THE MIND OF THE MURDERER

This is the sixth volume based on (and somewhat expanded from) the Isaac Ray Lectures which were instituted to improve the touchy relations between the law and psychiatry. Dr. Guttmacher, medical advisor in the Baltimore trial courts, has had wide clinical experience as a criminal psychiatrist- and this study is based on the evidence of more than 200 murderers. Dr. Guttmacher deals extensively with the types of murderer and the impulse to murder:- the alcoholic to whom liquor is a ""superego solvent""; the normal (the most usual) whose childish concepts toward death is part of his immaturity and often the result of underprivileged circumstances; the sociopathic, schizophrenic, etc., etc. He discusses ""expert testimony""- of the psychiatrist, how it must not be partisan; the physician- patient relationship and the conflict in loyalties a criminal action imposes on the doctor. There is a great deal of fascinating, clinical material- as well as cogent understanding of the indefinable areas which psychiatry presents to the law, but it is wholly designed toward a professional market in either field.