Évaluation criminalistique et criminologique de l’homicide sexuel. Exemple d’un meurtre pédophilique représentatif

In traditional practice, psychiatric knowledge is unable to supply the legal world with a full explanation for acts of violent crime. In addition to psychopathological data, the correct penal assessment of an offender requires the criminological and criminalistic analysis of the crime scene, the police records, the reconstruction of the crime, and the prolonged medico-psychological observation of the delinquent. This new method of assessing criminal behaviour is illustrated by the present case of a heterosexual pedophiliac murderer.     

Autobiographie et cure analytique dans l'œuvre de Michel Leiris

This article proposes a psychoanalytical approach to Michel Leiris' work; notably a questioning concerning the role played by his analytical therapy in writing his autobiography. Leiris asserts having written his first autobiography following his disappointment over his analytical therapy, which did not enable him to return to the original trauma, which he associates with the “primal scene”. In Leiris' writings this original trauma is hinged on the idea of death, which haunts his work. The unconscious sources of the creative process in the writer will be considered precisely from the standpoint of the dead person occupied by Leiris in his autobiography, according to three points of view. Firstly, Leiris' story, which is haunted by, ghosts, then, the issues of the therapy in writing his autobiography and finally the analysis of a childhood memory that Leiris considers to be the origin of his realization of death. The unifying factor of this examination will be the following hypothesis: Leiris will attempt to commit himself to the tomb through his autobiographic writing, which appears to him as a way of erecting his statue, of transfixing his memories and freezing the living part of himself. Within this perspective, writing could enable the writer to combat the catastrophic anguish of psychic death, which can take the form of an erosion, a dissolution, a collapse of the Ego, all obsessive images in his work. Leiris' point is to preserve himself in writing about the Self, so as not to be reduced to dust during his lifetime.     

Les attentes du juge d'instruction et du président de la cour d'assises

Forensic psychiatric expertise plays a major role in the pre-sentencing and sentencing phases of the work of two magistrates: it is indispensable for the examining judge, more particularly for criminal cases and important for the president of the assizes court who needs the expert's advice on a person's acting out whether or not the person suffers from a mental disease. In the first phase of examination an expertise of the incriminated person should be held according to the penal code and to the code of penal procedures. It is important to know whether the incriminated person's judgment at the time of acting out was abolished or not, if the expert decides it was, the case may be dropped. This happens in roughly 0,50% of criminal cases and their number has decreased from 444 to 286 between 1987 and 1999. The presidents of assizes courts are surprised that they regularly have to judge persons who are manifestly “limit” cases. In criminal cases examining judges ask for two expertises of the incriminated person: a psychiatric one and a medico-psychological one. Most often it is important that they be by two different experts as two opinions based on different theoretical approaches are preferable. The examining judge needs to understand the acting out whether or not the judgment of the incriminated person was abolished or altered and regardless of responsibility. Each case is then an occasion of working on the problematic of “the meaning of crime”. At the assizes court experts are important for the president and for the jury. A follow up of expertise is often requested namely one held a few weeks before the hearing complementing the initial one so as to update it and to show how the incriminated person has evolved. The president expects the expert's written report and oral presentation to be coherent, his report to be intelligible and to be instructive for the jury. He expects the expert to analyse the meaning of the crime in the subject's history if that person admits having committed the crime and this whether he is a pathological case or not. The president of the assizes court also expects the expert to give his recommendations relative to the possible inter-actions between the different protagonists leading to the crime. The expert's speech is directed to the jurymen. What they expect from justice is that experts enlighten them as clearly and precisely as possible with a pedagogy allowing them to understand the most advanced items whatever their various backgrounds. The specificity of sexual criminology will be developed at the time of the assizes session.     

PRACTIS : protocole d’analyse comportementale des infractions sexuelles extrafamiliales

After presenting the rationale behind behavioural analysis of sexual crimes beyond the family circle (Ann Med Psychol 2008;166:552-7), the authors have adapted and automated this test to the working practices of the Department of Behavioural Sciences of the French Gendarmerie. The missions of the latter encompass author profiling and criminal case comparisons. This new search tool, aka PRACTIS, is based on the fundamental components of violent crimes as well as the reconstruction of events. It enables the scientific quantitative and qualitative analysis of sexual assaults beyond the family circle, whether these are committed by a single offender or different ones.     

