Renata Salecl
What is on my mind?
316.6:159.964.2
343.9:165
The Law, Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis
Abstract: In criminology, we can observe a return to biology when we
are trying to explain why someone has committed a crime. Neuroscience and genetics are the two sciences that seem to offer new understanding of criminal behaviour. This paper, however, argues that our
fascination with these two sciences forgets the power of fantasy when
we are searching for the question of what makes a criminal. With the
help of psychoanalysis, the paper shows that criminal behaviour is far
more complex than a set of genes or the neurons of our brain. The paper
also points out that the turn to biology often prevents us from thinking
through the influence of the “social” on the psychological make of the
individual.
Keywords: crime, neuroscience, genetics, psychoanalysis, Jeffrey
Landrigan, Jacques Lacan.
S
ome years ago, I went to a Critical Legal Studies conference at Harvard and the evening before the event, searching for a restaurant near
my guesthouse, I had a chance encounter with a professor on a similar
quest. He was attending a conference on physics the next day. We joined
forces in our search and ended up sharing a meal. The professor asked me
what I was going to talk about and I mentioned psychoanalysis and the law.
He got visibly upset and almost started shouting at me what nonsense psychoanalysis was and how impossible it was to find any material, physical
proof for the existence of the unconscious. Politely, I asked him what the
subject of his lecture would be. He answered: “Black holes!” I asked him if
he did not in fact have a somewhat similar problem with his field of study to
the one I was supposed to have, since he also could not physically examine
black holes. My comment did not go down well – the man insisted that he
could mathematically prove the existence of black holes, which made his science much more viable than mine. No matter how much I tried to convince
him that something like the unconscious could also be proven if we look
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at our psyche, he could not be convinced that his black hole and mine had
something in common, i.e. that they had effects while we could not physically examine them. As one can imagine, we did not share another meal.
In one of Agatha Christie’s novels Hector Poirot points out that “[i]t is the
brain, the little grey cells on which one must rely. One must seek the truth
within – not without”. Poirot means that metaphorically: he is pointing out
that it is with the help of our reasoning that criminal cases can be explained.
Nowadays, however, we are more and more thinking this literally – i.e. that
it is in the brain or the body as such where the truth of subjectivity can be
found.
In 1985, National Geographic published Steve McCurry’s now famous photo
of a young Afghan girl in a refugee camp in northern Pakistan, where Afghans
were fleeing from the Soviet incursion into their home country. The girl in
the picture has striking green eyes; she looks straight into the camera and
gives an impression both of utter innocence and great strength in the midst of
hardship. When viewers take into account her simple dress and headscarf on
her head, they quickly draw the conclusion that she comes from the Muslim
world and is probably very poor. Yet the colour of her eyes makes her look
strangely Western, which is why viewers may also get the impression that
she is more like “us” than “them”.
In 2002, the popularity of this photo (which has since been used many times
on advertising posters for National Geographic) led the magazine to search
for the woman who had posed for the photographer 17 years before. A number of women came forward claiming that they were the Afghan girl. Their
stories, however, proved false, and the search continued until the photographer himself was given a lead suggesting that the actual Afghan girl might be
Sharbat Gula, a woman living high in the mountains near Tora Bora. When
the National Geographic journalists found the woman, they were shocked by
the poverty she lived in. She looked prematurely aged, was illiterate, and was
barely able to feed her three daughters.
The accounts of this woman matched McCurry’s recollection of their first
meeting and her eyes still had that tone of green that so captivated the observers of the original photo. National Geographic, however, wanted proof,
and so they took a photo of the woman’s eyes and sent it to a New Jersey
company specializing in analysis of the iris. When their scientific comparison of the eyes on the old photo to the new one was carried out, the Afghan
girl was finally declared officially found.
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National Geographic normally relies on storytelling, but in the case of the
Afghan girl, they wanted to supplement the story with scientific proof. They
thus resorted to forensic analysis of what was in effect a sublime object (the
eyes in this case), using technology that in other cases might have been used
in court. If they did not believe the story the Afghan woman was telling, they
very much believed the scientists who examined the images of her eyes from
the old and new photographs.
The fascination to look inside the body is very much part of today’s forensic
discourse, especially in the way this discourse is presented by various TV
shows like CSI or Forensic Files. In the US these shows are mostly aired on
a special channel called True TV. The clear message behind such shows is
that “the law will always find you” – it is only a matter of furthering forensic
science and the law will catch the most skilled criminal.1
Who is a criminal?
The question of what that “x” in a person that makes him or her a criminal
is has been occupying us for a long time. Similarly, we have been obsessing
with questions of how to predict and prevent someone from committing a
crime in the future. Neuroscience now offers incredible possibilities in this
regard – but with them, also many problems.
