What is forensic psychotherapy? Reflections on a new discipline

Abstract

This article aims to make a clear definition of forensic psychotherapy to help understand some of the theoretical and practical implications and breakthroughs this new discipline makes possible, including the enlargement of our ability to understand the causes and prevention of violent and other antisocial behaviours. All human behaviour and functioning, whether sick or healthy, life-threatening or life supporting, antisocial or prosocial, is caused by, or is a product of, the differences in individuals’ life experiences, such as child abuse or other forms of trauma, vs healthy and secure bonding and attachment experiences and their resulting character structure. In addition, other data concerning the causes of differences in the rates of individual as well as collective (e.g. political) violence, that is the epidemiology of violence, can only be understood and explained by referring to social forces and processes. I will examine how forensic psychotherapy is similar to and different from the many related disciplines that also deal with the various problems that arise in human interactions and social relations, such as violence and sexual abuse. Among those disciplines we may include forensic psychiatry; clinical psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy, including psychoanalysis; public health and preventive psychiatry and the social sciences, as well as moral philosophy and its derivatives and subsidiaries in the quest for justice; namely, law and politics.