RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Classics in Psychiatry and the Law: Francis Wharton on Involuntary Confessions
JF Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online
JO J Am Acad Psychiatry Law
FD American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
SP 67
OP 80
VO 40
IS 1
A1 Kenneth J. Weiss
YR 2012
UL http://jaapl.org/content/40/1/67.abstract
AB Philadelphia attorney Francis Wharton was a key intellectual figure in linking the sciences of medicine and law. In 1860, he published a monograph on involuntary confessions, which represented the closing chapter of Wharton and Stillé's Treatise on Medical Jurisprudence. He had already published A Monograph on Mental Unsoundness in 1855, the first book of the Treatise in its first edition. Wharton was convinced that many criminals had an inner compulsion to confess or to be caught, explained as divine jurisprudence. His remarks on confessions include a typology spanning psychodynamics to police tactics, using contemporaneous, historical, and literary examples. This remarkable document provides insight into the dynamics of unintended and involuntary confessions and is compatible, in part, with current scholarship. The author contrasts Wharton's schema with those of his English predecessor Jeremy Bentham, the psychoanalyst Theodore Reik, and others, and concludes that it represents an important transition toward a psychological approach to the criminology of confessions.