Books by Heather Wolffram
Forensic Psychology in Germany: Witnessing Crime, 1880-1939 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
This book examines the emergence and early development of forensic psychology in Germany from the... more This book examines the emergence and early development of forensic psychology in Germany from the late nineteenth century until the outbreak of the Second World War, highlighting the field’s interdisciplinary beginnings and contested evolution. Initially envisaged as a psychology of all those involved in criminal proceedings, this new discipline promised to move away from an exclusive focus on the criminal to provide a holistic view of how human fallibility impacted upon criminal justice. As this book argues, however, by the inter-war period, forensic psychology had largely become a psychology of the witness; its focus narrowed by the exigencies of the courtroom. Utilising detailed studies of the 1896 Berchtold trial and the 1930 Frenzel trial, the book asks whether the tensions between psychiatry, psychology, forensic medicine, pedagogy and law over psychological expertise were present in courtroom practice and considers why a clear winner in the “battle for forensic psychology” had yet to emerge by 1939.
The Stepchildren of Science: Psychical Research and Parapsychology in Germany, c. 1870-1939
Leading the reader through the darkened séance rooms and laboratories of Imperial and inter-war G... more Leading the reader through the darkened séance rooms and laboratories of Imperial and inter-war Germany, The Stepchildren of Science casts light on the emergence of psychical research and parapsychology in the German context. It looks, in particular, at the role of the psychiatrist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing - a figure who fashioned himself as both propagandist and Grand Seignior of German parapsychology - in shaping these nascent disciplines. In contrast to other recent studies in which occultism is seen as a means of dealing with or creating “the modern”, this book considers the epistemological, cultural and social issues that arose from psychical researchers’ and parapsychologists’ claims to scientific legitimacy. Focusing on the boundary disputes between these researchers and the spiritualists, occultists, psychologists and scientists with whom they competed for authority over the paranormal, The Stepchildren of Science demonstrates that in the German context both proponents and opponents alike understood psychical research and parapsychology as border sciences.
To read the first reviews of this book, go to:
Review in Social History of Medicine, published on-line 22 February 2011: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/02/22/shm.hkr034.full
Review in the British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 44,1 (2011), 144146: http://journals.cambridge.org/action//displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8192785
Review in Medical History, vol.55, 1 (2011), 130-131: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3037228/
Review in Health and History, vol. 12, no. 2 (2010), 140-1: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5401/healthhist.12.2.0140
Review in Metascience: http://www.springerlink.com/content/q54r22243207682q/
Review in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jhbs.20466/pdf
Review in German History : http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/09/23/gerhis.ghq071.full.pdf+html
Review in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences: http://jhmas.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/jrq051
Magonia Blog review: http://pelicanist.blogspot.com/2010/02/stepchildren.html
Sci-Tech Book News review: http://booknews.com/sci_issues/sci_mar2010/rodopi1.html
Amazon Customer review: http://www.amazon.de/product-reviews/9042027282
Papers by Heather Wolffram
Teaching Forensic Science to the American Police and Public: The Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, 1929-1938
Academic Forensic Pathology, 2021
Established in 1929, Northwestern University’s Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory (SCDL), Amer... more Established in 1929, Northwestern University’s Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory (SCDL), America’s first independent forensic crime laboratory, undertook a wide range of scientific case work during the 1930s, including toxicology, firearms identification, polygraph testing, the analysis of questioned documents and bacteriology; its mission being to provide Chicago with a world-class forensic science service. Alongside this mission, however, a key ambition of the SCDL’s founders was to forensically educate police officers, legal professionals, and the general public. Convinced that American police were largely ignorant of scientific aids to crime detection and that the public’s lack of forensic awareness led to the destruction and contamination of crime scenes, the SCDL attempted to fashion itself as a “school for manhunters.” But, while the laboratory’s ambitious program of public talks, scientific demonstrations, detective schools, expositions, and radio programs were intended ...
