A Useful Science: Criminal Interrogation and the Turn to Psychology in Germany Around 1800

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Abstract

This article argues that psychology gained prestige as a useful and practical science in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on discussions of the practice of criminal interrogation, the article shows that around 1800, legal scholars increasingly turned to psychology as a solution to practical problems of criminal justice that had arisen with the abolition of judicial torture. Whereas up to the eighteenth century most German legal scholars had found that their own “experience” sufficed to advise on interrogations, around 1800 they started to point out the necessity of psychological knowledge. Psychology hence became not only a field with specialists, journals, and courses but also a field of knowledge that people turned to to solve problems in wholly different areas.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)319-334
Number of pages16
JournalJournal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Volume58
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jul 2022
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The author wishes to thank Kaat Wils and the attendees of the History of Emotions Internal Colloquium at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this article.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Keywords

  • criminal psychology
  • emotions
  • forensic psychology
  • modernity
  • practical psychology

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