Psychology and Its Casualties

A closer look at go-to therapies, revealing how the law uses thin, materialistic, neurobiological veneers to make these therapies seem objective and just.



Today, even serious scholars casually want to reframe criminality as a mental illness that needs to be “treated”. What could possibly be wrong with this picture? As more proposals pile up to do away with the “antiquated” methods of the legal scholar, in order to construct a more “scientific” arrangement of society on the basis of psychology and psychiatry, justice is buried under materialistic, neurobiological veneers. Social problems find themselves individualized by a thick veil of inaccessible jargon that threatens to become binding and “objective”. Attempts to replace the traditional legal field with psychology and psychiatry have been carried out before – with disastrous results. This book is a collection of philosophical essays on the intersection of these different fields, and the case for why traditional legal frameworks are not obsolete.