A2 FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY - PSYCHODYNAMIC EXPLANATIONS OF OFFENDING; BOWLBY'S MDH AND INADEQUATE SUPEREGO

Question 1

Describe Bowlby’s MDH towards offending

Answer 1

• Says that a warm, continuous relationship w/ mother is needed to form meaningful relationships in adulthood
• Failure to establish attachment to mum in the critical peroid of the first few yrs leads to affectionless psychopathy in later life; lack of guilt, empathy and feelings for others
• So ppl w/ poor maternal attachment are more likely to commit crimes, and won’t dev close relationships

Question 2

Describe procedure and findings of Bowlby’s 44 Juvenile Thieves experiment

Answer 2

• Interviwed 44 juvenuile thieves and their families, along w/ a non-offender contorl group
• Found 14/44 showed affectionless psychopathy, and that 12 out of those 14 had prolonged maternal separation.
• In control group, only 2 ha experienced this separation.
• From this, Bowlby concluded that maternal separation caused criminal beh

Question 3

Evaluate Bowlby’s explanation of criminal beh

Answer 3

(+) Research evidence from Bowlby (1944)
(-) Researcher bias as Bowlby did the exp himself
(-) Doesn’t distinguish bet privation (failure to form an attachment) and deprivation (loss or damage to an attachment; privation is thought to be more powerful than deprivation
(-) Correlation not causation

Question 4

Describe the inadequate superego

Answer 4

• Superego is formed in phallic stage when Oedipus/Electra complex is resolved in kids and they adopt the same sex parent’s attitudes and morality
• S.ego rewards ego w/ pride for moral beh and punishes it w/ guilt for immoral beh
• Put forward by Blackburn (1993)

Question 5

Describe the 3 types of inadequate s.ego

Answer 5

• Weak s.ego: caused by absence of same sex parent during the phallic stage; no-one for child to identify w/ and so they can’t internalise a fully developed s.ego. This make immoral/criminal beh seem more acceptable to the perpetrator.
• Harsh s.ego: s.ego’s job is to punish for wrongdoing. Overly harsh s.ego will make you want to commit crimes so that you can be punished for your bad thoughts of committing crimes.
• A deviant s.ego comes from when a child internalises an immoral s.ego, e.g. boy raised by criminal father. This makes them less likely to associate guilt w/ criminal beh so more likely to offend.

Question 6

Evaluate the inadequate s.ego

Answer 6

(-) Blackburn’s theory is unfalsifiable; can’t be tested and disproven so reduces the scientific credibility of the argument and psychology as a whole.
(-) Psychodynamic approach suggests that girls form weaker s.ego than boys as they dont experience castration anxiety so are under less pressure to identify and internalise, but Hoffman (1975) found literally no evidence that girls offend more than boys
(-) Idea that crime runs in families could be explained by genetics rather than internalising a bad superego (see Lange (1930))
(-) Socailly sensistive; suggests that single parents/ same sex couples who have a child the opposite gender to them will develop criminal beh, which can make parents feel inadequate/ responsible for any future behaviour of the child. This doesn’t reduce the validity of the explanation but does show that it could have negative implications for society and the general public