This past October, the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (APPL) hosted their annual National Conference in Chicago. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the conference and learn about numerous different topics in the field of forensic psychiatry. As a second-year resident starting my own psychotherapy casework, I was particularly intrigued by the perspective of a panel discussion entitled, “Balance, Bias, Boundaries: Psychotherapy and Forensics.” The panelists and presenters at this session included Ren Belcher, MD, Karen Rosenbaum, MD, Ryan Wagoner, MD, and Anne Dailey, JD. The panel was primarily focused on criminal defendants and the psychoanalytic perspective of psychotherapy. Below, I seek to provide my perspective of the key concepts discussed for further understanding.
The panel began by highlighting the seeming contradiction between the way the law functions and the psychoanalytic perspective. The US Court system, as well as most judicial law, relies on a presumption of free will and rational thought. In other words, it presumes people are rational beings that make decisions in line with their conscious beliefs and intentions. It draws an almost linear relationship between intent, conduct, and punishment in an attempt to maintain social order and dispense justice in a moral fashion. Conversely, psychoanalytic theory considers much more than the conscious mind. For example, it considers the idea that childhood experiences and unconscious motives shape behavior. The argument panelist and lawyer Anne Dailey, author of “Law and the Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Perspective,” made is that while personal accountability may be necessary to maintain social order, this personal accountability should be subject to refinement in the context of all the forces we know driving human behavior. Continue reading.
