“Let the great axe fall”: from ancient Babylonian torture to modern forensic psychotherapy: Freud, Welldon, and the humanisation of criminality

Abstract

Since the dawn of time, those men and women who had committed acts of violence would often be subjected to incarceration, followed by torture and, subsequently, execution. We have no shortage of historical evidence documenting the use of beating, branding, flogging, confinement to stocks and pillories, breaking on the wheel, mutilation, tearing of the flesh with red-hot pincers, amputation of body parts, not to mention execution through such varied methods as hanging, impalement, stoning, beheading, garrotting, guillotining, boiling, burning, drowning, drawing and quartering, poisoning, shooting with arrows or bullets, starvation, and, in more recent years, electrocution or injection of a lethal dosage of drugs. In this article, the author will present a history of the sadistic treatment of criminal-ity across the ages. He will then explore and celebrate the ways in which Professor Sigmund Freud and his psychological successors ultimately created a radical para-digm shift, introducing immense compassion into the understanding and healing of offender patients. After reviewing the contributions of Professor Sigmund Freud and of some of the leading pioneers of forensic psychoanalysis, the author will then examine the ways in which Profesora Estela V. Welldon and her contemporaries helped to formalise and validate and expand the profession of forensic psycho-therapy on clinical and theoretical and institutional levels, thus providing us with a sense of hope that, in decades hence, those who perpetrate violence will be offered more humane treatment.