ABSTRACT
I had two somewhat contradictory aims in producing this book. I wished to keep to a format similar to that used in the first edition but, in the light of time and experience, to produce a revised work with a rather more restricted focus in order to encapsulate new thinking and approaches. It is not easy to achieve the best of all possible worlds. Only those familiar with the first version will know to what extent I have succeeded. It is now some eighteen years since the first work was conceived and fifteen years since its publication. In Chapter 1 I referred to a number of changes that have occurred since that time, not the least of these being the arrival of specialist texts in forensic psychiatry, and the arrival on the scene of two major forensic-psychiatric journals - the Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health - to which we now must add the arrival of a new forensic psychology journal, Psychology, Crime and Law.