In the last several years there has been a significant increase in usage of neuroscience in the courtroom in the US. In 2005 there were 30 cases in the US
in which the courts applied neuroscience; in 2012, however, this number already rose to 100. All together there have by now been 1500 US cases where
neuroscience was used as the main piece of evidence in the courtroom.2
It is not surprising that the law has become fascinated by neuroscience. First,
the law is always in search of a “helper” in explaining the subjectivity that
1
2
More on troubles with forensics, see Jim Fisher, Forensic under fire
(Rutgers UP, 2008) and Renata Salecl, “Perversion and Forensic.
Science: Fraudulent. Testimonies”, Social Research 78, 3 (Fall 2011).
Ian Sample, “US courts see rise in defendants blaming their brains
for criminal acts”, The Guardian, November 10, 2013, http://www.
theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/10/us-rise-defendants-blame-brainscrimes-neuroscience, accessed November 10, 2013.
Renata Salecl
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happens to be put in front of the judge and whom legal mechanisms try to
deter from transgressing the law. Second, discussions about the nature of free
will and responsibility of the criminal have been seriously challenged with
the advent of the new brain sciences.3
In the past, the law has always adjusted its perceptions of subjectivity with
regard to the philosophical perceptions of subjectivity that were dominant at
a particular time.4 At the time of Modernity the law thus went from being influenced by Descartes’ cogito to Kant’s idea of substance-less subjectivity to
various forms of psychiatric reasoning on uncontrollable impulses. From the
time of Lombroso and Gal, criminology has also tried to find in the body the
secret of the criminal. The idea was that understanding the biological marks
of potential criminality will allow society to prevent future transgressions
of law. There are many cases where neuroscience offers new insight into
people’s behaviour. One of the most fascinating cases is that of a middleaged school teacher who was well regarded in his profession. However, at
some point he started exhibiting paedophilic behaviour. He also started collecting pornography and his relationship with his step-daughter had undertones of sexual innuendo. As a result of this strange behaviour, the teacher
was asked to attend a group session for sexual addiction. On the way to the
first meeting, the teacher experienced a strong headache. As a result, he was
taken to the hospital. And there they discovered a benign tumour growing in
his head. After the operation, the teacher became “normal” again. However,
after some time, his behaviour went back to showing signs of paedophilia.
Again, doctors observed the growth of a tumour. They operated on him and
the man lost his previous sexual passions.
In criminal law, neuroscience is often involved when the defence is pleading insanity. In this regard, we are interested in how to differentiate between
the healthy and the ill, the normal and the deformed brain according to the
ability of an individual to make independent decisions – to be recognized as
3
4
See, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Megan S. Stephen: “Free Will in the
Twenty-first century: A Discussion of Neuroscience and the Law”,
from Brent Garland, Mark S. Frankel (eds.): Neuroscience and the Law
(Charles A. Dana Foundation, 2004); Dean Mobbs, Hakwan C. Lau,
Owen D. Jones, Christopher D. Frith: “Law, Responsibility, and the
Brain”, PLOS Biology, 5. 4, (2007).
See Aleš Završnik, Homo criminalis: Upodobitve zločinskega subjekta
v visokotehnološki družbi tveganja (Ljubljana: Inštitut za kriminologijo
pri PF, 2009).
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an autonomous individual. How to address cases of people with slight brain
damage?
The first aspect of the problem of differentiating between the normal and the
abnormal brain relates to actual and indisputable changes in the brain, brought
on by illness. In most instances, a tumour or a cyst causes such changes.
The second aspect pertains to a diminished criminal responsibility as a consequence of an underdeveloped brain.5 This issue generally concerns adolescents, since the frontal lobe of the human brain, which deals with the understanding of the consequences, the risk and the moral implications of our
actions, takes the longest to develop. On average, the abovementioned mechanisms only evolve towards the age of twenty. In conservative districts of the
USA, there is a strong tendency to ostracize young aggressive individuals
as soon as possible. They are regarded as so corrupt that society would be
better off completely isolating them early on. Some US states, such as North
Carolina, Texas and especially Southern, more conservative states, have a
very low age limit at which an individual is legally considered an adult. In
North Carolina, a thirteen-year-old was sentenced to life in prison for rape.
In such cases, neuroscientific findings could alleviate the radical punishment
of youth if their brain is seen as plastic, i.e. open to pivotal changes in the
process of growing up.
The third aspect applies to the issue of addiction, which raises several questions. Does the brain function altogether differently when under the influence
of drugs? How independent are the decisions of an addict? Some argue that
an addict was at least acting independently when he or she first started using
drugs. In the law, there are two basic lines of reasoning relating to addiction.
