You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this book Reik advances the thesis that the idea of a trial for the purpose of ascertaining the perpetrator of a crime and the manner of its commission is a comparatively late development in law. Originally, in prehistory, crime was simply the breaking of a taboo and was detected by the inevitable effect of the transgression: whoever fell ill or had a mishap (that is, whoever was 'punished') was the guilty one. The author attempts to demonstrate that our modern criminological and penal practices show many vestiges of ideas that have survived from the primitive, animistic stages of culture and that some of our most scientific means of crime detection still show traces of their prelogical origin. According to Reik, moreover, our current legal machinery leaves far too much room for the operation of irrational, unconscious factors in the judicial process. Illustrations are given of fantasied omnipotence of thought in both prisoner and prosecutor, of the narcissism of judge and jury, of the deep unconscious background of many legal errors. (One cannot help feeling that the law would do well to develop conscious insight into these trends instead of attempting to deal with them in terms of almost blind reaction-formations as exemplified in the judicial philosophies of men like Cardozo and Holmes.)
This volume is textually identical with the Hogarth Press edition of 1936. It is well written and well translated from the German by Dr. Katherine Jones and, despite the evident background of painstaking scholarship, sufficiently diverting to maintain the flavor of light reading. The inclusion of the gist of several good murder mysteries may add considerable zest for many readers.