Crime from a Psychiatrist's Point of View

Abstract

Psychology is the last of the sciences to become useful. Formerly, under the influence of scholasticism, it was purely theoretical. Profomundly educated men, born with a metaphysical trend, who held themselves aloof from the study of natural history, as it was then called, and looked with some disdain on chemists and physicists, as rather inferior persons who wasted time studying matter, studied, by introspection, their own mental processes and excogitated hypotheses to explain thought. Many were unconsciously biased by the theological training they received at home, in school and at the universities; some, born conservatives, consciously believed it was their duty to fight for traditional truth against all comers; a few, born with the spirit of revolt, broke loose and tried to disprove, by reason, beliefs with which reason has no relation, but which can only be accepted or rejected by faith. The old, scholastic psychology has gone somewhat out of favor, because of new methods of study, partly resulting from, and partly causing, the changed attitude of men of science of today. The psychology of today has a wider field, and has welcomed aid from other sciences. The first step forward, or, at least, in breaking away from traditional methods of study, was in accepting the results of the study of cerebral physiology as throwing light on such questions as sensation, the special senses, speech and motion. The discovery that certain parts of the brain have special functions, caused a change in the psychologic point of view. A very vital and important step was combining the study of psychiatry with psychology, in the hope that each would illuminate the other. So far, the result has not been as fruitful as was hoped, but it was a tremendous step in advance to realize that a diseased mind is not a mind that has been acted on by some mysterious thing, but a machine out of order. The study of child psychology and the careful observation of the development and growth of the mind from infancy, through adolescence and up to maturity is bound to lead to improvements in methods of education, and may throw some light on processes of thought. For