The Sex MonSTer: - John Jay College Of Criminal Justice - CUNY

Abby Stein, Ph.D. 

The Sex Monster: 

Dissociation as Parallel ProcesS 

in the Response to Sex Offenders 

Abstract: In the clinical literature, the term “parallel process” describes the way in 

which the dynamics of supervision echo those taking place in the relationship 

between the therapist and the patient. Gray and Fiscalini (1987) discerned how 

the same kind of unconscious enactments could occur in any sequence of interpersonal 

engagements that shared similar characteristics. Sex offenders, forensic 

practitioners, representatives of the criminal justice system, and the public embody 

such a dynamic series. Their parallel identifications often drive communal 

enactments that fuel misguided social policies regarding sex crimes. In this article, 

I examine how the deep splitting triggered by our own sexual desires and 

fears has fueled a contemporary hysteria that vilifies strangers, who may not have 

even committed any serious crimes, while deflecting attention from the most frequent 

location of sexual offense: the home. 

Keywords: parallel process, sex offenders, witch-hunt, sex crime, psychoanalysis 

Parallel processing is familiar to psychoanalysts as an 

uncanny phenomenon that presents in supervisory situations when 

clinicians unconsciously reenact with their supervisors the central quandaries 

of their relationships with patients. The concept of parallel processing 

has expanded over the years to encompass bidirectional and 

circular influences in interpersonal relationships, and even meta-processes 

in which superordinate parties, individual or institutional, engage in a 

reciprocal or antagonistic defensive course based on dissociated desires 

and threats. Grey and Fiscalini (1987) have noted that such processes are 

not limited to the psychoanalytic dyad but are easily observed “in any 

interconnected series of interpersonal situations that are structurally and 

dynamically similar in significant respects” (p. 132). 

Sex offenders, forensic clinicians, the criminal justice system, and the 

public represent just such a dynamic series. Together, they encompass a 

kind of chained response set with multiple countertransference enactments 

produced at every level of unspoken discourse, as each interlocutor ei- 

Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 47, No. 4. ISSN 0010-7530 

© 2011 William Alanson White Institute, New York, NY. All rights reserved. 

497 

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498 Abby stein, ph.d. 

ther incorporates or destroys the unconscious desires and concrete behaviors 

of their monster-partner, with role reversals (e.g., victim-aggressor, 

guilty-innocent, seduced-exploited) common throughout. The defensive 

chain serves a kind of cultural dissociation in which the offender’s denial 

of guilt (e.g., “that four-year-old seduced me”) and dissociated aggression 

(e.g., “but I loved her . . .”) find an eerie twinship with the forensic 

clinician’s struggle around authority and dependence, the legal system’s 

attempt to annihilate all indices of desire, and the public’s prurient attachment 

to sexual offenders, both real and imagined. 

At the macro level, the public engages an endless collusive cycle of 

eroticizing the victims they purport to protect, and protecting actual perpetrators 

(usually family members) while projecting their fear and rage 

onto a wide range of demonized strangers. I will argue that such behaviors 

are the inevitable outcome of parallel identificatory processes, unexamined 

and unchecked. 

Sex and aggression meet at the corner of desire and beg the questions: 

How strong are the cravings and how much will we do to satisfy them? If 

the desires are frustrated by conscience or external controls and we do 

not fulfill them, where do they go? Because we rarely own up to the perversity 

of our own desires, the repressed or dissociated affect surrounding 

them may be projected onto others, where they fuel enactments that 

correspond in some way with what has been cut out from consciousness. 

The current witch hunt for sex offenders is such an enactment, and is 

based, in part, on our own desires as they are modified or transmogrified 

in interactions with a host of intermediaries, including legal and medical 

institutions as well as the media. In this article, I will use clinical illustrations, 

personal anecdotes, legal essays, and research findings to explore 

these defensive maneuvers and their deleterious effects on both private 

lives and public health. 

Terror, Horror, and Awe: A Sullivan Trifecta 

In The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, Harry Stack Sullivan (1953) 

identifies a series of uncanny emotions that articulate the experience of 

“violent anxiety,” which provides a “tributary to the not-me” (p. 314). 

“Not me” is a state of severe dissociation that individuals enter as protection 

against recurrences of the original triggering anxiety. I begin with a 

series of anecdotes that capture some of the ways in which my own dissociative 

process around sexual boundary crossing has come into play 

personally and professionally. 

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the sex monster 499 

1. I was a young mother, exploring the far corners of a newly blossoming 

shopping district in South Beach, Miami. I turned the baby 

stroller onto a somewhat more edgy and deserted side street, although 

a number of storefronts—widely spaced, not so well appointed—advertised 

a punk nirvana: tattoo shops, second-hand 

clothing, clubs still shuttered at 3 p.m. I continued down the block, 

noting only peripherally what looked like the usual scroungers 

leaning against grimy walls painted flamingo pink, the color of 

walls in Miami. As I approached, the men—three, I think—started 

making small catcalls, and tossing out husky invitations, “co’mere, 

baby,” “ooh, sweet, don’t you like me?” and I prepared myself to 

just go past them in the way countless women have learned to do: 

quickly, head down, no eye contact, girding for the laughter that 

would follow me as I moved on, escaping their eyes. However, as I 

walked by, something entirely different occurred, something that 

had never happened to me before. One of the men reached out to 

touch the leg of my sleeping toddler in his stroller. He said “ooh, I 

would like to fuck that” and all the men laughed and agreed, adding 

various things they would like to do to my baby. I moved past, 

quickly, head down, no eye contact, with a level of revulsion I had 

never before felt. I was completely unmoored and strangely terrified, 

despite the fact that no one followed us down the block. 

