Psychology of Law and Crime

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor: Professor Renata Salecl
• Assessment: a 4000-word essay (100%)

In this module we will look at the way the law and the judicial system affects the individual, be it in the position of a lawyer or a person who is in a variety of ways affected by the legal machinery in his or her daily private and public life.

First, you will learn theoretical approaches on the internalisation of law: the very fact people undergo the process of socialisation to slowly acquire an understanding about the nature of social prohibitions.

Psychological and psychoanalytic theories will be of help for the understanding of why some people internalise social prohibitions and others do not. Clear differences emerge between what classical Freudian psychoanalysis depicts as neurosis and what is known as psychosis or schizophrenia. You will gain a clear understanding of how psychoanalysis can help legal practitioners.