INDEX 503
CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY.
INTRODUCTION.
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, Choulant’s collection of the
latter’s, “Quaestiones,” is still valuable. Criminal psychology was
developed further by Hoffbauer,[4] Grohmann,[5] Heinroth,[6]
Schaumann,[7] Münch,[8] Eckartshausen,[9] and others. In Kant’s 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
Friedreich’s[12] well-known text-book (cf. moreover V. Wilbrand’s[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 Näcke,[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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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