2. I was playing with my four-year-old. We were very happy, tickling 

each other, traversing the living room on all fours, collapsing finally 

in a fit of laughter that turned into a drained kind of relaxation. I sat 

up after a while and crossed my legs. My son came up behind me 

and began rubbing my neck and kissing it. He started to gently pull 

down the strap of my nightgown to kiss my shoulder and, without 

thinking, I jumped up, breaking his embrace and the mood, shouting 

“Lunch!” I realized immediately that we (or at least I) had just 

had an Oedipal moment, with the kind of seduction that Freud had 

hypothesized. Almost as quickly, I noted with bemusement that my 

instinctive response to this small pleasure at the hands of my young 

boy had been pure horror at the sudden recognition of what I might 

be capable of doing. For a few minutes at least, I could not look my 

son in the eye. 

3. A client comes in one day particularly flustered. Her husband of 

many years has made a confession. He told her, in a stilted fashion 

and with eyes averted, that as an adolescent he had been repeatedly 

molested—coerced into fellatio—by a family friend who some- 

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times babysat. The client’s presentation is filled with contradictions: 

she is awash with compassion, she feels betrayed, she wants to understand 

what seems inexplicable, thinks she finally understands 

something about her husband’s ways that before eluded her, she 

wants to kill the abuser, she wants to kill her husband for not killing 

the abuser. Over the next few weeks, I hear how her marriage is 

coming unglued from his revelation. Mostly, the client is furious 

that her husband seems incapable or unwilling to supply greater 

detail about the molestations. She keeps relating stories about her 

entreaties to him to tell “the whole truth.” It sounds to me like she 

is both forcing him to expose himself and compelling him to talk, 

something he doesn’t want to do but that she is certain is good for 

him. I feel my client is reenacting the abuse scenario with him, 

metaphorically forcing him get naked and do something with his 

mouth. She is so angry at her husband’s refusal to submit to her 

wishes that she withdraws from their sexual relations for a while. I 

wonder if, through this punishment, she is somehow protecting him 

from sex. Throughout this time in our work, I find myself feeling 

concerned for her husband and turned off by her. As a third, I am 

awed by the long reach of the husband’s distant sexual abuse: how 

it has reached into the present and choked off my own desire for 

closeness with my client. 

4. Over the years, I have done a lot of clinical and research work in 

the areas of violent crime, sex crime, and childhood sexual abuse. 

Years ago, when a colleague welcomed me into a new research 

project by throwing open a file of autopsy photos showing a sexual 

mutilation and dared me to look, I remember scanning the picture 

easily. At the time, I felt that being constituted in a particular way— 

not being squeamish or overly sentimental—simply meant that I 

was well suited to the kind of population with whom I had chosen 

to work. I had little negative affective reaction to my work. When 

interviewing offenders, I was intensely interested in their stories 

and felt a great deal of compassion for them, because so many had 

been victims of terrible maltreatment in childhood (Stein, 2007). 

The more research and writing I did, the more I recognized my own 

dissociation around my subjects’ sexual violence. Disturbingly, I realized 

how often the jaw-dropping stories I heard were distilled in 

my brain to their erotic components. Rather than experiencing the 

uncanny emotion of it all, I would fixate on the most perverse sex- 

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ual components of the narratives—not fixate exactly but find them 

in my head: unbidden, intrusive, and, yes, arousing. It felt amazingly 

easy to be inside the head of a sex murderer, I would think, or 

have him inside mine. Consciously, at least, none of the interactions 

“freaked me out” as much as having strangers leer briefly at my 

baby in his stroller, or feeling the momentary blur of propriety and 

desire when my child’s lips grazed my neck. 

The deeply unsettling nature of sex and aggression, and the potential 

for boundary violation they present, constitute much of the core theoretical 

and clinical work of psychoanalysis. Not coincidentally, the same two 

chimeras haunt all the forensic cases with which I am familiar, even 

those in which offenses seem superficially detached from the erotic or 

violent. A history of burglaries committed may predict corporeal invasions 

later on (Schlesinger & Revich, 1999), a naked suicide often has 

special significance (Simon, 2008), and even graffiti has its sexual and 

aggressive undertones (Stocker, Dutcher, Hargrove, & Cooksource, 1972). 

The thought of blatantly sexual offenses, of course, can be a bullet to the 

epicenter of consciousness. Particularly in cultures whose struggle between 

the puritanical and the Dionysian is enacted rather than articulated; 

ideas of bodily integrity and violation arouse powerful, intolerable 

affect, as can be intuited in my four vignettes. 

