Understanding and dealing with crime

HEINFRIED DUNCKER, Professor of Humanities at the University of Kassel, head physician of various forensic psychiatric hospitals and addiction treatment units, expert psychiatrist for the courts. ASTRID HIRSCHELMANN, Senior Lecturer, qualified to direct research, in psychopathology and criminology at the University of Rennes 2.

The book takes up the reflections of French psychoanalysis on preoedipal evolution, in particular the reflections of Bergeret on fundamental violence and Lacan on the mirror stage. He uses them in two directions of reflection. One concerns the understanding and the therapeutic offers necessary in the treatment of delinquents suffering from serious narcissistic disorders. Here he also takes up concepts related to institutional psychotherapy and the modalities for creating a setting in which restorative emotional experiences are possible. The other path of reflection concerns the analysis of the disposition in Germany for the extremist authoritarian regime in the 1930s. In this analysis, the consequences of the authoritarian educational style that was decisive for the upbringing of children in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century and the narcissistic destructuring that followed the First World War and the consequences of the economic crisis in that country are taken up on the one hand. Reflections on the disposition of a population to an extremist ideology are particularly relevant in the context of the Islamist dynamic.