Gary I. Lilienthal, PhD – Professor of Law, President of Carrington Rand, Melbourne, Australia

Series: Criminal Justice, Law Enforcement and Corrections
BISAC: LAW026000; PSY000000; PSY014000
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52305/BMNP5365

Criminal law and psychology encounter the same human conduct from different positions. Criminal law asks whether conduct satisfies the elements of an offence, whether the accused possessed the required mental state, whether a defence applies and what legal consequences follow. Psychology asks how perception, cognition, memory, emotion, desire, attachment, trauma and interpersonal experience became organised within the person whose conduct is being examined. Forensic psychotherapy extends the psychological inquiry into unconscious conflict, defensive organisation, symbolic meaning, narrative formation and the manner in which earlier experience continues to inhabit present action.

Criminal Law for Psychologists: Criminal Responsibility, Trauma and the Unconscious approaches the criminal subject neither as a diagnostic category nor as an abstract bearer of legal capacities. Human conduct emerges within psychological organisation. Cognition, volition, affect, language, memory, attachment, unconscious conflict, defensive processes and social relationships may combine differently within different people. Two people may commit outwardly similar acts while arriving at them through markedly different psychological pathways. Conversely, similar psychological vulnerabilities may produce very different behaviour. This principle of differential psychological organisation recurs throughout the chapters.