Право и психиатрия: относно проблема за формите на медикализация на престъплението
Law and Psychiatry: Concerning the Problem of Medicalizing Forms of Crime

Summary/Abstract: This paper attempts to make a sociological reconstruction of an interdisciplinary field in which legal norms and medical rationality have been combined in a historically specific way. The starting point was 1800-1830, when – in a series of extreme criminal cases – psychiatry entered into criminal law. This represented the first important form of medicalizing crime. At a discursive level this was effectuated through the concepts of ‘insanity’ and ‘monomania’. However, in the middle of the 19th century – as evidenced by the transition from extreme crime to everyday criminality – this psychiatric form began falling to a marginal position. During the second half of the century – through the theories of hereditary causality and degeneration – there was a new phase in the process of medicalizing of crime. The topic of the ‘dangerous individual’ made possible the emergence of an anthropology of the criminal subject as well as the concept of social defense. At the very end of the 19th century a new system of relations between psychiatry and criminal law was established. A third form of medicalizing of crime appeared in the second half of the 20th century and still remains unstable: this is the growingly intensive use of genetic technologies and DNA databases in police and court practices. Nowadays the concepts of ‘individual risk’ and ‘collective security’ have definitely transformed the concepts of ‘freedom’ and ‘responsibility’; the former represent the functions of contemporary medical rationality of legal norms; thus a new system of social order is being constituted.

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