Abstract
This article explores the psychoanalytic construct of annihilation anxiety in order to develop a more thoroughgoing engagement between criminological theory and contemporary psychoanalysis. Though a few criminologists have commented on crime, scapegoating and retribution using classic psychoanalytic ideas, we bring Hurvich’s current empirical work on annihilation anxiety to the discourse. Beginning with his definition of annihilation anxiety as ‘fears of being overwhelmed, merged, penetrated, fragmented, and destroyed’, we apply Hurvich’s measures to reactions to crime and insecurity and interpersonal, collective and international crime. We discuss doing criminology interpretively, applied to the dynamic connections between crime and reactions to it, including political and policy responses. We conclude that criminologists could and should help distinguish between potential and imminent threats, to advance a post-positivist approach to crime and other security threats. We argue that such an approach moves criminology toward a social science more humane and pragmatic for its conscious engagement with unconscious fears harboured amidst the purportedly rational calculi of justice.
Annihilation anxiety is here defined as a mental content reflecting concerns over survival, preservation of the self, and the capacity to function… These anxieties…fall into two separate groups…When they involve the anticipation of potential threat, they are regarded as referable to a basic danger (Freud, 1990/1926), part of an expanded series of anticipated dangers…but annihilation anxiety may instead involve an experience of present danger, what Freud (1926) called a traumatic moment, the feeling of Apocalypse Now!
The aim of this article is to foster a more thoroughgoing engagement between criminological theory and contemporary psychoanalysis than currently pertains. The article begins by documenting the tendency in much contemporary criminology to apply classical psychoanalytic ideas in a metaphoric way that, while useful, is untypical of the discipline today. We explore the development of contemporary relational psychoanalytic thinking with regard to fears of annihilation that often inform responses to crime and the desire to criminalise. We draw attention to the work of Marvin Hurvich (and colleagues) (Hurvich, 1989, 2003; Hurvich et al., 2007, 2013; Hurvich and Freedman, 2011a, 2011b), the contemporary psychoanalyst who has done most to elaborate the concept of annihilation anxiety empirically, and author of the Hurvich Experience Inventory, a normed and validated measure of instinctual fear of annihilation. In this article we demonstrate the criminological application of the seven subscales of this metric and assess the nature of annihilation anxiety. Hurvich’s equiposition, between his self-appellation as a contemporary Freudian analyst and a pioneer in the quantification of psychodynamic phenomena, has led him to uncover empirically rich insights of considerable relevance to the growing field of psychosocial criminology. While psychosocial scholars have tended to conceptualise anxiety as a biographically-rooted motive for both the criminological subject’s investment in discourse and the underlying source of many manifestations of violence and rage (Gadd and Dixon, 2011; Gadd and Jefferson, 2007; Hollway, 1989; Hollway and Jefferson, 2000), Hurvich’s scale invites us to conceive the social and personal contours of anxiety in ways that are more dynamically interlinked and hence susceptible to change.
As will become apparent, contemporary ways of working with psychoanalytic theory differ from criminological orthodoxy, which tends to pitch hypothesis against hypothesis. Conversely, psychoanalysts observe material that each patient brings to the sessions, to work creatively with whatever disparate facts are available and shape them into some form of meaningful pattern – an interpretation – to share with the patient in iterative sessions, drawing meaning from patients’ accounts of thoughts, feelings, behaviours and events in biographical and social context. Such work is rarely about the testing of meta-generalisations to resolve a debate – as classic Freudianism is presumed to be – and is instead about the presentation of clinical particularities in order to promote a better understanding and so move beyond debilitating conflict.
Criminology’s anxious past and present
The idea that anxiety motivates human behaviour has a long pedigree in criminological thought. It was pivotal to the early clinical criminology that predominated before and just after the Second World War. John Bowlby (1946), for example, explored separation anxieties of children evacuated from cities during World War II – who were sent to the countryside to protect them from the bombings, had lost parents in the war, or had suffered abusive home lives – who stole items that instilled feelings of security they craved. Ernest Burgess (1930) detected separation anxieties in the case of Stanley, Clifford Shaw’s infamous jack-roller. Edward Glover (1960), a former editor of the British Journal of Delinquency, conceptualised the popular and political appetite for punishing offenders, especially sex offenders, as a projective defence mechanism, noting that it was Sigmund Freud:
…who first uncovered the unconscious roots of that uniquely human reaction which goes by the name of ‘guilt’ and which is responsible for a brood of moralistic concepts, including those of sin, punishment, expiation and the sacrifice of scapegoats…(Glover, 1960: ix)
This psychoanalytic heritage was abandoned in the 1960s – and dropped from the citation trail – as the new ‘critical’ criminology cast court-mandated therapeutic intervention as part of the oppressive apparatus of governmental social control and net-widening (Findlay, 2010). Scapegoating became reconceived as an exclusively Durkheimian insight (Downes and Rock, 2003; Erikson, 1966) and remains so, even in the works of those, like David Garland, who fall back on a catalogue of psychoanalytic metaphors to depict a state in ‘hysterical denial’ and a populace prone to the ‘sudden and excessive feeling of alarm or fear, usually affecting a body of persons… leading to extravagant or injudicious efforts to secure safety’ entailed in the visceral embodiment of ‘panic’ (Garland, 2001 and 2008: 10) . While the limitations of borrowing from psychoanalysis without contemplating the anxieties of particular criminological subjects has been remarked upon in relation to issues of both racism (Jefferson, 2008) and punitiveness (Maruna et al., 2004) the idea that ‘projective’ responses to ‘social and psychic conflicts’ are ‘relatively straightforward and don’t require further elaboration’ (Garland, 2000: 10) has been rather too readily accepted by leading criminological thinkers.
