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

Such expressions of anger against oneself often finish with fainting. The reason of the latter is much less exhaustion through paroxysms of rage than the recognition and consciousness of one’s own helplessness. Reichenbach[96] once examined the reason for the fainting of people in difficult situations. It is nowadays explained as the effect of the excretion of carbonic acid gas and of the generated anthropotoxin; another explanation makes it a nervous phenomenon in which the mere recognition that release is impossible causes fainting, the loss of consciousness. For our needs either account of this phenomenon will do equally. It is indifferent whether a man notices that he cannot voluntarily change his condition in a physical sense, or whether he notices that the evidence is so convincing that he can not dodge it. The point is that if for one reason or another he finds himself physically or legally in a bad hole, he faints, just as people in novels or on the stage faint when there is no other solution of the dramatic situation.

When anger does not lead to rage against oneself, the next lower stage is laughter.[97] With regard to this point, Darwin calls attention to the fact that laughter often conceals other mental conditions than those it essentially stands for—anger, rage, pain, perplexity, modesty and shame; when it conceals anger it is anger against oneself, a form of scorn. This same wooden, dry laughter is significant, and when it arises from the perception that the accused no longer sees his way out, it is not easily to be confused with another form of laughter. One gets the impression that the laughter is trying to tell himself, “That is what you get for being bad and foolish!”

Under this caption must be placed certain conditions that may under given circumstances be important. Although apparently without any relations to each other they have the common property of being external manifestations of mental processes.

In many cases they are explanations which may arise from the observation of the mutative relations between cruelty, bloodthirstiness, and sensuality. With regard to this older authors like Mitchell,[98] Blumröder,[99] Friedreich,[100] have brought examples which are still of no little worth. They speak of cases in which many people, not alone men, use the irritation developed by greater or lesser cruelty for sexual purposes: the torturing of animals, biting, pinching, choking the partner, etc. Nowadays this is called sadism.[101] Certain girls narrate their fear of some of their visitors who make them suffer unendurably, especially at the point of extreme passion, by biting, pressing, and choking. This fact may have some value in criminology. On the one hand, certain crimes can be explained only by means of sexual cruelty, and on the other, knowledge of his habits with this regard may, again, help toward the conviction of a criminal. I recall only the case of Ballogh-Steiner in Vienna, a case in which a prostitute was stifled. The police were at that time hunting a man who was known in the quarter as “chicken-man,” because he would always bring with him two fowls which he would choke during the orgasm. It was rightly inferred that a man who did that sort of thing was capable under similar circumstances of killing a human being. Therefore it will be well, in the examination of a person accused of a cruel crime, not to neglect the question of his sexual habits; or better still, to be sure to inquire particularly whether the whole situation of the crime was not sexual in nature.[102]

In this connection, deeds that lead to cruelty and murder often involve forms of epilepsy. It ought therefore always to be a practice to consult a physician concerning the accused, for cruelty, lust, and psychic disorders are often enough closely related. About this matter Lombroso is famous for the wealth of material he presents.

The question of home-sickness is of essential significance and must not be undervalued. It has been much studied and the notion has been reached that children mainly (in particular during the period of puberty), and idiotic and weak persons, suffer much from home-sickness, and try to combat the oppressive feeling of dejection with powerful sense stimuli. Hence they are easily led to crime, especially to arson. It is asserted that uneducated people in lonesome, very isolated regions, such as mountain tops, great moors, coast country, are particularly subject to nostalgia. This seems to be true and is explained by the fact that educated people easily find diversion from their sad thoughts and in some degree take a piece of home with them in their more or less international culture. In the same way it is conceivable that inhabitants of a region not particularly individualized do not so easily notice differences. Especially he who passes from one city to another readily finds himself, but mountain and plain contain so much that is contrary that the feeling of strangeness is overmastering. So then, if the home-sick person is able, he tries to destroy his nostalgia through the noisiest and most exciting pleasures; if he is not, he sets fire to a house or in case of need, kills somebody—in short what he needs is explosive relief. Such events are so numerous that they ought to have considerable attention. Nostalgia should be kept in mind where no proper motive for violence is to be found and where the suspect is a person with the above-mentioned qualities. Then again, if one discovers that the suspect is really suffering from home-sickness, from great home-sickness for his local relations, one has a point from which the criminal may be reached. As a rule such very pitiful individuals are so less likely to deny their crime in the degree in which they feel unhappy that their sorrow is not perceivably increased through arrest. Besides that, the legal procedure to which they are subjected is a not undesired, new and powerful stimulus to them.

