Law and Psychiatry: Rethinking the Relationship

Front Cover
CUP Archive, Mar 30, 1984 - Medical - 527 pages
This book is about the competing images of man offered us by the disciplines of law and psychiatry. Michael Moore describes the legal view of persons as rational and autonomous and defends it from the challenges presented by three psychiatric ideas: that badness is illness, that the unconscious rules our mental life, and that a person is a community of selves more than a unified single self. Using the tools of modern philosophy, he attempts to show that the moral metaphysical foundations of our law are not eroded by these challenges of psychiatry. The book thus seeks, through philosophy, to go beneath the centuries-old debates between lawyers and psychiatrists, and to reveal their hidden agreement about the nature of man. Some attention is paid to practical legal and psychiatric issues of contemporary concern, such as the proper definition of mental illness for psychiatric purposes, and the proper definition of legal insanity for legal purposes. This book was first announced, for publication in hard covers, in the Press's January to July seasonal list.
 

Contents

The idea of practical reason and explanation in
9
The legal view of persons
44
49
64
The challenge of psychiatry
113
Does madness exist?
155
Psychiatry and the concept of mental illness
182
The legal concept of insanity
217
Does the unconscious exist?
249
The unconscious as the source of an increased
310
The unconscious as the source of a decreased
350
The unity of the self
387
Toward a philosophical rethinking of law
416
Notes
426
References
495
Index
514
Copyright

The nature of psychoanalytic explanation in terms of
281

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Bibliographic information