Evaluation

• Gender bias - androcentric


  • Freud - women should develop a weaker superego; little reason for anyone to identify with women due to their low status
  • Electra complex's solution is less satisfactory
  • We should see more women as criminals than men - this is not the case
  • Therefore, Freud's work suffers from alpha bias
• Research support for overdeveloped superego


  • Goreta - Freudian-style analysis of 10 offenders
  • Diagnosed disturbances in superego
  • Each offender experienced the need for punishment - possibly due to overdeveloped superego
  • Therefore, this research supports the role of psychic conflicts and overdeveloped ego as a basis for offending
• Counterpoint to Goreta


  • If correct, we should see harsh parents raising children with overwhelming guilt
  • Evidence suggests the opposite - Kochanska et al.
  • Therefore, this questions the relationship between harsh parents and feelings of excessive guilt
• Lack of falsifiability


  • Applications to crime are not open to empirical testing due to the focus on the unconscious
  • Arguments such as inadequate superego can only be judged at face value due to the absence of supporting, scientific evidence
  • Therefore, psychodynamic explanations are regarded as pseudoscience and contribute little to our understandings of crime