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

[1] The Female Offender.

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sumed. Now he is old and weak, he knows that he can no longer do this easily, i. e., that his money and property are all that he has to depend on in his old age, and hence, he is very much afraid of losing or decreasing them, so that his prudence becomes miserliness, later mania for possession, and even worse; finally it may turn him into a criminal.

The situation is the same sexually. Too weak to satisfy natural instincts in adults, he attacks immature girls, and his fear of people he can no longer otherwise oppose turns him into a poisoner.

Drobisch finds that by reason of the alteration of characteristics, definite elements of the self are distinguishable at every stage. The distinguishing element in extreme old age, in senility, is the loss of power, and if we keep this in mind we shall be able to explain every phenomenon characteristic of this period.

Senile individuals require especial treatment as witnesses. An accurate study of such people and of the not over-rich literature concerning them will, however, yield a sufficient basis to go on.

What is most important can be found in any textbook on psychology.

The individual cases are considerably helped by the assumption that the mental organization of senility is essentially simplified and narrowed to a few types. Its activities are lessened, its influences and aims are compressed, the present brings little and is little remembered, so that its collective character is determined by a resultant, composed of those forces that have influenced the man’s past life. Accurate observation will reveal only two types of senility.[1]

There is the embittered type, and there is the character expressed in the phrase, “to understand all is to forgive all.” Senility rarely succeeds in presenting facts objectively. Everything it tells is bound up with its judgment, and its judgment is either negative or positive. The judgment’s nature depends less on the old man’s emotional character than on his experience in life. If he is one of the embittered, he will probably so describe a possibly harmful, but not bad event, as to be able to complain of the wickedness of the world, which brought it about, that at one time such and such an evil happened to him. The excusing senile will begin with “Good God, it wasn’t so bad. The people were young and merry, and so one of them—.” That the same event is presented in a fundamentally different light by each is obvious. Fortunately, the senile is easily seen through and his first words show how he looks at things. He makes difficulties mainly by introducing memories [1] H. Gross: Lehrbuch f<u:>r den Ausforschungsdienst der Gendarmerie.

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which always color and modify the evidence. The familiar fact that very old men remember things long past better than immediate occurrences, is to be explained by the situation that the ancient brain retains only that which it has frequently experienced. Old experiences are recalled in memory hundreds and hundreds of times, and hence, may take deep root there, while the new could be repeated, only a few times, and hence had not time to find a place before being forgotten. If the old man tells of some recent event, some similar remote event is also alive in his mind. The latter has, however, if not more vivid at least equally vigorous color, so that the old man’s story is frequently composed of things long past. I do not know how to eliminate these old memories from this story. There are always difficulties, particularly as personal experiences of evil generally dominate these memories. It is not unjust, that proverb which says “If youth is at all silly, old age remembers it well.”

Section 83. (d) Differences in Conception.

I should like to add to what precedes, that senility presents fact and judgment together. In a certain sense every age and person does so and, as I have repeatedly said, it would be foolish to assert that we have the right to demand only facts from witnesses. Setting aside the presence of inferences in most sense-perceptions, every exposition contains, without exception, the judgment of its subject-matter, though only, perhaps, in a few dry words. It may lie in some choice expression, in the tone, in the gesture but it is there, open to careful observation. Consider any simple event, e. g., two drunkards quarreling in the street. And suppose we instruct any one of many witnesses to tell us only the facts. He will do so, but with the introductory words, “It was a very ordinary event,”

“altogether a joke,” “completely harmless,” “quite disgusting,”

“very funny,” “a disgusting piece of the history of morals,” “too sad,” “unworthy of humanity,” “frightfully dangerous,” “very interesting,” “a real study for hell,” “just a picture of the future,”

etc. Now, is it possible to think that people who have so variously characterized the same event will give an identical description of the mere fact? They have seen the event in accordance with their attitude toward life. One has seen nothing; another this; another that; and, although the thing might have lasted only a very short time, it made such an impression that each has in mind a completely different picture which he now reproduces.[1] As Volkmar said, “One [1] Cf. H. Gross’s Archiv XIV, 83.

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nation hears in thunder the clangor of trumpets, the hoof-beats of divine steeds, the quarrels of the dragons of heaven; another hears the mooing of the cow, the chirp of the cricket, the complaint of the ancestors; still another hears the saints turn the vault of heaven, and the Greenlander, even the quarrel of bewitched women concerning a dried skin.” And Voltaire says, “If you ask the devil what beauty is, he will tell you that beauty is a pair of horns, four hoofs, and a tail.” Yet, when we ask a witness what is beautiful, we think that we are asking for a brute fact, and expect as reliable an answer as from a mathematician. We might as well ask for cleanliness from a person who thinks he has set his house in order by having swept the dirt from one corner to another.

