Jungian Crime Scene Analysis: An Imaginal Investigation

This book presents the serial killer as having 'imagopathy' – that is, a disorder of the imagination – manifested through such deficiencies as failure of empathy, rigid fantasies, and unresolved projections. The author argues that this disorder is a form of failed alchemy. His study challenges long-held assumptions that the Jungian concept of individuation is a purely healthful drive. Serial killers are unable to form insight after projecting untenable material onto their victims. Criminal profilers must therefore effect that insight informed by their own reactions to violent crime scene imagery, using what the author asserts is a form of Jung’s 'active imagination'. This book posits sexual homicides as irrational shadow images in our rationalistic modern culture. Consequently, profilers bridge conscious and unconscious for the inexorably splintered killer as well as the culture at large.

After establishing the dark fictional and non-fictional landscape of criminal profiling, Jungian Crime Scene Analysis examines how two experts, John Douglas and Robert Ressler, tacitly apply imaginal techniques in order to gather evidence about their quarries. Jungian approaches to active imagination and countertransference help to define this forensic project, grounded in the archetypal psychology concept of image.