Abstract
The blood must have been everywhere. A shotgun at close range is not a delicate instrument. It sprays dozens of pellets that can rip into the flesh, tearing open innumerable capillaries, veins, and arteries. Moreover, the weapon’s blast is such that it can splatter shards of hair, flesh, and sinew over huge areas. Not withstanding all this, not even withstanding the fact that their final shots came from muzzles placed firmly against their parent’s heads, the Menendez brothers, and their lawyers, were able to persuade several jurors at their first trial that this was not murder. Amazingly, although these decision-makers had seen photographs of the devastation (even if some were suppressed as too inflammatory), they still maintained that it was not the fault of those who admitted pulling the triggers.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes and References
Wilson, J. Q. (1997). Moral Judgment. New York: The Free Press.
Walker, L. E. (1979). The Battered Woman. New York: Harper & Row.
Greenberg, D. F. (1988). The Construction of Homosexuality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Hart, C. W. M. (1988). The Tiwis of North Australia, 3rd Edition. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Adamson, H. E. (1978). The Cheyennes: Indians of the Great Plains, 2nd Edition. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Meeks, W. A. (1993). The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Freud, S. (1953–1974). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. (Edited by J. Strachey). London: Hogarth Press and Institute for Psychoanalysis.
American Psychiatric Association Committee on Nomenclature and Statistics. (1968). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; 2nd Edition. Washington, D. C.
American Psychiatric Association Task Force on Nomenclature and Statistics. (1980). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; 3rd Edition. Washington, D. C.
The account that follows, including quotes, is from: Kirk, S. A. & Kutchins, H. (1992). The Selling of DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
For a more detailed discussion of how morality operates see: Fein, M. (1997). Hardball Without an Umpire: The Sociology of Morality. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Siegler, M. (1974). Models of Madness, Models of Medicine. New York: MacMillan.
In sociology, deviance refers to behaviors that break important norms in important ways. In many ways, what is deviant is used to define what is normal. See: Erikson, K. (1964). Notes on the sociology of deviance, In Becker, H., The Other Side: Perspectives on Deviance. New York: The Free Press.
For a sociological, and a medical, rendition of the medical explanation of deviant behaviors see: Eaton, W. W. (1986). The Sociology of Mental Disorders, 2nd Edition. Westport, CT: Praeger; Gove, W. (Ed.) 1982. Deviance and Mental Illness. Beverly Hills: Sage; Ausubel, D. (1967). Personality disorder is disease. In Scheff, T. (Ed.), Mental Illness and Social Process. New York: Harper & Row.
For an historical account of how “mental illness” was regarded see: Skultans, V. (1979). English Madness: Ideas on Insanity 1580–1890. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Leifer, R. (1969). In the Name of Mental Health. New York: Science.
For a heavily physiological explanation of mental disorders see: Wender, P. H. & Klein, D. F. (1981). Mind, Mood & Medicine: A Guide to the New Biopsychiatry. New York: New American Library.
Sociologists have indeed studied the aspects, and functions, of this role. See: Parsons, T. (1964). Social Structure and Personality. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe.
For an unself-conscious handbook on violence as a medical problem see: Fenley, M. A. et al. (1993). The Prevention of Youth Violence: A Framework for Community Action. Atlanta: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For some pros and cons on personal problems as disease entities see: Wing, J. K. (1978). Reasoning about Madness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Spitzer, R. & Williams, J. (1982). The definition and diagnosis of mental disorder. In Gove, W. (Ed.), Deviance and Mental Illness. Beverly Hills: Sage.
American Psychiatric Association Task Force on Nomenclature and Statistics. (1980). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; 3rd Edition. Washington, D. C.
For a non-technical, but graphic, depiction of schizophrenia see: Schulz, C. G & Kilgalen, R. K. (1969). Case Studies in Schizophrenia. New York: Basic Books.
The disease “hysteria” was the precursor of the “histrionic” personality, but because the term referred to the woman’s uterus as the cause of the condition, it was jettisoned in favor of a more gender neutral word. See: Veith, I. (1965). Hysteria: The History of a Disease. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
From: Kirk, S. A. & Kutchins, H. A., op cit.
American Psychiatric Association; Task Force on DSM-IV. (1994). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; 4th Edition. Washington, D. C.
For the case of psychoanalysis see: Fine, R. (1979). A History of Psychoanalysis. New York: Columbia University Press.
An example is: Alexander, F. & Selsnick, S. (1966). The History of Psychiatry. New York: Harper & Row.
Fraser, A. (1979). King Charles II. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
Scull, A. (1974). Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth Century England. Princeton University Ph.D.
Scull, A. (1989). Social Order/Mental Disorder: Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Scull, A., ibid.
Scull, A. (1981). Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era. London: The Athlone Press.
The barbarity of some of these techniques is hard to fathom. Prefrontral lobotomies, for instance, entailed driving an ice-pick-like device into the brain and swishing it around in the manner of a windshield wiper. See: Valenstein, E. S. (1986). Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness. New York: Basic Books.
