Criminal Psychology: A Manual for Judges, Practitioners, and Students

Criminal Psychology: A Manual for Judges, Practitioners, and Students

OF all disciplines necessary to the criminal justice in addition to the knowledge of law, the most important are those derived from psychology. For such sciences teach him to know the type of man it is his business to deal with. Now psychological sciences appear in various forms. There is a native psychology, a keenness of vision given in the march of experience, to a few fortunate persons, who see rightly without having learned the laws which determine the course of events, or without being even conscious of them. Of this native psychological power many men show traces, but very few indeed are possessed of as much as criminalists intrinsically require. In the colleges and pre-professional schools we jurists may acquire a little scientific psychology as a philosophical propaedeutic, but we all know how insufficient it is and how little of it endures in the business of life. And we had rather not reckon up the number of criminalists who, seeing this insufficiency, pursue serious psychological investigations. One especial psychological discipline which was apparently created for our sake is the psychology of law, the development of which, in Germany, Volkmar[1] recounts. This science afterward developed, through the instrumentality of Metzger[2] and Plainer,[3] as criminal psychology. From the medical point of view especially, Choulants collection of the latters, Quaestiones, is still valuable. Criminal psychology was developed further by Hoffbauer,[4] Grohmann,[5]{2} Heinroth,[6] Schaumann,[7] Mnch,[8] Eckartshausen,[9] and others. In Kants time the subject was a bone of contention between faculties, Kant representing in the quarrel the philosophic, Metzger, Hoffbauer, and Fries,[10] the medical faculties. Later legal psychology was simply absorbed by psychiatry, and thereby completely subsumed among the medical disciplines, in spite of the fact that Regnault,[11] still later, attempted to recover it for philosophy, as is pointed out in Friedreichs[12] well-known text-book (cf. moreover V. Wilbrands[13] text-book). Nowadays, criminal psychology, as represented by Kraus,[14] Krafft-Ebing,[15] Maudsley,[16] Holtzendorff,[17] Lombroso,[18] and others has become a branch of criminal anthropology. It is valued as the doctrine of motives in crime, or, according to Liszt, as the investigation of the psychophysical condition of the criminal. It is thus only a part of the subject indicated by its name.[19] How utterly criminal psychology has become incorporated in criminal anthropology is demonstrated by the works of Ncke,[20] Kurella,[21] Bleuler,[22] Dallemagne,[23] Marro,[24] Ellis,[25] Baer,[26] Koch,[27] Maschka,[28] Thomson,[29] Ferri,[30] Bonfigli,[31] Corre,[32] etc.{3} ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 1320
Author: Gross, Hans
Release Date: May 1, 1998
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Translator: Kallen, Horace Meyer, 1882-1974