Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘crime’ is not treated as a simple legal or sociological category but as a site of profound psychological and moral complexity. Jung’s seminars on Zarathustra press the most radical claim: that the deeper one investigates a crime psychologically, the less tenable any final moral judgment becomes, for crime reveals itself as inevitable, even meaningful, within the full context of a life’s unfolding. This does not abolish moral function but renders it paradoxical. Hillman, approaching from archetypal psychology, situates criminality within the daimon theory, reading destructive acts as perversions of the soul’s calling—the ‘bad seed’ as a monothematic literalism of the acorn’s deeper purpose. Edinger links primal crime to cosmogonic myth: incarnation itself is framed as an originary transgression against divine order, establishing crime as an archetype of separation. The political-philosophical strand, represented here by Hannah/Arendt, elevates crime to the category of ‘crimes against humanity’—offenses against human plurality itself, not merely against particular victims. The addiction literature (Hari, Maté, Alexander) treats criminalization as a political and therapeutic problem, arguing that the labeling of addiction as crime produces the very social devastation it purports to address. Across all registers, the corpus insists that crime must be read psychologically, historically, and structurally before it can be judged.
The more you investigate the crime, the more you feel into it, the less you are capable of judging it, because you find when you go deep enough, that the crime was exceedingly meaningful, that it was inevitable in that moment.
Jung argues that deep psychological investigation of crime dissolves the capacity for moral judgment, revealing inevitability and meaning where conventional ethics sees only culpability.
, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, 1988thesis
crimes against humanity are not just ‘inhuman acts’… neither are they similar to more familiar crimes like expulsion or mass murder. Rather, they threaten the very possibility of humanity… an attack upon diversity as such.
Drawing on Arendt, this passage defines crimes against humanity as attacks on human plurality itself, distinguishing them categorically from ordinary crimes and grounding them in philosophical anthropology.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981thesis
Choosing to put a chemical into your body should not be a crime, and being addicted should not be a crime… The feeling that a drug addict is a sick person rather than a criminal was already present in the society.
Hari argues that criminalizing addiction is a political and therapeutic error, citing Portugal’s decriminalization as evidence that treating addiction as illness rather than crime produces better outcomes.
, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015thesis
The fall of the soul from its immortal state into bodily form is also often linked with a primal crime. For instance, Empedocles describes immortal spirits condemned to incarnation because of violence and perjury.
Edinger identifies a mythic-alchemical tradition in which incarnation itself constitutes a primal crime, linking matter, evil, and the soul’s descent into embodied existence.
, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis
the dilemma of how to reconcile traditional doctrines of criminal law (based on the idea of state sovereignty) with the postsovereign condition exemplified by crimes against humanity was particularly salient here.
This passage identifies the juridical crisis posed by crimes against humanity: they cannot be adequately addressed by criminal law premised on state sovereignty, demanding a new post-sovereign legal framework.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
A criminal psychopath was the consequence of biophysical forces and endowed with a particular physiology shared also by geniuses and artists and strongly influenced by sexual libido.
Hillman surveys hereditary and physiological theories of criminality, critiquing their determinism while noting their historical entanglement with both psychiatry and political terror.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
Television offers the daimon that light, that celebration. If TV can be blamed for serious criminality, it is less because of what it shows than simply because it shows, affording instant worldwide recognition, full exposure.
Hillman reframes serious criminality through the daimon theory, arguing that the desire for recognition—not media content—is what links celebrity culture to violent crime.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
her skepticism toward group concepts and her dynamic concept of plurality enable Arendt to deliver a trenchant account of the crime of genocide as constituting a ‘crime against the human condition’ as such.
Arendt’s philosophical pluralism, as interpreted here, allows her to reconceive genocide not as a crime against a specific group but as a crime against the ontological condition of human diversity.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
‘Petty crime’ is anything but petty to economically stressed families who must make up the losses… Petty crime is a cause as well as an effect of dislocation.
Alexander situates petty crime within a causal loop with social dislocation, arguing that addiction-driven property crime both reflects and deepens the psychosocial poverty from which addiction arises.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
prevention of the demonic must be based in the invisible ground ‘above the world,’ transcending the very idea of prevention itself… inviting the daimon in the acorn to move out from the hard-shell confines of an only-bad seed.
Hillman proposes that the archetypal prevention of criminal demonic expression lies not in behavioral control but in seducing the daimon toward its fuller, undistorted expression.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
Criminalization and prevention are not identical—if anything, the first undermines the other… current drug laws against possession make drugs more readily available to potential new users than decriminalization would.
Maté argues that criminalizing drug possession is counterproductive as a preventive measure, as prohibition inflates the illicit market and increases rather than reduces access.
, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, 2008supporting
Most crimes of sexual assault still go unreported, as victims recoil from the public shaming they will almost certainly encounter if they come forward… sexual assault still remains effectively a crime of impunity.
Herman identifies the systemic failure of legal institutions to hold perpetrators of sexual violence accountable, framing the gap between crime incidence and prosecution as a social-structural problem.
, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting
a compensation, a payment imposed in consequence of a crime, in order to redeem oneself. At the same time it is a means of reconciliation. Once the crime is over and paid for, an alliance becomes established.
Benveniste traces the Indo-European linguistic roots of crime’s legal redress, revealing that compensation for crime was originally conceived as a path to reconciliation and restored social alliance.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973supporting
Jack Katz, Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions of Doing Evil.
This bibliographic reference points toward Katz’s phenomenological account of crime’s subjective allure, a text Hillman draws upon for his analysis of criminal motivation in the preceding chapter.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996aside
All jurors would watch the same scenes, with exactly the same behaviors onscreen, but through affective realism, they would come away with only perceptions, not facts, constructed in line with their own beliefs.
Barrett illustrates how affective realism and ideological bias shape jurors’ interpretation of evidence, undermining the legal system’s pretense of objective fact-finding in criminal proceedings.
, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017aside