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Law is a jealous mistress, the venerable Blackstone once said, and one law professor adds, the law is also fickle and a whore.* The law requires all of one's time, but the law also draws from all others. Law, unless it is “pure law,” is about something else—property, business or people. Until recently, however, there has been little sympathy or textbook material for the “casserole” approach in legal education, and in particular, for “law and behavioral sciences.” The material, when existent, has been considered too “soft” for use, and is colloquially referred to as “law and b.s.”
Law professors spend considerable time in cutting and pasting appellate court opinions into an ingenious or provocative arrangement, with some text material interspersed. Following this casebook pattern, the editors of this volume have brought together excerpts from court cases and writings in psychoanalysis and psychiatry.
A series of excerpts conveys a different message and is a different product than the writing of one author. A book—any book—is a whole design and needs to be seen as a whole. In studying a traditional casebook, the same approach is recommended, and the law student is expected to go beyond the individual case and to extract the theme or themes and their development as presented in the series of cases. Supposedly, the student in using this book is expected to go beyond the parts of it. Can he though abstract from a court case, and excerpt from Freud, Erikson and many others?
A law professor may say that a psychiatrist is needed to teach the course. The psychiatrist, in turn, may say that the editors themselves are needed. Be that as it may, the editors have compiled a treasury of material heretofore inaccessible as a practical matter to the law student and others.
The volume in the first part presents a study of psychoanalytic theory and explores its relevance to a variety of fundamental legal issues; in the second part it returns the lawyer to his more familiar role as a part