In States of Denial, for example, Stan Cohen (2001) instructed us to explore why we tend to look away from, or under-react to, the acute human suffering caused by famines, the perpetration of atrocities and environmental disasters. In elucidating the concept of ‘denial’, Cohen signalled his greatest intellectual debt to the relational therapist Christopher Bollas (1993: 167), who argued that each ‘of us is aware in ourselves of the workings of denial, of our need to be innocent of a troubling recognition’. However, one has to look beyond States of Denial to discover if the denials encountered by therapists really do resonate with those which Cohen suggested are symptomatic of the nation state.
Anxious avoidance of troubling recognitions is also at the heart of the late Jock Young’s (2007) thesis, The Vertigo of Late Modernity: he hypothesized that the late modern middle classes are so afraid of falling that they begin to eye with envy the lives of those imagined to be indulging in the high life at others’ expense. Middle class hostility is thus directed at a ‘stereotype of the underclass: with its idleness, dependency and institutional responsibility, with its drug use, teenage pregnancies and fecklessness’ (Young, 2007: 42). The middle classes imagine a work-shy, benefit-cheating, morally intransigent substratum of young people, asylum seekers, single mothers and deadbeat fathers enjoying the ‘quality time’ and leisure pursuits they – the ‘time-poor’, actively employed, responsibly parenting, mortgage-paying, ‘law-abiding majority’ – simply do not have. Henceforth, punitive sentiments arise not so much from state actors alive to their political impotence (as Garland argues), but from the resentful middle class who process their fear of incurring a humiliating fall from grace through vindictive fantasies of retribution against the excluded and marginalised.
In order to test this hypothesis further, Young argued for a criminology that transcends the tendency – which, he suggested, was intrinsic to classic anthropological writing and the Freudian heritage upon which some of it draws (Bott Spillius, 2005) – to depict ‘demonisation as a cultural universal, a product of ever present problems of human psychology or group formation’, and instead:
…locate such a process in time and social context, to specify who is more likely to demonise, to explain the context of the labels applied to outsiders, to understand the mechanisms of exclusion and describe the likely outcome of such othering. In short, to know the when, why, who, what, how, and whither of demonisation. (Young, 2007: 141)
However, Young and his colleagues remained dismissive of those more explicit in their use of psychoanalytical concepts to address these questions of when, why, who, what and how (Chancer, 2014: 410; Ferrell et al., 2008: 23), even while the dialectic between social patterns of inequality and the psychic suffering it engenders have become the mainstay of psychosocial studies (Hoggett and Frost, 2008). Within criminology the fullest articulation of this line of thinking is to be found in Gadd and Jefferson’s Psychosocial Criminology, which shows what a Kleinian perspective (attendant to defence mechanisms) and relational perspectives (attendant to the dynamics of identification) can bring to a criminology caught between sociological approaches, which normalise deviance, and popular thinking which sensationalises the signs of psychopathology (Gadd and Jefferson, 2007). For them, as for Hollway (1989), anxiety arises out of a complex mix of biographical, historical and situational circumstances. It makes for a restless subject motivated to invest in particular articulations of gender, discourses of race and nation, and the fear of crime, who – if unable to be soothed or to self-soothe – may act out conflicts and hatreds when confronted with painful losses or truths. Using this framework Gadd and Jefferson (2007) attempt to show how crimes such as domestic violence, sexual abuse and racially aggravated assaults can be explained without overgeneralising, as well as how the fear of crime entails projective dynamics of which people are not always fully conscious. Within the psychosocial approach, anxiety is configured variously as a product of insecurities and vulnerabilities, however sourced, as well as the hurt of losing those with whom one closely identifies (Robinson, 2011).
Loss and annihilation anxiety
Loss and its relation to anxiety have, however, been theorised more intricately in the corpus of work produced by Anna Freud and subject to empirical testing in the work of Marvin Hurvich and colleagues (Hurvich, 1989, 2003; Hurvich and Freedman, 2011a, 2011b; Hurvich et al., 2007, 2013). Anna Freud’s (1936/1966) research about fear, anxiety and the structure of defences came to focus upon children who had experienced separations from their parents during and after World War II. During the course of studying older children’s accounts of separation, Anna Freud developed the idea of the ‘love object’, thus establishing the dyad of one who feels (the subject) toward another entity (the object) as the central and organizing dynamic of mental life, progressing from survival object (food source) to gratifying affective gain from the object (love). This begins with the mother and infant, and reiterates in other relationships throughout life. Attachment patterns in object relations permeate all other relationships of interdependency that provide security in its various forms, across developmental stages and experience, in working life as in family life.
Anna Freud’s theoretical model conceived three basic fears: fear of loss of love object, fear of loss of love from love object, and fear of annihilation. These, she argued, were the psychical basis around which children’s relationships with significant others – ‘object relations’ – were formed. So essential is attachment to love objects, Anna Freud argued, that to lose them threatens the organisation of mental life. Significantly, Anna Freud sought to differentiate the neophyte’s innate physical dependency from later socially influenced needs for relatedness and the attendant fear of its loss (separation trauma) older children and adults must endure. In particular, she drew attention to the fear of recapitulation of loss (Freud, A, 1967: 169–170) that we experience in the aftermath of separation. Anxiety comes most intensely, Anna Freud claimed, with subsequent attachments or love objects which then present further potential losses; we confront these knowing – consciously or unconsciously – what loss might entail. When the original object of attachment has been lost before, separation anxiety attends to relational iterations, generating the most acute of fears.
