In this paper, I argue that it is possible to have an account of shame and guilt as mature concepts in moral psychology that sit alongside immature ones. In arguing for this, I adopt the critical r...

This essay considers the two-way relation between critical realism and psychoanalysis. Critical realism vindicates and deepens our understanding of ontology by drawing on the sciences for which it...

In this wide-ranging interview Alan Norrie discusses how he became involved with Critical Realism, his work on Dialectical Critical Realism, and responses to it amongst the Critical Realist communi...

This essay considers how we talk in moral terms about crime and punishment using a framework that comes from psychoanalysis. The idea of the human as a metaphysical animal, an animal that thinks and loves, is given a naturalistic explanation in Freudian metapsychology as it was developed by Melanie Klein and Hans Loewald. While the former helps us understand the desire to punish as the enjoyable return of pain for pain, the latter indicates how mature human beings seek to pursue (...) a sense of wholeness. This understanding of moral psychology is applied to thinking about criminal justice where three ethical stances are identified, the vindictive, the vindicative and the validatory. The vindictive and the vindicative represent a compromise formation in law which excludes a broader validatory process aimed at truthful human reconciliation. (shrink)

This essay argues that Didier Fassin’s ‘The Will to Punish’ reveals the social grounds for a ‘persecutory impulse’ in modern punishment, which sits alongside a ‘humanising trace’. The challenge for a critical theory of modern penality is to think through this strange combination. The work of Melanie Klein and Freud, properly interpreted, can illuminate its conjunction and disjunction.