The processing of those affects involves a number of defensive maneuvers, 

including denial, negation, dissociation, projection, and identification, 

as well as retributive enactments of surveillance, punishment, and 

exile. Projective identification is a particularly effective method of dealing 

with frustration: one simply puts one’s most awful half thoughts and feelings 

into the Other; the subject remains pure whereas the object is contaminated 

(Ogden, 1979). If the recipient of these projections can metabolize 

them on behalf of the one who is overwhelmed (parents do this 

for children all the time), a reflective capacity may develop. But when 

projective identification occurs too frequently or too intensely—or when 

there is no containing other to metabolize the frustration—a psychopathological 

course is set (Bion, 1959). Projective identification is the chief 

mechanism in the production of psychological, physical, and sexual aggression, 

in which the externalization of profound but unformulated internal 

events results in actual harm to another human being (Meloy, 

1988). I contend that our culture provides ever more arousing but forbidden 

sexual objects, which then become vehicles for frustration. Our de- 

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sires (e.g., scatological, pedophilic, sado-masochistic) are projected onto 

others, whether or not they share our fantasies, and certainly independent 

of whether they have acted them out. As Ogden (1979) theorized, 

any reality that does not comport with our fantasized projections is 

quickly dismissed. 

. . . there is a pressure exerted by the projector on the recipient of the projection 

to experience himself and behave in a way congruent with the 

projective fantasy. This is not an imaginary pressure. This is real pressure 

exerted by means of a multitude of interactions between the projector and 

the recipient. (p. 359) 

So intense is the pressure to conform, the inheritor of toxic projections 

may ultimately take on the qualities that are being ascribed to him or her. 

To some extent, we make the Other what we need him or her to be, not 

only in perception but through his or her acquiescence to our demands. 

For example, when we banish men convicted of sex offenses to tents on 

the outskirts of town—as has happened intermittently in Florida, Tennessee, 

and Georgia—and allow them to fraternize only with other sex offenders 

we are virtually asking the men to reoffend (Associate Press, 

2009; City Paper [Nashville], 2010; Samuels, 2011). Their conforming behavior 

is then used to justify our original expulsive actions even though, 

consciously, we may not be aware of how we have helped shape their 

behavior. 

Unconscious influence is at least bidirectional (Stern, 2010, and perhaps 

multidirectional, with each participant simultaneously contributing 

to a series of dissociated enactments that shape others’ thoughts and behavior. 

Writing about supervisor-therapist dyads, Gediman and Wolkenfeld 

(1980) note that an unrecognized affect from the patient-therapist 

dyad reconstitutes itself within the relationship between supervisor and 

therapist, creating an unconscious parallelism that is “truly triadic: a complex 

multidirectional network, or system, and not simply a unidirectional 

process with a set point of origin in the patient” (p. 236). Thus, there is 

not a one-to-one correlation or simple transfer of affective data. Rather, at 

each level of interaction, there may be both displacement and distortion, 

resulting in countertransference reactions that are slightly unhinged from 

their original trigger, elaborated in a deeply personalized way, and that 

evoke slightly more convoluted “parallels” to the originally dissociated 

phenomena. Although, in the psychoanalytic literature, such parallels 

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were first recognized in supervisory relationships, coincident identificatory 

processes among multiple actors are not unique to psychoanalytic 

interactions. Indeed, as Bromberg (1982) remarked, “life is a good example 

of what goes on in psychoanalytic supervision” (p. 92). Just like 

transference, parallel processes can occur in any set of human relationships, 

although they are particularly common in relationships in which 

there are clear lines of authority and in which the subordinate feels inclined 

to “manage the impressions” of the authority figure (p. 139). 

Transactions like these are commonplace between people accused of 

sexual offenses and psychiatric “experts” or forensic therapists, between 

testifying experts and prosecution or defense teams, between lawyers 

and the judiciary, between forensic mental health practitioners and their 

institutional bosses, as well as between those clinicians and the public 

(and the media who shape public perception), and, finally, between the 

public and anyone who is suspected of sexual deviance. 

Seducing the Bogeyman 

I was once asked to be on a panel with Chris Hansen (2007), a television 

correspondent and author of the book To Catch a Predator: Protecting 

Your Kids from Online Predators Already in Your Home. My own book 

on predation (Stein, 2007) had come out the same year as Hansen’s and 

his agent, obviously not having read it, thought we would make a nifty 

team inveighing against the supposed scourge of the century: men who 

sought sex with underage girls. When I explained my more nuanced 

view of things, Hansen’s representative was amazed that, even given my 

position, I wouldn’t want to take advantage of the easy publicity to be 

garnered in a seek-and-destroy mission to root out the “perverts” in our 

midst. 

Online predators are only the latest in a series of “folk devils” (McRobbie 

& Thornton, 1995) identified by the public as an insidious threat to 

children’s welfare. The contemporary sex panic actually began with a raft 

of sex abuse convictions of day-care center workers in the 1980s, starting 

with the infamous McMartin Preschool case. (For a summary of earlier 

sex panics, see Zilney & Zilney, 2009.) Even latter-day wisdom about that 

decade’s raft of indictments—in which overzealous district attorneys 

prosecuted cases with psychological evidence that defied credibility— 

has done little to derail the witch-hunting of supposed sexual offenders, 

even though the targets are no longer day-care workers and kindergarten 

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teachers. At the time of the spectacularly public day-care scandals, social 

scientists (de Young, 1997) speculated that the sudden furor over children’s 

safety with paid caretakers reflected an unacknowledged conflict 

around social changes that had driven women into the labor force in increasing 

numbers during the prior decade (Hofferth & Phillips, 1987). 