In object relations theory, this fear of loss, and the pain of its anticipation, produces paranoid schizoid mentalities (Klein, 1946) that give rise to iterative states of aggression. Eventually, as object relatedness becomes established, in what Melanie Klein identified as the ‘depressive position’, the individual is more able to tolerate the relational paradox without projecting the pain this involves onto others. In the depressive position, one can perceive a difference between an absent object and missing it, and of an object that has ‘gone missing’ but may return (Bell 2011: 83; Bion, 1962). The former might occur when a child has lost a loved one, such as a death or of parental estrangement; the latter when an object has gone missing, might just be when a loved one is temporarily away or elsewhere at the moment, but expected back. Of course, for some people with acute anxieties and more fragile attachments, the two are harder to distinguish, so that absence of a love object becomes abandonment, with lingering effects. The capacity to endure the differentiation between these two feeling states generates recurring challenges: the ability to negotiate these challenges varies, by individual experience, by constitution. Learning to survive the loss of an object that has ‘gone missing’ is critical to developing a capacity to relate to and care for others in the face of the actual and irrecoverable losses we all face in later life (Hollway, 2006).
Marvin Hurvich’s reconceptualisation of annihilation anxiety
Taking the object relational approach to loss as a starting point, psychoanalyst Marvin Hurvich argues that annihilation anxieties are shaped considerably by both the anticipation of separation and loss anxieties, determined by early life experiences. As Hurvich explains:
Annihilation anxieties are triggered by survival threat; are found early but can be engendered throughout the life cycle; constitute a basic danger; are residuals of psychic trauma…are motives for defense; and may be associated with particularly recalcitrant resistances. (Hurvich 2003: 579)
Developing the relational paradigm, Hurvich argues that it is the fear of loss of self – both conscious and unconscious aspects, and physical and psychic aspects of self – which connects intrapsychic dynamics to experiences of threat, danger and harm in the external world. It is at this point that fantasies – of helplessness, merger, abandonment, destruction, estrangement, being overcome or overwhelmed – all come into play. In a contemporary reworking of the psychoanalytic heritage, Hurvich has reformulated the notion of annihilation anxiety as a complex construct that is not unitary and identical in each of its manifestations.
Over the last 25 years, Hurvich has established the Hurvich Experience Inventory (HEI/50) as a valid and reliable clinical measure of aspects of annihilation anxiety. 1 Taking as his starting point the notion that annihilation anxiety involves the ‘fears of being overwhelmed, merged, penetrated, fragmented, and destroyed’, Hurvich has sought to catalogue and measure the range of fantasies that commonly arise among clinical populations (Hurvich, 2003: 581). The HEI/50 is organized according to seven subscales as follows: (1) Overwhelmed/inability to cope; (2) Merged/claustrophobia; (3) Trapped; (4) Disorganized/fragmentation of self and identity; (5) Invaded/impingement/penetration; (6) Abandoned/loss of needed support; and (7) Destroyed/catastrophic mentality. In what follows, we consider each of Hurvich et al.’s seven subscales in terms of their criminological import at micro, meso and macro levels through illustrative vignettes from criminological research and from crime-related accounts in journalism and popular culture. We show how the relational fears of loss and harm have criminological import in terms of a range of attachments: to persons, property and communities; to conceptions of safety, freedom and justice; and to securitisation – personal, national and international – as well as the institutional operationalisations of power and social control.
Overwhelmed and inability to cope
Hurvich organized this subscale to focus upon concerns about being overwhelmed, the most central attribute of annihilation anxiety (Hurvich and Freedman, 2011b; Hurvich et al., 2007). ‘Particular components are apprehensions over loss of control, feeling flooded, bursting, immobilized, and unable to cope’ (Hurvich and Freedman, 2011b: 108). The items in the HEI/50 subscale that measure ‘threats to self and ability to function’ (Hurvich et al., 2007) are expressed as follows.
I feel I could shatter into bits
I am not sure who I really am
I feel like I am destroyed as a person
I need someone to reassure me when I am afraid
I feel I can’t pull myself together
I fear rejection
It’s hard to get over something that makes me nervous
I feel like I am being overwhelmed
I fear getting swept up and lost in another person
I fear loss of control of myself.
In clinical settings, clients scoring high on this scale would be those vulnerable to other people’s criticisms, volatile, liable to lose their temper quickly, and jealous and insecure in their relationships. They may feel that others boss them around or control them and restrict their self-expression. They are those who seek considerable personal space, yet feel very alone. Some would be like Stanley, Clifford Shaw’s subject in The Jack-roller: a ‘self-defender’, a young man with an intense fear of abandonment who nevertheless ran away from home repeatedly (Bereswill, 2007; Burgess, 1930; Gadd and Jefferson, 2007). Practitioners working in the field of domestic violence intervention would recognise such qualities among those who mistreat their partners but feel they cannot live without them, who expend much emotional energy trying to repair relationships they repeatedly undermine and damage (Gadd, 2003; Wolf-Light, 1999). Illustrative of a tragic paradox of annihilation anxiety, serious violence by young women can be reconceptualised as post-traumatic defensive behaviours, as a constellation of likely futile efforts at protection by discharging volcanic rage and attempting to quell engulfing fears of further harm and suffering (Robinson and Ryder, 2013).
