Criminal Psychology, Hans Gross [jenna bush book club .txt] 📗

His imagination, which was so creative, worked so easily and without <p 464>

effort that he was not aware of its activity, and moreover, his fundamental ideas were so clear that everything fell into lines spontaneously without his being conscious of it later. This “working” of the imagination is so effortless to fortunate natures that it becomes an ordinary movement. Thus Goethe tells of an imaginary flower which broke into its elements, united again, broke again, and united in another form, etc. His story reveals one of the reasons for the false descriptions of perception. The perception is correct when made, then the imagination causes movements of ideas and the question follows which of the two was more vigorous, the perceptive or the imaginal activity? If the one was intenser, memory was correct; if the other, the recollection was erroneous. It is hence important, from the point of view of the lawyer, to study the nature and intensity of witnesses’ imagination.[1] We need only to observe the influence of imaginal movements on powerful minds in order to see clearly what influence even their weak reflection may have on ordinary people. Schopenhauer finds the chief pleasure of every work of art in imagination; and Goethe finds that no man experiences or enjoys anything without becoming productive.

 

Most instructive is the compilation of imaginative ideas given by H<o:>fler[2] and put together from the experiences of scholars, investigators, artists, and other important persons. For our purposes it would be better to have a number of reliable statements from other people which would show how normal individuals were led astray by their imaginations. We might then learn approximately what imaginative notions might do, and how far their limits extend.

Sully calls attention to the fact that Dickens’s characters were real to him and that when the novel was completed, its dramatic person<ae>

became personal memories. Perhaps all imaginative people are likely to take their imaginings as actual remembered events and persons. If this happens to a witness, what trouble he may cause us!

 

A physician, Dr. Hadekamp, said that he used to see the flow of blood before he cut the vein open. Another physician, Dr.

Schmeisser, confirms this experience. Such cases are controlled physically, the flow of blood can not be seen before the knife is removed.

Yet how often, at least chronologically, do similar mistakes occur when no such control is present? There is the story of a woman who could describe so accurately symptoms which resulted from a swallowed needle, that the physicians were deceived and undertook [1] Cf. Witasek: Zeitschrift f. Psychologie. Vol. XII. “<U:>ber Willk<u:>rliche Vorstellungsverbindung.”

 

[2] Psychologie. Wien u. Prag. 1897.

 

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operations which only served to show that the woman had merely imagined it all. A similar case is that of a man who believed himself to have swallowed his false teeth. He even had serious feelings of choking which immediately disappeared on the discovery of the teeth under his night-table. A prominent oculist told me that he had once treated for some time a famous scholar because the latter so accurately described a weakening of the retina that the physician, in spite of his objective discoveries, was deceived and learned his mistake only when it appeared that the great scholar fortunately had been made game of by his own imagination. Maudsley tells how Baron von Swieten once saw burst a rotten corpse of a dog, and, for years after, saw the same thing whenever he came to the same place. Many people, Goethe, Newton, Shelley, William Black, and others, were able completely to visualize past images. Fechner tells of a man who claimed voluntarily to excite anywhere on his skin the feeling of pressure, heat, and cold, but not of cut, prick or bruise, because such imaginations tended to endure a long time.

There is the story of another man who had a three days’ pain in his finger because he had seen his child crush an analogous finger.

 

Abercrombie tells of an otherwise very excitable person who believed in the reality of the luck that a fortune-teller had predicted for him, and some authorities hold that practically everybody who eagerly awaits a friend hears his step in every sound. Hoppe’s observation that pruritus vulv<ae> excites in imaginative women the illusion of being raped is of considerable importance, and we criminalists must watch for it in certain cases. Lieber tells of a colored preacher who so vividly painted the tortures in hell that he himself could merely cry and grunt for minutes at a time. M<u:>ller cites a lady who was permitted to smell from an empty bottle and who regularly lost consciousness when she was told that the bottle contained laughing gas. Women often assert that when about to change their homes they often see the new residence in dreams just as it really appears later on. Then there is a story of a man blind for fourteen years who nevertheless saw the faces of acquaintances and was so troubled thereby that the famous Graefe severed his optic nerve and so released him from his imagination.

 

Taine describes the splendid scene in which Balzac once told Mad. de Girardin that he intended to give Sandeau a horse. He did not do so, but talked so much about it that he used to ask Sandeau how the horse was. Taine comments that it is clear that the starting point of such an illusion is a voluntary fiction. The person <p 466>

in question knows it as such in the beginning but forgets it at the end. Such false memories are numerous among barbarous peoples and among raw, untrained, and childish minds. They see a simple fact; the more they think of it the more they see in it; they magnify and decorate it with environing circumstances, and finally, unite all the details into a whole in memory. Then they are unable to distinguish what is true from what is not. Most legends develop in this way. A peasant assured Taine that he saw his sister’s soul on the day she died,—though it was really the light of a brandy bottle in the sunset.

