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In“Psycho-Analysis and the Establishment of the Facts in Legal Proceedings” (), originally given as a lecture to a class on jurisprudence, Freud draws a telling analogy between the criminal and the hysteric. Both are concerned with secrets, Freud writes, noting, however, an important difference.“In the case of the criminal it is a secret which he knows and hides from you, whereas in the case of the hysteric it is a secret which he himself does not know either,
which is hidden even from himself.” Yet the criminal may not always know the secret of his crimes. If he is psychotic, he may remain not only oblivious to the causes of his crimes, but perhaps ignorant of the actual misdeeds. The task of the examining magistrate, or of the biographer intent upon investigating the psychological link between mental illness and crime, may then be to uncover hidden psychical material and to invent the “detective devices” that will enable the criminal to reveal his guilt to himself and others. Freud did not treat any psychotic killers, and until recently few if any studies showed how a specific childhood incident predetermined the shape and form of terrible crimes. Consequently, Flora Rheta Schreiber's The Shoemaker promises to be a landmark study for psychiatry and law.
The Shoemaker is the story of Joseph Kallinger, a Philadelphia shoemaker who was arrested in January 1975, with his then 13-year-old son Michael, for breaking into five suburban homes. Kallinger was 38 at the time his psychosis erupted into violent crime, although 25 years earlier he showed signs that foreshadowed his acts. The Kallinger's 7-week crime spree ended in a final break-in during which the father-son team held eight people hostage in a house in a small New Jersey town. Tying up the occupants, Kallinger ordered a young woman, Maria Fasching, to chew off the penis of another hostage. When she refused, the shoemaker —convinced he was obeying the command of God —stabbed her to death. Amidst conflicting psyc