However, such threats to self are apparent when reconceived at the level of the group or community, or of the nation state. Communities that are sites of change, both swift and gradual, which cannot organize effectively in relation to new challenges to their physical and economic security, rapidly come to fear decline. The protestors on the Paulsgrove Estate in the South of England, studied by Jessica Evans (2003) in the wake of the murder of Sarah Payne, could be conceived in this way. Unable, as they were, to contemplate the sexual abuse and poverty that was impinging upon their own family lives, the protestors campaigned for the advent of laws that publicly named and shamed paedophiles, exiling the menacing threats to their children to some imagined place outside of any community. The Trayvon Martin case in Sanford, Florida presented George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch coordinator, as ‘acting out of fear, mistrust, and confusion’, as depicted by his defence team (Reuters, 2012), or otherwise pervasive racial paranoia, as those more outraged by Martin’s death have proclaimed. The structural racism made manifest by professional police responses to the shooting and killing – to do nothing – was buttressed by Zimmerman’s claims of self-defence from a 14-year-old African-American boy carrying only a package of candy and a soft drink.
More ordinarily, the organising tendencies of politicians and those involved in the planning and development of gated communities and other ‘havens’ rendered ‘safe’ for those who can afford them also arise from threats to self and fear of inability to function. ‘Broken Britain’, British Prime Minister David Cameron’s moralisation of a threatened society, is diagnostic in its evocation of a nation losing its ability to live up to a much-fabled sense of British superiority (Gilroy, 2004). The Tea Party in the United States – leaderless and powerful – has been prescriptive in efforts to compromise certain constitutional protections of individual rights, while at the same time pushing an agenda of absolute individual liberties, perceived to be under imminent threat. Meanwhile, the political attraction of pseudo-experts such as New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton owes much to their promise to push the physical signs of disorder, poverty and human hardship to the perimeters of public consciousness, away from the places where the socially included reside, relax, shop and sight-see. From San Francisco in the early 1990s to London in the 2010s, ghettoisation has become policy where politicians envisage sweeping the poor into already depleted neighbourhoods, towns and cities, out of sight and out of mind (Knight, 2014; Mulholland et al., 2012).
In turn, fears of community depletion engender threats to self readily displaced by those who find it easier to perceive immigration as a problem and xenophobic politics as a solution. In the UK this has been evidenced in research conducted on ordinary people unashamed in their desire to call in the British National Party, National Front and/or English Defence League (Gadd and Dixon, 2011). In the United States, local and regional paramilitary organisations promulgated anti-immigrant resistance, putting themselves at risk to preserve a vulnerable border against ‘undeserving’ Mexicans and other undocumented immigrants who, they claimed, would present threats to American culture, jobs, safe neighbourhoods and education for ‘real’ Americans. Mainstream politicians have normalised the anti-immigrant cause, usurping its fervour while diluting its radicalism and pushing purveyors of anti-immigrant crime and violence to a marginal, though still potent, activism in the name of patriotic duty.
Merged/claustrophobia
Clinical presentation of clients with merger fears would typically be those who express excessive intolerance of, or utterly resist, strong relational emotions. Hurvich explains that ‘threats to psychic separateness and a loss of self’ often manifest as a:
…wish/fear [that] involves feeling entrapped, devoured, engulfed, or absorbed…Many conflicts and inhibitions over physical and emotional intimacy result from the wish or fear of merger in people with weak structural boundaries… This fear may be expressed as claustrophobia. (Hurvich, 2013: 4)
The measures used in this subscale include feeling swept up or lost in another person, fear of confusion about one’s sense as a separate self, and feelings of discomfort or anxiety when physically close to another, or in a crowd.
Those who are enmeshed in their attachments (Klein, 1946) may both fear and desire this state of merger. Hollway and Jefferson’s (2000: 70–77) evocative pen portraits of the Walters family convey these qualities in the case of ‘Ivy’, the agoraphobic grandmother who changed her name to conceal her out-of-wedlock daughter and who differentiates between her daughters in terms of sexual virtuosity, with damaging consequences. Ivy’s fear of crime and her controlling behaviour towards her daughters can be read as a symbolic acting out of her fear of stigmatisation as an unmarried mother in 1940s Britain. For another commonplace example, witness the kind of begrudging or ‘insincere’ apologies offenders offer to victims in restorative justice conferences (Daly, 2002) in which the apologist’s inability to come to terms with the shame of having done damage to the aggrieved diminishes the level of identification with the vulnerability of the other.
Cohen’s (2001) analysis of denial addresses this terrain too, quite rightly identifying reactions to the My Lai massacre as an evocative example. In 1968, a squadron of US soldiers (‘Charlie Company’), led by Lieutenant William Calley, wantonly killed and mutilated several hundred Vietnamese civilians. Calley, under orders followed by the whole of Charlie Company, was convicted of 22 counts of murder and served three and a half years for the crimes. Ron Haerbele, a fourth year college student of photography, drafted to a squadron that followed in Charlie Company’s wake, captured the degree of ‘psychic blankness’ (Hurvich and Freedman, 2011b: 112) that rendered the perpetrators of the massacre so devoid of emotional reaction when he recollected:
I noticed this small boy had been shot in the foot…he was walking towards the group looking for his mother… I didn’t notice the GI kneeling down beside me… then I suddenly heard the crack and…I saw this child flip over on top of the pile of bodies. The GI stood up and just walked away. No remorse. Nothing. The other soldiers…were staring off into space like it was an everyday thing…(Bilton and Sim, 1992: 133)
In war, the fear of getting close to the enemy promulgates some of the worst human rights abuses. The photographs of ‘enemy combatants’ humiliated and tormented at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, first published in 2004 as images reminiscent of holiday snapshots, are evidence enough of this. However, this is nothing new: photographs of American soldiers ‘waterboarding’ Filipino civilians in 1901, in a history of water torture (Kramer, 2008: 1–5), provide further documentation of such war crimes. United States government programs of forced sterilisation of African-American women (Price and Darity, 2010; Stern 2005) and medical experimentation with syphilis bacteria upon Guatemalans (Reverby, 2009) have attempted, and failed, to manage public moral panics about post-slavery and post-colonial legacies created by institutional exploitation. The same can be said of military torture of Native Americans (Finley, 2009). Such abuses are only possible because both those who perpetrate and those who authorise them have become so afraid of connecting with the humanity of the people before them.
