Leonard V. Kaplan

Sexual psychopathy, public policy, and the liberal state.

This article addresses several interrelated issues. It strives to situate a class of offenders within the liberal state. The disposition of this class allows an analysis of the tensions in liberal theory. It highlights the ways liberalism attributes individual responsibility for criminal behavior and captures the limits of those attributions. It also reveals liberalisms shift away from models of responsibility toward the social control of deviancy. The disposition of this class points toward the therapeutic mask involved in the social control model. Further, the disposition of this class may well serve as a model for isolating and demonizing other disfavored classes, including political dissenters.

On Psychiatry and its Disavowal of Mind: Legal and Cultural Implications

Biology is increasingly replacing psychology as the frame of reference for understanding human behavior. Where previously the schizophrenias and affective disorders attracted and vindicated biological explanation, now even psychodynamic explanations of the so-called neuroses are being replaced by biological understanding. This essay considers the potential loss entailed by perhaps premature biological reductionism. Anxiety has been a critical concept for psychological explanations of behavior. The move to biology resolves the mystery of anxiety by biochemically removing it. We trace what meaning anxiety had for three critical thinkers who used the term: Kierkegaard, Freud and Sartre. We argue that the loss of anxiety is a symptom of the loss of psychology and abdication on the part of psychiatry in contributing to the representation of human subjectivity for culture and law.

Book Review: The Insanity Defense: Instructions to State Legislatures: THE INSANITY DEFENSE: A BL UEPRINT FOR LEGISLATIVE REFORM. By Grant Morris. Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books, 1975. Pp. 133.

Grant Morris, a law professor who concerns himself with protecting and expanding the rights of the mentally deviant, offers this concise and fairly presented brief to state legislatures with a belief that legislative reform can effect meaningful change on conundrums that go to the heart of human existence. After all how do we determine whether behavior is voluntary or involuntary, healthy or diseased, blameworthy or blameless? Morris defers theoretical analysis in favor of reformist revisions of state law arguing in favor of &dquo;an improved and expanded insanity test, procedural safeguards in the trial of the insanity defense, psychiatric assistance for the accused in presenting the issue, treatment of the insanity-acquittee as any other mentally ill individual, and increased use of the diminished responsibility doctrine.&dquo; His supporting arguments draw from the contemporary literature and are supported by many critical reformers. A legislator unfamiliar with the very weighty legal literature on the insanity defense will be much informed concerning the contemporary legal scholarship analyzing the practical consequences of responsibility and dispositional assessments. If he wishes more theoretical, more deeply considered work on the subject he should turn to Abraham Goldstein’s