Law and the Unconscious

Winner of the American Psychoanalytic Association's 2018 Courage to Dream Book Prize

Winner of the Sharon Harris 2018 Book Award, given by The University of Connecticut for the best book published in the humanities.


"Anne Dailey takes up the controversial relation of law and psychoanalysis in a book of great cogency and importance. She goes far beyond the standard quarrels that divide the two fields and makes a reasoned and forceful case for psychoanalysis as coming to the aid of the law-not opposing it-in a richer account of human autonomy and responsibility."-Peter Brooks, Princeton University, author of Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature

"In this wise and wide-ranging book, Anne Dailey breathes fresh life into the psychoanalytic study of law. She makes the best case I know for the continuing relevance to law of the humanistic discipline of psychoanalysis and reminds us of the humility that must always accompany the law's fearful exercise of power when it relies on a conception of human agency that the psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious teaches us is incomplete."-Anthony Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law, Yale Law School

"In this masterpiece of scholarship, Anne Dailey argues that legal theory and our system of justice have been missing an essential ingredient: how the human mind works. Her synthesis of psychoanalysis and the law offers nothing short of a paradigm shift in how we approach some of the most challenging and controversial legal questions of our time."-Jordan Smoller, Professor Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School and author of The Other Side of Normal


"With a rare combination of erudition, insight, and vision, Anne Dailey compellingly argues for a reintegration of legal and psychoanalytic thinking about human behavior. This is a provocative, historically grounded study with great contemporary relevance."-Susanna Blumenthal, author of Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture