“Perchance to dream”. Personality modifications and criminal liability : a nineteenth-century debate between psychiatry and law
At the end of the nineteenth century, psychiatry ‘discovered’ some new pathologies such as split personality. These pathologies put into question the traditional reassuring image of human beings as capable of fully controlling his/her behaviour. The aim of this article is to cast new light on how th...
Gorde:
| Argitaratua izan da: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/chs, |
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| Egile nagusia: | |
| Formatua: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Hizkuntza: | Anglais |
| Argitaratua: |
Crime, Histoire & Sociétés
2016
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| Sarrera elektronikoa: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Gaia: | At the end of the nineteenth century, psychiatry ‘discovered’ some new pathologies such as split personality. These pathologies put into question the traditional reassuring image of human beings as capable of fully controlling his/her behaviour. The aim of this article is to cast new light on how the discovery by psychiatry of certain mental disorders questioned the unitary vision of the human mind previously shared and accepted by legal theory and medical sciences. Certain psychiatrists maintained that some actions seemed to be determined by unconscious forces within an individual, even without any obvious mental illness. These observations challenged the concept of legal liability which had previously been accepted by most legal scholars, and gave rise to a lively debate between medicine and law. |
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