Such processes require a complete disavowal of the emotional vulnerability of the protagonist as much as the victimised. As Mark Bracher (2009: 115) observes, of George W Bush’s initial responses to the 9/11 attacks,
No one who recalls George Bush’s facial expressions, gestures, and body language as he descended from his helicopter and walked towards the White House on his return to Washington following the 9/11 attacks can doubt that he experienced feelings of pain, fear, and shame, which are feelings that most Americans had as well…Rather than expressing these feelings, however, Bush repressed them and ‘attacked Afghanistan and Iraq instead…’
Perhaps emotional repression is ‘essential for war’ (Bracher, 2009: 115). In any event, it is highly problematic for those working in the embattled field of crime control, so often also politicised as a ‘war’, whose work with victims and offenders cannot be done effectively without compassion. Ann Withorn’s study (1986) of relations between women welfare workers and their women clients in the USA reveals antipathy on both sides. Welfare workers, operating on the lowest rungs of state bureaucracy, spend their workdays assessing eligibility for means-tested welfare benefits of the mothers who come before them asking for monetary support. Their wages as low-level bureaucrats barely keep their families afloat, and may render them periodically dependent on the welfare benefits provided by the very system that employs them. Stereotypes of the poor and their proximity to crime and deprivation contribute to a bilateral relational dilemma causing workers and clients to feel guilt and disgust as they fear close encounter, one to the other.
Something similar can be detected among anti-violence workers encountering ‘vicarious trauma’, defined as the harm that human service providers suffer in the course of their work (Pearlman and Saakvitne, 1995). Manifestations of vicarious traumatisation include empathic failure and constrained emotional, cognitive and somatic functioning, just when empathy, analysis and action are most needed. Challenged by clients’ problems and caught up in cycles of underfunding and under-appreciation, many shelter workers, for example, suffer feelings of isolation, depletion, helplessness and hopelessness, despite the public narrative of collective progress and social solidarity (Robinson and Electris, 2008). Among individual workers the anxiety this provokes may be appeased, temporarily, as clients’ needs are disavowed through defences such as splitting – idealisation of the worthy object followed by devaluation of the same object – and projection. Good clients are protected, while those deemed undeserving or overly needy may be neglected. Demoralised victim support workers come to perceive some as ‘aggressive’, overly needy, uncommitted to leaving an abuser, or prone to drink, drug and/or mental health problems that fall short of desirable images of victimhood (Stark, 2007: 75–78). Shelter managers, unable to square resource demands, may treat subordinates who are overwhelmed with the pressures of their jobs with disdain similar to that (mis)directed at ‘undeserving’ clients (Robinson and Electris, 2008: 83).
Trapped
According to Hurvich (2013: 4) those who feel ‘trapped’ experience being ‘cornered, confined, immobilized…The experience of “no way out” carries with it a sense of danger and of helplessness’. Measures used in this subscale make reference to the following mind-frames
A choice among alternatives needs to be made, and all recognized alternatives appear intolerable
Caught in a lie or a manifest inconsistency the individual cannot justify on the facts
Experiencing intolerable feelings and don’t know how to calm oneself
Ambivalently involved in a relationship that is headed toward what feels like unavoidable commitment
Claustrophobia.
The public feeling of ‘United We Stand’ in the US following the September 11th bombings by Al Qaeda of New York’s World Trade Center yielded legislative action that produced The USA Patriot Act in 2001. The Act dramatically redefined privacy and civil liberties, a collective defensive posture reminiscent of the UK’s Prevention of Terrorism Act implemented almost 30 years earlier. That sense of no way out, no place to turn, figures largely in the fear of being captured or harmed experienced by those caught in the high anxiety of a crime in process. Here, hostage-taking or unintended violence against untargeted victims may be the result of intolerable vulnerability experienced by the perpetrator. Of course, this sense of being trapped can provoke an individual to lash out in defensive action, or an organised political entity to do the same, with or without intention. All that is needed is the anticipation, in fantasy, of imminent harm; fantasies that racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and homophobia frequently furnish. Similarly, following the death or disappearance of a child, lawmakers can become so engulfed by floods of public grief that they feel compelled to yield to parents and lobbyists calling for legislative protection of innocence made in the deceased victim’s name. They often do this not because such laws would prevent another death, but because they feel unable to offer a progressive alternative and because the fantasised risk of recurrence is too overwhelming to contemplate.
Disorganized/fragmentation of self and identity
Dissociation and the fragmentation of identity that may accompany it can be conceptualised clinically as a ‘disintegration of the self’ (Hurvich, 2011b: 108). One might say: ‘I do not know who I am anymore, feel alienated from myself, fear going mad, or falling apart’. The relevant HEI measures include the following.
