When she filed a complaint against her daughter’s father to denounce the violence that they both suffered, Deborah* still had “confidence” in the justice system. But the psychological assessment requested by the juvenile judge, to “describe the possible repercussions caused by the facts”, changed everything. “The psychoanalyst who received my daughter felt that I was in a position of omnipotence with respect to her, which could have influenced the critical discourse that she held about her father”, testifies Deborah, even though this expert never spoke with her. In his report, which The Express consulted, another observation devoid of context is intriguing: “The little girl has probably not completed her castration complex.”
This theory, developed by Freud in 1933, maintains that girls, wronged by not having a penis when they are children, feel resentment towards their mother before getting closer to their father, to have their phallus. “It’s completely astonishing to write such a thing,” fumes Deborah, who had to do some research at the time to understand the meaning of the sentence. “What does this have to do with the violence my daughter was a victim of?” asks the mother. The following days, Deborah nevertheless learns that the judge orders joint custody. In the placement order, to which The Express had access, several passages from the expert report are cited by the magistrate.
In France, psychoanalysis remains very present in the courts: among the 134 professionals of the National Company of Psychological Experts (Cnepsy), 28% refer to it. The discipline invented by Freud is nevertheless based on concepts that have never been scientifically validated and whose use in a judicial context can prove problematic. “These experts do not define the terms they use, such as Oedipus, the unconscious or narcissism, and regularly deploy absurd interpretations in family matters to demonstrate that a parent is dangerous,” denounces Marie Guellec, psychologist and legal expert at the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal.
Asked by plaintiffs to provide expert comments – a document designed to clarify or highlight the flaws in a report already produced – the latter recalls formulations that are often obscure among supporters of psychoanalysis: “The Oedipal triangulation is undetermined and unrecognized”; “It is very important for Madame to undertake psychotherapy to help her mentally deliver her baby”; “We note the presence of an omnipotent pregenital maternal image.”
Lack of regulation
More serious, according to Marie Guellec: this case where an expert considered that a mother was lying when she accused her husband of having raped their child, based on a… drawing. “The little boy had drawn a damaged and scratched-out house. According to the expert, it was a question of him symbolically reproducing what he perceived in his mother,” illustrates Marie Guellec, specifying that the expert recommended sole custody to the father, a recommendation followed by the judge. “In the majority of cases, magistrates, unable to evaluate the quality of an expert report, rely on the opinions of psychologists or psychiatrists,” continues the specialist.
If these theories are also present in the courts, “it is because the practice of psychology is not subject to any regulation”, deplores Mickaël Morlet-Rivelli, psychologist and legal expert at the Reims Court of Appeal. In France, applications to register on the lists of legal experts are simply evaluated by a college of magistrates, and not by peers. Unlike other countries, psychological experts are also always free in their methodology. Since 1993, for example, the United States has required its experts to justify the scientific reliability of the theories used – have they been tested in real conditions or subject to publication? –, but also that a margin of error be indicated when psychometric tests are used.
“I am wary of speeches based solely on science. For me, the theoretical orientation of an expert, even if it is psychoanalytical, is not a problem,” maintains Alain Dumez, the honorary president of the Cnepsy. According to him, the absence of psychologists on the registration juries on the lists is “a good thing”, because it “avoids conflicts of interest”. “The difficulties come rather from training in psychology, where there is sometimes very little clinical practice,” he assures. According to estimates by Mickaël Morlet-Rivelli, 74% of French psychological experts are not trained in criminology. And although a decree has imposed training in expertise in order to register on the lists since 2023 – again, controlled by magistrates – nothing is said about its content. Result: legal experts sometimes have less knowledge than non-experts or the general public, particularly on understanding how memory works, according to an article published in the journal The Psychological Year.
Traumatic repression
Among experts of psychoanalytic persuasion, this observation is exacerbated. One Freudian notion, in particular, is widely used despite its lack of reliability: that of “traumatic repression”. In a column entitled “Justice and amnesia”, broadcast on France Culture on June 4, 2014, psychoanalyst Caroline Eliacheff explains for example: “It is indisputable that sexual traumas – but they are far from being the only ones – can be repressed from consciousness, or even denied as if they had never existed.” In 2005, the American professor of psychology at Harvard University, Richard. J. McNally, demonstrated in a reference work, Remembering Trauma, that most traumatic memories were well remembered by victims, including in the long term. Those who claim to remember their trauma years later could be the subject of false memories induced by therapies, as attested by several studies.
“A jury in a court of law, convinced that memories of childhood abuse can be repressed, could be biased and convict an accused on the basis of recovered memories, without considering the possibility of false memories,” warns Olivier Dodier, a researcher in cognitive psychology at the University of Nîmes. Conversely, “traumatic repression” can sometimes concern the accused, trapping him in an impossible dilemma: “Either he remembers his crime and is guilty, or he does not remember it because he represses it,” explains Nicolas Rochat, a researcher in psychocriminology at the University of Grenoble Alpes.
The emblematic example is that of Loïc Sécher, a farm worker convicted of rape in 2003 and then cleared seven years later, after his accuser retracted his convictions. his legal expertise tinged with psychoanalysis, we read that “the difficulties of remembering [du crime] evoked by [Loïc] were to be linked to a repression aimed at preventing the subject from finding himself confronted with a transgressive image of himself.”
Unreliable tests
Another problem is the overuse of the Rorschach test, named after its creator, Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who was a supporter of Freudian theories. This test, presented as “a test of interpretation of fortuitous forms”, consists of asking a subject to describe what he perceives in plates of symmetrical inkblots, half of which show colors. Studies on the Rorschach, manydemonstrate that it lacks reliability, with experts who use it tending to “over-pathologize” their patients. “It ultimately gives more information about the person doing the assessment than about the person being assessed,” adds Marie Guellec, who is regularly confronted with reports where this test is used.
Like this expert psychologist with a psychoanalytic approach, according to whom the dragon seen by a child in one of the inkblots represented “an omnipotent maternal figure”, demonstrating that “the mother had too much influence over the child”. “In reality, the little boy had spoken of “Bilbo and the Dragon”, a reference to the novel The Hobbit Tolkien. But the expert missed it because he was not familiar with the work,” explains Marie Guellec. In this case, the judge nevertheless decided to remove custody from the mother.
In larger cases, however, the Rorschach test is often used, as is the Rosenzweig test, a test developed by a psychologist convinced that he had experimentally confirmed Freud’s theory of repression, and whose reliability is also disputed. Between 2004 and 2018, Monique Olivier, accused of complicity in murder – she will be sentenced to life in prison in 2023 – was assessed using these tools. Worse, Philippe Herbelot, the psychologist and psychoanalyst responsible for measuring her intelligence, is said to have used a sixteen-year-old outdated version of Westchler Adult Intelligence Scale (Wais), the reference test, according to Mickaël Morlet-Rivelli. Result: while the first established that Monique Olivier was “gifted”, with an intelligence quotient (IQ) of 131, the second, asked for a counter-expertise, on the contrary measured with two colleagues that the intelligence of the accused was close to average, with an IQ of 92.
“If we say that she is gifted, the manipulator theory is perfectly consistent with the image that public opinion has of her, regardless of the fact that there is no scientific basis,” criticizes Mickaël Morlet-Rivelli. Contacted, Philippe Herbelot did not respond to our requests. But a magistrate, who has followed the case closely, is categorical: “As long as there is no transparency and control over the work of experts, there will continue to be controversies. And the loser, in the end, will always be the litigant.”
* The first name has been changed.
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