ABSTRACT
A major problem with Petrażycki’s theory of law is that he used the terms “imperative” and “attributive” as primitives. As a result, his notion of law as consisting of combinations of representations or perceptions of behaviors and imperative-attributive emotions is premised on unclear foundations. Further, Petrażycki ignored the contribution that psychoanalysis made to these issues. In this chapter, Edoardo Fittipaldi argues that imperative-attributive, or jural, emotions should be understood as anger; an emotion that Fittipaldi reconstructs psychoanalytically. This approach makes it possible to, first, clarify the relation between Petrażycki’s jural emotions and Rudolf von Jhering’s sense of right (Rechtsgefühl) and, second, merge Petrażycki’s theory of law with psychoanalytical research on the sense of entitlement and with Lonnie Athens’s radical interactionism.