My body feels like it doesn’t belong to me
I feel like I have more than one self
I feel intruded upon mentally or physically
I keep searching for an identity I don’t quite have.
Keeping oneself together in such a state thus consumes considerable mental energy (Freud, A, 1966). Diagnoses of borderline personality typically focus upon dissociation, parasuicidal behaviours, and other symptoms of emotional disregulation, and frequently appear in the records of adjudicated women (Robinson, 2005), where reports of abuse and neglect prevail in personal histories. In criminology, the concept of dissociation is encountered most frequently in accounts of child sexual abuse and traumatic sequelae. Here it is used to describe the psychological state of those who are so devastated they cannot hold themselves together psychologically. In psychodynamic terms, unconscious manifestations of this disintegration occur at stages of memory formation, repression, loss and recovery, following trauma, modified by recurring events and recollections. Following Freud (Freud, S, 1905; 1913), the relational psychoanalytic argument assumes that memory is constantly re-narrated and re-formed as unsettling anxieties and desires motivate us to rethink the past in conversation with others (Scott, 1996: 44–46). Those who have experienced sexual abuse from adult carers can become deeply disturbed by a constellation of effects, identified as traumagenic, that emerge in the process of recollection (Browne and Finkelhor, 1986) – betrayal, stigmatisation, powerlessness and traumatic sexualisation – that tend to play out differently for boys and girls as childhood sexual trauma impinges on adolescent development (Robinson, 2005) and the social contextual responses to sequelae of abuse. Betrayal of trust shatters attachments with adult carers. Physical pain further exacerbates the dissolution of psychic organisation regarding issues of safety. Adult intimacy is easily coloured by earlier exploitative dynamics. Some female victims whose development has been shaped by identifications with those who have abused them literally do not – and cannot – know who they are. The ways in which others perceive and respond to their behaviours may miss the indelible, underlying dynamics, further complicating a panoply of traumagenic effects. As Anne Marie West, daughter of notorious murderers Rose and Fred, explained when she insisted she would always be her ‘Daddy’s girl’ even though:
Daddy raped her, gave her syphilis, got her pregnant and kicked her in the face with steel-capped boots. She called her younger, obedient self a ‘cry-baby’. She was hungry for love…The couple whispered endearments to her as they fingered and tore her… After they had abused her small, broken body, they stroked her, gave her a salty bath, were ‘so kind, so kind’, she said… Anne Marie never complained because she didn’t know she was being abused. She remained grateful to her parents… After she had finished giving evidence in the dock, she tried to kill herself. Two weeks ago, she said that yes, she missed them still, despite all they did. ‘They were all I had.’…(Gerrard, 1999: 5)
Displaced people sometimes present with similar forms of dissociation. Majid, a 26-year-old Kurdish Iranian asylum seeker, denied leave to remain in Britain, explained in in-depth interviews (to David Gadd):
I haven’t a life in England …I can’t go anywhere because I haven’t money. I haven’t passport. I can’t go to another city…What can I do?
A Christian Iranian, Majid expected that were he to be deported, ‘troops’ would come to his house, as they had done many times before. He anticipated that if they found him, he would be buried in sand ‘head above ground’, and stoned to death. Unable to eat and suffering headaches he believed to be caused by medications he had been prescribed following a suicide attempt, Majid could not present a coherent account on the day his immigration case was presented in court. Instead he cut his own head open and told the judge:
I am not ready for court…I am not ready in the forehead …everywhere blood… When I speak and sound crazy.
Not allowed to work or travel, Majid was living clandestinely amidst other asylum seekers, who were so fearful his presence would compromise their cases they felt unable to support him, casting him out lest his suicidal thoughts bring the police to their door.
[I am] in the heart… sick… I go to the kitchen in the dark, when I washing the knife…I think for my family. I think for my situation. I think for my life in England. I haven’t anything. I haven’t any support. I haven’t any benefit, any job, any passport…. I have too much problem… Sometime I think about go to kill myself. Some friends come, ‘Go out. Why you kill … yourself in my house… [You] Should go to outside’… I haven’t any life anymore.
In such cases, where asylum-seekers have no officially sanctioned legitimate identity – no citizenship – disorganisation of the self intensifies, and those desperate to avoid deportation are forced either to accept the fate from which they originally fled or to turn to illicit economies of unregulated migrant labour and creation of a false identity. In effect these impossible choices generate the asylum seeker ‘problem’ of invasion imagined by many to be threatening Western countries, while at the same time a political dissociation characterises the responses of those European leaders who have chosen to leave thousands of migrants to drown in the oceans under the premise that rescuing sinking ships would simply encourage more to come (Kingsley and Traynor, 2015).
Invaded/impingement/penetration
This dimension of the HEI scale includes fears of being ‘invaded’, ‘penetrated, impinged and intruded upon, and sometimes feeling colonized and controlled from within by an alien presence’ (Hurvich et al., 2013: 5). Hurvich has recently added that his patients who score highly on this dimension sometimes fear being assaulted, devoured or mutilated. ‘Individuals who experience impingement in earlier years are more vulnerable to intrusion experiences when they suffer psychic trauma. Patients may harbor fantasies of the self as porous, vulnerable to leaking out, and being unable to hold or contain anything’ (Hurvich 2013: 4). Commonly patients feel they are victims of intrusion in the form of aggression, assault, or revenge; trapped, devoured, or smothered by another; or forced to do something against their wills, or something is done to them against their wills.
