ABSTRACT
Within criminology the psychosocial approach is most commonly associated with the work of Gadd and Jefferson, whose book Psychosocial Criminology highlighted the lost legacies of psychoanalytic thinking in criminology and revealed what the discipline might gain from re-engaging with concepts derived from Kleinian and object-relational psychoanalysis. Using case studies, Gadd and Jefferson illustrated the potential of the psychosocial approach to explain anomalous features of the perpetration of domestic and sexual violence, the fear of crime and racist crime, as well as the homophobic hate crimes of Clifford Shaw's infamous Jack-Roller, 'Stanley'. The psychosocial approach is often identified as a key perspective in writing about hate crime, domestic violence and desistance because it is conceptually well equipped to critically interrogate issues of context and motive without requiring the researcher to side with those whose politics they do not agree with, whose social demographic characteristics they cannot share, or whose behaviour they cannot condone.
