The uncanny crime: the otherness of the crime

Abstract

Who is a foreigner and who is not? Are we really foreigners beyond the borders of the country? The aim of this article is to show that something else is at play in this notion: we are all strangers and something in us makes us strangers to ourselves. Violent crime involving the dimension of loss of perception ans sense of reality demonstrates this strangeness. This is what we will show, starting from our psychodynamic clinic in the penitentiary field. Our proof is based on the con-cepts of heimlich-unheimlich (Freud) and extime (Lacan). Violent crime in itself, especially if violent, could have an uncanny effect on human beings. In the case of some forms of psychosis, such as schizophrenia, this effect becomes radically extraneous to the criminal himself. In these cases crime shows the strangeness of the subjectivity by itself. The uncanny crime is that crime which reveals the author of the act as stranger to himself. This reveals a silent general characteristic of the criminal act in itself. From the stranger to the familiar: there and back.