Psychoanalysis and Profiling

When you think about psychology most often the first thing that would pop up on everybody's mind is Psychoanalysis and Sigmund Freud, of course the founding father. As a simple introduction to Psychoanalysis, Freud believed that people can be cured by making unconscious thoughts and motivation into conscious resulting in insights, this is commonly used for people with depression and anxiety disorder.

For a Pyschoanalysis process to work a psychiatrist would have a patient lie in a couch to relax, and the doctor sits beside him taking notes while they told him about their dreams and childhood memories. It is a lengthy process and could take up several week to years. According to the article i've read Psychoanalyis by Saul Mcleod in simplypsychology.org

 "Anxiety disorders such as phobias, panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder are obvious areas where psychoanalysis might be assumed to work"

 So now we've tackled a bit about psychoanalysis, one thing that baffles me is Profiling and how it is related to psychoanalysis and yet uses a different set of formulas, it is like a different world; in psychoanalysis you have a patient to work with, you ask him/her questions and she/he responds but in profiling or in criminal profiling to be specific, you have to deal only of the evidences presented to you by the "patient", you do not ask questions, pieces of the answer are given to you, that's what make profiling a bit more interesting. In an article i've read entitled Criminal profiling: the reality behind the myth by Lea Winerman for apa.org, they described how profiling work and how it can be useful in solving unsolvable cases, like for Jack the ripper case, they used crime scene clues to make predictions.

There are four phases or questions that profilers uses to gain insight of the personality or behavior of the murderer, the first of it would be what fantasy or plan, or both, did the murderer have in place before the act? What triggered the murderer to act some days and not others? This is more of what influenced that suspect to do such thing. What type of victims did the murderer selects? What were the method and manner? In here it could be anything from shooting, stabbing, strangulation or something more brutal. Body disposal is another fact to consider, Lastly is the postoffense behavior, most of serial killers can't be caught unless they wanted to be caught, this is the time the murderer leaves clues or certain style for them to get recognized. Criminal profiling are usually done by psychiatrist or those with psychology major since it tackles more of the behavior of the suspect.