(Remember, this era of the working woman also saw the rise of the 

“nanny cam” to surveil domestic workers.) Indeed, as we have become 

more comfortable with women’s employment, nursery school sex panic 

has, for the most part, subsided. However, subject to escalating anxiety 

over new technologies that they cannot easily master, it is no surprise 

that adults are now focused on the Internet as an instrument of sexual 

predation. 

Once again, we concentrate on the bogeyman in the bush (or in this 

case the box), despite the fact that the vast majority of abuse occurs 

within the family. Ironically, the method that law enforcement and its 

handmaidens in media use to catch potential offenders is to enlist as 

many middle-aged White FBI agents (or male journalists) as possible, 

have them pretend on the Internet to be underage White girls, and then 

wait and see how many men are duped into showing up to have sex 

with them. Given the parallel processes involved, it is not surprising that 

our method of capture revolves around tempting the predator into our 

lair through seductive artifice. We become the entrapper, and our intent 

is to trick our victim/potential offender into sudden exposure. We camouflage 

our intentions by mimicking little girls on the precipice of puberty. 

In this convolution, it is difficult to discern who is the quarry and 

who is the avid hunter. These FBI sting operations work on the premise 

that a heinous crime would have occurred without their intervention. 

True, the Internet facilitates communication in both positive and negative 

ways, some of them illegal, but it is not at all clear that online “predation” 

is occurring with a frequency or viciousness that warrants the large-scale 

law enforcement efforts to stem it. 

Just as the invention of the automobile provided would be teen copulators, 

still living with their parents, a new opportunity for sexual indiscretion, 

so the Internet is now a vehicle for sexual activities of various 

kinds, including criminal ones. In a national survey of law enforcement 

agencies about sex crimes initiated online against juveniles (Wolak, Finkelhor, 

& Mitchell, 2004), 385 agencies reported 1,723 such cases. The vast 

majority of victims fit a profile similar to those in statutory complaints. 

Most were young teenagers who had met adults over 25 years of age in 

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online chat rooms. The adults had not lied about their ages or their sexual 

intentions. Ninety-five percent of encounters were nonviolent. Prior 

to meeting, dyads had extensive communications, usually in an effort to 

establish romantic relations. Meetings tended to be multiple and about 

half of the victims said they were in love with those they had contacted. 

The authors concluded that, although media have underscored the vulturine 

quality of online encounters, what we know so far suggests that a 

vulnerable subset of teens engaging in sexual risky behaviors may simply 

have transferred their risk taking from the corner to the computer. Rather 

than a huge new demographic of Internet victims, we have the same old 

population of depressed, insecure teens who act out sexually and are 

therefore susceptible to being manipulated by older adults. 

As with many earlier sex panics, the line may be drawn from parental 

anxiety over sexuality, magnified exponentially by the introduction of a 

new technology with which they are not facile, to the identification of a 

stereotypic villain. Law enforcement responds to that public outcry, not 

necessarily by preventing crime, but by boosting arrest rates in whatever 

way they can. As Andrew Carlon (2007) wrote in “Entrapment, 

Punishment, and the Sadistic State” (2007, p. 1114), “with entrapment, 

punishment becomes an end in itself.” Likewise, in psychological terms, 

punishment may quench neurotic anxiety because it reduces the tension 

associated with the fantasy that something terrible is about to happen. I 

wonder whether FBI stings create the crime we fear in fantasy, and punish 

it in reality, obviating individual mechanisms of defense in the race 

to obliterate moral anxiety. 

The Criminal Justice Response to Sex Offenders 

Over 90% of sex offenses occurring in the home, even ones as serious as 

rape, are handled by Child Protective Services. These state and municipal 

social service agencies generally seek non-court resolutions such as therapy 

or community service for the accused. In many state statutes, offenders 

who have a prior relationship with their victims cannot even be labeled 

as sexual predators, regardless of the seriousness of their crimes 

(Zilney & Zilney, 2009). The Sex Offender Registration and Notification 

Act, which mandates the registration of sex offenders in state and federal 

databases, specifically excludes those who commit incest, even though 

they are responsible for the most frequent type of sexual violation (Zilney 

& Zilney, 2009). Actually, incest is the sexual crime least likely to be 

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prosecuted in criminal court. On the other hand, less invasive sexual 

crimes committed by strangers, such as public masturbation or lewd language 

directed at a minor, are often reported to the police and prosecuted, 

and many low-level offenders are placed on sex offender registries. 

Community notification laws mandate that information regarding 

the location of registered sex offenders be made available to the public. 

In some states, information is broadly disseminated to the public and the 

media, whereas in other states the privacy of offenders is more protected. 

In some states, sex offenders are designated as such on their driver’s licenses 

even if their crimes were committed as juveniles. Disturbing responses 

to what is perceived as a spike in sex crimes, but what more 

likely reflects a trend in increased reporting, have emerged in many 

states. 

Although 10% of the 63,000 sex offenders on Texas’s registry are violent 

predators, the other 56,700 consist of young boyfriends of girls not 

yet 17 (the age of consent in Texas), mentally retarded offenders who 

have exposed themselves, people possessing graphic drawings (not photographs) 

of naked children, vagrants who have urinated in public, and 

even teens caught “sexting” nude pictures of themselves to friends. Registrants 

are barred from living near schools, parks, and homes with young 

children (including their own) without regard to the specific nature of 

their convictions. 

