Guilty Man Research Articles

An Atoning Priority in the Hymns of Calvary and Gethsemane

An Atoning Priority in the Hymns of Calvary and Gethsemane

Matthew Arnold’s Bokhara

ONE OF THE PIECES particularly admired by initial readers of Matthew Arnold’s first volumes of poetry was ‘The Sick King in Bokhara’ (1849). ‘[M]ost pleasing to the ordinary mind’, said The Times on 4 November 1853;1 ‘one of the wisest, most simple, and most genial of the poems’,2 added Fraser’s Magazine the following year. The story on which the poem—probably written in 1847 or 1848?3—is based is told in Alexander Burnes’s Travels into Bokhara (1834).4 It concerns the King of Bokhara who tries, generously, to overturn the death penalty handed down to a strict Muslim who had in some way violated the law. But the guilty man will have none of the King’s attempts at mercy and is slain at his own demand, even though the King instructs his executioners to allow him to escape if he makes the attempt. The King weeps over the...

Adapting to Loiterly Reading: Agatha Christie’s Original Adaptation of “The Witness for the Prosecution”

Adapting to Loiterly Reading: Agatha Christie’s Original Adaptation of “The Witness for the Prosecution”

Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture by Keridiana W. Chez

Reviewed by: Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture by Keridiana W. Chez Emily Bell Keridiana W. Chez. Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2017. Pp. 212. $69.95. Our relationship with animals, Keridiana W. Chez suggests, poses "the ethical problem of our age" (153), invested as we are in pets as emotional tools for human wellbeing. Modern anxieties around animal sentience, their experience of pain, and the rights they should have are traced back to the nineteenth century in this compelling study of human-dog relations in the Victorian period. Chez draws on the central concerns of Animal Studies (the difficulty of representing animals as more than symbolic, or mirrors of our own humanity, rather than as fully realized individuals – and what exactly recognizing that individuality means, when we can only ever convey animality in human terms) in arguing that the Victorian dog acted [End Page 164] as an emotional "prosthesis." Through a series of chapters tightly focused on English and American novels of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, she traces a shift in human-dog relations in the Victorian period that laid the groundwork for many of today's anxieties around man's best friend. At the beginning of the Victorian period dogs were agents of the working-class, used to draw carts and run on treadmills. By the end of the century, they "posed for portraits, wore boots, rode on carriages, and left cartes de visite at their neighbor's homes" (1). This movement from working-class to bourgeoisie, from useful to useless, from physical labor to emotional, is central to Chez's work. This positing of the dog as emotional prosthesis emphasizes the intimacy with the Other at play in the various representations explored in this study. The chapters chart a movement from pets as connecting family members together, to the dog as a specifically masculine tool used to demonstrate its owner's humanity. Fears around dogs' capacity for rebellion then arose, culminating in the belief that the "ideal" pet was one who was wild, tamed only by a "worthy" owner. Chez's argument is based on a close reading of Victorian novels chosen to illustrate the role dogs play in the lives of families. Her thesis challenges the understanding of Victorians as repressing and restraining emotion, instead suggesting that the concern was how best to deal with a lack of emotion in a changing, anxiety-inducing world. This concern was partly addressed through human relationships with canine companions. The first chapter focuses on family relationships in David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, using the common Victorian image of "happy families" (animals trained to cohabit peacefully rather than act as predator and prey) as a framework. These happy families, seen in zoos and circuses, often included dogs who kept the peace in such unnatural groupings through their playfulness. Chez argues that dogs in Dickens serve a similar function: David Copperfield's Jip and Oliver Twist's Bulls-Eye both belong to unhappy families but work to create affective bonds between family members. In David Copperfield, Jip's bad behavior is a sign that things are fundamentally wrong within the family. David's problematic treatment of Dora is mirrored in her treatment of Jip: David buys his wife a cookery book to train her to be a better homemaker, and she in turn uses it to train Jip to perform tricks. In Oliver Twist, Bulls-Eye is aligned with Sikes, but also with Nancy: the dog is a victim of Sikes's abuse, just as she is. Bulls-Eye's death mirrors his master's, but in leading the mob to the guilty man Bulls-Eye is also an extension of the accusatory eyes of the dead woman, pursuing Sikes through the London streets. Chapter 2 charts a shift to dogs as personal prosthesis rather than family-oriented, exploring George Eliot's Adam Bede and Middlemarch. Chez suggests that Adam's dog Gyp is key to his moral development, centering on [End Page 165] interactions between Adam, his mother Lisbeth and the dog. In Middlemarch, by contrast, it is Dorothea...

