Crime and Psychology

Claud Mullins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032132549
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000508468
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1943 Crime and Psychology reveals to the public some of the results of well-known magistrate Claud Mullin's many years of pioneering work in using the help of medical psychologists for the treatment of criminals. The book contains numerous actual cases of real scientific and social value. They show how even men who have in the past been sent to prison for serious offences can be helped, through treatment while at liberty, to lead useful lives for many years afterwards. The author also shows how psychological principles could become essential features of our system of criminal trial. This constructive and convincing book is an essential read for scholars and researchers of criminal psychology, applied psychology, criminology, and psychology in general.

CHAPTER 1

SOME PRINCIPLES OF MODERN PSYCHOLOGY¹

The criminal has been regarded as sinner, moral reprobate, or anthropological monstrosity, or has been explained away as a by-product of social conditions without much individual significance…. Neither individual nor society is the ultimate end of the investigation. It is the relation subsisting between them at any given time which is the real subject matter…. A man’s psychological attitude is basically determined by the relation between individual and community…. The value of the psychological approach cannot be overestimated. The essential point is that the reaction of individual and environment produces a psychological attitude.

HENRY T. F. RHODES²

MODERN PSYCHOLOGY teaches that there is a part of our mind of which we are ordinarily not aware which has a profound effect upon us in that it may influence our thoughts, our beliefs, our characters, our emotions, and our behaviour. ‘Our mind is like an iceberg of which only one small part, the conscious, is above the surface.’³ In the larger part below the surface, that is below the level of consciousness, thoughts, feelings, wishes, and impulses may be active and have an influence upon us.

In itself this is ancient knowledge. In a book, A History of Medical Psychology,⁴ it was stated that ‘medico-psychological ideas are found in the literary monuments of ancient India’, in the Vedas, which were composed between 1000 and 2000 years B.C. Plato wrote about the unconscious influenceof experience and atmosphere on human character and conduct. Thus:

We would not have our guardians [ruling class] grow up amid images of moral deformity, as in some noxious pasture, and there browse and feed upon many a baneful herb and flower day by day, little by little, until they silently gather a festering mass of corruption in their own soul…. Then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall flow into the eye and ear, like a health-giving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason.¹

Even some of the distinctive ideas and methods of Sigmund Freud are suggested in some passages of Plato. ‘My art’, declared Socrates, according to Plato, ‘is like that of midwives, but differs from theirs, in that I attend men and not women, and I look after their souls when they are in labour, and not after their bodies.’ There is definitely a psycho-analytical ring in what follows:

The triumph of my art is in thoroughly examining whether the thought which the mind of the young man brings forth is a phantom and a lie, or a fruitful and true birth. And like the midwives, I am barren, and the reproach often made against me, that I ask questions of others and have not the wit to answer them myself, is very just. The reason is, that the god compels me to be a midwife, but does not allow me to have children. So I myself am not at all wise, nor have I any invention or child of my own to show, but those who talk with me profit…. It is quite clear that they never learned anything from me; all that they master and discover comes from themselves…. Dire are the pangs which my art is able to arouse and to allay in those who consort with me, just like the pangs of women in childbirth…. For I have actually known some who were ready to bite me when I deprived them of a darling folly.²

There is much here that will be familiar to those who understand the principles of psycho-analysis and the reactions that are sometimes shown by patients undergoing psycho-analysis. Indeed, the words ‘all that they master and discover comes from themselves’ constitute the essence of most modern psycho-therapy. But ancient though these ideas are, it has been only in recent decades that sustained efforts have been made to study unconscious factors and by understanding them, to modify their influence where they have wrought harm.

One of the fundamental maxims of modern psychology is that what has been forgotten or repressed, or experienced only in the unconscious, is not obliterated. The belief of Freud that nothing is forgotten, in the meaning of being obliterated, has been challenged by other psychologists,¹ but there is no need for us to enter into this controversy, since for our purpose it suffices that much that has passed beyond memory, and much that has never been recorded in it, remain in the unconscious and can be powerful factors. There are, of course, various depths in the unconscious. It is a common experience of us all that what has been forgotten can often be recalled by an effort of will, or by some resumed contact or association. Such experience illustrates the working of what is termed the pre-conscious. But some impulses, ideas, and emotions, especially those which are the most important and primitive, are incapable of becoming conscious, usually because of the mentally painful conflict to which they give rise; they are barred from consciousness by a process known as unconscious repression.

This unconscious system of the mind is in constant operation, in sleep as well as during the daily round, and it is of supreme importance to realize that what has been repressed can exercise a powerful, and often a harmful, influence on health, both physical and mental, and also on conduct. Such influence is, of course, not realized, either by the sufferer or by those around him.

Therefore the purpose of psycho-therapy is to restore to health those whose lives are being adversely affected by their unconscious conflicts. This is done by helping them to gain an insight into the causes of their condition. When faulty repressions giving rise to mental symptoms are corrected, the emotional tension is released. It is only as a man ‘is brought to recognize the parts of his experience and the dynamics of his life with which he has lost contact that he comes to realize that his problem is within his own personality’.¹ Psycho-therapy practises the art of leading afflicted people to retrace their steps, so that by re-experiencing what has hurt and lain unconscious and by ventilating unconscious conflicts that are still active, they can secure release from the ill effects of both. Psycho-therapy seeks to trace back to its origin the symptom that has caused breakdown, to ascertain why mental pain and conflict arose and why they have persisted in such strength.