The first is built on a strong determinism, which includes neuroscientific
findings on the biology of addiction, while the second allows for a certain
measure of free will in addicts.6
There are a number of cases where neuroscience was used successfully in
court, even in Europe, which is usually more conservative in this regard that
the US.
5
6
Terry A. Maroney: “The False Promise of Adolescent Brain Science in
Juvenile Justice”, Notre Dame Law Review (November 2009).
See Stephen Morse, “Addiction, Genetics, and Criminal Responsi­
bility”, Law and Contemporary Problems 69 (Winter 2006), 165-208.
Renata Salecl
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In Italy in 2009, Stefania Albertani received a life sentence for the murder
of her sister and for the attempted murder of her parents. Two years later,
her sentence was reduced based on a neuroscientific testimony that claimed
that Stefania had changes in the prefrontal cortex where we presuppose one’s
mechanisms for controlling our impulsive urges are based. The court also
accepted the reasoning of a geneticist that Stefania had a deficiency in the
MAOA enzyme which presumably shows that she might have been genetically predisposed for crime.7
This was already the second Italian case where genetics8 helped to reduce a sentence. The first one happened in 2009 when the Italian court reviewed the case
of Algerian immigrant Abdelmalek Bayout who was sentenced to 9 years and 2
months in prison for stabbing to death a man on the street who had presumably
mocked Bayout’s make-up. Bayout had already received a reduced sentence
because of his previous psychological problems. However, his sentence was
further reduced by a year when a neuroscientist claimed that the brain scan
showed that he had changes in the brain in the area where it is presumed that we
have aggression-control functions and when a geneticist pointed out that he had
changes in 5 genes that we relate to aggression. Here, too, a deficiency in the
MAOA enzyme influenced the judge’s decision in an important way.9
In the US, neuroscience has been used in many cases where people are
searching for payment for some damages – like after car accidents or other
7
8
9
More on this in Ilina Singh, Walter P. Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter
Sinnott-Armstrong, Julian Savulecu, Bioprediction, Biomarkers, and
Bad Behavior: Scientific, Legal, and Ethical Challenges (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013).
For more on genetics and the law, see, Debbie Wilson: “My genes
made me do it”: An analysis of a genetic propensity for criminal
conduct argument in criminal cases and its implications for genetic
determinism” ALPN Paper Series, (2007); Nita Farahany, William
Bernet: “Behavioural Genetics in Criminal Cases: Past, Present, and
Future”, Genomics, Society and Policy, 2. 1. (2001); Karen Rothenberg,
Alica Wang: “The Scarlet Gene: Behavioural Genetics, Criminal Law,
and Racial and Ethnic Stigma” (both articles from: Nita A. Farahany
(ed.): The Impact of Behavioral Sciences on Criminal Law (Oxford,
2009).
Emiliano Feresin, “Lighter sentence for murderer with ‘bad genes’”,
Nature, October 30, 2009, http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091030/
full/news.2009.1050.html, accessed November 10, 2013.
96 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #6
injuries. There are also a number of cases where sportsmen use neuroscience to prove that they developed early dementia as a result of damages they
experience during the course of the game. Football and boxing are pertinent
examples here.
There have been interesting cases also dealing with addiction. One of the
most intriguing cases happened in Australia where the court tried a man for
sexual assault. However, when it was discovered that the man suffered from
Parkinson’s disease and was taking special drugs for that which in some
cases cause as a side effect a gambling addiction or hyper-sexuality, this was
taken as an excuse for the man’s behaviour.
In the US, the State of Illinois used neuroscience when it tried to limit the
selling of aggressive video games to children. However, in this case, the
gaming industry employed a more skilled neuroscientist, who pointed out
that we could not localize and pinpoint exactly which parts of the brain are
affected by some images since our brain is highly plastic and as such also
highly unpredictable.10
One of the most bizarre cases of the use of neuroscience in a court happened
when a doctor was put on trial for defrauding an insurance company for a
million dollars. His neuroscientist claimed that this doctor had experienced
a slight stroke in the past that damaged the areas for computation. It was,
however, unclear how it transpired that these areas were damaged in such a
way that he always calculated to his advantage and how he was also able to
pass the test to have his medical license renewed.
When brain images are used in court, we have a possibility to create new
stories, a new fantasy about what is in the subject more than him or her self.11
These fantasies are further supplanted by the so-called CSI effect. The latter
refers to the influence of crime shows (e.g. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation)
on the expectations of the jury concerning the execution of the investigation,
10
11
Entertainment Software Ass’n. v. Blagojevich (404 F. Supp. 2d 1051
(N.D. Ill. 2005)).
More on the use of brain science in court in Lucille A. Jewel, “Through
a Glass Darkly: Using Brain Science and Visual Rhetoric to Gain
a Professional Perspective on Visual Advocacy”, Southern Cal.
