And my training in criminology, in all this?

Criminology and psychoanalysis: when understanding crime illuminates the subject

There are trainings one does not choose by chance. The detour through criminology, for a psychoanalyst, is not a deviation of course — it is a deepening. A way to push further the question at the heart of every analysis: why does a subject do what he does, including what destroys him, including what destroys the other?

What criminology is — and what it is not

Criminology is often misunderstood. One readily imagines it as a discipline of detection, almost police-like — profiling suspects, drawing up typologies of serial killers, explaining crime by biology or environment.

That is reductive. Criminology is a human science in its own right, a crossroads of psychology, law, sociology, psychiatry and philosophy. It does not seek merely to catalogue criminal acts — it seeks to understand what, in a subject, in a history, in a social context, makes the passage to the act possible.

And that is where things become really interesting.

The passage to the act: where speech fell silent

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the passage to the act has a precise definition. It is not simply “doing something violent” or “losing control”. It is the moment when the subject, overwhelmed by something he can neither symbolise nor metabolise, leaves the field of language to enter that of the real.

The passage to the act is the failure of speech. When one can no longer say, one does. When anguish becomes unbearable and no representation comes to contain it, the body acts in place of the word.

It is an extraordinarily powerful key — not only to understand crimes, but to understand a whole series of behaviours that patients bring to the consulting room: self-harm, running away, brutal ruptures, explosions of anger, risk behaviours. Everything that resembles an exit from the symbolic frame.

Criminology taught me to read these moments otherwise. Not as pathologies to be contained, but as signals — clumsy attempts, sometimes disastrous, to resolve something unresolved.

The question of evil: neither monster nor victim

One of the things criminology teaches — and that psychoanalysis confirms in its own way — is the resistance to explanations that are too simple.

There are two symmetrical temptations before crime, and notably before grave crimes. The first: the monster. The perpetrator is radically other, incomprehensible, outside ordinary humanity. The second: the absolute victim. The perpetrator is only the product of his childhood, his poverty, his traumas — he could not have done otherwise.

These two postures have in common that they evacuate the subject. In one case, he is excluded from humanity. In the other, he is dissolved in determinism.

Serious criminology, like serious psychoanalysis, refuses these two shortcuts. It poses a more uncomfortable question: how does a subject — a being of language, of history, of desire — come to that? Not to excuse. To understand. And understanding is the condition of any clinic worthy of the name.

What this changes in my practice

Concretely, training in criminology modifies the clinical gaze in several ways.

First, it refines the reading of antecedents. When a patient evokes a judicial history — his own or his family’s — the criminological frame makes it possible not to remain at the surface of facts. To seek the subjective logic behind the act, what it answered, what it expressed, what it attempted to resolve.

It then makes it possible to work with patients whom other practitioners hesitate to receive. Patients with passages to the act in their history, antisocial conducts, judicial trajectories. These patients are not without an unconscious — they are often those whose unconscious speaks loudest, for want of having been able to speak otherwise.

Finally, it refines the understanding of family dynamics. Violence, in a family, does not spring from nowhere. It inscribes itself in a transmission, sometimes across several generations. Criminology provides tools to locate these inheritances — and psychoanalysis provides the tools to work them.

The law, desire, and the subject

There is a profound point of encounter between criminology and Lacanian psychoanalysis: the question of the law.

For Lacan, the law is not merely the social prohibition — it is the very structure of desire. Desire is constituted around a lack, a limit, a founding interdiction. This is what Lacan calls the function of the Name-of-the-Father: the symbolic instance that comes to inscribe the limit, to separate the child from fusional omnipotence, and thereby to make desire possible.

When this function fails — absent, inconsistent, or on the contrary crushing — something in the relation to the law and to the other goes awry. It is not a destiny, not a fatality. But it is a clinical reality often found in trajectories marked by transgression.

Criminology documents these trajectories. Psychoanalysis listens to them otherwise — seeking not the cause, but the subjective logic. Not the deterministic why, but the why of the subject.

Understanding crime to better hear suffering

One might believe that criminology is a discipline remote from the psychoanalytic consulting room. That it belongs to the courts, to expert assessments, to prisons.

It also belongs to the analytic space — because violence, transgression, the relation to the law and to the other do not stay outside when a patient enters a consulting room. They are there, in speech, in silences, in acting-out, in repetitions.

To have gone through criminology is to have learned not to turn one’s gaze away. To hold the question even when it disturbs. To stay on the side of the subject — not on the side of judgement, not on the side of excuse, but on the side of understanding.

That is, at bottom, what every analysis asks.