MORAL INSANITY

Legal insanity, moral insanity, and Stendhal's Le rouge et le noir.

PROBLEMS pertaining to concepts of legal and medical insanity have long been present and at times seem to defy solution. Differing views of justice, the impulse toward revenge, and the devices to expiate guilt of the individual and society complicate further the complex currents of any era. They were with us in the aftermath of the killing of a President and the condemnation of his alleged assa...

Moral insanity and psychological disorder: the hybrid roots of psychiatry

This paper traces the significance of the diagnosis of 'moral insanity' (and the related diagnoses of 'monomania' and ' manie sans délire') to the development of psychiatry as a profession in the nineteenth century. The pioneers of psychiatric thought were motivated to explore such diagnoses because they promised public recognition in the high status surroundings of the criminal court. Some suc...

A Note on Moral Insanity and Psychopathic Disorders

Despite a good deal of argument to the contrary (Maughs, 1941; Hunter and Macalpine, 1963; Walk, 1954; Walk and Walker, 1961; Craft, 1965; Whitlock, 1967) it is still com monly believed that Prichard's 'moral insanity' (1835) was the forerunner of our present-day concept of psychopathic (sociopathic) personality; the most recent example of this appearing in the paper by Davies and Feldman (1981...

Insanity

J C Prichard's concept of moral insanity--a medical theory of the corruption of human nature.

In the eighteenth century, insanity was widely explained within the Lockean philosophical framework of enlightened rationality: delusions or illusions, basically erroneous thinking, led human reason into the wrong. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, after the French Revolution and in the midst of the transformations which the industrial revolution brought about, new theories of insanit...