Narrative Criminology and Psychosocial Criminology: Similarities, Differences and a Tentative Integration

• In Event: Narrative Criminology II: Gender and Psychosocial Dynamics

Abstract

In recent years, two new approaches have bloomed in criminological thinking: narrative criminology and psychosocial criminology. Both have argued for a new consideration of offenders’narratives, based on qualitative and ethnographic research, collocating (or re-collocating) the author of crime at the center of the criminological inquiry. Both approaches confer a much bigger importance than before to the author’s narrative about life events and the reasons for his/her choices, and describe the reality of crime from his/her point of view. The present contribution tries to show the similarities and the differences between them, first looking for concepts that could constitute a “bridge” between the two (e.g. sociological concepts of “account”, or “self-presentation”, and psychodynamic concepts of “self” or “conscious mind”), and subsequently exploring the ways in which both approaches try to go “beyond” what the subject has narrated.

Author

• Alfredo Verde, University of Genoa