Personality and Dangerousness: Genealogies of Antisocial Personality Disorder

205 Pages·2001·0.79 MB·English

by  David McCallum

This page intentionally left blank
In the aftermath of the Port Arthur shootings, Dunblane or the
schoolyard killings in America, communities try to come to terms with
private and public trauma and there is a need to understand what kind
of person can commit such terrible acts. The problem of how to
understand dangerousness often centres on the role of the mental
health and criminal justice systems and it is from the intersection of
these two institutions that the categorisation of dangerous persons has
emerged.
David McCallum traces the history of the category of antisocial
personality disorder and shows how it is linked to particular kinds of
governing. He examines key legal and institutional developments in
Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States and also parallel
developments within psychiatry and psychological medicine. Applying
a social theoretical analysis to this material McCallum challenges our
assumptions about the formation and control aspects of dangerousness
and personality.
david mccallum is Associate Professor in Sociology at Victoria
University in Melbourne. He is the author of The Social Production of
Merit (1990) and numerous chapters and articles on the history of
human sciences and government.
PERSONALITY AND
DANGEROUSNESS
Genealogies of Antisocial Personality Disorder
David McCallum
Victoria University, Melbourne
         
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
  
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa
http://www.cambridge.org
© David McCallum 2004
First published in printed format 2001
ISBN 0-511-00794-9 eBook (Adobe Reader)
ISBN 0-521-80402-7 hardback
ISBN 0-521-00875-1 paperback
In memory of my brother
Peter McCallum
mb, bs, dpm, franzcp
1943–1999
Contents
Acknowledgements page viii
Introduction 1
1 Law, psychiatry and the problem of disorder 7
2 Histories of psychiatry and the asylum 36
3 The borderland patient 58
4 Counting, eugenics, mental hygiene 76
5 The space for personality 94
6 Surfaces of emergence 123
7 Personality and dangerousness 143
Notes 154
Bibliography 173
Index 189
vii
Acknowledgements
I am greatly indebted to Jennifer Laurence for her role as research
assistant for this project. Her scholarship and care in preparing primary
source material and her immense knowledge and understanding of the
research field has contributed enormously to this work.
The project was supported in the form of an Australian Research
Council Large Grant for which I am most grateful. I would like to thank
Victoria University for allowing me to undertake periods of leave to
concentrate on the book, and to acknowledge the help and advice from
colleagues at Goldsmiths College, University of London, the Australian
Centre at the University of Melbourne, and the Research School of
Social Sciences at the Australian National University, where as a Visiting
Fellow I had an opportunity to be influenced by a broad range of
thinkers in social and political theory.
The head librarian Jillian Hiscock and staff at the Mental Health
Services Library, Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital in Parkville Victoria
were very helpful indeed, as were Dorothea Rowse and other staff at the
Brownless Medical Library, University of Melbourne. Thanks as well to
the Royal Australian College of Physicians History of Medicine Library
in Sydney, the Heritage Office, Department of Planning and Develop-
ment in Victoria, to Elizabeth Willis, Curator of Public and Institutional
Life at the Museum of Victoria, to staff in Special Collections at the
Baillieu Library at Melbourne University and the La Trobe Collection
in the State Library in Victoria, and to Emily Wark and other staff at
Victoria University Library at Footscray Park.
I have had the privilege over several years of being able to share ideas
with friends and colleagues and I especially want to acknowledge David
Burchell, Graham Burchell, Mitchell Dean, Margaret Goding, Barry
Hindess, Ian Hunter, Gavin Kendall, Peter McCallum, Denise Mere-
dith, Jeffrey Minson, Nikolas Rose, David Silverman, Gordon Tait,
Deborah Tyler, John Uhr and Garry Wickham. The responsibility for
any of the strengths and weaknesses of the book rests, of course, with
me.
viii