Criminal Psychology by Hans Gross (10 best books of all time .txt) 📕

hard to do and still harder to maintain. But in reality the presentation is not so wonderful, and taken altogether, is not at all skilful; whoever wants to manifest anger must make the proper gestures (and that requires no art) and when he makes the gestures the necessary conditions occur and these stimulate and cause the correct manifestation of the later gestures, while these again influence the voice. Thus without any essential mummery the comedy plays itself out, self-sufficient, correct, convincing. Alarming oneself is not performed by words, but by the reciprocal influence of word and gesture, and the power of that influence is observable in the large number of cases where, in the end, people themselves believe what they have invented. If they are of delicate spiritual equilibrium they even become hypochondriacs. Writing, and the reading of writing, is to be considered in the same way as gesticulation; it has the same alarming influence on voice and general appearance as the other, so that it is relatively indifferent whether a man speaks and acts or writes and thinks. This fact is well known to everybody who has ever in his life written a really coarse letter.

Now this exciting gesticulation can be very easily observed, but the observation must not come too late. If the witness is once quite lost in it and sufficiently excited by the concomitant speeches he will make his gestures well and naturally and the artificial and untrue will not be discoverable. But this is not the case in the beginning; then his gestures are actually not skilful, and at that point a definite force of will and rather notable exaggerations are observable; the gestures go further than the words, and that is a matter not difficult to recognize. As soon as the recognition is made it becomes necessary to examine whether a certain congruity invariably manifests itself between word and gesture, inasmuch as with many people the above-mentioned lack of congruity is habitual and honest. This is particularly the case with people who are somewhat theatrical and hence gesticulate too much. But if word and gesture soon conform one to another, especially after a rather lively presentation, you may be certain that the subject has skilfully worked himself into his alarm or whatever it is he wanted to manifest. Quite apart from the importance of seeing such a matter clearly the interest of the work is a rich reward for the labor involved.

In close relation to these phenomena is the change of color to which unfortunately great importance is often assigned.[77] In this regard paling has received less general attention because it is more rare and less suspicious. That it can not be simulated, as is frequently asserted in discussions of simulation (especially of epilepsy), is not true, inasmuch as there exists an especial physiological process which succeeds in causing pallor artificially. In that experiment the chest is very forcibly contracted, the glottis is closed and the muscles used in inspiration are contracted. This matter has no practical value for us, on the one hand, because the trick is always involved with lively and obvious efforts, and on the other, because cases are hardly thinkable in which a man will produce artificial pallor in the court where it can not be of any use to him. The one possibility of use is in the simulation of epilepsy, and in such a case the trick can not be played because of the necessary falling to the ground.

Paling depends, as is well known, on the cramp of the muscles of the veins, which contract and so cause a narrowing of their bore which hinders the flow of blood. But such cramps happen only in cases of considerable anger, fear, pain, trepidation, rage; in short, in cases of excitement that nobody ever has reason to simulate. Paling has no value in differentiation inasmuch as a man might grow pale in the face through fear of being unmasked or in rage at unjust suspicion.

The same thing is true about blushing.[78] It consists in a sort of transitory crippling of those nerves that end in the walls of small arteries. This causes the relaxation of the muscle-fibers of the blood vessels which are consequently filled in a greater degree with blood. Blushing also may be voluntarily created by some individuals. In that case the chest is fully expanded, the glottis is closed and the muscles of expiration are contracted. But this matter again has no particular value for us since the simulation of a blush is at most of use only when a woman wants to appear quite modest and moral. But for that effect artificial blushing does not help, since it requires such intense effort as to be immediately noticeable. Blushing by means of external assistance, e.g., inhaling certain chemicals, is a thing hardly anybody will want to perform before the court.

With regard to guilt or innocence, blushing offers no evidence whatever. There is a great troop of people who blush without any reason for feeling guilty. The most instructive thing in this matter is self-observation, and whoever recalls the cause of his own blushing will value the phenomenon lightly enough. I myself belonged, not only as a child, but also long after my student days, to those unfortunates who grow fire-red quite without reason; I needed only to hear of some shameful deed, of theft, robbery, murder, and I would get so red that a spectator might believe that I was one of the criminals. In my native city there was an old maid who had, I knew even as a boy, remained single because of unrequited love of my grandfather. She seemed to me a very poetical figure and once when her really magnificent ugliness was discussed, I took up her cause and declared her to be not so bad. My taste was laughed at, and since then, whenever this lady or the street she lives in or even her furs (she used to have pleasure in wearing costly furs) were spoken of, I would blush. And her age may be estimated from her calf-love. Now what has occurred to me, often painfully, happens to numbers of people, and it is hence inconceivable why forensic value is still frequently assigned to blushing. At the same time there are a few cases in which blushing may be important.

