of female traits. Female criminals are amoral — without morality — not immoral, which would imply a loss of morality; they are cold, calculating people who have not learned to treat others with pity and concern. He posits four basic wishes driving every individual: the desire for new experience, for security, for response, and for recognition. In women the response wish is most marked: in law-abiding women it is fed by retaining chastity as a way of obtaining a devoted husband, security and a family to love; in amoral women the need for love drives her to any act to gain affection.

Pollak doubted that women commit as little crime as the official statistics show, and advanced a theory of hidden female crime. Following Freud, he explained female crime by sexual neurosis: women are traditionally shy, passive and passionless but can simulate an orgasm to hide their true feelings, can take part in sex without physical passion, and can learn to conceal menstruation; within the sexual sphere they therefore learn to manipulate, deceive and conceal, which decides their inherent nature and makes them likely to be the instigators of crime actually perpetrated by men. Where they offend themselves, the crimes are explained on psychological grounds, as shoplifting explained as kleptomania, or on sexual grounds, as prostitution; other crimes can be hidden and underhand, such as poisoning or infanticide. He added the chivalry thesis: women appear less before, and are more leniently treated by, the criminal justice system because men have a protective attitude towards them and dislike making accusations, so that chivalrous treatment stretching from police through jury to judge results in a great under-conviction of female criminals.

• It ignores the social. Freud mostly ignores social, economic and political factors and uses psychology alone to explain female criminality; the concept of a well-adjusted woman is based very much on traditional ideas of sexuality and society, so it suffers from the same sex and class problems as the earlier theories.
• It assumes total difference. All these theories assume that women are more or less totally different from men in every respect — biology, psychology, needs, desires, motivations — and link women's criminality to unquestioned popular assumptions about problem women, usually associated with breach of the norm of wife, mother and homemaker.
• It continues the witch-hunt. Heidensohn identifies a powerful and recurring popular image of deviant women as especially evil, depraved and monstrous, used by scientific criminologists as the basis of theories which not only had a stigmatising effect but have had unfortunate consequences for the treatment of women offenders.
• Pollak's blind spot. He seems not to have considered the possibility that a lack of social, political and economic power may have forced women into taking an underhand or manipulative way to enforce change and better their position.
• It is untestable in its own terms. The unconscious conflicts of the neurotic offender are said to be deeply embedded and capable of being brought to light only by a psychiatrist trained in psychoanalytic techniques — which places the evidence beyond ordinary refutation.
• Practical consequence. Abject worship at the shrine of psychoanalysis did not produce scientifically validated techniques for the treatment of offenders on probation; few probation officers give a clear and specific description of what they mean by treatment.

- On causes of crime, this answers the syllabus head Freud's Theory of Criminal Behaviour directly: give the three structures, the two principles, and the underdeveloped superego, and then give the contrast with Lombroso on universality. - On women offenders, give Lombroso, Thomas, Freud and Pollak as a sequence and show the movement from body to psyche to concealment — then attack all four with Heidensohn, and end by noting that the most promising ideas come from control theories and from strain theories applied in a gender-neutral manner. - On penology, note the practical bridge: psychodynamic thinking supplied the casework model of probation, and probation as casework concentrates not so much on crime and delinquency as on criminals and delinquents, and not so much on those as on those with emotional problems. - On the free-will debate, Freud belongs on the determinist side but does not remove responsibility: on his account most people learn control, and the criminal is the one who did not. </content>