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Serial killer Ted Bundy practically begged mental health experts to study him. He claimed it would provide valuable insights about serial killers like himself. He hoped for a truly in-depth, one-on-one examination, sorting through the details of his criminal acts with painstaking clinical analysis. Of course, he was a narcissist, so his request is no surprise, but he wasn't wrong about the approach. Over the past century, a few mental health experts have tried to do precisely this with several extreme offenders. I have included samples below.
Due to their clinical training and experience, these professionals have provided helpful ideas about what makes the most perverse multiple murderers tick. Although mental health professionals of any persuasion tend to evaluate offenders according to the explanatory codes of their times, a few were path-finders.
FIRST ANALYSTS
Since the earliest days of psychiatry, "alienists" have tried to understand the motives and acts of the criminally insane. Initially they believed that anyone who acted contrary to reason must be psychotic, but then a certain type of rational criminal stood out. In 1809, hospital director Philippe Pinel noticed the disturbing behavior of what we now call a psychopath when he treated a missionary who had slaughtered his entire family.
Subsequently, other wardens of psychiatric asylums studied "moral insanity" to learn how the basic human faculty for socially appropriate behavior could fail. Such offenders, they observed, had no remorse about their cruel or destructive acts, and yet they also had no identifiable delusional mental illness.
Around 1830, the enthusiasm for scientific methods inspired physicians with a specialty in mental disease to clarify and systematize their knowledge about violent offenders. They focused on defining a context that made sense of dangerous aggression, based on notions about disease. Isaac Ray, a hospital superintendent, founded the discipline of forensic psychiatry with his publication in 1938 entitled A Treatise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity. His ideas influenced the defense team during the 1843 trial of Daniel M'Naghten, a British case that inspired the insanity "rule" still used as a defense throughout most of America today.
During the 1880s, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Director of the Feldhof Asylum in Germany, served as a legal psychiatric consultant. To make the diagnosis of mental disorders scientific, he...