La construcción del sujeto peligroso en españa (1880-1936). El papel de la psiquiatría y la criminología

Abstract

The objective of this work is to examine how psychiatry and criminology contributed to the pathologisation of criminals and the criminalisation of madness, thus increasing the stigmatisation and marginalisation of mental patients and deviant individuals. Based on Michel Foucault's ideas on the dangerous and abnormal individual, I intend to describe the construction of the dangerous subject in Spain between 1880 and 1936 taking into account three main issues: 1) the influence of degenerationism on psychiatric court reports and the reception of criminal anthropology in Spain during the decades of the 1880s and 1890s; 2) the conflict between psychiatrists and law concerning the concepts of responsibility, free will and potential risk, showing how around the mid 1890s a sector of the psychiatric profession introduced a notion, that of diminished responsibility, that fostered a new perception of the dangerous individual and a redefinition of social defence; 3) the treatment of the social dangerousness of the mentally ill by the mental hygiene movement from 1920 to 1936. © 2013 CSIC.