In 2006, the General Assembly of the State of Georgia passed House 

Bill 1059, a law that made it illegal for a sex offender to live or work in 

Georgia (Geraghty, 2007). Attempts to remove low-level offenders from 

the state registry, including those convicted of statutory rape, have all 

failed. The state’s plan to force the mass evacuation of 12,000 registered 

offenders, including some in nursing homes or hospice, has been delayed 

through the intervention of the Southern Human Rights Center and 

the American Civil Liberties Union, who filed suit against the State of 

Georgia. The outcome of the lawsuit is still uncertain. 

Although sexual homicides are very rare, they have always received 

outsized attention and resulted in extralegal remedies. Although the first 

sexual psychopath law, passed in Michigan in 1937, was soon found unconstitutional, 

a raft of similar laws allowing the indefinite civil commitment 

of offenders following the completion of their prison terms have 

survived legal challenges throughout the 1990s, despite the fact that they 

place offenders who have already done their time in double jeopardy 

(Zilney & Zilney, 2009). More worrisome is the fact that many of the 

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newer commitment laws extend to sex-related offenses other than homicide 

and allow mental health practitioners to testify in court about alleged 

mental abnormalities that predispose individuals to committing sex 

crimes, despite almost no empirical evidence that the checklists upon 

which these conclusions are based are empirically valid. Charles Patrick 

Ewing (2011), a veteran forensic expert witness and social policy expert 

intimately involved with the administration of New York State’s recently 

passed Sex Offender Management and Treatment Act (SOMTA), commented 

wryly that the act could have been named the “full employment 

for psychologists act” because of the legions of clinicians suddenly being 

trained to evaluate and treat offenders subject to the conditions of the act 

(p. vii). This clearly poses a conflict, perhaps unconscious, as it benefits 

clinicians to keep diagnosing conditions that provide a revenue stream. 

Recent laws have reinstated castration as a method of treatment for sex 

offenders. Although in some states castration is a voluntary precondition 

of early release, in other states the law requires the court to order chemical 

or surgical castration for offenders, including first time offenders (Zilney 

& Zilney, 2009). In Louisiana, a bill was passed in 2008 allowing the 

courts to impose surgical castration for violent offenses not in lieu of, but 

in addition to, a prison sentence. Not all states require a precastration 

medical or psychological evaluation and many do not outline clear procedures 

for informed consent prior to castration (Scott & Holmberg, 

2003). Although some studies have shown castration to be successful in 

reducing sexual drive and aggression (Berlin, 1989; Lösel & Schmucker, 

2005), in general, the effects of castration are easily reversed with the 

administration of testosterone, for which a black market has already developed 

among more serious offenders. 

The recent raft of draconian laws involving sex offenses are enormously 

expensive to implement, constitutionally weak, unproven as antidotes 

to recidivism or, worse, may actually increase the likelihood that 

offenders will commit crimes (Wakefield, 2006). Moreover, evidence suggests 

that sex crimes committed by strangers actually were declining in 

the years before this crusade against sex offenders began (Ewing, 2011). 

So why are we prosecuting this war? At multiple levels—personal, legal, 

psychiatric, and public—actions and reactions constitute a chain in 

which anxieties about aggressive sexual feelings and relations are externalized 

and projected onto demonized Others. The interpersonal field is 

actually a tetradic system composed of mutually triggering and reinforcing 

subsystems that support the dissociation of individual sexual aggres- 

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sion and then enacts (or contains) that sexual aggression by designating 

populations as deviant, pathological, and criminal. At the personal level, 

we disown our own aggressive desires for eroticized victims paraded by 

the media, allowing us to externalize the true source of danger, which is 

perilously closer to home. We project our fears and hostility onto a conglomeration 

of hastily assembled villains, enlisting mental health workers 

to categorize them and police, courts, and legislatures to eradicate them 

and the sexual demons they represent. 

Co-opting Forensic Psychology 

In stark contrast with work in other psychological settings, it always 

struck me as strange that lacking empathy for one’s patients was not only 

tolerated, but subtly encouraged, in forensic services. Understandably, 

part of the training process for clinicians who evaluate and testify for the 

courts is accepting that their responsibility is not to the patient but to the 

agency or institution requesting psychological assessment (Sattar, Pinals, 

& Gutheil, 2002). The idea of forensic testimony as unbiased truth has 

been promoted by well-known psychiatric experts whose striving for 

“excellence” precludes any subjective feelings that might prejudice court 

proceedings (Dietz, 1996, p. 153). Whether or not this type of clinical 

neutrality is actually possible in the courtroom is questionable. More important, 

I worry that the dispassionate (or sometimes even persecutory) 

stance required for legal assessment may infect practitioners’ engagement 

in treatment when they work clinically with offenders, which many 

do when they are not earning money testifying. 

