Poetry that Does not Fade: Gerrit Achterberg’s Experience with Law and Forensic Psychiatry

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the work of the Dutch poet Gerrit Achterberg who was hospitalised in a forensic psychiatric institution on the basis of an entrustment order after he killed his landlady. The diagnosis of the form and degree of Achterberg’s insanity was made on the basis of his poetry that his psychiatrists supposed was indicative of his sexual deviance and criminal state of mind. It is argued that the Achterberg case asks the legal professional to consider, firstly, how the institutional languages of law and forensic psychiatry often impose their conceptual frameworks to such a degree that other languages are excluded, and, secondly, to be aware of the interpretive pitfalls of one’s own linguistic usages because legal interpretation as a claim for meaning is a human activity, i.e. law is not found, it is made.