Positive and Negative Attitudes

This presentation, then, has offered an account whereby these lawyers ultimately came to take out the pain and displeasure caused by the challenges to their self­image upon their clients.

That one party was lying can still be offered as an answer. That I might be lying remains with those of you reading; while, I recognise that, the supposition lawyers were lying in the interviews could still be said to carry at least some weight. Lawyers might have grown to resent their clients, blaming them for things that were not their fault, then lied to me that this was a healthy relationship in order to protect their careers and standing. As before, though, this understanding still appears somewhat impulsive to me. More pertinently, though, it would make little sense for lawyers to use the interviews to feed me the received line. They will have been aware that I had borne witness to what occurred behind the scenes over the many months of preceding participant observation. Rather, the alternative offered in this research is that lawyers could hold to both positive and negative attitudes simultaneously, not necessarily conscious of this distinction or its contradictory nature.

At this point, Jung's approach to attitudes seems to offer promise in understand­ing the situation we have seen. For Jung (2009: 414), an attitude can be understood as, ‘the readiness of the psyche to act or react in a certain way'. This aspect of his theory is not far removed from the position of mainstream psychology, as repre­sented by Bohner and Wanke (2002). However, where this more controversial, psy­choanalyst diverges, moving beyond even Freud, is in Jung's (2009: 415) supposition that attitudes are generally constituted in pairs: one conscious, the other uncon­scious, a distinction which means that, ‘consciousness has a constellation of con­tents different from that of the unconscious, a duality particularly evident in neurosis'.

The theory of Jung (2009) offers insights which, as with Freud's (1989c) ego, might be appropriated in lay terms and used as a heuristic device to provide some explanatory potential for the divergent accounts of these lawyers' attitudes. The lawyers conceivably suffered from a neurosis, a split between their consciously espousing positive attitudes to clients and unconsciously disseminating negative attitudes. This can be characterised as their distinguishing between the client and a client: the general and the particular. The client was that experienced in the abstract, viewed in theoretical terms through the prism of access to justice and thus repre­senting the social agenda discussed in the formal interviews. On the other hand, a client was the concrete experience, that client dealt with in the here and now, associ­ated with all the pain and displeasure of their position; that which they resented throughout the participant observation. When thinking objectively, detached and reasoning, the lawyer still held positive attitudes towards the client, as in the inter­views. It was only when lost in the moment, acting on subjective impulses that the lawyers displayed these negative attitudes towards a client.

I only ever wanted to do crime. I wanted to do law but crime was the only area that inter­ested me, I liked the idea of working with people. I have quite an altruistic attitude, so I wanted to make a difference - I wanted to help the underdog. It's just something I've grown up with, my mum did a lot of charity work, I worked with a lot of disadvantaged people when I was growing up, and I suppose I just wanted, in my own little way, to make a difference.

(Laura, solicitor, Swining MacSage, INT)

In the participant observation, she revealed negative attitudes:

I hope this man gets prison. He's a nasty piece of work. You didn't hear that! But, urgh, thinking he can talk to me like that.

(Laura, solicitor, Swining MacSage, IC)

I'm quite glad he hasn't turned up; he's a whinging little git.

(Laura, solicitor, Swining MacSage, IC)

I've had enough of him, fuck him. Someone else can do him, I don't care.

(Laura, solicitor, Swining MacSage, IC)

For Laura, the social agenda and willingness to work for the client appeared strong; however, her resentment and frustration at having to deal with a client seemed just as powerful. Despite this, in the formal interview, she came across as comfortable with her practice and at peace with herself.

This process, clearly, required another act of rationalisation on the part of these lawyers. In order to reconcile the negative attitudes they displayed as they went about their everyday business with the loftier ideals positive attitudes represented, the lawyers engaged in a fantasy. The lawyers could, thus, treat clients they encoun­tered without respect, displaying derision and a willingness to dismiss and degrade them with ease but, as long as they felt they were doing their job to the best of their abilities, they could claim positive attitudes.

Rather than lying in a conscious, and malicious or duplicitous manner, it is pos­sible they were lying without realising it, to themselves and thereon to me. Regardless of whether I went native, the lawyers appear to have seen me as native by the time of the interviews. They spoke to me as they would speak to one another, on the inside. displaying a professional attitude in theoretical terms but quite the contrary in real­ity. As such, when provided with the time and space to muse upon their attitudes towards clients, they thought in the abstract, and convinced themselves that the abstract was more than just a myth. However, I also saw the concrete, and that there was a disparity between the two.

Whether or not the lawyers realised it, then, they displayed negative attitudes to their clients. This must be indicative of a strained lawyer-client relationship, and so highly concerning to those who believe in the principle of access to justice and the rights of defendants to be afforded dignity. More so, with these clients so reliant on the lawyers to realise their right to a fair trial, the prevalence of these attitudes raises daunting questions about the further impact these attitudes may have had on their practice. In his discussion of ‘cop culture', Waddington (1999: 302) notes the dis­tinction between the canteen and the street; the negative attitudes police display in the former should not be assumed to have an impact on what they do on the latter. In this research, the lawyers have been shown to disseminate their most negative attitudes while actually on their street. In either case, though, that negative attitudes can be identified should raise the question of how they might thereon be manifested in behaviour. This is the topic to which any such interested research need apply itself next. So, it is that in the following chapter I move on to consider one aspect of that behavior: how lawyers managed contact and access.