The Mask of Objectivity: Digital Imaging and Psychopathy

Abstract

Enter the psychiatrist in her role as forensic expert witness. As we have seen, the creation of child sexual abuse as a public problem was not the end of the story, because in the mid-1990s, sensational news articles about the problem provided a resurgence of fear and loathing that demonized all sex offenders, and not just abusers of young children. But how should the demons be characterized? Sex offenders may have been represented in terms reminiscent of the witch craze, but we know there are no witches. If sex offenders were to be controlled, the source of their terrifying conduct must, our modern witch hunters believe, be discovered by scientific methods. Accordingly, bad behavior is increasingly medicalized and framed as mad behavior. The prevalence of dangerous deviant sexual conduct begs for explanation in terms of mental disorders, and the courts looked to psychiatrists to provide those explanations. Only a persistent mental disorder, it might seem, could account for a persistent and widespread wave of sexual behavior that threatens the security of home and family. It is an easy step from recognizing a pattern of dangerous sexual deviance to seeking an explanation in terms of the inability to control one’s conduct. While we might simply appeal to folk-psychological explanations of such behavior, e.g. in terms of moral failure, psychiatry has held out hope of a scientific explanation in terms of abnormal psychological mechanisms. To borrow Bob Dylan’s phrase, psychiatrists seem to be the experts on the impact of our “thought-dreams” on behavior. Their expertise, it is hoped, will transform moral panic into objective risk assessment. However, as we argue in this chapter, we neglect how profoundly wrong this view is at our peril.

If my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.

Bob Dylan