Wilson, D. C. (1975). Stranger and Traveler: The Story of Dorothea Dix, American Reformer. Boston: Little, Brown.
Levi, H. E. (1949). An Introduction to Legal Reasoning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lombroso-Ferrero, G. (1972). Criminal Man, According to the Classification ofCesare Lombroso. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith.
Hume, D. [1739] (1961). A Treatise on Human Nature. New York: Dolphin Books.
Freud’s “talking cure” was devised in conjunction with Joseph Breuer. See: Breuer, J. & Freud, S. (1957). Studies on Hysteria. New York: Basic Books.
Gay, P. (1988). Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York: W. W. Norton.
A brief review of sociological concepts, such as “role,” can be found in: Wachniak et al. (1993). Sociological Perspectives: A Resource Manual. Kennesaw, GA: Kennesaw State University.
Examples of personal roles are: scapegoat, caretaker, family hero, family mascot and the family beauty. See: Fein, M. (1990). Role Change: A Resocialization Perspective. New York: Praeger.
How personal roles are used in family therapy is exemplified by: Minuchin, S. (1974). Families and Family Therapy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Fein, M., op cit.
Nixon, R. (1962). Six Crises. New York: Doubleday.
Wills, G. (1969). Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Ambrose, S. E. (1987). Nixon: The Education of a Politician 1913–1962. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Temperament seems to be a fairly stable, and biologically inherited, aspect of personality. See: Chess, S. & Thomas, A. (1986). Temperament in Clinical Practice. New York: Guilford Press.
Kubler-Ross, E. (1969). On Death and Dying. New York: MacMillan.
The term “psychotherapy” does not have a precise meaning, but a widely admired discussion of it is found in: Frank, J. (1973). Persuasion and Healing; A Comparative Study of Psychotherapy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
An overview of various alternatives is available in: London, P. (1964). The Modes and Morals of Psychotherapy. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Also includes an exploration of the moral dimension of therapy.
John B. Watson’s “behaviorism” was a radical attempt to eliminate superstition from psychology by virtually defining emotion out of existence. See: Watson, J. B. (1914). Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology. New York: Holt.
For an anthropological examination of this practice see: Lemert, E. M. (1997). The Trouble with Evil: Social Control at the Edge of Morality. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques [1762] (1913). The Social Contract. In G. D. H. Cole (Ed.), The Social Contract and Discourses. London: Dent.
In Whose Keeper, Alan Wolfe compares the relative importance of political, economic, and social factors in understanding how civil society works. Wolfe, A. (1989). Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. For a more historical perspective see: Seligman, A. B. (1992). The Idea of Civil Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wilson, J. Q. (1997). Moral Judgment. New York: The Free Press.
Moore, M.S. (1984). Law and Psychiatry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Howard, P. K. (1995). The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America. New York: Random House.
American Psychiatric Association; Task Force on DSM-1V, op cit.
Emotions, such as anger, turn out to be social as well as personal phenomena. In their communication and motivation functions, they are interpersonal means of controlling behavior. See: Fein, M. (1993). I.A.M.: A Common Sense Guide to Coping with Anger. Westport, CT: Praeger.
For further details of the specific application of intense emotions to creating and sustaining moral principles see: Fein, M. (1997). Hardball Without an Umpire: The Sociology of Morality. Westport, CT: Praeger.
For one example of excuses see: Olson, W. K. (1997). The Excuse Factory: How Today’s Employment Laws Promote Mediocrity in the Workplace. New York: The Free Press.
Austin, J. L. (1961). Philosophical Papers. Edited by J. O. Urmson & G. J. Warnock. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
Scott, M. B. & Lyman S. (1968). Accounts. American Sociological Review, 33,46–62.
Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in Public. New York: Basic Books.
For an overview of labeling theory as applied to mental illness see: Scheff, T. J. (1966). Being Mentally III. Chicago: Aldine.
Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Staddon, J. (1995). On responsibility and punishment.” The Atlantic Monthly, February, 88–94.
Rogers, C. (1951). Client Centered Therapy. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.
For an introduction to how Rogers believes people should treat one another see: Rogers, C. R. (1961). On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.
For an account of medicine as a form of social control see: Horowitz, A. V. (1982). The Social Control of Mental Illness. New York: Academic Press.
Dr. Peter Kramer argues passionately that the latest psychotropic drugs can reformulate our personalities in almost mystical ways. See: Kramer, P. D. (1993). Listening to Prozac: A Psychiatrist Explores Antidepressant Drugs and the Remaking of the Self. New York: Viking.
For a discussion on why effective control of crime depends on morally credible control agents, see: Robinson, P. H. (1995). Moral credibility and crime. Atlantic Monthly, March, 72–78.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1999 Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
(1999). Extreme III: Radical Medicalism. In: The Limits of Idealism. Clinical Sociology: Research and Practice. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-29601-2_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-29601-2_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-306-46211-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-585-29601-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive