The Secret that Guilty Confessions Fail to Disclose

Abstract

Theodor Reik (1), in his Compulsion to Confess, presents a case study of a man who admits to a crime he did not commit. Reik indicates that the man's confession is actually valid, insofar as the confessor unconsciously believes that he has to castigate himself because he desired to do precisely what the murderer did. Consequently, his self-abnegation is impelled from his unconscious realization that he is no better in his heart than the murderer was by his actual deed. His sense of guilt was unconscious, Reik tells us, because nothing is more injurious to our self-regard than evidence of our dark urges.Reik's explanation is based upon the psychoanalytic contention that reverses the conventional view of thought and deed. This notion claims that psychical reality, not material reality, is the basis for psychological life. Consequently, dreams and "forbidden" fantasies can be of such illicit tenor that they can exceed even the import of actual villainous deeds; and therefore, they must be repressed from conscious awareness.In my work with destructive clients (2, 3), I have found suspect the notion that our deepest fear is that we are malevolent. By the use of intuitive insights about the nature of confession in the writings of three master literary psychologists and from clinical evidence in a case study of a client who confessed to a crime, I seek here to show the actual psychodynamics at work in the confession of a crime.