Criminal psychology : a manual for judges, practitioners, and students / by Hans Gross ; translated from the 4th German edition by Horace M. Kallen ; with an introduction by Joseph Jastrow.

  • Gross, Hans, 1847-1915.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Criminal psychology : a manual for judges, practitioners, and students / by Hans Gross ; translated from the 4th German edition by Horace M. Kallen ; with an introduction by Joseph Jastrow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    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) Mis7inderstandings. Section io6. (i) Verbal Misunderstandings.i 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. ^ 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.^ 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 ^ Many omissions have been necessitated by the fact that no English equiva- lents for the German examples could be found. [Translator.] 2 Cf. S. Freud: Psychopathologie des Alltagsleben. ^ Cited by James, Psychology, Buefer Course.