{"title":"What is forensic psychotherapy, and why is it so important?","authors":"J. Gilligan","doi":"10.33212/ijfp.v4n2.2022.119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33212/ijfp.v4n2.2022.119","url":null,"abstract":"The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Manual considers suicidal behaviour as an appropriate problem for psychiatric attention, but not homicidal behaviour. There is no scientific basis for this distinction. It is clearly a moral distinc-tion, in which for purely arbitrary and irrational reasons homicide is defined as a moral evil that deserves punishment, unlike suicide, which is considered (appro-priately) as a symptom of illness that deserves treatment. And yet moral value judge-ments are clearly not scientifically testable hypotheses, unlike medical diagnoses and treatments. The distinction here is between moral philosophy and medical science. The fatal flaw with moral value judgements is that they are of no help to us if our goal is to learn what causes violence, and how we can prevent it, which is where forensic psychotherapy comes in.","PeriodicalId":111356,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134057577","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The roots of evil: why ordinary people commit atrocities","authors":"Konstantin Nemirovskiy","doi":"10.33212/ijfp.v4n2.2022.144","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33212/ijfp.v4n2.2022.144","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout history, people have struggled to understand the nature of evil—starting with primitive beliefs in evil spirits leading people astray and monotheistic con-ceptions of the dualism of good and evil, during the Renaissance the focus shifted to understanding the evil influence of society on the good in man. The horror of the two wars of the last century and continuing military conflicts of the day forced a different view of the problem—philosophers suggested, and social psychologists confirmed, the existence of a “banality of evil” in which the average person in certain circum-stances becomes a likeness of Lucifer. Modern scientists offered many other ex-planations—from genetic to brain functioning. In turn, psychoanalysis has proposed a host of theoretical concepts to explain the inner nature of violence, from Thanatos and compulsive repetition to attachment dysfunctions and destructive narcissism. Whatever the models, dehumanisation remains an extremely serious problem, threatening not only the lives of individuals, but more and more often the existence of different ethnic groups and the world as a whole. This article attempts to discuss different factors that influence dehumanisation, as well as reflecting on some ways to prevent it.","PeriodicalId":111356,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy","volume":"252 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114364975","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Can a focus on the importance of relationships help us address the pandemic of violence?","authors":"John Lord Alderdice","doi":"10.33212/ijfp.v4n2.2022.192","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33212/ijfp.v4n2.2022.192","url":null,"abstract":"This article cautions against the use of our psychological understanding to promote a particular political agenda and proposes three elements as a guide to the devel-opment of a new paradigm—the ideas emerging from complexity science; human emotions as a positive evolutionary advantage rather than an irrational flaw; and the significance of relationships between large groups rather than a rule-of-law approach based on individuals. This is a potentially radical agenda, but the author suggests that leaders may be well-advised to pursue an approach that takes more account of complexity, emotions, and relationships, as a necessary evolutionary path for the survival of our civilisation.","PeriodicalId":111356,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117325412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Female aggression: a family conundrum","authors":"R. Doctor","doi":"10.33212/ijfp.v4n2.2022.176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33212/ijfp.v4n2.2022.176","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines a family therapy case involving a woman who was violent to her children and partner where conscious and unconscious paranoid beliefs were manifested in projective identification and sadomasochistic liaisons between the children and/or partner. I will illustrate how apparent social appropriateness covered up an extremely disturbed personal relationship. I will explore how this paranoid and perverse relationship arises from the use of a particular type of defensive organisation. This is characterised by a mostly narcissistic and unyielding defence, namely projective identification, which functions to help the patient avoid knowing about her aggression and anxiety by avoiding connection with other people and with reality.","PeriodicalId":111356,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy","volume":"111 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122595391","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Odd one in: a psychotherapist’s experience of interaction with the judicial system in working with patients with high levels of destructiveness","authors":"Natalya A. Frolova","doi":"10.33212/ijfp.v4n2.2022.156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33212/ijfp.v4n2.2022.156","url":null,"abstract":"During arrest and investigation, the perpetrator of a murder can find themselves not only locked up in a place of detention, but also in a close dyadic relationship with the judicial system, duplicating the role of the archaic, punitive superego. This con-figuration does not encourage psychic triangulation as a space in which traumatic reality can be accepted and symbolised, nor does it foster an ability to reflect on the crime committed, to grieve, and repent. The alternative position can mean identifica-tion with the criminal community, in which protective narcissistic identity feeding can take place, reinforcing the ego, but not bringing it any closer to contact with reality and the capacity for coming to the depressive position. When mature psychic mechanisms fail to work, archaic processes come into play, fraught with severe manic conditions with a high risk of destructive enactment. This article presents the clinical experience with a forensic patient whose situation