Interdisciplinary Law Journal, 19. 237 (2010).
Renata Salecl
| 97
as well as the acquisition and the presentation of evidence. The CSI effect
can prompt jurors to look for complicated tests and lines of argument, which
may even not be in use yet, but are regularly seen in TV shows. The problem
manifests itself because the TV environment disproportionately increases the
expectations of the actual capabilities of contemporary forensic science.
The jury can find an illustrative colour brain scan to be far more objective
and clear a proof than it actually is – such a scan fascinates the viewer, and
this is known as the Christmas tree effect. Complications can also occur
when experts try to interpret individual brain scans, which can often be inconclusive.12
As the state cannot afford high costs – e.g. ordering brain scans – for every
criminal proceeding, there exists a danger of unbalanced trials. What does it
mean, if due to its costliness such evidence is only at the disposal of the rich,
not the state or the poor?
Psychoanalysis and crime
The reasoning of psychoanalysis about crime is very different from that of
neuroscience. Psychoanalysis primarily asks: Why do some people internalize social prohibitions and others do not? How is it that different people
relate to the law so differently: some are oblivious to social prohibitions;
others constantly feel guilty; still others claim they have committed crimes
when in reality they have done nothing wrong; and some even inflict punishment onto themselves? Clear differences emerge here between what classical
Freudian psychoanalysis depicts as neurosis and what is known as psychosis
or schizophrenia. Even more complicated are cases of perversion.
For psychoanalysis, the question is also what is the distinction between the
moral law that governs the individual in his inner self and the legal norms
that govern an individual in the outer world? The fact is that although this
“inner” law is ambivalent, the external law does not always function as a
12
Still another dilemma pertains to the use of neuroscience in trying to
figure of if the defendant is lying or not. See Joelle Anne Moreno: “The
Future of Neuroimaged Lie Detector and the Law”, Akron Law Review
(2009); Tom Butler: “Can We Scan For Truth in a Society of Liars?”,
American Journal of Bioethics, 5. 2 (2005).
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restriction on our “inner” morality. On the contrary, it could function either
as the alleviator of an unbearable tension caused by the subject’s “inner” law
or as a purely instrumental regulator, whose presence the subject does not
perceive as an obstacle.
One of the main challenges of psychoanalysis with regard to crime is dealing
with the issue of responsibility. Paradoxically, psychoanalysis perceives the
subject as much more responsible than the law often does. Psychoanalysis
tries to carve the space for human responsibility that goes beyond the naturenurture divide.
When Freud invented his term Nervosen-wahl (choice of neurosis) his idea was
not to perceive the subject as someone who rationally chooses his or her neurosis, but rather to point out how the subject is in a paradoxical way the “author”
of his or her suffering. He or she is thus not fully determined by nature (biology)
or nurture (family) – in the midst of these important factors, the subject finds his
or her own answers, i.e. he or she remains a subject and is not simply an object,
i.e. a tool in the hands of other mechanisms which determine him or her.
The subject is thus perceived as someone who always in a very specific way
creates his or her symptom. This authorship of the symptom is not perceived
in a rational way. Unconscious mechanisms are very much present in the
way neurotic symptoms are formed. However, when we use the term “choice
of neurosis” we also open the space for change. The symptom can change,
the subject can make changes in his or her life.
Criminology usually explains a criminal act either by locating the instigating causes in external factors (such as poverty, family dysfunctions, peer
pressure, etc.) or with the help of psychological factors (such as addiction,
aggression, manic-depression, or other psychiatric personality disorders).
Significantly, such an explanation tends to dehumanize the criminal: the
criminal is perceived as an irresponsible entity caught in the interplay of
either social or unconscious psychic mechanisms, or both. In this scientific
approach to crime, as well as in the legal treatment of the criminal, the offender is not perceived as a subject, but as an object in the hands of some
external or internal operations over which he has no control. Consequently,
the only task of the experts dealing with crime is to locate those mechanisms
and thereby to determine the responsibility of the criminal.
In contrast to this approach, psychoanalytic theory tries to explain a criminal
act in terms that do not dehumanize the criminal. Psychoanalysis agrees that
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crime could be explained by a variety of causes. For example, murder could
be linked to psychosis and shoplifting could be a reaction to the lack of love
or other traumas of childhood. But psychoanalysis perceives these kinds of
acts as a specific mode of subjectivization, a means by which the subject tries
to resolve his inner tensions, inhibitions and traumas. Specifically, in the case
of theft, such an act could be perceived as resulting from a lack of love or
as repaying a certain symbolic debt. But according to such an explanation,
the criminal is not dehumanized; he is not reduced to being a cog in the interplay of some mechanisms. On the contrary, the criminal’s theft emerges
as the way in which the subject, through committing the crime, subjectivizes
himself in a new way. Psychoanalysis regards crime as a “passage à l’act”,
as an act by which the inner tensions of the subject are resolved. The essential psychoanalytic consideration is thus what role theft plays in the libidinal
economy of the thief.
