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Originally planned as an introduction to the English version of Professor Karl Berg's 'Der Sadist'1, a study of the Kürten case, the author states that 'it became somewhat too long for its original purpose' and what was to be an introduction was therefore published as a separate volume.
It can be divided roughly into two themes: an exposition of why Kürten was considered sane and therefore executed, and an attempt to trace the development of his personality and the unconscious trends behind his criminal activities.
Both themes are presented with a good deal of confused thinking. In the discussion of Kürten's 'sanity' the author admits that 'since the terms of reference imposed by law on the experts were legal rather than scientific, the question settled by the verdict does not finally dispose of the question which Kürten poses in his sinister and enigmatic personality for the psychopathologist and medicolegal expert'. However, despite the question thus introduced, he tries to justify the decision of the court that Kürten was 'sane' on the ground that he was clever enough to keep 'his lust on leash' when there was sufficient danger of his being apprehended, and that he could thus exercise the free will which, in Germany, is the legal hallmark of sanity. He then goes even further and says that Kürten would also have been convicted in England under the old law laid down in the MacNaughton case according to which a man is 'insane' if he does not 'know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong'. In this criterion the postulate of 'free will' is, of course, tacitly understood to be operating.
How far this viewpoint lies from the scientific psychoanalytic approach to criminality can well be seen in Alexander and Staub's