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology, 2020
Forensic psychology in the 21st century entails the application of psychology to all aspects of t... more Forensic psychology in the 21st century entails the application of psychology to all aspects of the criminal justice process. Forensic psychologists, therefore, are engaged in the theorization of offending, offender profiling, the psychology of testimony, investigative interviewing, the psychology of juries and judges, and psychological approaches to the punishment and treatment of offenders. Historically, however, forensic psychology, has been narrower in scope. Founded principally in Europe during the late 19th century as a response to the reform of criminal procedure and research on suggestion, which undermined confidence in witness credibility, forensic psychology was initially pursued by jurists and psychiatrists eager to understand the behavior of all those involved in the criminal justice process. While this ambition was pursued piecemeal by jurists throughout the early 20th century in their studies of guilty knowledge, judges, jurors, and investigators, the exigencies of the...
The Criminological Construction of Female Mediumship in Early Twentieth-Century Germany
Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural, 2017
During the early twentieth century, several prominent fraud trials that featured mediums as defen... more During the early twentieth century, several prominent fraud trials that featured mediums as defendants captured public attention in Germany. Of particular note were the trials of the “flower medium” Anna Rothe in 1902 and the criminal-telepath Else Günther-Geffers in 1928, which were given substantial coverage in the German daily press. While these sensational trials focused the public on the question of the reality of mediumistic phenomena and psychical researchers on discovering the mechanism by which mediums achieved their supernormal feats, a small number of jurists and criminologists used such cases to explore the nature of female criminality. Among them was the criminologist Erich Wulffen, whose books Psychologie des Verbrechers (Psychology of the criminal) and Das Weib als Sexualverbrecherin (Woman as sexual criminal) used Rothe and Günther-Geffers as examples of a particular type of criminal: the hysterical female swindler.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Notes and Records: the Royal Society journal of the history of science, 2017
Since the 1990s a number of studies, such as Alan Gauld's A history of hypnotism, Alison Winter's... more Since the 1990s a number of studies, such as Alan Gauld's A history of hypnotism, Alison Winter's Mesmerized, Daniel Pick's Svengali's web, Andreas Mayer's Sites of the unconscious and, most recently, William Hughes' That devil's trick, have elucidated the scientific as well as the popular cultures in which mesmeric and hypnotic practices thrived in the nineteenth century. 1 By the end of the nineteenth century-that is, the time on which the articles of this special issue focus-hypnotism was a common topic of medical, legal and public debate in several European countries. The therapeutic potential of hypnotic suggestion was balanced against the dangers of a mental state that made the individual a seemingly powerless subject of the hypnotizer's will and commands. Risks to individual and collective mental health, of sexual abuse of hypnotized persons, and of criminal suggestions were widely invoked whenever hypnotism was discussed. The 'magnetic' treatments by lay healers and the popular performances by stage hypnotists such as Donato (Alfred Edouard D'Hont) and Carl Hansen, who toured Europe, caused political concerns about public health and public order, leading to calls for the banning of hypnotic practices or for restricting their use to qualified medical men. Indeed, hypnotism appears to have been a practice around which a number of acute popular anxieties coalesced during the nineteenth century, including fears related to psychological contagion, crowds, race, class and gender. 2 In the scientific discourse, the pendulum of opinion had begun to swing from Jean-Martin Charcot's school at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, which interpreted hypnosis as an induced pathological state of the nervous system, to Hippolyte Bernheim's school at the University of Nancy, which saw it as a psychological state resulting from suggestion. In some instances, however, the idea of pathology was hard to dispel, often surviving as part of a dual model of hypnosis that could be used to promote the therapeutic benefits of medical hypnosis while simultaneously warning of the profound dangers of lay practice in this field. 3 When not engaged in the defence or promotion of their particular theory of hypnosis, both schools and their supporters across Europe also fought a rearguard action against their pre-scientific past, seeking to establish what separated hypnotism from animal magnetism. The six articles of this issue delve into the various conflicts highlighted by the wideranging debates around and responses to hypnotism. Above all, they give us the opportunity to consider the significance of 'place' in the historical hypnotism debates. We mean this in two regards. First, there has so far been relatively little research on these debates in Spain and Italy, and-with the exception of the contributions of Joseph Delboeuf 4-in Belgium. To use the vocabulary of the 'spatial turn' in the humanities, these debates allow us to follow processes of dissemination from the two rival centres of hypnotism, Paris and Nancy, to the 'periphery'. Of course, disseminators and propagators of hypnotism have been known before, especially through the long list of visitors to the
