notorious criminals could lead him to answers and renown.
The prison authorities, not to mention the prosecutors for the future trial, were uninterested in the questions that excited Kelley’s curiosity. Nobody in Nuremberg wanted to know what made these human beings in high Nazi positions commit such nefarious acts.
In seeking to isolate the workings of the Nazi mind, Kelley was venturing into a controversial field of study, the intersection of psychiatry and criminology. Sociologists had long speculated on the causes of criminal behavior and studied the social forces that produce crime. But psychiatrists had less successfully looked within criminals, using their expertise on emotional states, subconscious motivations, and diseases of the mind. For decades, going back to the pioneering psychiatric work of the eminent nineteenth-century American physician Benjamin Rush, doctors had searched for flaws in some people that caused deviant behavior.These early investigators had thought of the elusive flaws as biological—something wrong or evolutionarily backward in the body. But what if the defect was not in the organism, but in the mind? The pioneering nineteenth-century criminologist Cesare Lombroso had speculated that criminals act in accordance with their nature: they are born bad. He began searching for the innate physical and mental characteristics of criminals. Much of Lombroso’s work has long been discredited as inaccurate, racist, and a form of social Darwinism, butin attempting to measure the psychological states of his criminal subjects, he pulled criminology into the realm of psychiatry. He pegged criminals as impulsive, immature, deprived of affection, and lacking in restraint, all qualities that later studies bore out. This inspired others to wonder whether, if the seeds of criminality were psychological, a cleverinvestigator could make his name by identifying one or more measurable and diagnosable mental disorders that led to such behavior.
In court, where psychiatrists were increasingly testifying on the sanity of accused criminals, the mind experts simply addressed whether the accused person could distinguish right from wrong, not how he might fit some psychological profile of criminally insane perpetrators. Through the early years of the twentieth century, scientists of many types honed in on various mental defects supposedly shared by convicts. In Britain in 1913, Charles Buckman Goring (no relation to Hermann Göring) found that weak intelligence was the only shared quality among convicts he studied. Later studies tagged certain psychoses and neuroses as better identifiers of criminals than low intelligence.By the 1930s an enormous study of the psychiatry of crime in the prisons of New York State was beginning to indicate that personality disorders were the sparks of much criminal behavior. These disorders included antisocial behavior, narcissism, and paranoia.
Consequently people who worked with criminals increasingly viewed crime as a medical problem. Throughout the American justice system, police officers, social workers, lawyers, and judges were accepting the important role of psychological factors in criminal behavior. Hundreds of psychiatrists applied their skills in prisons.
In 1943, in the middle of World War II, the American psychiatrist Richard Brickner published Is Germany Incurable? , a book that Kelley owned.Brickner tried to view the crimes of the German government as he would examine the behaviors of a patient. He declared that although many individual Germans were mentally healthy, their nation’s actions “have been typical of what the psychiatrist finds in certain highly alarming types of individual behavior.” He discovered evidence of German mental disorder in news dispatches that the journalist William L. Shirer sent back to the United States during the early months of the war. In one, Shirer described an audience’s mass salute of Hitler at the Berlin Opera, “their faces
The prison authorities, not to mention the prosecutors for the future trial, were uninterested in the questions that excited Kelley’s curiosity. Nobody in Nuremberg wanted to know what made these human beings in high Nazi positions commit such nefarious acts.
In seeking to isolate the workings of the Nazi mind, Kelley was venturing into a controversial field of study, the intersection of psychiatry and criminology. Sociologists had long speculated on the causes of criminal behavior and studied the social forces that produce crime. But psychiatrists had less successfully looked within criminals, using their expertise on emotional states, subconscious motivations, and diseases of the mind. For decades, going back to the pioneering psychiatric work of the eminent nineteenth-century American physician Benjamin Rush, doctors had searched for flaws in some people that caused deviant behavior.These early investigators had thought of the elusive flaws as biological—something wrong or evolutionarily backward in the body. But what if the defect was not in the organism, but in the mind? The pioneering nineteenth-century criminologist Cesare Lombroso had speculated that criminals act in accordance with their nature: they are born bad. He began searching for the innate physical and mental characteristics of criminals. Much of Lombroso’s work has long been discredited as inaccurate, racist, and a form of social Darwinism, butin attempting to measure the psychological states of his criminal subjects, he pulled criminology into the realm of psychiatry. He pegged criminals as impulsive, immature, deprived of affection, and lacking in restraint, all qualities that later studies bore out. This inspired others to wonder whether, if the seeds of criminality were psychological, a cleverinvestigator could make his name by identifying one or more measurable and diagnosable mental disorders that led to such behavior.
In court, where psychiatrists were increasingly testifying on the sanity of accused criminals, the mind experts simply addressed whether the accused person could distinguish right from wrong, not how he might fit some psychological profile of criminally insane perpetrators. Through the early years of the twentieth century, scientists of many types honed in on various mental defects supposedly shared by convicts. In Britain in 1913, Charles Buckman Goring (no relation to Hermann Göring) found that weak intelligence was the only shared quality among convicts he studied. Later studies tagged certain psychoses and neuroses as better identifiers of criminals than low intelligence.By the 1930s an enormous study of the psychiatry of crime in the prisons of New York State was beginning to indicate that personality disorders were the sparks of much criminal behavior. These disorders included antisocial behavior, narcissism, and paranoia.
Consequently people who worked with criminals increasingly viewed crime as a medical problem. Throughout the American justice system, police officers, social workers, lawyers, and judges were accepting the important role of psychological factors in criminal behavior. Hundreds of psychiatrists applied their skills in prisons.
In 1943, in the middle of World War II, the American psychiatrist Richard Brickner published Is Germany Incurable? , a book that Kelley owned.Brickner tried to view the crimes of the German government as he would examine the behaviors of a patient. He declared that although many individual Germans were mentally healthy, their nation’s actions “have been typical of what the psychiatrist finds in certain highly alarming types of individual behavior.” He discovered evidence of German mental disorder in news dispatches that the journalist William L. Shirer sent back to the United States during the early months of the war. In one, Shirer described an audience’s mass salute of Hitler at the Berlin Opera, “their faces
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