BOOKS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

FORD

THE MIND OF THE MUR-

DERER by Manfred Guttmacher, M.D., Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, New York, 244 pp., $4.50.

THE CRIMINAL MIND by Philip Q. Roche, M.D., Grove Press, Inc., New York (Evergreen Paper Back Edition) 299 pp., $1.95.

These two definitive volumes deal with the same subject material, though from slightly different approaches. Both include detailed (and often lurid) case histories of murder, not for their own sakes, but as a springboard for launching a close analysis of the psychiatric profession in relation to legal procedures. THE CRIMINAL MIND deals primarily with psychiatric concepts and language as distinguished from legal concepts and language. THE MIND OF THE MURDERER, on the other hand deals primarily with the status of the psychiatrist in the courts, as the source of "expert testimony" in this field. In each book, case histories include the trial of the accused, including the role of the psychiatrist as "expert" in behalf of prosecution or defense.

The crux of the entire problem is, of course, in the definition of "sanity." The legal and psychiatric concepts revolving about this term have been widely divergent, and almost necessarily so, since the former rests

upon traditional moral values, while the latter reaches toward objective and scientific appraisals. Both THE MIND OF THE MURDERER and THE CRIMINAL MIND agree that, while the psychiatrist is called into court to help settle questions of "sanity" or "insanity," his testimony is often only half-comprehensible to a jury, and sometimes unconsciously modified to favor the side on which he is testifying.

In addition to the central subject of sanity, both books evaluate corollary terms and situations, for example, the accused as a psychiatric "patient" and his consequent right to privacy; or the hypothetical usefulness of juries composed entirely of psychiatric experts; or the term "insanity" as distinguished from mental "defects" or "illness." The reader will find each author thoroughly competent to weigh and describe the present inconsistencies between legal and psychiatric concepts, and will conclude that psychiatric testimony in the courts will at length exert a great effect, not only upon criminal laws themselves, but upon criminology generally, and upon judicial procedures in criminal cases.

The psychiatric profession is definitely on the side of that school of thought which chooses to regard antisocial acts to be a result of psychic illness, rather than as crime defined as such by law. Thus, the scientific and humanitarian view is coming