From a criminological perspective, the relevance of this dynamic should seem self-evident. There are many empirical studies of victimisation, including studies of the effect of being burgled, robbed, physically assaulted, subjected to hate crimes and raped, that testify to ways in which crime intrudes upon psychological well-being (Iganski, 2008; Kearon and Leach, 2000).Well-known effects include fear of revictimisation, persistent feelings of unsafety and insecurity, explosive rage, restlessness, emotional disregulation and pervasive sadness.
This symptomatology can, however, also apply to those who perpetrate hate crimes – hence the terms ‘homophobia’ and ‘Islamophobia’, referencing both fear and prejudice. Illustrative of this is the homophobe’s fear that gay people will inflict homosexuality upon them merely by proximity (Tomsen, 2009). The racist’s preoccupation is similarly with contamination, a range of inconsequential differences addressed to food, size, shape, skin colour, even smell, referencing deep-rooted fears of intrusion expressed perniciously as fear of miscegenation and dilution of racial purity (Rustin, 1991). Anna Freud’s (Freud, A, 1936/1966) defence dynamic of ‘identification with the aggressor’, wherein an anxious and angry subject mitigates threats of annihilation through psychic merging with the perceived adversary, explains the other side of these projective processes: hostility can be internalised by the communities subject to them, challenging self-worth among some ethnic and sexual minority groups. Those so harmed sometimes engage in retaliatory aggression, evidencing another variation of ‘identification with the aggressor’ (Sherwood, 1980).
Feelings of physical and psychological intrusion can also arise out of feelings of complicity with perpetrators, as Gobodo-Madikizela, the black South African psychoanalyst who interviewed Eugene de Kock, the white police commander who headed up apartheid’s death squads, explains. Reflecting on the time she shook de Kock’s hand, his ‘trigger hand’, the hand that was used to shoot black South Africans dead, Gobodo-Madikizela noted:
I had touched his leprosy… I was now infected with the memory of having embraced in my heart the hand that had killed, maimed, and blown up lives… I had not immediately felt a chill when I touched de Kock. But something odd did happen the morning after the interview. I was awake and lying in bed. Then it dawned on me that I couldn’t lift my right forearm… I had reached out to offer consolation to de Kock, and now it had gone completely numb. I couldn’t feel with it, as if my body were rejecting a foreign organ illegitimately planted. (Gobodo-Madikizela, 2003: 41)
It subsequently transpired that de Kock too had experienced this encounter as traumatic, because he had to confront the real possibility that he was implicated in the murder of family members of the young woman who had been sent to interview him. What Gobodo-Madikizela’s account reveals, however, is the essence of the relational, psychoanalytic point. Once she and de Kock had been able to contemplate the nature and source of this chilling effect, they were able to identify with each other in ways that seemed less invasive and more tolerable, however improbable such connection was given their respective experiences of apartheid.
Abandoned/loss of needed support
An inability to identify with the humanity of the other can also exacerbate other annihilation anxieties, as a yearning for attachment exacerbates the torment (Robinson, 2011). Hurvich calls this the fear of being abandoned. The panic one feels at the loss of a significant person, which Hurvich likens to falling into a black hole, captures this experience. Those suffering this form of annihilation anxiety will feel (Hurvich, 2007; 2013):
Isolated
Left or abandoned by those upon whom they depend
Never having been supported
Betrayed by those upon whom they depend
Real or imagined rejection.
Children of neglectful and/or abusive parents often end up in bureaucratically managed systems of care which may address perfunctory needs but fail to foster development toward autonomy and self-sufficiency. For many, fears of abandonment persist through adolescence, well intentioned offers of love, care and support turned away in defensive manoeuvres that reject the rejectors before they reject them (Sykes and Matza, 1957). Veterans, both from the recent war on terror and the Vietnam war, often feel abandoned by larger community sympathies as they return from conflicts that have lost popular support. They feel betrayed by the nations for which they risked their own lives (McGarry and Walklate, 2011).
Destroyed/catastrophic mentality
According to Hurvich, those caught in this mentality will
…respond with a life and death attitude to danger. There is a focus on dying and on psychic death, on fears of world destruction, petrification… and on the ‘death imprint’. A catastrophic mentality is a frequent response to psychic trauma, and may be associated with a ‘doomsday scenario’ (Krystal, 1988), a dread and even a conviction that sooner or later there will be a return of a fate worse than death, because lightning does strike twice in the same place. (Hurvich, 2003: 109).
South Africa endured six years of abject terror from 1994 to 2000. In this period:
…over 400 criminal detonations and explosions occurred in South Africa. Most occurred in the context of internecine gang warfare and vigilante action against criminal gangs and suspected drug dealers in the Western Cape. After mid-1996 an increasing number of bombings and assassinations were motivated by a desire to create a climate of fear as urban terrorism inflicted death and destruction on the citizens of Cape Town. The bombers began to target central Cape Town and popular tourist spots, as well as the state in the form of police stations, court buildings and personnel of the justice system. (Boshoff et al., 2001: 4)
Rampant public anxiety is, of course, the point of most terrorism. It tends also to be encountered by the orchestrators of law enforcement who must endure a constant state of vigilance in which they anticipate both physical and political annihilation should they lose control again. This, of course, is what lies behind ‘shoot to kill’ policies, adopted not only in South Africa and implicated in the police perpetrated massacre in Marikana in 2012 (Alexander et al., 2013), but also in the UK before the shooting in 2005 of Jean Charles de Menezes (Punch, 2010), and in the USA where pro-gun control proposals following the Newtown school shootings in 2012 were met with disbelief by many who regard the arming of citizens as the only way forward in catastrophic war of all against unknown enemies within and where ‘collateral damage’ is inevitable. Breakout ‘I can’t breathe’ demonstrations across the USA following the New York police killing in 2014 of Eric Garner reflected a community suffocated by racism, extended to the massive public grief at the subsequent revenge murders of two New York police, Asian and Latino officers, mistaken to be white by the killer.
