Bad behaviour: an historical perspective on disorders of conduct

Abstract

Conduct disorder is by many centuries the oldest of the diagnostic categories used in contemporary child psychiatry. Some of the earliest evidence about the control of undesirable behaviour, adult or child, presents a picture of the individual or family unit as the sole responsible agency, with little or no outside interference available or sought. The Platonic tradition that forms one of the threads of western attitudes to morality offers one of the earliest, and still one of the most sophisticated, analyses of the relationship between harmful actions and the development of criminal responsibility. The problem of conduct disorder is central to the concerns of evolutionary psychology, because a disorder defined in terms of 'violations of social norms' raises important evolutionary questions. In this chapter, the authors have presented examples of public responses to conduct disordered children over the centuries, concentrating on religious, philosophical, legal and psychiatric writings.