How do we bring the law into line with people's psychological experience? How can psychoanalysis help us understand irrational actions and bad choices? Our legal system relies on the idea that people act reasonably and of their own free will, yet some still commit crimes with a high likelihood of being caught, sign obviously one-sided contracts, or violate their own moral codes--behavior many would call fundamentally irrational. Anne Dailey shows that a psychoanalytic perspective grounded in solid clinical work can bring the law into line with the reality of psychological experience. Approaching contemporary legal debates with fresh insights, this original and powerful critique sheds new light on issues of overriding social importance, including false confessions, sexual consent, threats of violence, and criminal responsibility. By challenging basic legal assumptions with a nuanced and humane perspective, Dailey shows how psychoanalysis can further our legal system's highest ideals of individual fairness and systemic justice.

How do we bring the law into line with people’s psychological experience? How can psychoanalysis help us understand irrational actions and bad choices? Our legal system relies on the idea that people act reasonably and of their own free will, yet some still commit crimes with a high likelihood of being caught, sign obviously one-sided contracts, or violate their own moral codes—behavior many would call fundamentally irrational. Anne Dailey shows that a psychoanalytic perspective grounded in solid clinical work can bring the law into line with the reality of psychological experience. Approaching contemporary legal debates with fresh insights, this original and powerful critique sheds new light on issues of overriding social importance, including false confessions, sexual consent, threats of violence, and criminal responsibility. By challenging basic legal assumptions with a nuanced and humane perspective, Dailey shows how psychoanalysis can further our legal system’s highest ideals of individual fairness and systemic justice.

Law and the Unconscious is the first work of the French legal philosopher Pierre Legendre to appear in English. Trained as a lawyer, a historian and a psychoanalyst, the work of Pierre Legendre has consistently confronted law with the teaching and methods of psychoanalysis. The present collection of essays addresses a fascinating and diverse set of themes including the doctrinal regulation of tears, dance and law, the desire for the absolute, the war of texts, and the power of images.

'I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth' we say in a court of law. 'In a court of law, the truth is precisely what we will not say', says Lacan. ‘If God is dead, everything is permitted’, writes Dostoyevsky. ‘If God is dead, everything is prohibited’, responds Lacan. ‘I think, therefore I am’, reasons Descartes. ‘I am where I do not think’, concludes Lacan. What are we to make of Lacan’s inversions of these mottos? And what are the implications for the legal system if we take them seriously? This book puts the legal subject on the couch and explores the incestuous relationship between law and desire, enjoyment and transgression, freedom and subjection, ethics and atheism. The process of analysis problematizes fundamental tenets of the legal system, leading the patient to rethink long-held beliefs: terms like ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’, ‘truth’ and ‘lies’, ‘reason’ and ‘reality’, ‘freedom’ and ‘responsibility’, ‘cause’ and ‘punishment’, acquire new and surprising meanings. By the end of these sessions, the patient is left wondering, along with Freud her analyst, whether ‘it is not psychology that deserves the mockery but the procedure of judicial enquiry’. A unique study on the nexus of Law and Psychoanalysis, this book will interest students and scholars of both subjects, as well as general readers looking to explore this perverse and fascinating relationship.

Sexual desire, and the possible dangers associated with its more extreme manifestations, provokes strong, albeit often contradictory reactions. Such reactions are a well-known stimulant of creative, juridical and scholarly activity, and the texts of law, literature and academic criticism respond to it in ways that suggest both of revulsion and fascination. But how are we to understand such responses, and what can they tell us about the relationship between law and its‘others’? Exploring these questions in the context of HIV transmission, on-street sexual exploitation and erotic asphyxiation, this book draws on psychoanalytic theory in order to understand the motivations behind legal, literary and cultural constructions of sexual offences, their perpetrators and victims. Its analysis of these constructions in a diverse range of sources - including appeal judgments in England & Wales and North America, criminal trials and their reporting, visual and linguistic cultures and both modern and ‘classical’ literature – will be of great interest to legal theorists and socio-legal scholars, as well as those with relevant concerns in the fields of literature and cultural studies.

A sleepwalking, homicidal nursemaid; a "morally vacant" juvenile poisoner; a man driven to arson by a "lesion of the will"; an articulate and poised man on trial for assault who, while conducting his own defense, undergoes a profound personality change and becomes a wild and delusional "alter." These people are not characters from a mystery novelist's vivid imagination, but rather defendants who were tried at the Old Bailey, London's central criminal court, in the mid-nineteenth century. In Unconscious Crime, Joel Peter Eigen explores these and other cases in which defendants did not conform to any of the Victorian legal system's existing definitions of insanity yet displayed convincing evidence of mental aberration. Instead, they were—or claimed to be—"missing," "absent," or "unconscious": lucid, though unaware of their actions. Based on extensive research in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers (verbatim courtroom narratives taken down in shorthand during the trial and sold on the street the following day), Eigen's book reveals a growing estrangement between law and medicine over the legal concept of the Person as a rational and purposeful actor with a clear understanding of consequences. The McNaughtan Rules of l843 had formalized the Victorian insanity plea, guiding the courts in cases of alleged delusion and derangement. But as Eigen makes clear in the cases he discovered, even though defense attorneys attempted to broaden the definition of insanity to include mental absence, the courts and physicians who testified as experts were wary of these novel challenges to the idea of human agency and responsibility. Combining the colorful intrigue of courtroom drama and the keen insights of social history, Unconscious Crime depicts Victorian England's legal and medical cultures confronting a new understanding of human behavior, and provocatively suggests these trials represent the earliest incarnation of double consciousness and multiple personality disorder.