Internet offenders from a sense of guilt

Abstract

In his 1916 paper on ‘Some character types met with in psycho-analytic work’, Freud famously refers to ‘Criminals from a sense of guilt’. He describes reports by patients of forbidden acts, committed in youth, which were done principally because they were forbidden, and which brought a sense of relief: ‘Paradoxical as it may sound, I must maintain that the sense of guilt was present before the misdeed, that it did not arise from it but conversely – the misdeed arose from the sense of guilt’ (p. 332). Nearly 100 years on, Freud’s observation has a fresh relevance to the crime of downloading child pornography, which, in some cases, seems to be driven not primarily by sexual desire, but more in response to a persecutory internal object and the associated, primitive, sense of guilt.