RENSIC PHASE OF LITIGIOUS PARANOIA 132

IV THE MALINGERER: A CLINICAL STUDY 156

V THE ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF KLEPTOMANIA 239

INDEX 267

STUDIES IN FORENSIC PSYCHIATRY

CHAPTER I

PSYCHOGENESIS IN THE PSYCHOSES OF PRISONERS

That mental disorder may be due to causes purely psychic in nature is
acknowledged by everyone. The older psychiatrists laid much stress on
this point, a revival of which may be seen in the present-day widespread
psychoanalytic movement. The reaction to the all too-embracing
materialistic tendencies which have dominated psychiatric thought in
recent decades was bound to come. It was especially the clinician who
gave the impetus to this movement, because in pursuing the materialistic
bent he found himself totally helpless as a therapeutist in the great
majority of mental cases, and was therefore eventually forced to seek
more promising paths.

Bleuler's attitude towards this question, because of the prominent
position he occupies in the world of psychiatry, is interesting.

"Bleuler, who succeeded Forel as Professor of Psychiatry and Medical
Director of the Cantonal Insane Asylum (Burghoelzi) at Zurich, having
become convinced that no solution could be arrived at along this
anatomical path for the many riddles offered by the disturbed mental
life, had for years chosen the psychological path. He was led to take
this course because he knew that of the chronic inmates of the asylum,
only about one-fifth showed anatomical changes of the central nervous
system sufficient to explain the mental deviations exhibited."[1]

The results already achieved by this change of attitude in psychiatry
are sufficient justification for its existence.

One became especially convinced of the potency of mental factors in the
production of mental disease from the observation and study of the
psychoses of criminals. Here the conflicts which lead an individual to
seek in mental disorder a satisfactory compromise are so concrete as to
leave no doubt concerning cause and effect.

Kraepelin[2] asserts that mental disorders occur ten times as frequently
in prison as in freedom. The criminal, who in most instances is already
burdened with a more or less strong predisposition to mental disorder,
upon being placed in prison finds himself at once in a most favorable
environ