Medical History, 2012
In July 1925, the psychiatrist Albert Moll appeared before the district court in Berlin-Schöneber... more In July 1925, the psychiatrist Albert Moll appeared before the district court in Berlin-Schöneberg charged with having defamed the medium Maria Vollhardt (alias Rudloff) in his 1924 bookDer Spiritismus[Spiritism]. Supported by some of Berlin’s most prominent occultists, the plaintiff – the medium’s husband – argued that Moll’s use of terms such as ‘trick’, ‘manipulation’ and ‘farce’ in reference to Vollhardt’s phenomena had been libellous. In the three-part trial that followed, however, Moll’s putative affront to the medium – of which he was eventually acquitted – was overshadowed, on the one hand, by a debate over the scientific status of parapsychology, and on the other, by the question of who – parapsychologists, occultists, psychiatrists or jurists – was entitled to claim epistemic authority over the occult. This paper will use the Rudloff–Moll trial as a means of examining Moll’s critique of occultism, not only as it stood in the mid-1920s, but also as it had developed since th...
Parapsychology on the couch: The psychology of occult belief in Germany, c. 1870–1939
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2006
This article considers the attempts of academic psychologists and critical occultists in Germany ... more This article considers the attempts of academic psychologists and critical occultists in Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to construct a psychology of occult belief. While they claimed that the purpose of this new subdiscipline was to help evaluate the work of occult researchers, the emergence of a psychology of occult belief in Germany served primarily to pathologize parapsychology and its practitioners. Not to be outdone, however, parapsychologists argued that their adversaries suffered from a morbid inability to accept the reality of the paranormal. Unable to resolve through experimental means the dispute over who should be allowed to mold the public's understanding of the occult, both sides resorted to defaming their opponent.
An Object of Vulgar Curiosity": Legitimizing Medical Hypnosis in Imperial Germany
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2010
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, German medical hypnotists sought to gai... more During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, German medical hypnotists sought to gain a therapeutic and epistemological monopoly over hypnosis. In order to do this, however, these physicians were required to engage in a complex multi-dimensional form of boundary-work, which was intended on the one hand to convince the medical community of the legitimacy and efficacy of hypnosis and on the other to demarcate their use of suggestion from that of stage hypnotists, magnetic healers, and occultists. While the epistemological, professional, and legal boundaries that medical hypnotists erected helped both exclude lay practitioners from this field and sanitize the medical use of hypnosis, the esoteric interests, and sensational public experiments of some of these researchers, which mimicked the theatricality and occult interests of their lay competitors, blurred the distinctions that these professionals were attempting to draw between their "legitimate" medical use of hypnosis and the "illegitimate" lay and occult use of it.
Aries, 2012
The relationship between science and its 'occult' siblings is a strange thing. On the one hand, w... more The relationship between science and its 'occult' siblings is a strange thing. On the one hand, we find that surprisingly many scientific icons, ranging from Galton, the Curies and Einstein to Gödel, Heisenberg and Pauli, entertained a more than just fleeting interest in 'things that go bump in the night'. While some took telepathy and psychokinesis seriously at least as hypothetical scientific anomalies worth investigating, others unflinchingly (though rarely publicly) embraced them as facts of nature. On the other hand, we find much more visible and rather passionate proclamations
Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, 2017
Lurid tales of the criminal use of hypnosis captured both popular and scholarly attention across ... more Lurid tales of the criminal use of hypnosis captured both popular and scholarly attention across Europe during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, culminating not only in the invention of fictional characters such as du Maurier's Svengali but also in heated debates between physicians over the possibilities of hypnotic crime and the application of hypnosis for forensic purposes. The scholarly literature and expert advice that emerged on this topic at the turn of the century highlighted the transnational nature of research into hypnosis and the struggle of physicians in a large number of countries to prise hypnotism from the hands of showmen and amateurs once and for all. Making use of the 1894 Czynski trial, in which a Baroness was putatively hypnotically seduced by a magnetic healer, this paper will examine the scientific, popular and forensic tensions that existed around hypnotism in the German context. Focusing, in particular, on the expert testimony about hypnosis ...
