Personal essay. Crime as communication by Lee Coombes. 2P

 Between December 2001 and December 2002 I worked for the Wiltshire Drug Treatment and Testing Order Team (DTTO). DTTO’s were set up by the government with the purpose of reducing drug-related crime in the community.

 Often the choice for the ‘offenders’ as they are officially known by the Probation Service, was a prison sentence or a DTTO. Some offenders opted for a DTTO believing it was a softer option, others opted to do the time, some started a DTTO and then opted for the more holding environment of imprisonment.

 The work I did for the DTTO included group work and relapse prevention groups. I had a caseload of up to six clients who I saw on a one-to-one basis once a week. I was supervised in my work by an external supervisor called Rose Persson.

 Rose had worked with offenders in the prison service. I found the supervision very helpful. Rose always referred to what she called the ‘early environmental failure’ of some of the clients and urged me to find out as much as possible about their early life and the crimes for which they had been sentenced.

 Rose gave a talk at the Royal Literary and Scientific Institute in Queens Square Bath. The title of the talk was ‘Crime as Communication.’ It probably sounds stupid but I had not thought of crime as a form of communication before and the idea implicit in the title grabbed me. For Rose the crime itself often revealed the unconscious deficit of the ‘offender,’ i.e. the lonely mugger who stole a girl’s mobile phone: was he jealous she had friends? Why wasn’t someone calling him? The burglar who liked to sit quietly in the houses of the people he burgled. Was he creating the home he had always wanted to live in? In a sense ‘the offenders’ were revealing themselves through their crime just as children revealed their unconscious phantasy through play.

 I remember putting Rose’s theory to the test, I looked up the last crime for one of my clients, a man who found communication almost impossible and reoffended so often he eventually returned to prison. This client’s last crime was the theft of a child’s bicycle at Christmas. The bicycle was actually stolen from under a Christmas tree. In the client’s file was a letter from his mother who was currently in a secure institution suffering from paranoid-schizophrenia. In the letter, which was written in January the mother apologises to her son for not getting him anything for Christmas but promises to do better next year. The fit was so perfect somehow, my client has stolen the thing he lacked and revealed what it was that he needed most.

 My work made me think about crime as a form of communication and I found it interesting to look at what other people had written about it. Melanie Klein argued that many criminals needed to live in a permanent relationship with an external punishing authority. They continue criminal activities to sustain actual condemnation from outside.  

 In Klein’s view the development of a healthy character involves a capacity to acknowledge the bad aspects of the self as well as the good ones. To support a one-sided view of the self as good, even mental functions may be split off. Klein described criminal activity in children and concluded that the criminal (even as an adult) looses his morality in order to evade a sense of guilt. In other words it is easier to blame others and avoid any sense of responsibility for the persons own behaviour.

 During my work with the Drugs Treatment and Testing Order Team (DTTO) I saw many clients in the throws of persecutory anxiety that was projected out and often, unfortunately, became real through the acting out of counter transference. It was uncomfortable to be in a room with a client in the process of attempting to get rid of parts of himself. What I saw were adult children unable to contain their fear, with no patience and an inability to cope with any form of discomfort or frustration, heroin for them was the good mother that allowed them to heal the unbearable feelings within themselves and function in the world. The punishing part of themselves that was externalised was manifested in terms of the courts and the police and me. The only problem in their lives was that the police stopped them from carrying on stealing.

 My supervisor frequently brought me back to the early failure and the more I found out about it the more I learned about the client’s home life. Often there was violence or a disrupted home life through illness or death or separation. Erik Erikson is useful in his book Childhood and Society when he talks of a failure to integrate one or other of the infantile stages and how patients defend themselves against these infantile patterns – ‘stubbornly, wastefully, unsuccessfully.’ (Erikson 1951: 53).

 In my experience he is absolutely right when he talks of how ‘addicts, for example, depend as the baby once did, on the incorporation by mouth or skin of substances which make them feel both physically satiated and emotionally restored. But they are not aware that they yearn to be babies again. Only as they whine and boast and challenge are their disappointed and babyish souls revealed.’ (Erikson 1951:52).

 In the groups I helped run I remember being overwhelmed with feelings of boredom and fatigue the result of projective identification and cut off feelings.

 In one to one sessions I felt bad at my job, my skills were rubbished and I felt simultaneously unhelpful and deskilled. I felt frustrated too by the client’s inability to introject my helpful advice or feedback. The knock on effect was an acting out of splitting with the staff; the manager and other workers became alternately the ‘good object’ or the bad object.

 Klein talks about the infant’s limited ability to contain the destructive elements of his nature, his need to use the mother as a person onto and into whom he projects his aggression and anxiety. Isca Salzberger-Wittenberg argues that this understanding of the child’s anxiety clarifies the nature of the holding function and why receptivity and holding are of such importance: it is to contain the baby with his terror. (Salzberger-Wittenberg 1970:42).

 I soon realised that part of my job with the DTTO was to take on a lot of the client’s anger and aggression. My job was to contain their fears and anxieties and to hold them and at the right time give them back. I often came home feeling drained and exhausted with the weight of other people’s unsaid and unspoken feelings (as well as their directly and indirectly expressed anger and frustration).

