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The criminal investigation of a so-called crime of passion as a narrative construction The dossier prepared for a criminal prosecution is, to say the least, second-hand information. It gathers together at a distance the defendants’and the witnesses’words, subjecting them to the constraints of a rigorous system with its own priorities. The contradiction thus created is perhaps insurmountable : the Code of Criminal Procedure specifies that the investigation has as its goal the positivist notion of « the revelation of the truth ». However, one may well consider that, on the contrary, what is constructed in this process should be analyzed as a fiction with several authors (the police, the prosecution, psychiatric medicine, and the individual subjects who represent them), as a necessarily legendary biography of absent subjects. Nevertheless, this legend tells a truth, or some truths, of enormous interest to the social psychologist and the clinician.