Testifying, in addition to providing extra income for psychiatrists and 

psychologists, allows for a public demonstration of one’s mastery of 

one’s field. It brings recognition and respect, in contrast to forensic clinical 

work, which is often unrewarding, given the multiple difficulties 

faced by clients and the inadequately supported institutions charged with 

their care. Affectively speaking, testifying can supply a quick thrill or satisfy 

an exhibitionistic longing versus the lengthy struggle of therapy with 

patients from this population (Schetky & Colback, 1982). In court, unlike 

in treatment, countertransference issues can be easily avoided. Indeed, 

Park Dietz (1996), a famous forensic psychiatrist, sees the ethical demands 

of forensic testimony as adversarial to the usual self-examination 

that accompanies psychological work. However, although Dietz calls to 

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forensic practitioners to pursue truth by rising above the countertransference, 

Ruszczynski (2008) outlines the folly of that pursuit. 

I think it is generally understood that working analytically with violent and 

perverse patients requires long periods where much of the work is done in 

the countertransference. By this it is meant that the therapist has to be consistently 

receptive to, and be the repository for, much of the patient’s internal 

world. Because these types of patients have not developed a sufficient 

internal space to manage, contain, and process their anxieties and impulses, 

the external space in the world around them comes to be used for 

evacuative purposes. Hence, they act on the world around them and 

generate reactions in the external world. This is why they come to the attention 

of the criminal justice system or psychiatric services. (Ruszczynski, 

2010, p. 23) 

In fact, negotiating the countertransference is both more fraught and 

more important with offenders than with other types of patients. Imbroglios 

can arise around a number of countertransference positions: the 

therapist may be overly moralistic or punitive, too compliant, unrealistically 

idealistic, split off and abandoning, or totally enmeshed. Often, 

treatment providers have a disproportionate sense of responsibility and 

live in fear that the offender, if set loose, will again violate the law (Lion 

& Leaff, 1973). There may be a “perverse excitement” (Purcell, 2006) on 

the therapist’s part (this has often been true for me, even when acting in 

a purely research role), arising from male therapists’ abashed or dissociated 

admiration for the offender’s sexual exploits or female therapists’ 

fantasy of partnering in a sado-masochistic dyad (Stein, 2007). Temple 

(1996) notes how, in forensic settings, when patients act out, therapists 

often join in, taking the part of one of the patient’s projected internal 

objects. By not reflecting on the countertransference, clinicians may fuel 

chaotic emotions instead of containing them. 

Protter and Travin (1983, p. 223) point out that running from the transference 

and the countertransference produces diagnoses that categorize 

patients as either “mad” (psychopaths) or “bad” (malingerers). Strausburger 

(1986, p. 197) suggests that the “myth of untreatability” arising 

from these diagnoses is both a cause and an effect of countertransference, 

rather than being a true assessment of any of the offender’s inherent 

qualities. Because violent people have so often been mistreated, 

neglected, and abandoned in childhood, their inner landscape may be 

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bleak—in some cases, it may even seem devoid of animate objects. The 

clinical presentation feels empty; clinicians anxious to avoid the oppressive 

nothingness may assume their patients have no inner dynamics, i.e., 

nothing to work with. This “less than meets the eye” position is exemplified 

by Meloy (1988), who, writing of work with the criminal psychopath, 

notes that the most insidious countertransference reaction is “the 

assumption of [the patient’s] psychological complexity” (p. 331–332) 

when, according to Meloy, she or he is only imitating complexity in order 

to manipulate the therapist. Although Meloy cautions that a finding of 

psychopathy should not imply that the patient is necessarily untreatable, 

he does say that the more severe the disturbance, the more likely it is that 

psychotherapy will fail. Although this may be true, one must wonder if, 

as Strausburger contends, therapy fails because it is only superficially 

entertained, thereby both justifying and reinforcing the idea that certain 

offenders cannot be helped. This bias becomes an excuse for not investigating 

the possibility that the clinician’s withdrawal from the treatment 

is a function of countertransferential rage, terror, hate, or boredom, rather 

than a cool assessment of the patient’s amenability to treatment. Indeed, 

the therapist may unwittingly be taking on the role of the neglectful caretakers 

in the violent patient’s past (Glasser, 1998). Particularly in individuals 

where the longing for care is dissociated, the clinician may collude 

in the idea that no care is needed (Dimen, 2001). 

This attitude of indifference is further instantiated by administrative 

rules in forensic settings that, of necessity, must prioritize workplace 

safety over any particular therapeutic mission (Mercer, 2008). The desire 

for relational security, expressed through both institutional regulation 

and clinicians’ own unexamined countertransference, may hinder formulations 

by therapists that pierce dissociation, thereby auguring conflict. In 

this sense “the management of risk becomes a superego activity” (p. 81), 

which sometimes indicates a parallel processing of the offender’s own 

overly punitive superego, formed in response to parental maltreatment in 

childhood. In addition, forensic practitioners are simultaneously introjecting 

and projecting the posture of attorneys, judges, the criminal justice 

system, and forensic services, as well as the public pressure to punish 

sex offenders. 

It is interesting that this parallel process can be observed both in the 

undertreatment of truly dangerous offenders and the overdiagnosis of 

juvenile offenders. As the laws have expanded to include underage perpetrators, 

many adolescents have paid an exorbitant price for engaging 

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in sexually inappropriate behaviors that, in previous generations, may 

have been thought of as sexual experimentation, young love, or problems 

of impulse control rather than sexual deviance. Others, who have 

engaged in more serious sexual violations, may be reenacting abuse scenarios 

in which they were the young victims. Clearly, this latter group 

should not be revictimized yet again by overzealous psychiatrists and 

prosecutors. 

