Criminal Psychology by Hans Gross (best book recommendations .TXT) 📕

This may afford some explanation for the very different statements we often receive from numerous observers of the same event; each one had expected a different thing, and hence, had perceived and had ignored different things.

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Again, the opposition of the I and You in the person himself is a noteworthy thing. According to Noel, this is done particularly when one perceives one’s own foolish management: “How could you have behaved so foolishly!” Generalized it might be restated as the fact that people say You to themselves whenever the dual nature of the ego becomes visible, i. e., whenever one no longer entertains a former opinion, or when one is undecided and carries about contradictory intentions, or whenever one wants to compel himself to some achievement. Hence “How could you have done this?”—“Should you do this or should you not?”—“You simply shall tell the truth.”—More na<i:>ve people often report such inner dialogues faithfully and without considering that they give themselves away thereby, inasmuch as the judge learns at least that when this occurred the practical ego was a stranger to the considering ego, through whom the subjective conditions of the circumstances involved may be explained.

What people call excellent characterizes them. Excellences are for each man those qualities from which others get the most advantage. Charity, self-sacrifice, mercy, honesty, integrity, courage, prudence, assiduity, and however else anything that is good and brave may be called, are always of use to the other fellow but barely and only indirectly the possessor of the virtues. Hence we praise the latter and spur others on to identical qualities (to our advantage). This is very barren and prosaic, but true. Naturally, not everybody has advantage in the identical virtues of other people, only in those which are of use to their individual situation—

charity is of no use to the rich, and courage of no use to the protected.

Hence, people give themselves away more frequently than they seem to, and even when no revelation of their inner lives can be attained from witnesses and accused, they always express enough to show what they consider to be virtue and what not.

Hartenstein characterizes Hegel as a person who made his opponents out of straw and rags in order to be able to beat them down the more easily. This characterizes not only Hegel but a large group of individuals whose daily life consists of it. Just as there is nowhere any particularly definite boundary between sanity and foolishness, and everything flows into everything else, so it is with men and their testimonies, normal and abnormal. From the sober, clear, and true testimony of the former, to the fanciful and impossible assertions of the latter, there is a straight, slowly rising road on which testimony appears progressively less true, and more impossible.

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No man can say where the quality of foolishness begins—nervousness, excitement, hysteria, over-strain, illusion, fantasy, and pathoformic lies, are the shadings which may be distinguished, and the quantity of untruth in such testimonies may be demonstrated, from one to one hundred per cent., without needing to skip a single degree. We must not, however, ignore and simply set aside even the testimony of the outlaws and doubtful persons, because also they may contain some truth, and we must pay still more attention to such as contain a larger percentage of truth. But with this regard we have our so-called smart lawyers who are over-strained, and it is they who build the real men of straw which cost us so much effort and labor. The form is indeed correct, but the content is straw, and the figure appears subjectively dangerous only to its creator. And he has created it because he likes to fight but desires also to conquer easily. The desire to construct such figures and to present them to the authorities is widespread and dangerous through our habit of seeking some particular motive, hatred, jealousy, a long-drawn quarrel, revenge, etc. If we do not find it we assume that such a motive is absent and take the accusation, at least for the time, to be true. We must not forget that frequently there can be no other defining motive than the desire to construct a man of straw and to conquer him. If this explanation does not serve we may make use finally of a curious phenomenon, called by Lazarus heroification, which repeats itself at various levels of life in rather younger people. If we take this concept in its widest application we will classify under it all forms that contain the almost invincible demand for attention, for talking about oneself, for growing famous, on the part of people who have neither the capacity nor the perseverance to accomplish any extraordinary thing, and who, hence, make use of forbidden and even criminal means to shove their personalities into the foreground and so to attain their end.

To this class belong all those half-grown girls who accuse men of seduction and rape. They aim by this means to make themselves interesting. So do the women who announce all kinds of persecutions which make them talked about and condoled with; and the numerous people who want to do something remarkable and commit arson; then again certain political criminals of all times who became “immortal” with one single stab, and hence devoted their otherwise worthless lives thereto; and finally, even all those who, when having suffered from some theft, arson, or bodily harm, defined their damage as considerably greater than it actually was, not for the purpose <p 254>

of recovering their losses, but for the purpose of being discussed and condoled with.

As a rule it is not difficult to recognize this “heroification,”

inasmuch as it betrays itself through the lack of other motives, and appears definitely when the intent is examined and exaggerations are discovered which otherwise would not appear.