Conclusion
We have shown here how fears and anxieties rooted in crime and punishment, in social inequality and tragedy, have criminological import in terms of the reactions they generate amongst people, groups and communities, the thinking they shape in relation to safety, justice and crime policy, and their implications for interpersonal, local and global manifestations of power, control and securitisation. We have used Hurvich’s concept of annihilation anxiety, together with the clinical dimensions his empirical research has charted, to show how psychoanalytical thinking can enrich criminological understanding of crime, crisis and disaster. We have applied Hurvich’s HEI to illuminate the sometimes unthinkable thoughts and feelings ordinary citizens, law enforcement officers, policymakers and politicians often confront when faced with threat of annihilation, real or imagined.
This paper is an introduction to a way of doing psychosocial criminology that extends the dialogue about the importance of anxiety, including how it is discerned, conceptualised and measured. We believe such work is critical because it provides a means of knowing – of providing a deeper understanding – what the powerful and the powerless can need in order to move beyond feeling trapped, overwhelmed and without choice. It provides a humanising vocabulary with which to probe and to articulate the motives of those who commit the most heinous crimes, to determine what is both similar and different about them – whether in terms of their prejudices, social demographics or biographies – and to recognise the emotional and cultural labour entailed by those charged with redressing their deeds. This is exactly the kind of knowing the Norwegian populace endured in the wake of the massacre perpetrated in Norway in 2011 by Anders Bhering Breivick, and what the Norwegian Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, called for when he insisted that listening to the racism and sexism central to Breivick’s defence would only strengthen his country’s commitment to its core values: ‘more democracy, more openness and greater political participation. It is also what truth and reconciliation can bring’ (Pidd and Meikle, 2011).
Here, we can only sketch the implications of doing criminology in a way that is much more sensitive to the role and functions of annihilation anxieties. However, one thing is clear: conceived as a facilitator of understanding, both social and emotional, the role of the criminologist in public policy debate should reach beyond the provision of scientific evidence, philosophical probing or political weight. It should also be the role of criminologists to understand why some topics become so highly charged and why those tasked with dealing with them sometimes struggle to do so fairly and responsibly. Hence, helping to distinguish between potential threats and imminent threats in the aftermath of tragedies is something psychosocial criminologists could and should do, for when the two are conflated, crime policy is less rational and more reactionary for it. We note that public attacks on one party over another often reflect a fear of collapse and destruction which, if not recognised as such, can unleash even more hostile reactions and desperate measures that further diminish feelings of safety and security among the general public. Helping to identify the substantive fear at the heart of any given moral panic – together with the alarm, projection and hatefulness carried by them – is something criminologists alive to the dimensions of annihilation anxiety can and should do for the common good.
For some, questions of social inequality warrant more rational consideration. The middle classes’ fear of falling may not be entirely misplaced, but citizens and leaders can contain punitive sentiment if such fears are exposed for what they are. Conversely, refugees threatened with forced return to places of persecution fear destruction so pernicious as to be uncontainable. This raises the questions of whether the focus of criminological critique should be primarily on those most preoccupied with the vulnerability of national borders, and what it is that motivates their feelings of panic. Exposing the identifications with aggressors inherent in emboldened legal and punitive measures for the omnipotent fantasies of control they are offers one way in which criminologists could reduce the chances that cycles of exclusion or retaliation will be inflicted on those least able to weather them. Psychosocial criminologists can find ways to recognise loss for victims, communities and nations by identifying what has truly gone when lives are destroyed and victims are killed, and what can endure, to move populations beyond unbearable grief or cycles of pernicious nationalism. Over-generalisations that drive public debate and practice about whom and what to fear leave little room for much in the way of reality testing. It is not wrong for politicians to ask who is dangerous and who should be feared. But criminologists must also ask what it is people, including the most powerful, are fearful of: how do these fears resonate with sexist, racist, religious, nationalist, homophobic or other forms of prejudice? – and, emphatically, what can be done to make such fears more manageable? This, we argue, means noting their specific form and character.
We claim that contemporary relational psychoanalytic concepts, empirically articulated as they have been by Hurvich and his collaborators, have considerable potential to advance to a post-positivist, integrative criminology, rendered more humane and pragmatic for its conscious engagement of the power of unconscious fears in the purportedly rational calculi of justice. Identifying such fears for what they are is the first step in learning how to contain them – a step that is necessary if social science evidence is to be properly heard and contemplated in a public domain highly charged with annihilation anxieties at the best of times. This is a quite different project from one that is focused only on rehabilitating offenders, once contained, in the service of social control. To advance the argument, academics must engage with the losses and anxieties that underwrite both mundane and spectacular forms of violence, whether interpersonal or state orchestrated. They must also consider the emotional ability of those already grieving or in pain to shoulder a burden of understanding something of the motives of violent perpetrators, when efforts at reconciliation depend upon this form of knowing (Butler, 2009). If we are serious about doing this, then we must engage with the new conceptual discourses of relational psychoanalysis, for these genuinely illuminate the workings of denial, scapegoating, retribution and aggression in ways that are far more dynamic than much contemporary criminology assumes.