Shame and guilt inducing drugs

The Author in this presentation examines the role of two complex human experiences, the Guilt and the Shame, in the field of the substances addiction. The population of abuser can be divided between users of sedatives and users of stimulants. Sedative drugs and stimulant drug belong to two different way of being-in-the-world. Sedative drugs are able to medicate the internal pain, which is constitutive of the guilt. Stimulant drugs are able to medicate the dysphoria, which is constitutive of the shame. In the realm of psychopathology Tellenbach with the concept of premelancholic personality in the guilty man and Kohut with the concept of narcissism in the tragic man have put the bases for a different typification. In both cases, the common final result, from a psychopathological point of view, is a severe crisis of the temporalization.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.

Racializing Kohut’s “Guilty Man” and “Tragic Man”: Serious Play in the Service of Inclusiveness

Drawing on history, philosophy, and complexity thinking, I address some limitations and possibilities in our theory for tackling the thorny and stubborn problem posed by White-centeredness. Although this article is written largely with White U.S. culture in mind, that situation is a fulcrum for explorations of inclusion and exclusion more generally.1

Planning for Study Design and Analysis for Point-of-Care Research Teams: Does Size Matter?

Planning for Study Design and Analysis for Point-of-Care Research Teams: Does Size Matter?

Thoreau and Stanley Kunitz's “The Guilty Man”

Thoreau and Stanley Kunitz's “The Guilty Man”

Convicting the innocent: where criminal prosecutions go wrong

On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington--defended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty case--was found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man. DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing. Based on trial transcripts, Garrett's investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory. Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.

Reflections on Breughel’s “Icarus” from a Kohutian Perspective

Pieter Breughel's famous 1558 painting, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," is dominated by foreground figures: a farmer intently plowing, a shepherd distractedly tending sheep, a solitary fisherman peering deeply into the place his line has sunk. Prominent in the background is a handsome sailing ship, canvas full, making headway toward distant lands. Without the work's title, one's visual inquiry would likely stop here; but a "Where's Waldo" curiosity spurs further investigation. And eventually it is spied, off in a corner, hardly noticeable: two small, flailing bare legs just before they, too, sink beneath the waves with nothing but a tiny splash. The fall of Icarus. Flying too near the sun, his wing wax melted, the feathers dispersed, and Icarus became the icon of scorn for those claiming human pride as the cause of human downfalls. The wages of sin is death, and sin is hubris, and hubris is what humankind is guilty of. Maybe the result of towering pride was Brueghel's theme here. Maybe he was attempting to prick our conscience, to arouse our suppressed guilt over our own efforts to be more than God intended in order that we might be saved from our own crash and burn, or crash and drown. This motif of "guilty man" would certainly have been the dominate theological perspective of his day. However, there is no fanfare of moral indignation in this picture. The fallen one is not made a front and center example of the perils of flying too near the sun, of vaulted pride and arrogance. No writhing souls twist in hell's punishments as made graphic by era painters and ecclesial preachers. Perhaps there is another way to interpret Breughel's work, which may be closer to what he intended. Rather than this whimsical scene being an indictment of our grandiose pride, it may be a depiction of our empathie failures. After a slight snicker, what can startle the viewer is the tiny place of tragedy in everyday life, and the gross indifference to that tragedy by everyday people. Breughel's work suggests the tendency of individuals to ignore the suffering of others in favor of their own absorbing agendas. Fields must be plowed, sheep guarded, fish hooked, new lands found. The tragedies that happen to other people have less impact, less importance, than attending to those things that insure the steadiness of our own well-being. More is depicted here than simply "Life goes on in spite of human tragedy," or "Tragedy