Some modern psychologists maintain that our minds are more than the repositories of experiences and that they are the repositories also of inherited instincts. They claim that just as our bodies do not really begin at conception, but are endowed with the physical characteristics of many generations of ancestors, similarly our minds are endowed with the experiences and instincts of previous generations. In this view a new-born child is in fact an elderly being, both physically and psychologically. ‘The collective unconscious is the mighty spiritual inheritance of human development, reborn in every individual … constitution’, wrote Dr. C. G. Jung, who also maintained that our dreams are sometimes ‘manifestations of the collective unconscious which, going beyond the individual conflicts’ of the dreamer, become involved in ‘the primordial experience of universal human problems’.² This view is much disputed among modern psychologists. Thus Alfred Adler, founder of the school of Individual Psychology, firmly denied the existence of an ‘inherited unconscious’.¹ But Adler was reluctant to accept heredity in any form. What can be said without fear of dispute is that just as constitutional factors affect a man’s physical development, there are constitutional factors which affect the development of the human mind. There is a psychological predisposition which constitutes, as it were, the soil in which the seed of mental conflict may later develop. Further than that we have no need to go, since the problem bf inheritance has but little practical bearing on the subject of this book.² No psychological report that I have ever received about a delinquent has suggested atavistic causes of his behaviour. Characteristics of remote ancestors may in fact have influenced the delinquent, and I have often suspected that this must have been the case, but magistrates work in criminal courts, not in scientific laboratories.

Both our bodies and our minds develop slowly from small beginnings. Experience, like inheritance, begins before birth. During a normal pregnancy the child-to-be has every need satisfied. It is undisputed that the child’s physical body can be injured or maldeveloped if the mother does not consume sufficient quantities of food containing the chemicals needed by the unborn child. Many psychologists claim that emotional experiences of the mother during the later stages of pregnancy can also affect the child in that such emotional experiences may also affect the quality of the nourishment that reaches the child in the womb. Some support for this view has come from non-psychological sources. For instance, when during the war of 1939 air raids on the civilian population of our cities began, Dame Louise Mcllroy (a well-known physiologist and gynaecologist and not a psychologist by profession) pleaded for the more intensive evacuation of expectant mothers from danger areas on the following ground:

What children, bom in circumstances fraught with terror for the mother, to say nothing of the physical dangers associated with air raids, will be like in later life, if they do survive, it is not difficult to imagine. We still come across cases of abnormalities in individuals born during the last war…. Fear is one of the most deadly enemies in obstetric practice.¹

I have had before me in court delinquents, physically normal, whose delinquent conduct was explained by medical experts, and sometimes by experienced police officers, as the indirect consequence of the fact that they were bom during air raids of the war of 1914. Naturally it was impossible to test these explanations scientifically, but even allowing for an ample margin of error, it is probable that there will be many such cases during the coming years. Happily, owing to the character of most of our people, the number of children born in air raids who are adversely affected in their psychological development to any serious extent is likely to be but a small proportion; for where no undue fear was felt, either by the parents or by those around the child, all is likely to be well with the child if its body escaped injury. But in future years our criminal courts are sure to have to deal with many who were not so fortunate. In fact, both for mothers and babies fear during air raids was an even greater danger than bombs. For present purposes air raids and bombs are merely instances of the possible effects on newly born children of experiences, physical or psychological, coming to the mother during pregnancy or confinement.

Some schools of psychological thought maintain that birth can originate unconscious experience which may have results in later life.² This was brought home to me when I was once discussing a man with an analytical psychologist, in general a follower of Freud’s teaching. This man had a harmless form of claustrophobia in that he hated any complete enclosure of the head or any undue pressure on it. He hated wearing a gas mask and would have been panic stricken had he put on a diver’s helmet; he even disliked it if a child sat on his head. This, I believe, is no unusual condition. The explanation given to me was that the condition probably originated in a difficult passage of the head at birth. Such a theory sounds at first fantastic, but once it is accepted that the mind receives impressions apart from consciousness, the theory seems at least possible. Happily for the man in question, he had been brought up wisely from the psychological point of view, but had his natural aggressive instincts been unduly repressed or overinhibited, then his form of claustrophobia could have resulted in a severe and even a crippling condition, which nothing but prolonged psycho-therapy could have relieved.

Even under the most favourable circumstances birth brings the earliest of a child’s major anxieties. Apart from physical dangers, the separation from the mother involves a loss of security. With birth begin both conscious and unconscious feelings of being thwarted; what psychologists term frustration has begun. The child is no longer supreme. The comparative security, quiet, and contentment of existence in the womb have given place to interference, risks, and the disappointments of human activity.

From its earliest days a child is occupied with the fulfilment of instinctive urges; for a time it remains supremely egocentric. But training begins almost at once and each step in this can have psychological consequences. There come a succession of new experiences, many of which are very disturbing to the child, but the love and care that it receives strengthen its sense of security and well-being. Gradually more and more adjustments have to be made, and these are far from easy for the child. Regularity in feeding, cleanliness, and so on, must involve restraints on primitive feelings. Intense anxiety, of great importance in later development, may arise if there are difficulties in breast feeding or even when feeding is not given when it is desired. Weaning is ordinarily a most anxious time for the child as well as for parents. At such times feelings of aggression are stimulated in every child. Dr. Money-Kyrie maintained that it is the human child’s helplessness, even more than the relatively long period of his dependence, that is significant in the story of mankind. When a human child is hungry, ‘he can only scream. This is the sole mechanism for the fulfilment of his needs he is endowed with…. Inevitably, therefore, he will be more ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Dedication
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Some Principles of Modern Psychology
• 2 Practical Possibilities
• 3 A Few Cases
• 4 Punishment
• 5 Further Obstacles
• 6 The Need for Investigation
• 7 Psychology and Criminal Procedure
• 8 Children in the Courts
• 9 The Bench and the Delinquent
• Appendix
• Index