Jacques Lacan made a typology of crimes in which he designated three types
of crimes: crimes of the Ego, of the Self and of the Super Ego. Crimes of
the Ego are crimes committed for simple profit, crimes of the Self are pure
instinctive crimes that are reactions to some aggression. But psychoanalysis
is primarily interested in the third type of crime, crimes of the Super Ego,
where a split between the Ego and the Super Ego is at work in the subject,
and it is precisely this split that the subject tries to resolve by committing
some criminal act.
Psychoanalysis has been in its own way interested in what our inside looks
like. Libido, the unconscious, drives, desires, affects have all been words it
has used to decipher that something in subjectivity that in varieties of ways
surpasses our conscious capability to comprehend ourselves and others.
Speaking about love, Jacques Lacan pointed out that in love we see in the
other what the other does not have and that we also offer to the other the
sublime object that we do not have. Since we fall in love with this sublime X
in the other that is a stand-in for the constitutive lack in subjectivity as such,
we create a fantasy scenario around this lack.
With the help of neuroscience, this fantasy scenario is getting a new structure.
The first reasoning about that x in us – our brain – has followed a particular
narrative of an ending. Neuroscientists first thought that the number of neurons is fixed. Only later did neuroscience realize that our brains continued
100 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #6
making new neurons throughout our lives. Discussions about neurons later
shifted to neurotransmitters and the desire for trying to localize functions in
the brain was mostly abandoned in the name of neuroplasticity which allows
for the unpredictability of the brain to be thought through.
We have seen similar shifts in the domain of genetics – from a certain fundamentalism of genes to memes to epigenetics and theories about the logic of
expression of genes and the power of the so-called junk genes.
Genes too get a new meaning if we look at them through the lens of psychoanalysis. They are that x in me that connects me with my ancestors and it is
what I am passing on to my offspring. As such they allow for a new rewriting
of the family history. They are also a new object of anxiety (especially when it
comes to particular illnesses), while they can also be something that appeases
anxiety and diminishes responsibility – it is not me, it is my genes that did it!
Jeffrey Landrigan
Let me now take a case that can be completely differently interpreted with the
help of genetics, neuroscience and psychoanalysis. This is the case of Jeffrey
Landrigan who was put on death row for double murder in the US. Jeffrey
used the last straw to hang onto life: in his petition for release, he pointed out
that he might have been genetically predisposed for killing.
Landrigan’s story is an incredible saga of violence going on in a single family.
Jeff’s great-grandfather was a bootlegger – he sold alcohol illegally. His son,
Jeff’s grandfather, died in a shootout with the police while he was robbing
a bank. Significantly, however, his own son (Darrel Hill) was observing this
shootout. Darrel Hill also became a criminal. He committed two murders and
later died while waiting on death row.
Darrel had a son called Billy whom he abandoned when he was a baby. When
Billy was two, he was also abandoned by his mother – she just left him in a
day care centre.
Billy was later adopted into a stable family, where he was well taken care
of and loved, as he said himself. This family renamed him Jeffrey. From his
youth onwards, Jeffrey had problems with drugs and alcohol and then ended
up being placed in various institutions for delinquent kids throughout his life.
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Jeff’s story is often used in texts which try to show a genetic predisposition
for crime. The most important claim about this was made in Adrian Raine’s
book Anatomy of Violence:
Darrel Hill, on death row, summed it up succinctly when he said: “I don’t
think there can be any doubt in anyone’s mind that he (Jeffrey Landrigan)
was fulfilling his destiny […] I believe that when he was conceived, what
I was, he became […] The last time I saw him he was a baby in a bed, and
underneath his mattress I had two .38 pistols and Demerol; that’s what he
was sleeping on”.13
Raine says: “Placing that gun and drugs under his baby boy’s pillow foreshadowed what was to come. Like father, like son – whether it is violence,
drugs, or alcohol. Landrigan was seemingly doing little more in life than
acting out the sins of his biological father.”
Raine points out that the very fact that Jeff was adopted and well-loved later
in his life could not change the biological determinism of his genetic makeup.
Jeff’s story can, however, be interpreted in another way. First, there is an
interpretation by way of brain damages. Jeff’s mother abused drugs and
alcohol throughout her pregnancy. Thus the judge who condemned Jeff to
death row later said that she would have chosen life imprisonment if she had
known that Jeff had brain changes that were likely caused by this behaviour
of his mother at the time of her pregnancy.
A different kind of interpretation of Jeff’s behaviour, however, we can accomplish with the help of psychoanalysis.