Élaboration d’un test d’analyse comportementale des crimes sexuels extrafamiliaux : principes médicopsychologiques et criminologiques généraux

After developing a standard protocol for the behavioral analysis of homicides and other violent crimes, the authors present the general medicopsychological and criminological principles of a new test that is specific to sexual aggression committed outside the family circle, such as pedophilia, rape and sexual homicide. Four analytic grids are proposed: modus operandi (technicity), modus operandi (spatiotemporal), relational component (verbal and behavioral), and circumstantial component. This new method of analyzing the crime scene and information from the criminal file may be used to improve criminal profiling, the quality of the legal inquiry, the quality of psychiatric assessments and scientific research into sex offenders.     

Rencontre de modèles cliniques et robotiques. Du saut entre les organisations psychiques

Clinical models of the mental system and robotic models of artificial thinking show analogies which enable us to compare them. These encounters facilitate the study of the jumps between the various mental organisations. Actually, these jumps are easily observed in current clinic. It is a matter of commonplace observations (the various organisations), of means reflecting them (ladder and systematical module), of natural jumps in mental disturbances (periods of evolution of mental disturbances, structuring of disturbances, integration of the various levels of organisation), and of internal gaps in the system during the formation of the meaning process. Correspondingly, robotics emphasize the specific principles of a system of artificial thinking: the internal structuring of the system, the relations with the external world and self-control; these principles are directly analogous with clinical facts. Furthermore, their realisation shows an efficient structuring of these jumps allowing a better understanding of them. These comparisons show the interest of modeling in three co-active and indissociable levels (biologic, semantic, and linguistic), of taking account of gaps and regulating factors, of refining means of thinking (particularly of intuition and of the matrices of logic knowledge) and of a better grasp of pathologic phenomena.     

Approche psychanalytique du « démoniaque » à partir de l'œuvre de Ian McEwan

This study examines a few epistemological reflections establishing the interest that literature and psychoanalysis can have for each other. It then attempts, through a structural analysis of the works of the contemporary English novelist Ian McEwan, to elucidate a point of theory: the use of the term “demonic” by Freud to qualify the death instinct. This leads us to raise anew the question of evil in relation to the forms taken by the rejection of castration as existential trauma. The emphasis is laid in particular on the perverse montage.     

Le voyage de Victor Hugo aux Pyrénées, un voyage dans la mémoire

1843 can be considered as a turning point in the life of Victor Hugo. Certainly in the middle of his life he had experienced dramatic events specifically the failure of his play Les Burgraves, the wedding of his daughter Leopoldine and more importantly her tragic death by drowning in the Seine at Villequier in September of the same year. These events had important psychological and emotional effects on him. We have tried to identify what affected Victor Hugo's unconscious thought processes by analysing different texts linked to these happenings, primarily the account of the journey referred to as Pyrenees by the executors of his will. This analysis leads us to establish a link with the drawings of Victor Hugo in which unconscious processes are already expressed by « l’homme ocean ». But if the purpose of our study is above all a psychoanalytical understanding of the process leading to involuntary memory, the « proustian memory », we are trying to replace this process in Victor Hugo's existential context, in the moment between the before and the after.     

