Law and Psychology: Understanding the Intersection

Posted on Feb 19, 2025 in Psychology and Sociology

Why Two Worlds Destined to Connect?

  • Because there is no shadow of a doubt that the differences between these two fields of knowledge are extremely significant and, at first glance, seem insurmountable:
  • Law: A positive, rational science that deals with legal facts and objective reality. It is the set of rules aimed at regulating human behavior, prescribing behaviors, and ways of conflict resolution; interrogation and testimony.
  • Psychology: An empirical science that deals with human drama and the reality of subjectivity. It is obsessed with understanding the keys to human behavior; interviews and testing.
  • Law: Little emphasis on fantasy, imagination, and desire; focused on the outside world; guilt, and conscious intent. It is returned to the world of “what should be,” legislating what is right or wrong for human coexistence.
  • Psychology: Emphasis on fantasy, imagination, and desire; focused on the outside world and inner world; conscious and unconscious guilt. It is dedicated to the world of “being,” the processes that drive human nature.
  • Law: Ignorance of the basic principles of the functioning of the mind. Difficulty sharing and accepting criticism. Tendency toward hegemony.
  • Psychology: Lack of legal principles and foundations of law. Sedimented procedures are not sufficiently critical and consistent. Practice is still in search of identity.
  • Law: Rigid structuring, less permeable to other branches of knowledge. Dogmatism. Millenary tradition (Roman law).
  • Psychology: Scientific evidence in the process of affirmation. Relativism. Scientific psychology was born in the 20th century.

Common Goals to Justify the Meeting of These Two Areas:

  • A) Interest in the conduct of human beings.
  • B) The fact that man is a citizen of two worlds, both belonging to the realm of being and must-be.

Psychology, in General, Can:

  • Allow man to know the world better, others, and himself. It can help understand the homo juridicus and improve it. It can help to understand the laws and their conflicts, especially legal institutions, and improve them as well. Concluding, it is a matter of justice to build bridges between these disciplines, which are not opposites but rather complementary, and the creation of a transdisciplinary territory.

How Can Psychology Contribute to Better Justice?

  • By doing “readings” of the underlying litigation.
  • Finding meaning in new emergencies that are needed in the social order, with new family arrangements, such as an ethical vision of new forms of reproduction, socio-affective paternity, and same-sex parents; the right to social identity of transsexuals, among other facts.

When the Judge Recognizes Expertise, They Admit:

  • The existence of the unconscious subject, something not revealed because they know that behind those acts, the discourse goal can be latent unconscious determinations for unknown reasons.
  • The presence in the records of the individual’s subjectivity, prefiguring a new landscape that is being mapped in the legal system, focusing on social and emotional aspects of human relationships.

Functional Psychoses:

Features:

  • Severe personality decompensation.
  • Marked deformation of reality.
  • Loss of contact with reality.
  • Disability-long ties.
  • Functional disability.
  • Need for hospitalization.

Comparisons Between Neurosis and Psychosis:

Neuroses

  • Mild degree of personality dissociation.
  • Maintained contact with reality.
  • Slightly threatened social contact.
  • Wide range of psychological and somatic symptoms, but with no hallucinations or other extreme deviations in thoughts, feelings, and actions.
  • Patient-oriented.
  • Some understanding of the nature of their behavior.
  • Rarely dangerous or harmful behavior.
  • Rarely requires hospitalization.

Psychoses

  • High degree of personality dissociation.
  • Contact with reality severely affected.
  • Unable to perform social action.
  • Wide range of symptoms, delusions, hallucinations, emotional blunting, and other behaviors quite abnormal.
  • Frequent loss of orientation in the environment.
  • Rarely understands the nature of their conduct.
  • Behavior often harmful to themselves and others, regularly requiring hospitalization.