The Secret that Guilty Confessions Fail to Disclose

In my work with destructive clients, I have found suspect the notion that our deepest fear is that we are malevolent. By use of intuitive insights about the nature of confession in the writings of three literary psychologists—Edgar Allan Poe, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoevsky—and from clinical evidence in a case study of a client who confessed to a crime, I seek to show the actual psychodynamics at work in the confession of a crime.