Guilty Man and Tragic Man in Decadent Tales of “Fin-de-Siècle” Europe

This article analyzes Guilty Man and Tragic Man in three noted novels of fin-de-siècle Europe: Oscar Wilde's (1891a)The Picture of Dorian Gray, Gabriele D'Annunzio's (1900)The Flame, and André Gide's (1902)The Immoralist. Coined by Kohut, Guilty Man and Tragic Man refer to the two core dimensions of human nature that are the focuses of classical psychoanalysis and self psychology, respectively. The decadent themes of the novels illuminate these core dimensions and reflect the increasing emphasis on subjectivity that was promoted by modern social developments and the consequent decay of traditional culture since the late 18th century. Este artículo analiza el Hombre Culpable y el Hombre Trágico en tres novelas célebres de la Europa del fin-de-siecle: El retrato de Dorian Gray de Oscar Wilde (1891), La flama de Gabriele D'Annunzio (1900), y El inmoralista de André Gide (1902). Acuñado por Kohut, el Hombre Culpable y el Hombre Trágico se refieren a las dos dimensiones nucleares de la naturaleza humana que son el centro de atención del psicoanálisis clásico y de la psicología del self, respectivamente. Los temas decadentes de estas novelas iluminan estas dimensiones nucleares y reflejan el creciente énfasis en la subjetividad que fue promovido por los modernos desarrollos sociales y el consecuente desmoronamiento de la cultura tradicional de finales del siglo XVIII. Cet article analyse l'Homme coupable et l'Homme tragique dans trois romans européens reconnus de fin de siècle: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) d'Oscar Wilde, Le Feu (1900) de Gabriele D'Annonzio, et L'immoraliste (1902) d'André Gide. Nommés ainsi par Kohut, l'Homme coupable et l'Homme tragique réfèrent aux deux dimensions fondamentales de la nature humaine au centre respectivement de la psychanalyse classique et de la psychologie du soi. Les thèmes décadents des romans éclairent ces dimensions fondamentales et reflètent l'importance accrue mise sur la subjectivité amenée par les développements sociaux modernes et la décadence qu'ils ont entraînée dans la culture traditionnelle depuis le dix-huitième siècle. Dieser Artikel analysiert den Schuldigen Menschen und den Tragischen Menschen in drei bekannten Novellen Europas der Jahrhundertwende: OscarWilde's Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray (1891), Gabriele DAnnunzio's Die Flamme (1900) und Andre Gide's “Der Immoralist” (1902). Die Begriffe schuldiger und tragischer Mensch, von Heinz Kohut geprägt, beziehen sich auf die beiden zentralen Dimensionen menschlicher Natur, die der Fokus der klassischen Psychoanalyse beziehungsweise der Selbstpsychologie sind. Die dekadente Thematik der Novellen beleuchtet diese zentralen Dimensionen und zeigt die zunehmende Bedeutung der Subjektivität auf, die durch die moderne soziale Entwicklung und die konsequente Abnahme traditioneller Kultur seit dem späten 18. Jahrhundert begünstigt wurde. Questo articolo analizza l'Uomo Colpevole e l'Uomo Tragico in tre famosi romanzi europei di fine secolo: “Il ritratto di Dorian Gray” di Oscar Wilde (1891), “Il fuoco” di Gabriele D'Annunzio (1900), e “L'immorale” di André Gide (1902). Espressioni coniate da Kohut “l'Uomo Colpevole” e “l'Uomo Tragico” sono due dimensioni della natura umana che sono il focus rispettivamente della psicoanalisi classica e della psicologia del sé. I temi decadenti dei romanzi illuminano queste dimensioni e riflettono la crescente enfasi sulla soggettività che è stata promossa dai moderni sviluppi sociali e dalla conseguente decadenza della cultura tradizionale a partire dal tardo ottocento.

