Legal Insanity: Towards an Understanding of Free Will Through Feeling in Modern Europe

Abstract

The degree to which insanity or mental infirmity can be instrumentalized in legal debate is shaped by understandings of what insanity is, the currency of a specific diagnosis, as well as official and unofficial symptomatologies, all of which render the law, as a system of knowledge and social practices, porous and permeable in regards to what might be abstractly called »the human mind and heart«. This article explores the changing role of emotions in explaining, demonstrating, and adjudicating insanity during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the insanity plea became a matter of heated debate in relation to specific trials of capital offenses, which not only brought crime but also the subject of criminal insanity into the public eye. At the same time, the rise of expert scientific testimony and the modern medical sciences – specifically medical psychology and the advent of psychiatry – created different definitions and understandings of mental illness that challenged legal definitions of insanity. This led to interdisciplinary discussion and debate, as physicians sought to provide a serviceable system to the lawyers, and lawyers sought new ways to discover and prove cases. The medicalization and pathologization of emotions not only led to the introduction and interpretation of new kinds of emotional evidence in the courtroom, it also gave emotions a range of different potential meanings, challenging the psychological premises and assumptions of the law as well as the principles and purposes of criminal justice.