"The History of Policing" In Criminal Justice: A New Zealand Introduction. Editors: Gilbert J, Newbold G. 70-90. Auckland University Press, Auckland 2017
The Criminological Construction of Female Mediumship in Early Twentieth-Century Germany", Preternature, Volume 6 Issue 2 (2017), 337-35
During the early twentieth century, several prominent fraud trials that featured mediums as defen... more During the early twentieth century, several prominent fraud trials that featured mediums as defendants captured public attention in Germany. Of particular note were the trials of the “flower medium” Anna Rothe in 1902 and the criminal-telepath Else Günther-Geffers in 1928, which were given substantial coverage in the German daily press. While these sensational trials focused the public on the question of the reality of mediumistic phenomena and psychical researchers on discovering the mechanism by which mediums achieved their supernormal feats, a small number of jurists and criminologists used such cases to explore the nature of female criminality. Among them was the criminologist Erich Wulffen, whose books Psychologie des Verbrechers (Psychology of the criminal) and Das Weib als Sexualverbrecherin (Woman as sexual criminal) used Rothe and Günther-Geffers as examples of a particular type of criminal: the hysterical female swindler.
History of hypnotism in Europe and the significance of place. Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, 72, 2 (2017)
Introduction to a special issue on the History of Hypnotism in Europe by Andreas-Holger Maehle an... more Introduction to a special issue on the History of Hypnotism in Europe by Andreas-Holger Maehle and Heather Wolffram
Crime and hypnosis in fin-de-siecle Germany: the Czynski case: Notes and Records the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science 71, 2 (2017)
Lurid tales of the criminal use of hypnosis captured both popular and scholarly attention across ... more Lurid tales of the criminal use of hypnosis captured both popular and scholarly attention across Europe during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, culminating not only in the invention of fictional characters such as du Maurier's Svengali but also in heated debates between physicians over the possibilities of hypnotic crime and the application of hypnosis for forensic purposes. The scholarly literature and expert advice that emerged on this topic at the turn of the century highlighted the transnational nature of research into hypnosis and the struggle of physicians in a large number of countries to prise hypnotism from the hands of showmen and amateurs once and for all. Making use of the 1894 Czynski trial, in which a Baroness was putatively hypnotically seduced by a magnetic healer, this paper will examine the scientific, popular and forensic tensions that existed around hypnotism in the German context. Focusing, in particular, on the expert testimony about hypnosis and hypnotic crime during this case, the paper will show that, while such trials offered opportunities to criminalize and pathologize lay hypnosis, they did not always provide the ideal forum for settling scientific questions or disputes.
"God save us from psychologists as expert witnesses": The battle for forensic psychology in early twentieth-century Germany
History of Psychology, 2015
"'Trick', 'Manipulation' and 'Farce': Albert Moll's Critique of Occultism". Medical History 56, 2 (2012): 277-295.
"Hallucination or materialisation? The animism versus spiritism debate in late-19th-century Germany." History of the Human Sciences 25, 2 (2012): 45-66.
