ABSTRACT
The treatment of this subject has long been suffering from two handicaps: it has been neglected in favour of criminal anthropology and biology, and it has been too much identified with the study of criminal pathology, i.e. of the mentally abnormal offender. It is only from the early decades of the present century on, with the gradual weakening of the influence of the Lombrosian school, with the coming of psycho-analysis and the growing awareness that there is no hard and fast line of demarcation between the normal and the abnormal, that the psychology of the normal offender has come into its own. A brief, but valuable sketch of the history of the subject, to which special reference may here be made, has been given by Bonger. 1 Among the first to collect a volume of case material on the matter was the French lawyer F. G. de Pitaval in his Causes célèbres et intéressantes (1734 ff. in 20 volumes), followed by a German work Der Neue Pitaval (1842 ff.) and several new editions (1742–95), one of them with a preface by no less a person than Friedrich Schiller, whose intense interest in the subject is well known. The nineteenth century saw the publication of Anselm von Feuerbach's Merkwürdige Kriminalrechtsfälle (1808–11) and his Aktenmässige Darstellung merkwürdiger Verbrechen (1827–9), as of several other works which had this in common with their famous predecessor that they were collections of interesting criminal cases, especially of sensational trials. 2 While these collections have greatly increased our knowledge of individual crimes and criminals, most of them suffered from the weakness that they concentrated too much on the ‘interesting’, i.e. the sensational, case to the exclusion of the great masses of ordinary ‘run of the mill’ cases and that they paid too much attention to criminal trials to the exclusion of crimes not brought before the courts. Moreover, their psychology was often primitive, in accordance with the backward state of the scientific study of psychology at the time when the earlier of these pubhcations appeared. More recent collections, such as the ‘Notable British Trials Series’, 3 usually consist of verbatim reproductions of the trial with introductions which often attempt to break through the barriers and formalities of English criminal procedure and to make at least a brief assessment of the psychological and psychiatric factors at work.
