Juvenile delinquency from a psychoanalytic perspective

Abstract

The crime and the crime, the criminal and the offender, and finally the victims, are distributed according to consensual agreements that determine what a crime is and what its punishment is. Moreover, there is a social construction of crime and its consequent punishment that although it is valid for all, it must contemplate the way in which it is applied according to particular cases. Each society generates its criminals and criminals, those that fall from the established norms and implements different forms of penalization. Criminal responsibility is based on the idea of ​​conscience and the understanding of acts and freedom of choice. However, the diagnosis of illness suspends this rule of law as well as that of criminal responsibility. On the other hand, the chronological age of the person who commits the crime or the crime is contemplated by the laws and can also take away the imputability. The so-called "juvenile delinquency" summons undoubtedly multiple speeches that converge and differ from each other, in particular as regards legal perspectives and other disciplines such as psychoanalytics. Both justice and psychoanalysis use the notions of guilt and responsibility but in different ways. We will examine this difference to emphasize the proper action of psychoanalysis that is directed at subjects, to then stop at how the superego thrust and the decline of authority contribute to the inclusion of young people in crime.