Psychoanalysis

Psychological questions are integral to crime fiction - whether to establishing motive or to diagnosing the root causes of a 'sick society'. The role of the investigator, even in more traditional crime fiction, is often constructed in ways that suggest parallels with the enquiries of the psychoanalyst: that is, both are probing into the secrets of the past in an effort to throw light on the sources of trauma and destructiveness. The 'psychology of the criminal', of course, comes particularly to the fore in those crime novels in which we are brought very close to the thought processes of a deranged mind (as we are, for example, in the first-person psychopath narratives of Jim Thompson). Julian Symons, in Bloody Murder, takes this focus on psychological issues to be one of the defining features of the crime novel (or 'noir thriller') as distinct from the classic detective novel (the 'whydunit' as opposed to the 'whodunit').

The following extract, the opening paragraphs of Naomi King's 'The Noir Thriller: Male Identity and the Threat of the Feminine' (which can be read in full within the crimeculture site), offers a good summary of some of the key issues involved in psychoanalytic readings of crime novels:

'Issues of identity, sexuality and gender are all key themes associated with the genre of noir. In his book In A Lonely Street, Frank Krutnik describes noir films and fiction as pervaded with an ‘excessive and obsessive’ sexuality that deviates from and challenges social norms, exploring the darker areas of the psyche. Krutnik also argues that noir texts are dominated by a sense of masculinity in crisis with their prevalence of male figures who are ‘both internally divided and alienated from the culturally permissible (or ideal) parameters [sic] of masculine identity, desire and achievement’ in a post-war world (Krutnik, p.xiii). This destabilizing effect is posited as a major factor in constituting the typical noir text’s atmosphere of anxiety and disorientation.

'Closely tied to the issue of masculinity is that of female sexuality. In many noir novels and films, females and femininity are represented as Other, subversive and threatening. Sometimes this threat is overt, manifested explicitly for example in the figure of the femme fatale whose voracious sexuality has the terrifying power to entrap and doom the male protagonist. At other times it is not so obvious, but remains a latent presence lurking beneath the surface of the text. Noir fiction of the thirties, forties and fifties often seems to share with much ‘high’ Modernist writing this obsession with the female Other, Freud’s ‘dark continent’, expressed through fear and loathing of female sexuality represented symbolically through images of engulfing slime, darkness and fluidity. A good example here would be Conrad’s classic Modernist thriller The Secret Agent, in which the city of London becomes a frighteningly unknowable ‘slimy aquarium’ at night, and is linked associatively to the figure of the hysterical murderess Winnie'.'

Some additional extracts on psychoanalysis and popular psychology in the noir thriller:

'In the 1940s noir thrillers, criminal impulses are generally motivated in terms of individual malaise or psychic dysfunction. Any social critique is ostensibly deflected. Yet at the same time, this very stress upon psychic disorder - and the alienation from social living - often suggest a breakdown of confidence in the defining and sustaining cultural regimentation of identity and authority.' (Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street, pp. 54-5)

'Crime writers do in fact use psychology as motivation but also as a warehouse of archetypes, a Bullfinch's Mythology or Ovid's Metamorphoses, "the kind of mythology that might emerge if Oedipus, endowed with Freudian knowledge about himself, still saw fit to enact his myth." Freudian and other psychiatric concepts work less to explain motives than to provide conventions and effects. Their use enables the crime writer to engage us in the nervous center of the genre where an uncomfortable identification merges into recognition of an appalling otherness, an otherness that is a dangerous potential for the self, its carnival mirror image.' (Tony Hilfer, 'Deviant Impulses: Incest and Doubling,' in The Crime Novel, p. 14)

The essays these extracts are taken from are ones you would find generally useful: Krutnik's 'Film Noir and the Popularisation of Psychoanalysis,' in In a Lonely Street and Hilfer's 'Deviant Impulses: Incest and Doubling,' in The Crime Novel.

Some of the characteristic questions posed in psychoanalytic criticism of crime fiction are (http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/subjects/public_policy/pce2070/secure/critcrime.html):