To compare the varieties of intellectual attitude among men generally, we must start with sense-perception, which, combined with mental perception, makes a not insignificant difference in each individual. Astronomers first discovered the existence of this difference, in that they showed that various observers of contemporaneous events do not observe at the same time. This fact is called “the personal equation.” Whether the difference in rate of sense-perception, or the difference of intellectual apprehension, or of both together, are here responsible, is not known, but the proved distinction (even to a second) is so much the more important, since events which succeed each other very rapidly may cause individual observers to have quite different images. And we know as little whether the slower or the quicker observer sees more correctly, as we little know what people perceive more quickly or more slowly.

Now, inasmuch as we are unable to test individual differences with special instruments, we must satisfy ourselves with the fact that there are different varieties of conception, and that these may be of especial importance in doubtful cases, such as brawls, sudden attacks, cheating at cards, pocket-picking, etc.

The next degree of difference is in the difference of observation.

Schiel says that the observer is not he who sees the thing, but who sees of what parts it is made. The talent for such vision is rare.

One man overlooks half because he is inattentive or is looking at the wrong place; another substitutes his own inferences for objects, while another tends to observe the quality of objects, and neglects their quantity; and still another divides what is to be united, and unites what is to be separated. If we keep in mind what profound differences may result in this way, we must recogruze the source of the conflicting assertions by witnesses. And we shall have to <p 377>

grant that these differences would become incomparably greater and more important if the witnesses were not required to talk of the event immediately, or later on, thus approximating their different conceptions to some average. Hence we often discover that when the witnesses really have had no chance to discuss the matter and have heard no account of it from a third person, or have not seen the consequences of the deed, their discussions of it showed distinct and essential differences merely through the lack of an opportunity or a standard of correction. And we then suppose that a part of what the witnesses have said is untrue, or assume that they were inattentive, or blind.

Views are of similar importance.[1] Fiesto exclaims, “It is scandalous to empty a full purse, it is impertinent to misappropriate a million, but it is unnamably great to steal a crown. The shame decreases with the increase of the sin.” Exner holds that the ancients conceived Oedipus not as we do; they found his misfortune horrible; we find it unpleasant.

These are poetical criminal cases presented to us from different points of view; and we nowadays understand the same action still more differently, and not only in poetry, but in the daily life. Try, for example, to get various individuals to judge the same formation of clouds. You may hear the clouds called flower-stalks with spiritual blossoms, impoverished students, stormy sea, camel, monkey, battling giants, swarm of flies, prophet with a flowing beard, dunderhead, etc. We have coming to light, in this accidental interpretation of fact, the speaker’s view of life, his intimacies, etc. This emergence is as observable in the interpretation also of the ordinary events of the daily life. There, even if the judgments do not vary very much, they are still different enough to indicate quite distinct points of view. The memory of the curious judgment of one cloud-formation has helped me many a time to explain testimonies that seemed to have no possible connection.

Attitude or feeling—this indefinable factor exercises a great influence on conception and interpretation. It is much more wonderful than even the march of events, or of fate itself. Everybody knows what attitude (stimmung) is. Everybody has suffered from it, everybody has made some use of it, but nobody can altogether define it. According to Fischer, attitude consists in the compounded feelings of all the inner conditions and changes of the organism, [1] Marie Borst: Recherches experimentales sur l’<e’>ducation et la fidelit<e’> du temoignage. Archives de Psychologie. Geneva. Vol. III. no. 11.

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expressed in consciousness. This would make attitude a sort of vital feeling, the resultant of the now favorable, now unfavorable functioning of our organs. The description is, however, not unexceptionable, inasmuch as single, apparently insignificant influences upon our senses may create or alter our attitudes for a long time without revealing its effect on any organ or its integration with the other mental states. I know how merely good or bad weather determines attitude, how it may be helped immediately by a good cigar, and how often we may pass a day, joyous or dejected, only to discover that the cause is a good or a bad dream of the foregoing night. Especially instructive in this regard was a little experience of mine during an official journey. The trouble which brought me out was an ordinary brawl between young peasants, one of whom was badly cut up and was to be examined. Half-way over, we had to wait at a wayside inn where I expected a relieving gendarme. A quarter of an hour after the stop, when we renewed the journey, I found myself overcome by unspeakable sadness, and this very