Recent Book: The Psychiatrist's Approach: The Psychology of Crime
| Date | 01 August 1965 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X6503800811 |
| Published date | 01 August 1965 |
| Subject Matter | Recent Book |
In some respects, to use a lawyer's
phrase,
Moriarty"
.. . applies well-
settled principles to new sets of
circumstances". Many will cherish
the hope
that
it
will continue to do so,
but
they will share with the Editor, in
his preface, some concern lest the
increasing complexity, exceptions and
so on which seem to bedevil the
lawmakers and certainly bemuse
those who have to put the sometimes
curious results into operation, should
not only add to the difficulties of
policing but undermine the value of
an excellent publication which has
become an institution.
H. J.
PONSFORD
THE PSYCHIATRIST'S APPROACH
DAVID
ABRAHAMSEN:
The Psychology
of
Crime. Science Editions. John Wiley
&Sons. I5s.
This
book
can be recommended to
police officers and others who are
concerned about the motivations and
personalities of criminals; to those
who believe
that
to detect a criminal
and to cure him of his criminality is
preferable to detecting the criminal
and by merely punishing and failing to
cure ensuring that he will need to be
detected on many subsequent
occasions.
Once the terminology of the
book
is
mastered-and
this is not difficult,
although the average British reader
does not have the preoccupation with
psychiatry
nor
the superficial familiar-
ity with psychiatric terminology which
the average American reader is
presumed to
have-the
reader will
find the arrangement of the book and
the style in which it is written lucid,
persuasive and attractive. The index
is very good and footnotes and source
references are avoided by the admirable
use of a
"notes"
section at the end
of the volume.
The book deals most ably with the
diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of
criminality and devotes separate chap-
ters to the problems peculiar to
different classes of
criminals-to
the
general criminal, both chronic and
acute, to the sex offender, to the
murderer and to the juvenile delin-
quent. The police reader will find
much that is thought-provoking in the
chapter on
"Criminal
Law and
Psychiatry", where the theoretical and
practical validity of several definitions
of legal insanity is examined.
Perhaps most controversial is Dr.
Abrahamsen's approach to the problem
of criminality in the individual, an
approach which reduces criminal be-
haviour to a mathematical formula
expressing the relationship between the
three factors of criminalistic tendencies,
the total situation and the individual's
inherent resistance to temptation.
387
Alayman is not competent to
assess the validity or value of this
approach, though Dr. Abrahamsen's
manipulation of the formula through-
out the book illuminates and instructs.
The layman may be forgiven, however,
for doubting the basic validity of the
"science" of psychiatry when the
statement that
"44.3
per cent. of the
non-delinquents examined were
mentally
abnormal",
at p. 83, is
followed by the statement, at p. 121,
that,
"the
borderline between normal
and abnormal is at times so fine that
nobody really can say where it
is".
It
is refreshing to find an
author
in
this field who admits that a great
mistake was made when
"Freud's
basic idea
that
much in us that is now
suppressed or repressed should be
released, was misinterpreted to mean
that
any suppression is
bad",
but it
does nothing to strengthen the lay-
man's trust in the science. One is
disappointed, too, to find the
author
dismissing the mistake by saying
that
"this
change of policies (the mis-
interpretation of Freud's basic idea)
took place at a time when much of
our
concern was directed towards the
needs of the
child".
If
one accepts Dr. Abrahamsen's
views on the causation of criminality
then one must accept one of his main
conclusions-that
the prevention of
criminality is largely a problem of
educating the persons who now
malform the developing personalities
of the children in their
care-parents,
guardians, teachers, etc. He makes
many broad suggestions which might
lead to a solution to the problem;
one could wish
that
he had been
more specific and had gone further
towards producing ablueprint of
an educational system which would
appreciably lessen the chances of
mental abnormalities arising from
environmental causes. A.
WHITTLE
August 1965
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