The FederalPosse ComitatusDoctrine: Slavery, Compulsion, and Statecraft in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America

In antebellum America, as in pre-industrial England, it was commonplace to witness civilians accompanying sheriffs and justices, scouring the countryside in search of scoundrels, scalawags, and other law-breakers. These civilians were theposse comitatus, or uncompensated, temporarily deputized citizens assisting law enforcement officers. At its core, theposse comitatuswas a compulsory institution. Prior to the advent of centralized police forces, sheriffs and others compelled citizens to serve “in the name of the state” to execute arrests, level public nuisances, and keep the peace, “upon pain of fine and imprisonment.” Despite its coercive character, though, thepossewas widely understood as one among many compulsory duties that protected the “public welfare.” Americans heeded the call to serve in localposses, explained jurist Edward Livingston, because of communal “ties of property, of family, of love of country and of liberty.” Such civic obligations, wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835, illustrated why Americans had such a pressing “interest in … arresting the guilty man.” At once coercive and communitarian, lamented Henry David Thoreau, theposse comitatusexemplified how those that “serve the state … with their bodies,” were “commonly esteemed good citizens.”

Genre’s Judgment

This article investigates the published torture allegations of Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen detained as a terror suspect in Guantanamo Bay for more than three years before his release without charge in January ZOo5. It considers the way in which particular genres (such as public speeches or television interviews) are able to confer or withdraw legitimacy from the one who tries to speak of torture. In particular, this article shows that the conventions of the interview (such as the modality of the question) effectively repeat rather than simply report the conditions of violence to which Habib bore witness, and frame him as a guilty man in advance of his testimony. Moreover, this genre deprives Habib of the power to testify in his own idiom, relegating him to the domain of the Differend (Jean-Francois Lyotard, 1988) In addition, the political and popular response to Habib’s testimony has focused principally on discrediting his claims. Despite these exceptional rhetorical challenges, this article argues that Mamdouh Habib has produced a manifesto of insurrectionary speech about torture in the War on Terror, and makes possible the future recontextualisation of his words into more hospitable genres.

Freud, Kohut, Sophocles: Did Oedipus Do Wrong?

In The Restoration of the Self, Heinz Kohut (1977) claimed to have a fuller understanding of the Oedipus complex than does Freud. In his discussion, he supplemented Freud's notion of “Guilty Man.” Guilty Man directs his life energy toward the activity of the drives; Tragic Man directs his life energy toward the fulfillment of the self. Kohut's formulation adds a depth of complexity that one finds missing in Freud's sexualizing of Oedipus. A fresh look at Sophocles' Oedipus cycle, emphasizing the necessary integrity of Oedipus Tyrannos with Oedipus Coloneus, confirms Sophocles' Oedipus to be more conducive to a Kohutian than to a Freudian reading. Oedipus' development throughout the dramas is interpreted in both Kohutian and Sophoclean terms, and Oedipus' apotheosis at the end of the Oedipus Coloneus is conceived in self-psychological terms as what it means to be fully human.