Topic 5. ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.

Section 50.

The question of association is essentially significant for lawyers because, in many cases, it is only by use of it that we can discover the conditions of the existence of certain conceptions, by means of which witnesses may be brought to remember and tell the truth, etc., without hypnotizing them, or overtesting the correctness of their statements. We will cursorily make a few general observations only:

Concerning the law of association, very little has been learned since the time of Aristotle. It is determined by: 1. Similarity (the common quality of the symbol).

2. Contrast (because every image involves opposition between its extremes).

3. Co-existence, simultaneity (the being together of outer or inner objects in space).

4. Succession (images call each other out in the same order in which they occur).

Hume recognized only three grounds of association of objects—

similarity, contact in time and space, and causality. Theo. Lipps recognizes as the really different grounds of association only similarity and simultaneity (the simultaneity of their presence in the mind, especially).

If, however, simultaneity is to be taken in this sense it may be considered the sole ground of association, for if the images are not simultaneous there can be no question of association. Simultaneity in the mind is only the second process, for images are simultaneous in the mind only because they have occurred simultaneously, existed in the same space, were similar, etc. M<u:>nsterberg,[1] who dealt with the matter and got important results, points out that all so-called inner associations, like similarity, contrast, etc., may be reduced to external association, and all the external associations, even that of <p 255>

temporal sequence, may be reduced to co-existence, and all co-existence-associations are psychophysically intelligible. Further: “The fundamental error of all association processes leading to incorrect connection of ideas, must be contained in their incompleteness.

One idea was associated with another, the latter with a third, and then we connect the first with the third … a thing we should not have done, since the first, while it co-existed with the second, was also connected with many others.”

[1] H. M<u:>nsterberg: Beitrage I-IV. Freiburg 1882-1892.

But even this account does not account for certain difficulties, because some associations are simply set aside, although they should have occurred. Man is inclined, according to Stricker, to inhibit associations which are not implied in his “funded” complexes.

If we find direct contradiction with regard to associations, the way out is not easy. We have then, first, to consider how, by comparatively remote indirection, to introduce those conditions into the “funded” complex, which will give rise to the association. But such a consideration is often a big problem in pedagogy, and we are rarely in the position of teaching the witness.

There is still the additional difficulty that we frequently do not know the circumstance with the help of which the witness has made his association. Thomas Hobbes tells the story of an association which involved a leap from the British Civil War to the value of a denarius under the Emperor Tiberius. The process was as follows: King Charles I was given up by the Scotch for $200,000, Christ was sold for 80 denarii, what then was a denarius worth?

In order to pursue the thread of such an association, one needs, anyway, only a definite quantity of historical knowledge, but this quantity must be possessed. But such knowledge is a knowledge of universal things that anybody may have, while the personal relations and purely subjective experiences which are at the command of an individual are quite unknown to any other person, and it is often exceedingly difficult to discover them.[1] The case is simplest when one tries to aid the memory of a witness in order to make him place single dates, e. g., when the attempt is made to determine some time and the witness is reminded of certain events that occurred during the time in question in order to assist him in fixing the calendar time. Or again, when the witness is brought to the place of the crime and the individual conditions are associated with the local situation. But when not merely single dates are to <p 256>

be associated, when complete events are to be associated, a profound knowledge of the situation must precede, otherwise no association is successful, or merely topsy-turvy results are attained. The difficulties which here ensue depend actually upon the really enormous quantity of knowledge every human being must possess in making use of his senses. Anything that a man has learned at school, in the newspapers, etc., we know approximately, but we have no knowledge of what a man has thought out for himself and what he has felt in his localized conditions, e. g., his home, his town, his travels, his relations and their experiences, etc.—However important this may be, we have no means of getting hold of it.

[1] A. Mayer and J. Orth: Zur qualitativen Untersuchung der Assoziation.

Ztschrft. f. Psychol. u. Physiol. der Sinnesorgane, XXVI, 1, 1901.

Those associations which have physical expression are of importance only in particular cases. For example, the feeling of ants all over the body when you think that you have been near an ant-hill, or the feeling of physical pain on hearing the description of wounds. It is exceedingly funny to see how, during the lectures of dermatologists, the whole audience scratches that part of the body which is troubling the patient who is being described.

Such associations may be legally valuable in so far as the accused who plead innocence make unconscious movements which imply the denied wounds. In any event, it is necessary to be cautious because frequently