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Books by Heather Wolffram
To read the first reviews of this book, go to:
Review in Social History of Medicine, published on-line 22 February 2011: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/02/22/shm.hkr034.full
Review in the British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 44,1 (2011), 144146: http://journals.cambridge.org/action//displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8192785
Review in Medical History, vol.55, 1 (2011), 130-131: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3037228/
Review in Health and History, vol. 12, no. 2 (2010), 140-1: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5401/healthhist.12.2.0140
Review in Metascience: http://www.springerlink.com/content/q54r22243207682q/
Review in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jhbs.20466/pdf
Review in German History : http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/09/23/gerhis.ghq071.full.pdf+html
Review in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences: http://jhmas.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/jrq051
Magonia Blog review: http://pelicanist.blogspot.com/2010/02/stepchildren.html
Sci-Tech Book News review: http://booknews.com/sci_issues/sci_mar2010/rodopi1.html
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Papers by Heather Wolffram
To read the first reviews of this book, go to:
Review in Social History of Medicine, published on-line 22 February 2011: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/02/22/shm.hkr034.full
Review in the British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 44,1 (2011), 144146: http://journals.cambridge.org/action//displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8192785
Review in Medical History, vol.55, 1 (2011), 130-131: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3037228/
Review in Health and History, vol. 12, no. 2 (2010), 140-1: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5401/healthhist.12.2.0140
Review in Metascience: http://www.springerlink.com/content/q54r22243207682q/
Review in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jhbs.20466/pdf
Review in German History : http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/09/23/gerhis.ghq071.full.pdf+html
Review in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences: http://jhmas.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/jrq051
Magonia Blog review: http://pelicanist.blogspot.com/2010/02/stepchildren.html
Sci-Tech Book News review: http://booknews.com/sci_issues/sci_mar2010/rodopi1.html
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While there were a number of important disputes between psychical researchers and psychologists that occurred in Germany during the late nineteenth century, including the famous Zöllner debate in which Wilhelm Wundt featured prominently, this paper will concentrate on the conflict between Eduard von Hartmann, author of Philosophie des Unbewußten [Philosophy of the Unconscious] (and member of the Berliner Gesellschaft für Experimental-Psychologie) and Aleksandr Aksakov, editor of the journal Psychische Studien, which took place during the 1880s and 1890s and subsequently became known as the animism versus spiritism debate. Hartmann, whose work on the unconscious enjoyed considerable popularity among Germany’s intellectual elite, provoked this debate by publishing an 1885 analysis of spiritualism in which he attributed the phenomena exhibited by spiritualist mediums to unknown mental powers, and the materialisations witnessed by séance participants to hallucination. In response, Aksakov, one of Germany’s most active propagandists for spiritualism, argued that the phenomena produced by mediums, most particularly materialisation, should be attributed to spirits. Hallucination, he maintained, could be ruled out because of the physical evidence for materialisation provided by séance photographs.
This paper will analyse the Hartmann-Aksakov debate for the insights it provides into the relationship between psychology and psychical research in late nineteenth-century Germany, and will consider the manner in which such conflicts helped shape the disciplinary evolution of these fields. It will attempt to show that the significance of this particular dispute went beyond the immediate exchange between Hartmann, Aksakov and their supporters, contributing on the one hand to a split between those who believed mediumship offered insights into the human psyche and those who maintained it was a metaphysical or spiritual phenomenon and on the other to the development of the psychology of deception and belief.
This paper will use the Rudloff-Moll trial as a means of examining Moll’s critique of occultism, not only as it stood in the mid 1920s, but as it had developed since the 1880s. The opinions that Moll expressed in the course of this trial, as he himself told the court, were the culmination of four decades of observation and experimentation in the field of occultism, reflecting both his own movement from a psychological to a psychopathological model of occultism and growing concern within the German scientific community about the professional and epistemological implications of the occult. The Rudloff-Moll trial also provides insight into the views of Germany’s occultists and parapsychologists, who argued that their legitimate bid for scientific credibility was hindered by Dunkelmänner (obscurantists) like Albert Moll.
This trial, I will argue, took place at the intersection of two contemporary debates. The first was the widespread medico-legal argument over hypnotic suggestion and crime. The second revolved around the forensic status and reliability of human observation and memory. In the course of this paper, I will analyse the manner in which the Berchthold case reflected and impacted upon contemporary criminological thought about the reliability of witnesses and memory and the dangers of suggestion.