Antisocial behavior seen from Psychoanalysis

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

Violent behavior from Psychoanalysis

On this day we will review the psychoanalytic approach of some of the most significant figures of psychoanalysis with regard to antisocial behaviors, to try to shed some light on this complex issue.

Sigmund Freud

The father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud I try to study criminals dividing it into two categories, mainly:

A) Offenders out of guilt

In 1915, Freud published an article in which he stated that, paradoxical as it may seem, these criminals present a feeling of guilt prior to the crime, so he comes to the conclusion that the consummation of his act represents, for the offender, 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 that according to him, comes from the guilt primordial in the 

Oedipus complex: kill the father to stay with the mother).

For Freud, guilt is the ambivalent manifestation of the life and death instincts, since guilt would come from the tensions between the superego and the id that are manifested in a latent need to be punished. He also clarifies that only guilt does not surface in the conscious field but is frequently repressed in the unconscious.

B) Criminals without feelings of guilt

They are subjects that have not developed moral inhibitions or believe their conduct is justified for his fight against societypsychopathic personalities and psychopathological) with a marked weakening of the superego, or with an ego structure incapable of preserving aggressive impulses and sadistic tendencies in the id by means of defense mechanisms.

He also adds as characteristics of the offender two essential features: the egocentrism and a destructive tendency, but it also says that in all men there is a natural or aggressive disposition due to narcissism.

Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler He was one of the first students and first dissenter of Freud's theories, creator of the so-called individual psychology. He shapes all of his work based on three main postulates: the feelings of inferiority, the power impulses 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 from the conduct. What's more, antisocial activity directed against others is acquired early by those children who fall into the erroneous opinion that all others can be considered as objects of their belonging. The dangerous behavior of him will depend on the degree of sentiment to the community. The offender, according to Adler, possesses a conviction of his own superiority, a subsequent and compensatory consequence of his early childhood inferiority.

Theodor Reik

Theodor Reik he devoted much of his theory and research to criminal conduct. An example of this is his book The psychoanalysis of criminal, where Reik emphasizes that there must be a joint effort between psychoanalysts and criminologists to clarify the criminal acts stating that one of the most effective means of discovering the anonymous criminal is to specify the motive for the crime.

He pointed out that the criminal act must be the expression of the individual's mental tension, arising from his mental state to constitute the promised satisfaction of his psychological needs. According to psychoanalytic concepts, there are projection mechanisms in crimes: the criminal flee from his own conscience how he would do to an external enemy, projecting this enemy out internal. Under such pressure, the criminal self struggles in vain and the criminal becomes careless and betrays himself. himself into a kind of mental compulsion, making mistakes that have actually been determined by the unconscious.

An example of this would be the inability of a subject not to leave traces of his own, but on the contrary, leaving clues at the crime scene. Another example that makes clear the unknown desire of the self 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 manages in the latency period to repress the genuine tendencies criminals of his impulses and sublimating them towards a pro-social sense, the criminal fails in this adaptation.

He states 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 offender manifests himself through his criminal behavior. A characteristic of all neurotics and of most criminals is the incomplete incorporation of the superego.

Sandor Ferenczi

Sandor Ferenczi He observed through the psychoanalysis of various anarchist criminals that the Oedipus complex was still in full evolution, it is worth saying that it had not yet been resolved and that his acts symbolically represented a displaced vengeance against primitive tyranny or oppressor of her parent. He finds that the criminal can never really explain what was committed, since it is and will always be incomprehensible to him. The reasons he gives for his misdeeds are always complex rationalizations.

For Sandor, the personality It is made up of three elements: instinctive me, real me Y social me (similar to the second Freudian cliché: it, I and superego) when the instinctive self predominates in the subject, Ferenczi says that he is a genuine criminal; If the real self is weak, delinquency takes on a neurotic character and when the weakness expresses it focuses on the hypertrophy of the social self, there are crimes as a result of a feeling of culpability.

Karl Abraham

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 pleasure principle (as we shared in a previous article, antisocial personalities tend to project traits of oral aggressiveness in the Machover human figure test).

He also noted similarities between warfare and totem festivals based on the works of his teacher, because 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 the ones who most feared possible retaliation from their parents as punishment. He concluded that, it is not the weakness of the superego, but the overwhelming severity of the latter is responsible for the characteristic behavior of asocial and criminal peopleThis as a result of the unreal projection of his fears and persecutory fantasies in the early sadistic phase against his parents.

When the child manages to unlink the unreal and destructive imago that the child projects to his parents and the process of social adaptation begins through the introjection of values ​​and desires to give back 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 structure strong superego, there will be strong and overwhelming anguish for which the individual may feel compelled to destroy or kill. We see here that the same psychological roots of the personality can develop into paranoia or criminality.

Jacques lacan

Undoubtedly, Jacques lacanis the most prominent figure in current psychoanalysis. What most interested Lacan in terms of criminological issues, were the crimes committed by paranoid psychotics, where delusions and hallucinations are the cause of their behaviors. For Lacan, the aggressive drive that is resolved in crime arises like this, as the condition that serves as the basis for psychosis, it can be said that it is unconscious, which means that the content intention that translates it into consciousness, cannot be manifested without a commitment to the social demands integrated by the subject, that is, without a camouflage of the constituent motives of the crime.

The objective characters of the crime, the choice of the victim, the criminal efficacy, its initiation and execution vary continuously according to the significance of the fundamental position. The criminal drive which 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 but the attempted murder of ourselves, precisely because the other would represent our own ideal. It will be the analyst's job to find the excluded contents that cause the psychotic delusions that lead to homicide.

Erich fromm

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

Furthermore, for Fromm, the explanation for destructiveness cannot be found in terms of animal or instinctual inheritance (as proposes, for example Lorenz) but must be understood on the basis of the factors that distinguish man from the rest of the animals.

Bibliographic references:

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