 Winnicott’s idea of the false self is a good one when discussing clients. During my time working at the Drug Treatment and Testing Order Team in Wiltshire (DTTO) I frequently saw smiling burglars and mild-mannered shoplifters who, if you believed their stories, wouldn’t have said boo to a goose. The hatred and anger was hidden somewhere else. When looking at the early years and formative periods of these clients lives it was clear that in their early years they had faced an early environmental failure, the break up of the family unit, a parent’s illness or death. The false smiling compliant self had grown as a response to the impingement.

 The creation of a false self was so effective it was firmly believed to be the real one. A spell in prison was seen as a bad break. They saw themselves as basically good people trying to get by in a harsh uncaring world. Indeed to some of them the only environment in which they felt safe and ‘held’ them effectively was imprisonment. Often their anger and destructiveness was projected outwards on to others

 In a paper called Delinquency as a sign of hope a record of a talk Winnicott gave to the Borstal Assistant Governor’ Conference in 1967 he talks of how, ‘in every case that comes your way there was a beginning and at the beginning there was an illness, and the boy or girl became a deprived child. Winnicott links antisocial crime with deprivation. ‘A change occurred which altered the whole life of the child and this change in the environment happened when the child was old enough to know about things.’ (Winnicott 1986: 91).

 Winnicott is useful too when he talks about the practical implications of this deprivation especially when he talks of the need for the child to feel safe. ‘…the child organises his life constructively in order not to feel too bad about the very real destructiveness that goes on in his mind. In order to achieve this in his development, the child absolutely requires an environment that is indestructible in essential respects.’ (Winnicott 1986: 94) If a child’s parents have split up for example his aggression feels unsafe to him. Winnicott talks of the importance of keeping consistent with regard to the time and place (‘sacred’ he says) of the meetings.

 The child can use the support of the therapist to reach back to the suffering that followed the reaction to the deprivation and there then ‘follows a memory of the time before the deprivation.’ (Winnicott 1986: 98).

 Winnicott talks of the suffering the child experiences reactive to the deprivation. By suffering Winnicott says he means, ‘acute confusion, disintegration, of the personality, falling for ever, a loss of contact with the body, complete disorientation and other states of this nature.’ (Winnicott 1986: 98).

 Klein’s theory of externalising the guilt is a useful one when looking at crime. The problem is always ‘out there,’ it is never located within. Similarly solutions are never found internally but are located outside the self in drugs and the adrenaline rush of crime with its consequent cat and mouse game of punishment and rehabilitation.

 I’m looking at crime but specifically at drug related crime and I am struck by Erikson linking of the development of the ego with the wider cultural values of the society an individual lives in. Whilst we don’t as yet live in the USA I was impressed by the massive spread in heroin use in rural areas. Part of this is the result of the increasing cheapness and availability of the drug but also seems to be a consequence of a widespread disillusionment of young people. I was struck too by the industrial scale of the stealing and crime committed to fund a habit and also how much the culture of addiction mimics in the crudest way the sort of enterprise culture touted by the likes of Margaret Thatcher in the eighties. You don’t steal you ‘earn,’ thefts are seen as earners and big stores legitimate ‘soft’ targets. Heroin becomes the ‘good object’ the nurturing dependable mother.

 My supervisor encouraged me to read more around the subject and recommended I read a book called From Pain to Violence by Felicity De Zulueta. I read the book and found it very rewarding and interesting. All the material around the early environmental failure was there but also the failure was put in the wider context of what is happening in society. So, for example in a country like the USA that imposes the death sentence there is a high murder rate.

 A few weeks ago I saw Michael Moore’s satirical film Bowling for Columbine in which Moore investigates gun-crime in the USA. What Moore finds out is the easy availability of guns and ammunition, a determined and highly motivated gun lobby with murky roots in the racist path, a high degree of fear-based sensationalist coverage of murder in the media and a country that glorifies and uses war as a means of foreign policy. Moore argues it is ironic that the columbine massacre in which two schoolboys took semi-automatic weapons to school and shot and killed a whole group of their classmates occurred on the day that the USA dropped more bombs on Serbia than on any other day in that war. A country that condones killing as a means of solving problems gives the message that murder is not only justified but is intrinsically right.

 The message both from the book and the film was that we cannot isolate crime away from what is happening in the society as a whole. Just as Winnicott argues that ‘there is no such thing as a baby…’ so too there is a wider connection between an individual and then his family and then the wider society.

In an article in The British Journal of Psychotherapy called Demonology versus science? Felicity de Zulueta succinctly sets out her argument. She uses Bowlby’s attachment theory to show how much human beings depend on each other. Trauma, she argues, has been defined as the sudden cessation of human interaction (Lindemann1944). The human infant has a primary need to establish and maintain proximity to some preferred individual. According to de Zulueta ‘Attachment is a form of human motivation as fundamental as the drive for food or sex.’ (de Zulueta 1997: 201). It is the disruption of these attachments that are at the heart of destructiveness.

