AbstractIn this paper the author shall try to illuminate the advantages of using a psychoanalytical model in our understanding of the forensic patient. There is the problem that sometimes the judicial and psychoanalytic approaches appear to be incompatible, though both are inherently intertwined with societal mores through the nature of anti‐social, delinquent actions usually associated with such cases. Many of the ideas at the root of this paper are from Karl Menninger, with whom the author trained in the early 1960s. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.