The Public: Turning Away and Toward 

Writing about psychoanalysts’ fascination with the darker side of human 

activity, Robert Winer (2001) speculated that, “unable to be evil, we 

might feel enlivened by being in the presence of evil” (p. 620). Evil certainly 

gets our juices flowing. Popular entertainments have always been 

studded with horrific villains that reify our own worst fantasies of the human 

capacity to harm. Many stories of evil have a seductive aura or even 

make an outright appeal to lurid sexual interest. 

In recent years, the lines between real and fictional accounts of crime 

have blurred, with media often ascribing almost supernatural powers of 

destruction to assorted evildoers, including terrorists, child murderers, 

and serial killers. Sexual “deviants,” “psychopaths,” and “predators” come 

close to topping this list. Cases with the highest profiles tend to feature 

nubile young girls and fish-eyed older men; few cases involving elderly 

victims are highlighted despite the fact that they are often chosen by offenders 

because of their greater physical vulnerability (Safarik, Jarvis, & 

Nussbaum, 2002). Newscasters like Nancy Grace have made a cottage 

industry of following the abductions of young White girls, whereas others, 

like Chris Hansen, have capitalized on the public’s vicarious interest 

in eyeballing the men who seem likely candidates to take advantage of 

those same young girls. Knoll (2008) likens the making of such “profit 

making deviance” to 15 th -century witch hunts, where the intensified 

search for wrongdoers led to an increased labeling of innocents that, in 

turn, appeared to confirm the wisdom of the original panic: “One of the 

lessons of the witchcraft hysteria in England was that once a definition of 

deviance has been officially sanctioned, the potential for abuse becomes 

virtually unlimited” (p. 107). 

Evil is becoming more popular every day. The concept is growing in 

psychiatry, where forensic psychiatrists Michael Welner (2007) and Michael 

Stone (1998) have introduced depravity and evil scales, respec- 

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tively, for evaluating offenders. Among the public, interest in labeling 

and punishing sexual deviance grows more insistent at the same time 

that sexual voyeurism is cultivated by marketers who eroticize sexual 

vulnerability and violation. One wonders, just who is being punished in 

the ricocheting projections? To paraphrase Freud in Totem and Taboo 

(1913), are our own deep but disowned desires producing alarmists, in 

the guise of prophets, who mirror our sinfulness and, from that guilt, 

create overly punitive commandments about what to do with those 

condemned? 

For example, in an undergraduate course on gender that I teach, where 

students are asked to bring in cultural representations of sex and gender, 

they consistently bring in advertisements featuring women not only in 

various stages of undress but pictured in situations where they are either 

about to be or have already endured some kind of physical or sexual 

brutality. We are transfixed by the visage of innocence breached; we can 

simultaneously imagine ourselves as victim and perpetrator without having 

to endure the traumatic consequence of either state. Most of us have 

been victims of someone at some time, and objectifying others allows us 

to reprocess and perhaps master that trauma. It is less likely that we have 

engaged the sadistic side of the equation. It is more than a vicarious 

thrill. As Baumeister (1997) notes, “the face of evil is no one’s real face— 

it is always a false image that is imposed or projected on the opponent” 

(p. 62). Punishing is an outlet for the guilt over our own titillation. 

Discussion 

I began my career working with, and writing about, violent perpetrators 

(Stein, 2007). I became known for that particular expertise, and so I got 

more work with that population. It became a comfortable professional 

niche. Then, more recently, I began working with a new population: 

victims (Stein, 2011; Stein, in press) although anyone who works with 

either of these groups has likely worked with the other, whether or not 

that is ever made explicit. I noticed something right away when I started 

to write and speak about victims: people are much more fascinated when 

you say you work with perpetrators. We have all been victims of one 

thing or another probably, but have likely disowned the parts of ourselves 

that wish to do harm. In the presence of perpetration, we may be 

repelled but we are also excited. In an odd way, people who have done 

awful, lurid, sexual things to others are not just more interesting to both 

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lay and professional folk, they are downright sexy. This sexiness rubs off 

on the clinician or researcher working with them, as if by osmosis the 

offender’s pulsing id comes to define the practitioner’s own ignoble motives 

and porous boundaries. And we are inexorably drawn to those who 

seem to resist the commands of the superego, those who go where we 

cannot. As I exclaimed when meeting my first forensic mentor, who had 

worked for four years with serial killer Ted Bundy, “I just want to touch 

the hand that touched the hand!” That mentor herself had made a similar 

overexcited kind of parapraxis about Bundy. Asked if Bundy was appealing 

(meaning his sentence) she misconstrued and blurted out “Yes, very!” 

I tell you these things to illustrate how riled and roused we are by the 

thought of sexual aggression and how easily even professionals lose 

their footing around the issue of sex crime and sexual offenders. We are 

easily seduced. And fearing our own excitement, we project an inflated 

version of desire onto designated others. We become paranoid and excessively 

punitive toward one group while deflecting attention from 

other groups that are, perhaps, more deserving of outrage. We vilify 

teens who “sext” but ignore sexual assaults against wives by husbands, 

or immigrant workers by those in power who are differently classed or 

raced. However, as Sullivan (1953) opined, this kind of dissociation is 

not simply a matter of “keeping a sleeping dog under anesthetic” (p. 

318). We expend a tremendous amount of energy to not see the crimes 

of those closest to us, and to criminalize the activities of those we choose 

to label threatening. A case in point is the differential, some might say 

deferential, treatment of incest by courts, clinicians, and the public. 

The forceful exclusion of incest, as well as other forms of nonstranger 

sexual crimes, from state sex offender statutes reinforces traditional notions 

of the family space as one best kept private. Indeed, the reluctance 

of law enforcement to pursue criminal cases for incest may stem from the 

fact that tremendous family pressure is brought to bear against complainants, 

who so fear that their truth telling will destroy the home that many 

withdraw their cooperation, severely hampering prosecution. Psychology 

has colluded with this stance by historically aiding and abetting the 

willful ignorance of incest. Psychoanalysis, in particular, for a long time 

protected incestuous perpetrators by dismissing as fantastical women’s 

memories of early intrafamilial sexual trauma because to acknowledge 

the ubiquity of incest could potentially undermine social equilibrium 

(Herman, 1992). Today, psychologists most often treat sexual activity 

within households as a kind of family dysfunction even though, as man- 

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dated reporters, they must notify law enforcement if a child is in danger. 

Reported cases are most often handled by child protective agencies that 

send offenders for treatment rather than prosecuting them criminally. 

What happens in the family, stays in the family court: another defensive 

loop closed. 

A similar defensive splitting can be seen in the centuries long reluctance 

to recognize sexual abuse by clergy. A raft of recent lawsuits had 

finally put an end to that dissociative reply to threat, or so I thought. Not 

so quickly: I had to chuckle recently when the second phase of an enormous 

research study into the causes of the sex abuse scandal in the 

Catholic Church found that the sexual abuse of minors by priests was an 

aberration that peaked in the 1960s, reflecting, according to the authors, 

a general change in social mores around other behaviors, such as premarital 

sex and divorce. 

Social and cultural changes in the 1960s and 1970s manifested in increased 

levels of deviant behavior in the general society and also among priests of 

the Catholic Church in the United States. Organizational, psychological, 

and situational factors contributed to the vulnerability of individual priests 

in this period of normative change. (Terry, Leland Smith, Schuth, Kelly, 

Vollman, & Massey , 2011, p. 2) 

What strikes me in the report is the degree to which criminal acts toward 

minors are attributed to sexually libratory changes accruing around positive 

transformations in the status of women, the growth of reproductive 

freedom, and changing attitudes toward sexual orientation. Perhaps the 

study’s conclusions provide greater evidence of our collective shame 

around sexuality than it does of priestly motivations. After all, the abuse 

of children by those in power has been going on for millennia across 

cultures; it seems a prima facie absurdity to link its reported spike to 

sexual freedoms gained in the United States during this circumscribed 

time period. After-the-fact theorizing that blames the general relaxation 

of sexual regulations for individual crimes and institutional cover-ups 

perhaps reflects the endless loop of introjections and externalizations 

characterizing our reaction to disturbing sexual acts. It protects us from 

the recognition that, given unlimited power over others, we too might 

satisfy the dark desires that lurk in our fantasies. 

Freud (1913 taught that where “wishful impulses were repressed, their 

libido is transformed into anxiety” (p. 87) and it is our anxiety and subse- 

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quent dissociation, I believe, that fuels the almost maniacal need to punish 

someone, anyone, for similar yearnings. That dissociation umbrellas 

family, friends, and trusted institutions while leaving alien others out in 

the rain. To acknowledge the danger close to us is far too threatening; if 

we cannot feel safe in our homes, our church, and with our friends we are 

undone in the most profound sense of the word. The split between familiar 

people (with their unknown dangers) and unfamiliar people (whose 

dangers we are convinced we know) facilitates what Sullivan (1956) described 

as the selective inattention on which our security depends. 

I have tried in this article to explore the tetradic levels of processing 

that are catalyzed by imbrications of sex and aggression. The recursive 

psychological situation both the public and forensic practitioners find 

ourselves in with sex offenders promotes both the willful ignorance of 

widespread criminal activities on the one hand and overly punitive, displaced 

responses to minor sexual infractions on the other. 

Religious institutions condemn masturbation and then turn a blind eye 

(so to speak) on the sexual abuse of minors. The criminal justice system 

puts mentally ill flashers on sex offender registries for life but chooses 

not to prosecute incestuous fathers. The media broadcasts preteen beauty 

queens but feigns shock and outrage when they are stalked or attacked. 

Psychologists diagnose evil without appreciating its contours, or recognizing 

its shadow in the mirror. 

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Abby Stein, Ph.D., is associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal 

Justice. She teaches in the college’s Interdisciplinary Studies Program, 

where she also oversees a fellowship program in collaboration with the 

Vera Institute of Justice. She is a contributing editor with the Journal of 

Psychohistory and has published over 30 articles and chapters on psychoanalytic, 

forensic, and contemporary social issues, as well as a book, 

Prologue to Violence: Child Abuse, Dissociation, and Crime (The Analytic 

Press, 2007). 

John Jay College of Criminal Justice 

899 Tenth Avenue, Room 432E 

New York, NY 10019 

(212) 237-8453 

astein@jjay.cuny.edu 

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