Reimaging ‘the Self’ in Criminology: Transcendence, Unconscious States and the Limits of Narrative Criminology
| Author | Ben Laws |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620919102 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620919102
Theoretical Criminology
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480620919102
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Reimaging ‘the Self’ in
Criminology: Transcendence,
Unconscious States and
the Limits of Narrative
Criminology
Ben Laws
University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract
Notions of ‘the self’ in criminology are rarely explored or defined, which is surprising
given how pervasively the term is used. According to narrative criminology, the self is
generated and moulded by the stories we tell; our identity emerges through narrative scripts
and these stories motivate future action. But this understanding of selfhood is quite narrow.
This article attempts to widen it by separating selfhood into three categories: ‘the reflexive
self’ (the person we think we are); ‘the unconscious self’ (things we do not know that shape
us); and ‘the experiencing self’ (the in-the-moment, living and breathing feeling of being
alive). The article begins with a critical engagement with the field of narrative criminology
which tends to address ‘the reflexive self’ somewhat in isolation. Then a number of
findings in criminology, psychology and theology are presented which reveal alternative
notions of selfhood. This includes engaging with theological accounts that can be described
as transcendent or transpersonal. Second, psychoanalytic research notes how our behaviour
is often motivated by unconscious processes that are hard to reconcile with traditional
notions of selfhood. There is a call to bring these different ‘selves’ into dialogue and to
draw cleaner distinctions between them. Increasing our understanding of selfhood helps
us to think more clearly about key criminological debates, such as the causal mechanisms
undergirding adaptation and desistance from crime.
Keywords
Embodiment, emotions, narrative criminology, narratives, self, self-identity,
unconscious
Corresponding author:
Ben Laws, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 9DA, UK.
Email: bwrl2@cam.ac.uk
919102TCR0010.1177/1362480620919102Theoretical CriminologyLaws
research-article2020
Article
2022, Vol. 26(3) 475–493
Introduction
In their separate books, psychologists Abraham Maslow and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
locate the same curious finding. That is, during so-called ‘peak-experiences’ (Maslow,
1962/2012) or when entering ‘flow states’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991) individuals consist-
ently experience a loss of ‘normal’ selfhood. Both authors grapple with the seeming
contradiction that during moments when people feel most virile, engaged and immersed,
they appear to have trouble narrating any sense of tangible ‘identity’. As Maslow
(1962/2012: 99–100) puts it, in these moments:
The creator becomes one with his work being created, the mother feels one with her child, the
appreciator becomes the music or the painting, or the dance, the astronomer is ‘out there’ with
the stars [. . .] [and that seemingly] the greatest attainment of identity, autonomy, or selfhood is
itself simultaneously a transcending of itself, a going beyond and above selfhood. The person
can then become relatively egoless.
Csikszentmihalyi (1991: 42) attempts to resolve this apparent paradox by claiming: ‘it is
when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that
we learn to become more than what we were’. These findings set an important tone for
this article and pose a challenge to criminologists who conceive of selfhood as a narra-
tive enterprise. This argument begins with a critical engagement with two claims often
made about the self in narrative criminology. First, that experience is always storied; and
second, that narratives are constitutive accounts that motivate continuity or change in
offenders’ lives. The main contention here is that the relationship between narratives and
self-change has been inflated slightly, and that narrative claims rest on a reductive under-
standing of the self as the ‘ego’ (i.e. the person we think we are). This aspect of selfhood
has been termed ‘the reflexive self’ (Seigel, 2005) because it is a conscious process that
attempts to reimagine, create, elaborate and reimage oneself. But outside of criminologi-
cal circles it is widely acknowledged (see Kahneman, 2011; Seigel, 2005) that the self
has other dimensions that can pull in opposing directions.
In the second part of this article, then, there is an attempt to widen the approach to
selfhood by focusing on two aspects that are less well articulated in criminology. The
first is sometimes called ‘the experiencing self’ (Kahneman, 2011), which refers to the
in-the-moment feeling of being alive on the one hand, and to more transcendent experi-
ences on the other. Alongside the work of psychologists and theologians, criminological
connections are established here (e.g. Katz, 1988; O’Donnell, 2014), and the claim is that
direct experience has an immediacy that typically precedes narrative expression. From
this juncture, the discussion turns to the idea of ‘the unconscious self’, and the sugges-
tion is that our selfhood is routinely shaped by less-than-rational forces. The idea that our
behaviour ‘speaks’ in ways that our words do not has a few criminological precedents,
with key publications from Gadd and Jefferson (2007) and Gilligan (1996) setting the
scene. While it is imprecise to claim that narrative criminologists rely on literal testimo-
nies alone (see Fleetwood, 2016; Presser, 2016; Verde, 2017), there remains a lack of
explanation about how issues of self-change are implicated in this process. This article
concludes by arguing that reimagining the self in narrative criminology involves bring-
ing these different aspects of selfhood into dialogue, and examining how doing so
476 Theoretical Criminology 26(3)
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