Wild Beasts and Idle Humors: The Insanity Defense from Antiquity to the Present

by Daniel N. Robinson

How does the law regard and define mental incompetence, when faced with the problem of meting out justice? To what extent has the law relied on extra-legal authorities--be they religious or scientific--to frame its own categories of mental incompetence and madness? Wild Beasts and Idle Humours takes us on an illuminating journey through the changing historical landscape of human nature and offers an unprecedented look at the legal conceptions of insanity from the pre-classical Greek world to the present. Although actual trial records are either totally lacking or incomplete until the eighteenth century, there are other sources from which the insanity defenses can be constructed. In this book Daniel Robinson, a distinguished historian of psychology, pores over centuries of written law, statements by legal commentators, summaries of crimes, and punishments, to glean from these sources an understanding of epochal views of responsibility and competence. From the Greek phrenesis to the Roman notions of furiosus and non compos mentis , from the seventeenth-century witch trials to today's interpretation of mens rea , Robinson takes us through history and provides the intricate story of how the insanity defense has been construed as a meeting point of the law and those professions that chart human behavior and namely religion, medicine, and psychology. The result is a rare historical account of "insanity" within western civilization. Wild Beasts and Idle Humours will be essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of thinking not merely about legal insanity but about such core concepts as responsibility, fitness for the rule of law, competence to enter into contracts and covenants, the role of punishments, and the place of experts within the overall juridical context.

Genres: Psychology, History, Law

299 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1996

About the author

Daniel N. Robinson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Georgetown University and a Fellow of the Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University.

Robinson has published in a wide variety of subjects, including moral philosophy, the philosophy of psychology, legal philosophy, the philosophy of the mind, intellectual history, legal history, and the history of psychology. He has held academic positions at Amherst College, Georgetown University, Princeton University, and Columbia University. In addition, he served as the principal consultant to PBS and the BBC for their award-winning series 'The Brain' and 'The Mind', and he lectured for 'The Great Courses' series on Philosophy. He is on the Board of Consulting Scholars of Princeton University's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and is a Senior Fellow of BYU's Wheatley Institution. In 2011 he received the Gittler Award from the American Psychological Association for significant contributions to the philosophical foundations of Psychology.

Reviews

[Durakov · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much better than a history on the insanity defense has any right to be. One reviewer remarked that it was "dry." I think this is about as interesting as this topic could possibly be given how dry the topic is. The reconstructions of medieval and early modern jurisprudence of madness were especially well done.

Every legal category from the furiosi to the modern "psychopath" are contextualized in the history of philosophical, folkloric, literary, and medical thought and livened up with little details that offer some flavor to legal categories that may as well be tautologies to the unfamiliar. For instance, I had no idea that the McNaughten of the most famous insanity test fame had expressed anti-Corn Law sentiments and socialized with chartists and socialists prior to his attempted assassination on the prime minister.

The weak points for me were that Robinson does not attempt much of a social history of these legal statutes. The book remains firmly within the realm of the history of the theory and the language of courts and only touches on social matters more or less directly related to this (leaving the bigger questions around the form of the court and why specific formulations of competency and vengeance arise only in such-and-such contexts to the side). Broader social history was perhaps outside the scope of a book already packed with medical and philosophical debates, but it does leave you feeling like there's an unaddressed elephant in the room. Second is the anglo-saxon focus. We hear of Mediterranean thought in the antiquity section and he tells us that the Arabs had very different concepts in the Middle Ages (without spending much time on them), but he builds up to a detailed account of (some) German, (but mostly) English and American jurisprudence, thus leaving out such major figures as Cesare Lombroso and the offshoot of forensic psychiatry/criminology that followed in his footsteps. For that matter and connected to this (given Lombroso's influence on each), he really doesn't touch on fascist, nazi, or pro-slavery jurisprudence of madness at all. Perhaps he saw these, as many do, as "mistakes" or contingent accidents gone adrift from the general teleology.

This is still among the best texts I've encountered on law and madness, and serves as a fantastic map for a broader project that would include those missing pieces I noted above.

[L]

dry, but well researched so far. at p.70.