Imaginal crime scene analysis: A forensic application of countertransferential active imagination

Daniels, A. B. (2002). Imaginal crime scene analysis: A forensic application of countertransferential active imagination. (Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2002). UMI no. 3060741

This study examines how crime scene analysts, or criminal profilers, tacitly apply a synthesis of Jungian interpretations of active imagination and countertransference. This work clarifies this construct, countertransferential active imagination or imaginal work, through the archetypalist concept of image. The first half of the study is an extensive review of Jungian writings and subsequent archetypalist formulations. This research also reviews autobiographical texts by two criminal profilers, John Douglas and Robert Ressler, proposing historical and literary antecedents for their practices. The second half examines several methodological questions. Beyond a fundamentally hermeneutic approach, a novel formulation is developed, rhizomic research, which values declaring over answering questions. Utilizing these methodologies, the author presents sexual homicide perpetrators as having disorders of imagination, imagopathy, seen through imaginal deficiencies such as failure of empathy, rigid fantasies, and unresolved projections. This research challenges assumptions that individuation is purely healthful. Individuation powers psychic activity and thus powers the dynamics of sexual homicide. Consciousness, in the transcendent function, transforms individuating images into ethical products. Imaginal work challenges practitioners to achieve transcendent functions to imagery. Perpetrators of sexual homicide are unable to form such insight after projecting untenable material onto victims. Therefore, criminal profilers are left to effect insight using active imagination on violent crime scene imagery. This work posits that sexual homicides are irrational shadow images in rationalistic modern culture. Consequently, profilers bridge conscious and unconscious for both inexorably splintered killers and the culture at large. This study details risks for profilers stemming from the unacknowledged imaginal nature of profilers' procedures. These dangers include pathological crime scenes imagery overlaying profilers' own individuating imagery. Furthermore, because neither theoretical cohesiveness nor a frame of practice supports profilers' imaginal efforts, vicarious traumatization and burnout may result. This study proposes several analytical practices to protect profilers from psychic infection. For imaginal practitioners, this work opens further vistas of application. For those less familiar with imaginal work, this study can be a primer of this rich area of clinical practice. Finally, this dissertation, which offers innovations to both analytical psychology and crime scene analysis, is designed to provoke further research into imaginal criminal profiling.