Systemic Changes that Could Reduce the Conviction of the Innocent

In an ideal world, juries would always reach the correct result. In theory, we believe that the second best choice is to err on the side of acquitting the guilty rather than convicting the innocent. We say that it is better to acquit ten guilty men than convict one who is innocent. But I'm not sure that we really believe it. Would we really let ten child molesters walk the street to avoid convicting one innocent one? I have my doubts. Although we think the system is tilted to protect defendants, it may not be. Juries may not really believe in the presumption of innocence. Furthermore the prosecutor usually has far more resources than the defense. Searches have to be reasonable, but at least the government can conduct them. The defense cannot. More generally, the prosecution has a professional police force investigating for it, and greater access to forensic testing. If the prosecutor wishes to frame a suspect (which fortunately is not the norm) it may not be all that difficult. It's hard to know which way juries in fact err more. Some high profile cases (John Hinckley, O.J. Simpson) may be instances in which a guilty man was acquitted. But recent studies have identified a huge number of wrongful convictions. I'm not persuaded that we really are acquitting more guilty people than convicting those who are innocent. There is probably no value in redefining reasonable doubt, but we can examine and try to minimize the causes of wrongful conviction. False identification is one of the largest problems. Of course, we can't disallow eye-witness identification. But we can alter procedures to make them more reliable. One is to show pictures and suspects individually so that the witness will not assume that the array includes the culprit. Another is to have the lineup conducted by someone who doesn't know who the suspect is to avoid intentional or unintentional tipping of the witness. False confessions are another problem. Perhaps the best remedy is to videotape all confessions so that defense counsel and the court (jury?) can see how the confession was obtained, and perhaps defense counsel can expose its probable inaccuracy. Bad forensics can be either intentionally or unintentionally done. In the former case, severe sanctions should be available, and, of course, the conviction so obtained should be set aside. With unintentional botched forensics, defense counsel simply need to be trained to spot the problem and counter the bad forensics with their own better forensics. Perhaps the most pernicious source of false convictions are so-called jailhouse confessions. These occur when an inmate claims to have overheard the defendant describe and confess to the crime. The informant is usually paid in the form of cash, dropped charges, and/or a reduced sentence. Obviously the probability of perjury is extremely high in such a circumstance. I would seriously consider disallowing this type of testimony entirely because of the high likelihood that it is false. Short of that, I'd at least require a cautionary instruction to the jury to be wary of the probability of falsity. I conclude with four suggestions that are predicated on the reality that wrongful convictions happen. (1) There should be innocence commissions set up similar to the British model. (2) Defenses should not be artificially limited. For example, pending the outcome of a U.S. Supreme Court case, a State can (and some do) deny the defendant the opportunity to present evidence that somebody else committed the crime. (3) As long as we know there are mistakes, capital punishment should be abolished (as most of the civilized world has). And (4) parole should not be contingent on a person's admitting his guilt. This presents an untenable dilemma for an innocent person, and may actually cause him to spend more time in prison than a similarly-situated guilty one.

September Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:Irwin N. Gertzog. 2004. Women and Power on Capitol Hill: Reconstructing the Congressional Women's Caucus.Roger Tuller. 2001. Let No Guilty Man Escape: A Judicial Biography of “Hanging Judge” Isaac C. Parker.Ronald Labbe and Jonathan Lurie. 2003. The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment.

The King's Buttons: The Language of Law inBilly Budd

Revolution and law are joined inBilly Budd— and were from its inception. According to the Genetic Text editors, Herman Melville's last work began as a headnote to a ballad about a condemned naval mutineer. Gradually, this kernel evolved into a prose narrative set in 1797, the year of seemingly contagious British naval mutinies — notably Spithead and “The Great Mutiny” at the Nore — that threatened the prosecution of England's naval war against the regicidal French revolutionary forces. By the time Melville had fixed upon these emblematic, modern political events for his scene, the mutineer of the ballad, an older and probably guilty man, had become a very different figure (Hayford and Sealts, 2). Billy Budd's extraordinary qualities now speak to the injustice of his capital sentence, whereas Captain Vere's judgment speaks to the imperative of necessity. This conflict is reflected not only in the doubts of the drumhead court that sentences Billy, but in the arguments of generations of critics and the midrash of commentary the novel has engendered.

Reviews of Books:"Let No Guilty Man Escape": A Judicial Biography of "Hanging Judge" Isaac C. Parker Roger H. Tuller

Reviews of Books:"Let No Guilty Man Escape": A Judicial Biography of "Hanging Judge" Isaac C. Parker Roger H. Tuller

Roger H. Tuller. <italic>“Let No Guilty Man Escape”: A Judicial Biography of “Hanging Judge” Isaac C. Parker</italic>. (Legal History of North America, number 9.) Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 210

Journal Article Roger H. Tuller. “Let No Guilty Man Escape”: A Judicial Biography of “Hanging Judge” Isaac C. Parker. (Legal History of North America, number 9.) Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 210 Get access Tuller Roger H.. “Let No Guilty Man Escape”: A Judicial Biography of “Hanging Judge” Isaac C. Parker. (Legal History of North America, number 9.) Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 210. $27.95. Lawrence H. Larsen Lawrence H. Larsen University of Missouri, Kansas City Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 107, Issue 2, April 2002, Page 550, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/107.2.550 Published: 01 April 2002

"Let No Guilty Man Escape": A Judicial Biography of "Hanging Judge" Isaac C. Parker

"Let No Guilty Man Escape": A Judicial Biography of "Hanging Judge" Isaac C. Parker