went beyond these typical scenarios. The result was the experience of valuable observation and the possibility of building therapeutic relations with the patient in a state of active psy-chotic enactment.","PeriodicalId":111356,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy","volume":"81 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123457551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Let the great axe fall”: from ancient Babylonian torture to modern forensic psychotherapy: Freud, Welldon, and the humanisation of criminality","authors":"B. Kahr","doi":"10.33212/ijfp.v4n2.2022.89","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33212/ijfp.v4n2.2022.89","url":null,"abstract":"Since the dawn of time, those men and women who had committed acts of violence would often be subjected to incarceration, followed by torture and, subsequently, execution. We have no shortage of historical evidence documenting the use of beating, branding, flogging, confinement to stocks and pillories, breaking on the wheel, mutilation, tearing of the flesh with red-hot pincers, amputation of body parts, not to mention execution through such varied methods as hanging, impalement, stoning, beheading, garrotting, guillotining, boiling, burning, drowning, drawing and quartering, poisoning, shooting with arrows or bullets, starvation, and, in more recent years, electrocution or injection of a lethal dosage of drugs.\u0000In this article, the author will present a history of the sadistic treatment of criminal-ity across the ages. He will then explore and celebrate the ways in which Professor Sigmund Freud and his psychological successors ultimately created a radical para-digm shift, introducing immense compassion into the understanding and healing of offender patients. After reviewing the contributions of Professor Sigmund Freud and of some of the leading pioneers of forensic psychoanalysis, the author will then examine the ways in which Profesora Estela V. Welldon and her contemporaries helped to formalise and validate and expand the profession of forensic psycho-therapy on clinical and theoretical and institutional levels, thus providing us with a sense of hope that, in decades hence, those who perpetrate violence will be offered more humane treatment.","PeriodicalId":111356,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy","volume":"94 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126226755","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A day in the life of an expert by experience","authors":"","doi":"10.33212/ijfp.v4n1.2022.59","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33212/ijfp.v4n1.2022.59","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":111356,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy","volume":"89 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134315279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The eroticisation of gaze in the psychoanalytic treatment of a paedophile","authors":"R. Hilty","doi":"10.33212/ijfp.v4n1.2022.24","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33212/ijfp.v4n1.2022.24","url":null,"abstract":"In this article I discuss the clinical case of a patient whose main symptoms included paedophiliac perversions and an obsessive sexual interest in filming and watching himself whilst performing masturbatory sex in front of a webcam, something that I have come to refer to as “self-voyeurism”. Whereas voyeurism has been widely explored in psychoanalytic literature, to the best of my knowledge the psychological meaning of “self-voyeurism” has not. Based on the relational history of my patient, I will discuss that the “self-voyeurism” was an eroticisation of attachment trauma, specifically the experience of an absent mother’s gaze which constellated a threatening infanticidal presence, along with a way to cope with his subsequent traumata, including sexual and physical abuse at the hands of a violent father. I believe that this perverse symptomatology was both a defence structure against attachment and a powerful way of communicating his wish for closeness and intimacy.","PeriodicalId":111356,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115634256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Defence mechanisms in crime narratives of psychopathic violent offenders","authors":"J. Willemsen","doi":"10.33212/ijfp.v4n1.2022.37","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33212/ijfp.v4n1.2022.37","url":null,"abstract":"The literature on crime narratives has demonstrated the relevance of studying offenders’ personal perspectives on crime as a means to gain insight in criminal behaviour. In this exploratory study, we examine the presence of defence mechanisms in crime narratives produced by violent offenders with psychopathic traits. The Defence Mechanism Rating Scale (DMRS) is used to assess defence mechanisms in crime narratives produced by 36 male inmates. The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) is used to assess psychopathic traits. Statistical analyses demonstrate the increased presence of obsessional defences (intellectualisation). The affective and lifestyle traits of psychopathy are positively associated with rationalisation. Our results indicate that psychopathic offenders tend to describe their violent crime in general and abstract terms and represent themselves as rational actors whose behaviour is normal and well-founded given the abnormal or irrational environment. We conclude that the narrative strategies deployed by offenders with psychopathic traits are characterised by defence mechanisms to deal with threats to the self.","PeriodicalId":111356,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116104262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An interview with an inspiring lawyer who is pursuing “smart justice”","authors":"Annie Pesskin","doi":"10.33212/ijfp.v4n1.2022.52","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33212/ijfp.v4n1.2022.52","url":null,"abstract":"This interview describes the hard work of a criminal lawyer, Iain Smith, working in Glasgow, Scotland who has been campaigning to make sure that offenders who have a history of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are given “smart justice” rather than ineffective and often punitive sentences by judges which lead to recividism and ruined lives.","PeriodicalId":111356,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115571255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}