Jungian Crime Scene Analysis: An Imaginal Investigation - Softcover

Daniels, Aaron B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782200061 ISBN 13: 9781782200062

Publisher: Routledge, 2014

Synopsis

This book presents the serial killer as having 'imagopathy' - that is, a disorder of the imagination - manifested through such deficiencies as failure of empathy, rigid fantasies, and unresolved projections. The author argues that this disorder is a form of failed alchemy. His study challenges long-held assumptions that the Jungian concept of individuation is a purely healthful drive. Serial killers are unable to form insight after projecting untenable material onto their victims. Criminal profilers must therefore effect that insight informed by their own reactions to violent crime scene imagery, using what the author asserts is a form of Jung's 'active imagination'. This book posits sexual homicides as irrational shadow images in our rationalistic modern culture. Consequently, profilers bridge conscious and unconscious for the inexorably splintered killer as well as the culture at large.

About this title

About the Author:

Aaron B Daniels

Review:

'In the sense that each neurosis involves a crime perpetrated against the psyche, each psychotherapist may have to become a crime scene analyst. Aaron Daniels, who has immersed himself in the existential-phenomenological and Jungian depth psychological literatures, gives a good account of their approaches to understanding here. He finds striking analogies between the methods of the contemporary Jungian therapist, bent on understanding the unconscious, and the way present-day profilers of the criminal mind must rely upon imagination. Daniels reflects brilliantly on our culture's fascination with depth psychological detection. With telling originality, he reveals the surprising agency that can emerge when a psyche engages the complexity of the shadow that has driven it to compromise its own integrity.'- John Beebe, past president of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1782200061
• ISBN 13: 9781782200062
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352