From various accounts about Jeff’s life it is know that he spent years trying
to track down his biological father. And he actually “found” him after he
committed his first murder.
This happened when Jeff was 20 years old (here is it good to remember that
Darrel – Jeff’s father – was a year older when he witnessed his own father
being killed by the police in a shootout). How did Jeff’s first killing happen?
13
See Adrian Raine, The Anatomy of Violence (New York: Pantheon,
2013), 79.
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When Jeff came out of prison he quickly got married and soon learned that
he would become a father. One day, he was out on a drinking spree with his
childhood friend. Jeff wanted this man to become the baby’s Godfather. In a
fight that ensued between the two men, Jeff stabbed his friend to death.
Jeff was sentenced to 40 years in prison. Paradoxically, however, Jeff found
his father through this crime. Not only did he finally follow in his father’s
symbolic footsteps – i.e. by truly symbolically identifying with his father
and acquiring the same symbolic name of “a criminal” – but while serving
his prison sentence, he actually got to know his father. A fellow prisoner told
him that in another prison he met Darrel Hill who physically resembled Jeff.
The two men then established contact and struck up correspondence.
The term “father” plays an important part in Jeff’s story in a variety of ways.
The very facts that he committed his first killing when he was about to become a father and that he actually killed a man who was to become his child’s
Godfather have important ramifications for the psychoanalytic understanding of this crime. It seems that Jeff had a particularly troubling relationship
with the symbolic role that a father occupies.
One should also not neglect the fact that Jeff as a little baby was already
caught into the web of anxiety related to transgression of the law. The very
fact that his father was hiding a gun and drugs under the baby’s mattress
could have important consequences for the development of this baby. We
know very well that little children are influenced by their caregivers in a
myriad different ways and that in an unconscious way they also take in the
anxieties present in their caregivers. What can be more anxiety-provoking
than sleeping on a gun?
From the book by Dan Malone and Howard Swindle America’s Condemned
we also learn that Jeff last saw his father when he was once as a baby taken
to prison to visit Darrel who was serving a sentence for robbery.14
Now, Darrel also committed his first killing by stabbing someone. This happened when he was in prison and a fellow inmate called him a “punk”. Darrel
claimed that the man was making a sexual innuendo at him and that he killed
him in self-defence. Throughout his life, Darrel, too, had problems with his
14
Dan Malone and Howard Swindle, America’s Condemned: Death Row
Inmates in Their Own Words (New York: Andrews Mcmeel Pub, 1999).
Renata Salecl
| 103
own father. After he witnessed his father being killed by the police, he started
having hallucinations that his father was actually still alive.
Although Jeff was adopted into a loving family, this family knew about Jeff’s
past. Even more important is the fact that the people in the town knew about
that, too. Jeff was thus mocked in school that his father was a bank robber.
Jeff developed a desire to learn about his biological family early on. He once
therefore searched the whole house in order to find some information about
that and he came across some notes about the Hill family – his biological
parents.
When Jeff was serving his sentence, he was despite his murder plea put in a
minimal-security work crew and there he would sneak out to have sex with
a woman he met in a park. (One wonders if he even unconsciously wanted
to impregnate that woman to become a father himself or if he was actually
horrified of that possibility.) Because he was not under constant surveillance,
he was in 1989 able to escape from prison.
When he escaped, funnily, he headed to Yuma in Arizona where he hoped to
find his biological mother. On the way there, he met Chester Dyer in Phoenix. Dyer worked in a health club and was known to pick up men and take
them home.
One particular evening, at a bar, Dyer told friends that he was having sex
with a man called Jeff. Several years later Dyer was found strangled by an
electrical cord and stabbed to death in his apartment. “A deck of pornographic cards were strewn over the bed and the ace of hearts was dramatically
propped up on Dyer’s back”.
He later committed robbery and the shoe prints brought the police to the
Dyer crime. Jeff denied that crime claiming that Dyer had made sexual advances but that another man did the killing.
Dan Malone and Howard Swindle in their account of the Landrigan story
ask: “Do chromosomal cards dealt at birth determine whether a person becomes a sociopath or a productive member of society? Or does the world in
which the child is reared cast the mould that forms the adult?”
The question therefore is whether Landrigan was dealt genetically predisposed cards to commit crime or was he himself in charge of dealing the cards
of crime?
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The very fact that actual playing cards were neatly arranged at the scene of
the crime indicates that Jeff was not simply a tool in the hands of some higher power – genes, for example – but that he was very much a subject who was
trying to come to terms with biology with the help of highly symbolic means.
The ace of hearts that he placed on his victim’s back might very well have
been yet another way he was trying to knit together the questions pertaining
to his origins. Here we should not forget that this murder happened on the
way to his search for his biological mother.