La clinique des entretiens préliminaires en psychanalyse

Few studies have been made on the practice of preliminary interviews, which are sessions that rely on less psychoanalytical theory than the following sessions, in analytical therapies. However, the first sessions with a new patient matter greatly to all analysts—a fact that our study confirms thanks to therapists’ answers to a standardized questionnaire that we validated in a previous study. The clinical observation data in our recently published study on the practice of preliminary interviews in psychoanalysis were collected empirically in the Department of Psychiatry of the Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital among 30 therapists—15 therapists with at least 10 years’ experience and 15 therapists with less than 5 years’ experience. They were asked to answer regarding the preliminary interviews with a patient they had seen two to five times by the time they answered the questionnaire. For this study we used an updated version of our questionnaire, with new to-the-point questions regarding the patient’s meta-communication. Thirty-six items cover five variables chosen according to the therapist’s degree of involvement in his decision to follow that patient. An additional evaluation scoring sheet, with a validated inter-judge reliability, allows the data to be assessed by members of the psychoanalyst group. The results of the evaluation scoring sheet are the “objective” aspect of the research. The questions regarding the five variables we focus on, allow the therapists to evaluate whether or not they feel they have answered the questionnaire. Their own assessment of their clinical work is the “subjective” aspect of the study. Though the patient’s meta-communication is slight during the very first sessions, all of the therapists involved in this study are able to spot it as one of the most promising elements for a psychoanalysis to be possible. The clinical data allow us to speculate that the psychodynamic hypothesis is worked out on the basis of what is heard of the patient’s meta-communication abilities. This is supported by psychoanalytical theory on the one band and on the other band by what the analyst’s experiences in his understanding of transference and counter-transference.     

Apports de la neurobiologie en psychiatrie de l'enfant et de l'adolescent

Recent findings in neurosciences are reviewed and applied to the domain of child and adolescent psychiatry, especially ADHD and PTSD in childhood. Behavioral genetics studies highlight a bidirectional relationship between genetic and environmental factors which interact at a certain critical period during the child development. fMRI and cognitive studies in turn reveal the brain plasticity which reflects that interplay between genes and environment both at a cellular level and at the level of the neural circuitry. In keeping with those experiments, a new neurocognitive model emerges, the forward model, wherein motor and emotional aspects of an experience are imprinted in our neural networks. This neural template is then automatically and non-consciously activated when the person is interacting with another one. Applied to PTSD and ADHD, this model suggests that the therapeutic challenge which is carried along with such disorders is to prevent the youth from re-activating such a neural template. If our understanding of the child psychopathology is stimulated by neurosciences findings, the therapeutic apparatus is enlarged as well with such new venues as the computerized-assisted cognitive remediation for ADHD. Such computer devices are used to elicit the activation of new neural networks and to help out the youth inhibiting the activation of the non-adaptative previous neural pathways.     

« L'expertise » de fin d'hospitalisation d'office médicolégale (article L 3213-8 du code de la santé publique)

The “expertise” required by article L. 3213.8 of the Code of Public Health is exceptional within the statute of “compulsory hospitalization” (Police-instructed compulsory hospitalisation in France corresponds to the juridical or court-ordered hospitalisation in Anglo-Saxon law). This paper proposes a critical analysis of this “expertise” and of the ensuing situation of pathological criminals based on an extended practice of expertise and taking into consideration the recent evolution of the concept of dangerousness.     

Validation d'une version abrégée du TCI (TCI-56) sur un échantillon de jeunes fumeurs et non-fumeurs

