The Criminal Brain: Understanding Biological Theories of Crime

3. Phrenology: The Abnormal Brain

40 3 Phrenology The Abnormal Brain Phrenology—the early 19th -century system of reading character from the contours of the skull—produced one of the most radical reorientations in ideas about crime and punishment ever proposed in the Western world. In the area of jurisprudence, its practitioners worked to reestablish criminal law on a new philosophical basis; to overhaul ideas about criminal responsibility; and—in a retributivist age—to develop a rehabilitative rationale for sentencing. In the area of penology, phrenologists opposed capital punishment and developed a plan for rehabilitating offenders that influenced criminal justice for the next 150 years. But it was in the area of criminology that phrenologists proved themselves most innovative, for they developed the first comprehensive explanation of criminal behavior, one that overlapped with the theory of moral insanity but was far more inclusive and systematic. On the basis of their understanding of the brain as an aggregation of independent organs or “faculties,” phrenologists could explain every form of criminal behavior from petty theft through wife beating to homicide. They had guidelines for distinguishing between sane and insane criminals; they introduced the idea that people vary in their propensity to commit crime; and they could account for differences in crime rates by age, nationality, race, and sex. Phrenologists could even explain the behavior of criminals whom we today would call serial killers and psychopaths, as in this case from one of phrenology’s basic texts: At the beginning of the last century several murders were committed in Holland, on the frontiers of the province of Cleves. For a long time the murderer remained unknown; but at last an old fiddler, who was accustomed to play on the violin at country weddings, was suspected in consequence of some expressions of his children. Led before the justice, he Phrenology 41 confessed thirty-four murders, and he asserted that he had committed them without any cause of enmity, and without any intention of robbing, but only because he was extremely delighted with bloodshed.1 At a time when most people would have explained the Dutch fiddler’s behavior in terms of evildoing, phrenologists attributed it to an innate brain defect. Their criminological ambition and scope—their desire to develop a Phrenological heads. Phrenologists tried to diagnose criminality and other abnormal mental states by studying the contours of the skull. Then, to restore the brain to normality, they tried to reduce the size of overdeveloped mental “faculties” and to increase that of underdeveloped faculties. Photograph by Danielle Rousseau. 42 Phrenology science of criminal behavior—excited liberal thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Phrenologists’ writings on criminal jurisprudence, penology, and criminology were part of a much broader, all-encompassing biosocial explanatory system that aimed at scientifically accounting for not only criminal behavior but all human behavior (and a great deal of animal behavior as well). Their system rested on five fundamental assumptions: 1. The brain is the organ of the mind. 2. The brain is an aggregation of about thirty separate organs or faculties , such as Combativeness, Covetiveness, and Destructiveness, that function independently.2 3. The more active an organ, the larger its size. 4. The relative size of the organs can be estimated by inspecting the contours of the skull. 5. The relative size of the organs can be increased or decreased through exercise and self-discipline.3 These fundamental ideas, all but the last of them formulated about 1800 by the Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall, became the basis of an international movement to develop a science of phrenology and spread its gospel. The movement occurred in two stages: a scientific phase, from about 1800 to 1830, when the phrenological system was developed, mainly by physicians and psychiatrists; and an overlapping popularizing stage, from about 1820 to 1850, during which phrenology became a fad, complete with social clubs, marketers, and hucksters. But the timing and duration of these phases differed by place, and although phrenology itself underwent little development after the 1840s, its ideas segued into the theory of degeneration that underpinned concepts of deviance in the late 19th century. Indeed, some phrenological societies remained active into the 20th century. Like other very early students of social behavior, phrenologists adopted methods previously developed in the natural sciences, assuming that the social world could be studied using the same procedures. They collected data, formulated hypotheses, and made positivist assumptions about the possibility of direct, objective apprehension of...