Jeff was sentenced to death for this murder. Arizona finally executed Jeff in
Oct 2010. (This happened after a lengthy dispute over which drug the state
can use for the execution, what the expiration dates of these drugs are and
where to get a new supply of them when the state runs out. Media reports
stated that Arizona finally imported the drug from the UK. However, the UK
a few months later prohibited export of such drugs abroad.)
Landrigan’s final words were: “Boomer Sooner”. This is the beloved rallying cry for the supporters of the University of Oklahoma football team called
Sooners. Jeff Landrigan remained a person with a strong need for identification until the end.
Enjoyment in transgression
The most complicated cases of transgression happen when the subject has
tremendous feelings of guilt while actually not having transgressed any
norms. The subject who suffers from a cruel Super-Ego and the unbearable
feeling of guilt that the latter imposes on him or her often commits a crime
in order to be at least guilty of something. In such a case the subject often
seeks punishment, since external punishment becomes less threatening than
the sadism of the Super-Ego.
This search for transgression one finds today in a variety of ways. With some
people the search for transgression involves a certain fantasy of all-powerfulness. In this case, a subject might deliberately seek out situations that
bring him or her to the point of testing the limit between life and death.
In Slovenia, we have an almost national obsession with mountaineering. Since
we are a small country, I guess the only way for people to escape is to climb
up the mountains. In recent years, however, we have experienced numerous
accidents on our mountains as well as when our mountaineers climbed high
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mountains around the world – especially in the Himalayas. In many of the
cases, the climber would do everything to transgress the usual way of making
the summit. He would go alone, without oxygen, he would take a road no one
else had taken before and sometimes he would even not tell anyone about his
expedition. The desire for transgression and the grandiose idea of mastery
were in the cases of such climbers often coupled with a fantasy of having a
special relationship with the mountain. Climbers would thus talk about the
mountain as a living being and would comment that the mountain either accepted you or not, that they had a special relationship with the mountain,
almost to the point of developing a specific form of communication with it.
If we have in many ways today observed a bipolarization of the social – not
only in the way we tackle crime, for example, but even in how we perceive
an economic crisis (often like a natural catastrophe and not a man-made occurrence), in some cases of the new forms of transgression we have made
a move back to the humanization of nature – the way pre-modern societies
used to do.
If in some cases the act of transgression appeases the cruelty of the Superego, in others it might be a way of mastering the anxiety over death. Humanizing dangerous mountains in this case contributes to this appeasement. But
in still other cases, the very act of transgression caries with it a particular
kind of jouissance. Here the risk of loss and punishment become secondary
to the jouissance that the subject seeks.
In the United States, a series of cases has lately involved lawyers who found
particular enjoyment in transgression using new technology to capture what
is under women’s skirts. Here we encounter another dilemma of the black
hole that can very well be measured and observed – however it still remains
in space around which very powerful fantasies are created and the very fact
that with all kinds of technologies we can see inside this hole does not deter
the desire to observe it in a transgressive way.
Interestingly, up-skirting, which is the official name for this transgression,
seems to be on the rise in today’s society, although we live in times of utter
visibility and everything related to the female sexual organ can be freely seen
online. Freud’s dilemma of how a boy goes about the fact that the woman
does not have a penis seems to be played out today with full intensity. And
men still get the most jouissance when they engage in the particular transgression of trying to figure out what is between women’s legs.
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When a man engaging in this transgression is a lawyer, the whole game gets
another twist. The State of Tennessee has dealt with the case of a lawyer who
found particular enjoyment in installing secret cameras under his employees’
desk, while the State of Massachusetts had a lawyer who loved taking pictures
with his mobile phone of the women sitting on the subway in very short skirts.
Other interesting US cases involved men installing hidden cameras onto their
shoe points or into their shopping bags which allowed them to capture images
from women standing in line in the shops. For psychoanalysts these cases
open up the dilemma of new forms of voyeurism and a particular jouissance
related to the transgression one finds in cases when the one doing the transgression is a lawyer. For the US legal system, the problem of up-skirting,
however, took a rather interesting perverse turn. The debates mostly centred
on the question of the protection of privacy in a public space. The question
thus was whether the space under the woman’s skirt is truly private in the case
when a woman walks in a public space. The first rulings in the cases of upskirting thus did not grant women in public spaces the right to privacy unless
they were captured in changing rooms. Only quite recently, the law changed
in this regard and now most of the states perceive it as illegal. One wonders what kind of reasoning US lawyers would follow with regard to Princess
Catherine’s wind-lifted skirt that recently occupied UK tabloids.