The psychobiological seven-factor model proposed by Cloninger et al. (1993) takes into account temperament and character dimensions to describe personality. Four of the dimensions are linked with biological, genetic and neuroanatomic structures, whereas the three other dimensions are related to the degree of individual, social and spiritual development. A study conducted by Wills et al. (1994) with adolescents showed that substance abuse was associated with high scores on Novelty Seeking and low scores on Harm Avoidance and Reward Dependence. The aim of the present study was, firstly, to create a short form of Cloninger’s temperament and character inventory (TCI) and, secondly, to study the impact of nicotine dependence as well as demographic variables on a sample of young adults. We created a short form of the TCI containing 56 items (TCI-56), eight for each scale. Responses are made on a five-point Likert type scale. A Swiss sample (n = 211), of 116 women and 95 men, aged from 15 to 30 years, participated in this study. Our population was divided into a group of 81 smokers and another of 130 non-smokers, according to their scores on the Fagerstörm test for nicotine dependence (1999). The structural validation consisted of two separate factor analysis with varimax rotations, one for the temperamental items, and the other, for the character ones. The first factor analysis conducted on the items of the temperament scales allowed to extract four factors explaining 40.7% of the variance. The correlations between factors and scales are the following: r = 0.71 for Novelty Seeking, r = 0.69 for Persistence, r = 0.95 for Harm Avoidance, r = 0.94 for Reward Dependence. The second factor analysis conducted on the items of the character scales allowed to extract three factors explaining 41.5% of the variance. The correlations between factors and scales are the following: r = 0.94 for Self-Directedness, r = 0.91 for Cooperativeness and r = 0.99 for Self-Transcendence. The internal consistencies range from α = 0.65 to α = 0.75 for the temperament scales, and from α = 0.71 to α = 0.83 for the three character scales. Concerning, the impact of the nicotine dependence, we observed that smokers have significantly higher scores for Novelty seeking, than non-smokers (P = 0.01). We found no difference for Harm Avoidance and Reward Dependence. Nevertheless, smokers seem to have the tendency to score higher on Transcendence (P = 0.06). Moreover, people having smoked more than 100 cigarettes in their life have significantly higher scores on this scale (P = 0.04) and the correlation between Transcendence and the Fagerstörm test is significant (r = 0.19). We also found gender differences: the women (N = 116) obtain significantly higher scores for Harm Avoidance (P < 0.001), for Reward Dependence (P < 0.001) and for Cooperation (P = 0.01). We further found a significant correlation between age and Self-Directedness, r = 0.34. We observed no interaction between gender and smoking or age and smoking on the dimensions of the TCI-56. The TCI short form (TCI-56) seems to be a valid and useful inventory to assess personality differences. Confirming the results of others about the relation between addiction and personality, we found that smokers have significantly higher scores for Novelty seeking, than non-smokers. But we were not able to find any significant differences for Harm Avoidance and Reward Dependence. This might be due to our sample that was made of young adults. This study also shows that Transcendence could be an interesting dimension for studies on tobacco smoking to consider. Concerning the impact of demographic variables, we observed that age and gender have specific and coherent influence on personality.     

Association entre anxiété et hyperlaxité articulaire : revue de la littérature

Joint hypermobility is an exaggerate increase of the joint's mobility due to an inherited alteration in the collagen fibres. For decades, it has been observed that people with this condition show very often symptoms of anxiety. Empirical studies corroborate these clinical observations and associate the joint hypermobility principally with the endogenous anxiety, which suggest that is a biological base shared by both phenomena. The discovery of the connection between the two different fields, psychiatry and rheumatology, has important implications; it offers the possibility of identifying the most vulnerable patients suffering anxiety disorder, by exploring the signs and symptoms associated with joint hypermobility.     

De l'état dépressif à l'état de triomphe du moi

Although melancholy has been the focus of a large number of studies, this has not been the case for mania and even less for the passage from melancholy to mania, more particularly the passage from a depressive state to a self-triumphant state, the latter expression being used by Freud to characterize states of self-induced excitement or elation. On the basis of the specific pathological model of the passage from melancholy to mania, the present study has therefore attempted to determine the underlying metapsychological processes for what are commonly termed cyclic disorders or changes of mood, the dynamics of which is connected with the types of interaction between the various elements within the psychic system. The theoretical approach that has been adopted is essentially psychoanalytical, and in parallel to Freud’s analysis of this state, we are already able to delineate the context in which cyclic disorders occur: it consists of an “interior theatre”, and on its stage the self in its relation to the ideal self which continues to play the same role as it had previously assumed in its relation to the exterior object, i.e. before it had incorporated the exterior object and allowed it to take its place. The self thus finds itself in the position of the object confronted with its ideal self, and the omnipotence of the latter henceforth determines the course of their relations.Melancholy and mania are thus related to the same “complex” and their metapsychological difference lies in the fate of the introjected object: if in the case of melancholy the object has taken over the role assumed by the self, what has become of the self in the manic state? In the present study, the hypothesis proposed is that of committing an intrapsychic act, an indefinitely perpetrated crime, i.e. the act of murdering the object constructed on the basis of a working model of mourning which requires that the mourner “strikes a fatal blow” for a second time in order to actively confirm the subject’s own satisfaction at remaining alive. However, the state of manic exhaltation, just like the state of melancholic depression, is linked to the conflict between the self and its ideal self and to the law of an alter ego that is always as cruel toward a mythical lost object which remains a cause of irrepressible nostalgia.