 

In conclusion, I want to cite a case I have already mentioned, which seems to me significant. As student I visited during vacation a village, one of whose young peasant inhabitants had gone to town for the first time in his life. He was my vacation play-mate from earliest childhood, and known to me as absolutely devoted to the truth. When he returned from his visit, he told me of the wonders of the city, the climax of which was the menagerie he had visited.

He described what he saw very well, but also said that he had seen a battle between an anaconda and a lion. The serpent swallowed the lion and then many Moors came and killed the serpent. As was immediately to be inferred and as I verified on my return, this battle was to be seen only on the advertising posters which are hung in front of every menagerie. The lad’s imagination had been so excited by what he had seen that day that the real and the imagined were thoroughly interfused. How often may this happen to our witnesses!

 

If the notion of imagination is to be limited to the activity of representation, we must class under it the premonitions and forewarnings which are of influence not only among the uneducated.

Inasmuch as reliable observations, not put together a posteriori, are lacking, nothing exact can be said about them. That innumerable assertions and a semi-scientific literature about the matter exists, is generally familiar. And it is undeniable that predictions, premonitions, etc., may be very vivid, and have considerable somatic influence.

Thus, prophecy of approaching death, certain threats or knowledge of the fact that an individual’s death is being prayed for, etc., may have deadly effect on excited people. The latter superstition especially, has considerable influence. Praying for death, etc., is aboriginal. It has been traced historically into the twelfth century and is made use of today. Twelve years ago I was told of a case in which an old lady was killed because an enemy of hers had the <p 467>

death-mass read for her. The old lady simply died of fright. In some degree we must pay attention to even such apparently remote questions.

 

(d) Misunderstandings.

 

Section 106. (I) Verbal Misunderstandings.[1]

 

Here too it is not possible to draw an absolutely definite boundary between acoustic illusions and misunderstandings. Verbally we may say that the former occur when the mistake, at least in its main characteristic, is due to the aural mechanism. The latter is intended when there is a mistake in the comprehension of a word or of a sentence. In this case the ear has acted efficiently, but the mind did not know how to handle what had been heard and so supplements it by something else in connection with matter more or less senseless.

Hence, misunderstandings are so frequent with foreign words.

Compare the singing of immigrant school children, “My can’t three teas of tea” for “My country ‘tis of thee,” or “Pas de lieu Rhone que nous” with “Paddle your own canoe.”[2]

 

The question of misunderstandings, their development and solution, is of great importance legally, since not only witnesses but clerks and secretaries are subject to them. If they are undiscovered they lead to dangerous mistakes, and their discovery causes great trouble in getting at the correct solution.[3] The determination of texts requires not only effort but also psychological knowledge and the capacity of putting one’s self in the place of him who has committed the error. To question him may often be impossible because of the distance, and may be useless because he no longer knows what he said or wanted to say. When we consider what a tremendous amount of work classical philologists, etc., have to put into the determination of the proper form of some misspelled word, we can guess how needful it is to have the textual form of a protocol absolutely correct. The innocence or guilt of a human being may depend upon a misspelled syllable. Now, to determine the proper and correct character of the text is as a rule difficult, and in most cases impossible. Whether a witness or the secretary has misunderstood, makes no difference in the nature of the work. Its importance remains unaffected, but in the latter case the examining justice, in so far as he correctly [1] Many omissions have been necessitated by the feet that no English equivalents for the German examples could be found. [Translator.]

 

[2] Cf. S. Freud: Psychopathologie des Alltagsleben [3] Cited by James, Psychology, Buefer Course.

 

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remembers what he has heard, may avoid error. The mistakes of the secretaries may in any event be reduced to a minimum if all protocols are read immediately, and not by the secretary but by the examining judge himself. If the writer reads them he makes the same mistakes, and only a very intelligent witness will perceive them and call attention to them. Unless it so happens the mistake remains.

 

I cite a few of the errors that I have observed. From a protocol with the suspect: “On the twelfth of the month I left Marie Tomizil”

(instead of, “my domicile”). Instead of “irrelevant,”—“her elephant.” Very often words are written in, which the dictator only says by the way; e. g., “come in,” “go on,” “hurry up,” “look out,” etc. If such words get into the text at all it is difficult to puzzle out how they got in. How easily and frequently people misunderstand is shown by the oath they take. Hardly a day passes on which at least one witness does not say some absolute nonsense while repeating it.

 

The discovery of such errors and the substitution of