Restriction of freedom and expiation of guilt. Rehabilitation as a way of reworking the crime

Abstract

We hereby aim at determining how influent a period of freedom restriction in Judicial Psychiatric Hospitals might be upon an elaboration process of the guilt, concerning women who committed a symbiotic homicide. Given that by “symbiosis” we mean a situation pertaining those early developmental phases, in which there is no psychic differentiation between a mother and her baby, we remark that leaving this psycho-developmental problem unsolved until adulthood might cause heavy consequences upon an individual’s both mental health and emotional behaviour. A “symbiotic crime” is usually a violent kind of murder, caused by a fusional state of mind involving both the victim and the aggressor. On one side, this kind of crime tries to solve the symbiosis between a victim and her/his aggressor, whereas on the other side it may bring a sense of guilt of persecutorial origin, which prevents the aggressor from elaborating the separation caused by the emotional loss and often implies his/her suicide following to the homicide. We have here reported a record of occurrences from Judicial Psychiatric Hospitals concerning inpatient women, who had murdered a descendant or a parent and committed suicide once discharged, since the elaboration process of their sense of guilt and of its hidden fusional factor had not been completed. In this regard, we refer to the body of works about symbiosis and guilt and to all related sorts of murder, such as matricide and filicide. In fact, though we acknowledge that not every single matricide or filicide case seems to be caused by a mental disease having strongly influenced the murderer in committing the crime, or by an unresolved fusional situation between victim and aggressor, the record of crimes we reported proved to be caused by such diseases. A real understanding of these sort of crimes is necessarily linked to the study of the generational interactions and the family background where the symbiotic couple was born and had been living. In fact, it is at this level that some crime originating and crime triggering elements come to light, which can be relevant not only to a judicial psychiatric valuation (about both crime attribution and the aggressor’s social danger), but also to his/her treatment course. Moreover, the latter doesn’t have to be just the chemical and psychological therapy of the individual’s mental disease: it also means taking charge of the intrapsychic effects caused in the aggressor by his/her crime, because, in the case they aren’t faced in the right way, they can bring about really serious damage, such as the suicide of the patient. We therefore underline the need for Judicial Psychiatric Hospitals to become not only the place where criminals can begin to face their own pathology, but also the place where they can begin to elaborate the crime related to it and the sense of guilt caused by the crime itself. This course must nevertheless be improved and completed, when it is possible, in those local facilities cooperating with Judicial Psychiatric Hospitals. In this perspective, a symbiotic crime calls for an organized net of intervention, so that a restriction of freedom in Judicial Psychiatric Hospitals is just the first step of a course, which must be necessarily carried out elsewhere and by other professionals, the whole of them being particularly careful to that process which, from the initial symbiosis and following to homicide, leads to a sense of guilt, which can turn into suicide. And this proving again that homicide and suicide are “two extremes which often touch” (Tantalo, 1988).