 If the caregiver is not available the infant protests, before showing despair, and finally becoming detached. At this point the infant will no longer respond to the return of the parent and might even snub her. This is called, ‘avoidant’ behaviour.

 The development of these attachment bonds is achieved by a complex process of physical and emotional attunement which is disrupted in childhood has long-term effects on our lives.

 The different responses to the caregiver became the focus of the work of Mary Ainsworth and her Strange Situation Test. Using the test she found 63% of middle class children showed a secure attachment: they cried on separation from mother but responded quickly to her warm hug on return. They were able to form good relationships in the nursery and home.

 20-25% of infants were found to be insecurely attached and showed an ‘avoidant’ response to their mother on her return. These infants learned to cut themselves off from their feelings of anger and fear so they were able to be near the parent they totally depend on. These children showed poor self-esteem and frequent hostility.

 Another group of infants showed a ‘disorganised’ response to the returning parent, a mixture of ‘avoidant’ and ‘anxious ambivalent’ behaviour. These individuals are described as suffering from trauma and will recreate their past childhood trauma in acts of destruction. (de Zulueta 1997:202)

 Certainly I could see this in the clients I saw – cycles of violence were repeated. What was handed down was passed on.

 Traumatised people relieve their traumatic experience through intrusive thoughts, nightmares, recurrent memories or through the actual re-enactment of the event. The client may play the role of the victim or the victimiser. Damage to the attachment system results in such intense terror and rage that it is often ‘cut off’ from consciousness: this means that the client may have no idea of why he is doing what he is doing. Feelings that are too painful to acknowledge can be brought back to mind by an external or internal trigger – only to recreate the original pain. Woman who were sexually abused become prostitutes or people who were abused as children become abusive to their own children.  

 De Zulueta maintains that the most important function of dehumanising the criminal by seeing him as evil is that it allows us to set him apart from the rest of us. For de Zulueta the roots of crime ‘lie in the secret violence of family life, a hidden violence our society does its best to ignore.’ (de Zulueta 1997: 206).

 De Zulueta argues that there are two dimensions of the manifestation of human violence which, at one level, can be seen as the results of a disrupted attachment system and, at another level, can be understood as a manifestation of human rage due to the ‘overwhelming narcissistic injuries to the self’ (de Zulueta 1993: 94-114).

  I think when De Zulueta quotes Ernest Wolf she really hits her points home (and I think its worth quoting Wolf in full) Wolf wrote:

The origin of narcissistic rage must be sought in the childhood experience of utter helplessness vis a vis the humiliating self-object parent…Such experiences of helplessness are unbearably painful because they threaten the very continuity of existence of the self and therefore they evoke the strongest emergency defences of the self in the form of narcissistic rage. (Wolf 1988: 80).

  To become human beings we need the right kind of love. If we don’t get it the results can be devastating. Bowlby argued that human beings are pre-programmed to develop in a socially co-operative way De Zulueta adds that whether they do or not depends on how they are treated. (de Zulueta 1997: 207).

In conclusion I can see how all these theories have helped me understand (often in retrospect) what was going on when I worked for the DTTO. Certainly Klein’s idea of projective identification and projection and splitting were useful when looking at this client group. My supervisor described these people as some of the most unrewarding clients to work with, as the failure rate was so high and how ones skills and successes were felt to be useless and short term. The clients would act out their avoidant and self-fulfilling and self-rejecting trauma with predictable consistency. The successes I did have were due mainly to Winnicott’s ideas of keeping the time and place of the therapy ‘sacred.’ Consistently turning up despite my own opinions of the success or otherwise of what I was doing helped build up a therapeutic relationship. It was in this relationship that some of the past hurt could be worked on usually through its reappearing in another form (i.e. missing appointments, not turning up etc). Erikson is good when looking at culture and ego formation and de Zulueta applies Bowlby’s theories to understanding some of the traumatic roots of crime and addiction. It is interesting to look at crime as a form of deadly play activity that reveals the early environmental deficit.

Bibliography.

Bowlby, J. (1969) ATTACHMENT AND LOSS. Volume 1, attachment. Hogarth Press. London.

De Zulueta, F (1997) Demonology versus Science? In BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY vol. 14 (2).1997.

De Zulueta, F (1993) FROM PAIN TO VIOLENCE. Whurr: London.

Erikson, E. (1951) CHILDHOOD AND SOCIETY. Hogarth Press. London.

Robert Hinshelwood et al (1998) INTRODUCING MELANIE KLEIN. Totem books: New York.

Holmes, J (1993) JOHN BOWLBY AND ATTACHMENT THEORY. Routledge: London.

Salzberger-Wittinberg. (1970) PSYCHOANAYTIC INSIGHT AND RELATIONSHIP: A KLEINIAN APPROACH. Routledge: London.

Winnicott. D.W. (1986) Delinquency as a sign of hope in HOME IS WHERE WE START FROM Penguin: London.

Quoted by De Zulueta:

Lindeman E. (1944) Symptomalogy and management of acute grief. In AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHIATRY. Vol. 101: 141-9).

Wolf, E. S. (1988) TREATING THE SELF: ELEMENTS OF CLINICAL SELF PSYCHOLOGY. Guilford: New York.