However, for our reasoning about the enjoyment in transgression, a recent
UK case of a solicitor who had a relationship with a law student who acted
as a prostitute is more interesting. When the woman exposed the affair to the
solicitor’s daughter, the solicitor decided to press changes against the student. She, however, sued back. Each was demanding payment for emotional
damages. However, the most interesting part of this rather bizarre story is
that the whole relationship was structured through a series of behaviour contracts the two parties involved were composing and sending to each other
throughout their liaison.
Conclusion
Human subjectivity with its imagination, fantasies, self-damaging behaviour
and jouissance related to transgression will never be able to be reduced to a
neuronal machine driven by complex firing patterns of the cells in our brains.
However, the very tendency to ground subjectivity in biology is a reflection
of important changes that we are going through in today’s society.
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More and more we can observe the tendency to eliminate the social from the
understanding of how society functions and especially how mechanisms of
socialization mould the biological being into a social subject.
How is this forgetting of the social played out?
First. Let us look at the power of poverty. One does not need high science to
observe that children who live in poverty in families where generation after
generation of people have been unemployed, where there is violence, addiction and fear of crime in the neighbourhood, will not go through the process
of socialization the way children in stable prosperous environments do.
Not surprisingly, in the US there was recently a study that pointed out that
children from a lower economic background get many more prescriptions for
Ritalin than kids from affluent neighbourhoods.
Even researchers who try to find biological causes for aggression agree that
children’s unruliness often continues into adulthood if they were raised in
unstable environments where there were also no limits to their behaviour.
When Ritalin becomes a substitute for the parents’ “no” there is far less
chance that the child will internalize social prohibitions – developing the
feeling of guilt and anxiety over them – which is what written legal prohibitions very much depend on.
When we hear that wealthy people give less Ritalin to their children it does
not mean that they actually have fewer problems with them. The difference
is that for their troubled children they find another type of help – mostly the
talking cure.
Neuroscience is offering us vast new possibilities to understand what is happening in our heads. However, it is also opening doors for new forms of
social control.
While we might be enchanted about the new possibilities for the enhancement of our mental capacities with new drugs, brain exercises or new forms
of direct brain stimulations, we should be worried by the fact that one of the
industries that are extremely interested in neuroscience is the military.15 The
15
Stephen Rose: “Risks”, Brain Waves Modules (Royal Society, January 2011).
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forenamed often sponsors brain research under the pretext that it might help
us find a way to eliminate the traumas of people who were victims of violence. Often one thus hears about the benefit of new drugs for women who
have been raped to eliminate their traumas. However, the real interest is not
only in finding drugs that will help soldiers forget the traumas they experienced, but also primarily to help soldiers endure without sleep and to find
ways to damage the enemy with new psychotropic war gases.
If the military were to study psychoanalysis, it would not be surprised that
for the trauma to be formed there is no need for a person to directly experience violence. One can develop trauma by only fantasising about violence
and also by imposing violence onto others from afar. Which is why soldiers
who operate drones experience similar post-traumatic symptoms to those
who engage in direct combat.
The way we regard the x in us (be it gene or brain) has always involved a
dose of fantasy – even if this fantasy is only related to the fact that the new
technology is offering us a clear way to answer the question of what is in my
mind.
Doors have always been a metaphor for opening or closing. Quite often we
have used architecture to talk about the ways to tackle the essence of the
subjects. Eyes are supposed to be the windows of the soul and the mouth the
door.
On the subject of our desire to deal with the unknown, Aldous Huxley famously said that “[t]here are things known and there are things unknown,
and in between are the doors of perception.”
Rem Koolhas opened this year’s Venice Biennial of Architectures with a
series of doors from various ages of history that end in the new door of today
– the security scanner.
Some things do not only open the doors to the future – they change it.
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Renata Salecl, a philosopher and sociologist, is a senior researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, Slovenia, visiting
professor at the Cardozo School of Law and Birkbeck College, University
of London and holds the Centennial Professorship at the department of law
at the London School of Economics. Professor Salecl was also a Fellow of
Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and Remarque Fellow at New York University. Professor Salecl is also a regular columnist for the Slovenian newspaper
Delo and is a member of several think tanks, where she works on developing
policy regarding women’s rights, maternity leave, and in vitro fertilization
in Slovenia. She has been awarded the titles Slovenian Woman Scientist of
the Year (2010) and Slovenian Woman of the Year (2011). Her books include
Tyranny of Choice (Profile Books, 2010); On Anxiety (Routledge, 2004);
edited, Sexuation, Duke University Press, 2000; (Per)versions of Love and
Hate (Verso, 1998); Gaze & Voice As Love Objects, edited with Slavoj
Žižek, Duke University Press, 1996; The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of Socialism (Routledge, 1994). Her books
have been translated into multiple languages; (Per)versions of Love and
Hate has been translated into German, Russian, Spanish, French, Korean,
and Serbo-Croatian and On Anxiety has been translated into Portuguese and
Turkish.
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