Jungian Crime Scene Analysis: An Imaginal Investigation

This study examines how crime scene analysts, or criminal profilers, tacitly apply a synthesis of Jungian interpretations of active imagination and countertransference. This work clarifies this construct, countertransferential active imagination or imaginal work, through the archetypalist concept of image. For its data, the study presents two distinct bodies of literature. The first is an extensive review of Jungian writings and subsequent archetypalist formulations. The second source of literature is the autobiographical texts by two criminal profilers, John Douglas and Robert Ressler.

Jungian Crime Scene Analysis makes use of a range of methodological considerations. Beyond a fundamentally hermeneutic approach, a novel formulation is developed, rhizomic research, which values declaring over answering questions. Utilizing these methodologies, this study presents sexual homicide perpetrators as having disorders of imagination, imagopathy, seen through imaginal deficiencies such as failure of empathy, rigid fantasies, and unresolved projections. This research challenges assumptions that individuation is purely healthful.