When such nostalgiacs confess their deed they never, so far as I know, confess its motive. Apparently they do not know the motive and hence cannot explain the deed. As a rule one hears, “I don’t know why, I had to do it.” Just where this begins to be abnormal, must be decided by the physician, who must always be consulted when nostalgia is the ground for a crime. Of course it is not impossible that a criminal in order to excite pity should explain his crime as the result of unconquerable home-sickness—but that must always be untrue because, as we have shown, anybody who acts out of home-sickness, does not know it and can not tell it.

Reflex actions are also of greater significance than as a rule they are supposed to be. According to Lotze,[103] “reflex actions are not limited to habitual and insignificant affairs of the daily life. Even compounded series of actions which enclose the content even of a crime may come to actuality in this way ... in a single moment in which the sufficient opposition of some other emotional condition, the enduring intensity of emotion directed against an obstacle, or the clearness of a moving series of ideas is lacking. The deed may emerge from the image of itself without being caused or accompanied by any resolve of the doer. Hearings of criminals are full of statements which point to such a realization of their crimes, and these are often considered self-exculpating inventions, inasmuch as people fear from their truth a disturbance or upsetting of the notions concerning adjudication and actionability. The mere recognition of that psychological fact alters the conventional judgment but little; the failure in these cases consists in not having prevented that automatic transition of images into actions, a transition essentially natural to our organism which ought, however, like so many other things, to be subjected to power of the will.” Reflex movements require closer study.[104] The most numerous and generally known are: dropping the eyelids, coughing, sneezing, swallowing, all involuntary actions against approaching or falling bodies; then again the patellar reflex and the kremaster reflex, etc. Other movements of the same kind were once known and so often practised that they became involuntary.[105] Hence, for example, the foolish question how a person believed to be disguised can be recognized as man or woman. The well known answer is: let some small object fall on his lap; the woman will spread her limbs apart because she is accustomed to wear a dress in which she catches the object; the man will bring his limbs together because he wears trousers and is able to catch the object only in this way. There are so many such habitual actions that it is difficult to say where actual reflexes end and habits begin. They will be properly distinguished when the first are understood as single detached movements and the last as a continuous, perhaps even unconscious and long-enduring action. When I, for example, while working, take a cigar, cut off the end, light it, smoke, and later am absolutely unaware that I have done this, what has occurred is certainly not a reflex but a habitual action. The latter does not belong to this class in which are to be grouped only such as practically bear a defensive character. As examples of how such movements may have criminological significance only one’s own experience may be cited because it is so difficult to put oneself at the point of view of another. I want to consider two such examples. One evening I passed through an unfrequented street and came upon an inn just at the moment that an intoxicated fellow was thrown out, and directly upon me. At the very instant I hit the poor fellow a hard blow on the ear. I regretted the deed immediately, the more so as the assaulted man bemoaned his misfortune, “inside they throw him out, outside they box his ears.” Suppose that I had at that time burst the man’s ear-drum or otherwise damaged him heavily. It would have been a criminal matter and I doubt whether anybody would have believed that it was a “reflex action,” though I was then, as to-day, convinced that the action was reflex. I didn’t in the least know what was going to happen to me and what I should do. I simply noticed that something unfriendly was approaching and I met it with a defensive action in the form of an upper-cut on the ear. What properly occurred I knew only when I heard the blow and felt the concussion of my hand. Something similar happened to me when I was a student. I had gone into the country hunting before dawn, when some one hundred paces from the house, right opposite me a great ball rolled down a narrow way. Without knowing what it was or why I did it I hit at the ball heavily with an alpenstock I carried in my hand, and the thing emerged as two fighting tomcats with teeth fixed in each other. One of them was my beloved possession, so that I keenly regretted the deed, but even here I had not acted consciously; I had simply smashed away because something unknown was approaching me. If I had then done the greatest damage I could not have been held responsible—if my explanation were allowed; but that it would have been allowed I do not believe in this case, either.

A closer examination of reflex action requires consideration of certain properties, which in themselves