Fighting like a wildcat

Abstract

This article draws upon a hermeneutic tradition of interpreting a cultural testimony like The Jack-Roller, and the text is revealed from a psychoanalytically inspired perspective. The unconscious meaning of the text is approached through the reader's irritations and reactions to the tale by a method that is called 'scenic understanding'. Finally we see different passages or scenes throughout the narrative being connected via a basic conflict in Stanley's life: his struggle for social recognition as a man and his longing for love and care as a child overlap in the ambivalent position of perpetrator and victim. This is related to a not-yet-contained experience of loss and mourning which fundamentally structures what Shaw calls Stanley's 'selfjustificatory attitude'. Key Wordsgender identity • hermeneutic interpretation • psychoanalysis and cultural critique • researcher subjectivity 'A handicapped start': irritations and rejections from the reader's perspectiveThe beginning of the The Jack-Roller, an autobiography written in the early 1920s under the supervision of sociologist Clifford R. Shaw, reminds the reader of the story-telling approach used in fairytales. The hero manages to Theoretical Criminology

Annihilation anxiety and crime

“…They are those who seek considerable personal space, yet feel very alone. Some would be like Stanley, Clifford Shaw’s subject in The Jack-roller : a ‘self-defender’, a young man with an intense fear of abandonment who nevertheless ran away from home repeatedly (Bereswill, 2007; Burgess, 1930; Gadd and Jefferson, 2007). Practitioners working in the field of domestic violence intervention would recognise such qualities among those who mistreat their partners but feel they cannot live without them, who expend much emotional energy trying to repair relationships they repeatedly undermine and damage (Gadd, 2003; Wolf-Light, 1999).…”

Understanding Violence in the ‘Society of Captives’: Sykes Meets Bourdieu in Prison

“…In what follows, biography is approached from a psychoanalytical perspective as a ‘multi‐layered synthesis; a synthesis of conscious and unconscious impulses and past and present experiences’ (Bereswill 2004a, p.14; cf. Bereswill 2007; Gadd and Jefferson 2007; Koesling and Neuber 2007). This concept is in contrast to the current widespread assumption of biography research that views biography as a mere result of piled‐up experiences and as a linear and chronological development (for example, Schulze 2006; Schütze 1984).…”

“…The interviews were analysed by a combination of objective hermeneutics (Oevermann et al . 1979) and deep hermeneutics (Bereswill 2007; Klein 2004; Lorenzer 1986). For a critical discussion of the methodological extent of both methods see Neuber (2009). …”