Concerning the characteristic influence of timidity see Paul Hartenberg.[95]
Especially self-revealing are the outbreaks of anger against oneself, the more so because I believe them always to be evidence of consciousness of guilt. At least, I have never yet seen an innocent man fall into a paroxysm of rage against himself, nor have I ever heard that others have observed it, and I would not be able psychologically to explain such a thing should it happen. Inasmuch as scenes of this kind can occur perceivably only in the most externalized forms of anger, so such an explosion is elementary and cannot possibly be confused with another. If a man wrings his hands until they bleed, or digs his finger-nails into his forehead, nobody will say that this is anger against himself; it is only an attempt to do something to release stored-up energy, to bring it to bear against somebody. People are visibly angry against themselves only when they do such things to themselves as they might do to other people; for example, beating, smashing, pulling the hair, etc. This is particularly frequent among Orientals who are more emotional than Europeans. So I saw a Gypsy run his head against a wall, and a Jew throw himself on his knees, extend his arms and box his ears with both hands so forcibly that the next day his cheeks were swollen. But other races, if only they are passionate enough, behave in a similar manner. I saw a woman, for example, tear whole handfuls of hair from her head, a murdering thief, guilty of more or fewer crimes, smash his head on the corner of a window, and a seventeen year old murderer throw himself into a ditch in the street, beat his head fiercely on the earth, and yell, “Hang me! Pull my head off!”
The events in all these cases were significantly similar: the crime was so skilfully committed as conceivably to prevent the discovery of the criminal; the criminal denied the deed with the most glaring impudence and fought with all his power against conviction—in the moment, however, he realized that all was lost, he exerted his boundless rage against himself who had been unable to oppose any obstacle to conviction and who had not been cautious and sly enough in the commission of the crime. Hence the development of the fearful self-punishment, which could have no meaning if the victim had felt innocent.
Such expressions of anger against oneself often finish with fainting. The reason of the latter is much less exhaustion through paroxysms of rage than the recognition and consciousness of one’s own helplessness. Reichenbach[96] once examined the reason for the fainting of people in difficult situations. It is nowadays explained as the effect of the excretion of carbonic acid gas and of the generated anthropotoxin; another explanation makes it a nervous phenomenon in which the mere recognition that release is impossible causes fainting, the loss of consciousness. For our needs either account of this phenomenon will do equally. It is indifferent whether a man notices that he cannot voluntarily change his condition in a physical sense, or whether he notices that the evidence is so convincing that he can not dodge it. The point is that if for one reason or another he finds himself physically or legally in a bad hole, he faints, just as people in novels or on the stage faint when there is no other solution of the dramatic situation.
When anger does not lead to rage against oneself, the next lower stage is laughter.[97] With regard to this point, Darwin calls attention to the fact that laughter often conceals other mental conditions than those it essentially stands for—anger, rage, pain, perplexity, modesty and shame; when it conceals anger it is anger against oneself, a form of scorn. This same wooden, dry laughter is significant, and when it arises from the perception that the accused no longer sees his way out, it is not easily to be confused with another form of laughter. One gets the impression that the laughter is trying to tell himself, “That is what you get for being bad and foolish!”
Section 16. (3) Cruelty.
Under this caption must be placed certain conditions that may under given circumstances be important. Although apparently without any relations to each other they have the common property of being external manifestations of mental processes.
In many cases they are explanations which may arise from the observation of the mutative relations between cruelty, bloodthirstiness, and sensuality. With regard to this older authors like Mitchell,[98] Blumröder,[99] Friedreich,[100] have brought examples which are still of no little worth. They speak of cases in which many people, not alone men, use the irritation developed by greater or lesser cruelty for sexual purposes: the torturing of animals, biting, pinching, choking the partner, etc. Nowadays this is called sadism.[101] Certain girls narrate their fear of some of their visitors who make them suffer unendurably, especially at the point of extreme passion, by biting, pressing, and choking. This fact may have some value in criminology. On the one hand, certain crimes can be explained only by means of sexual cruelty, and on the other, knowledge of his habits with this regard may, again, help toward the conviction of a criminal. I recall only the case of Ballogh-Steiner in Vienna, a case in which a prostitute was stifled. The police were at that time hunting a man who was known in the quarter as “chicken-man,” because he would always bring with him two fowls which he would choke during the orgasm. It was rightly inferred that a man who did that sort of thing was capable under similar circumstances of killing a human being. Therefore it will be well, in the examination of a person accused of a cruel crime, not to neglect the question of his sexual habits; or better still, to be sure to inquire particularly whether the whole situation of the crime was not sexual in nature.[102]
In this connection, deeds that lead to cruelty and murder often involve forms of epilepsy. It ought therefore always to be a practice to consult a physician concerning the accused, for cruelty, lust, and psychic disorders are often enough closely related. About this matter Lombroso is famous for the wealth of material he presents.