The matter is interesting even though we know nothing about the intrinsic inner process which leads to the influence on the nervous filaments. Blushing occurs all the world over, and its occasion and process is the same among savages as among us.[79] The same events may be observed whether we compare the flush of educated or uneducated. There is the notion, which I believed for a long time, that blushing occurs among educated people and is especially rare among peasants, but that does not seem to be true. Working people, especially those who are out in the open a good deal, have a tougher pigmentation and a browner skin, so that their flush is less obvious. But it occurs as often and under the same conditions as among others. It might be said for the same reason that Gypsies never blush; and of course, that the blush may be rarer among people lacking in shame and a sense of honor is conceivable. Yet everybody who has much to do with Gypsies asserts that the blush may be observed among them.

Concerning the relation of the blush to age, Darwin says that early childhood knows nothing about blushing. It happens in youth more frequently than in old age, and oftener among women than among men. Idiots blush seldom, blind people and hereditary albinos, a great deal. The somatic process of blushing is, as Darwin shows, quite remarkable. Almost always the blush is preceded by a quick contraction of the eyelids as if to prevent the rise of the blood in the eyes. After that, in most cases, the eyes are dropped, even when the cause of blushing is anger or vexation; finally the blush rises, in most cases irregularly and in spots, at last to cover the skin uniformly. If you want to save the witness his blush you can do it only at the beginning—during the movement of the eyes—and only by taking no notice of it, by not looking at him, and going right on with your remarks. This incidentally is valuable inasmuch as many people are much confused by blushing and really do not know what they are talking about while doing it. There is no third thing which is the cause of the blush and of the confusion; the blush itself is the cause of the confusion. This may be indubitably confirmed by anybody who has the agreeable property of blushing and therefore is of some experience in the matter. I should never dare to make capital of any statement made during the blush. Friedreich calls attention to the fact that people who are for the first time subject to the procedure of the law courts blush and lose color more easily than such as are accustomed to it, so that the unaccustomed scene also contributes to the confusion. Meynert[80] states the matter explicitly: “The blush always depends upon a far-reaching association-process in which the complete saturation of the contemporaneously-excited nervous elements constricts the orderly movement of the mental process, inasmuch as here also the simplicity of contemporaneously-occurring activities of the brain determines the scope of the function of association.” How convincing this definition is becomes clear on considering the processes in question. Let us think of some person accused of a crime to whom the ground of accusation is presented for the first time, and to whom the judge after that presents the skilfully constructed proof of his guilt by means of individual bits of evidence. Now think of the mass of thoughts here excited, even if the accused is innocent. The deed itself is foreign to him, he must imagine that; should any relation to it (e.g. presence at the place where the deed was done, interest in it, ownership of the object, etc.) be present to his mind, he must become clear concerning this relationship, while at the same time the possibilities of excuse—alibi, ownership of the thing, etc.—storm upon him. Then only does he consider the particular reasons of suspicion which he must, in some degree, incarnate and represent in their dangerous character, and for each of which he must find a separate excuse. We have here some several dozens of thought-series, which start their movement at the same time and through each other. If at that time an especially dangerous apparent proof is brought, and if the accused, recognizing this danger, blushes with fear, the examiner thinks: “Now I have caught the rascal, for he’s blushing! Now let’s go ahead quickly, speed the examination and enter the confused answer in the protocol!” And who believes the accused when, later on, he withdraws the “confession” and asserts that he had said the thing because they had mixed him up?

In this notion, “you blush, therefore you have lied; you did it!” lie many sins the commission of which is begun at the time of admonishing little children and ended with obtaining the “confessions” of the murderous thief.

Finally, it is not to be forgotten that there are cases of blushing which have nothing to do with psychical processes. Ludwig Meyer[81] calls it “artificial blushing” (better, “mechanically developed blushing”), and narrates the case of “easily-irritated women who could develop a blush with the least touch of friction, e.g., of the face on a pillow, rubbing with the hand, etc.; and this blush could not be distinguished from the ordinary blush.” We may easily consider that such lightly irritable women may be