Personality and dangerousness : genealogies of antisocial personality disorder

Abstract

Personality and Dangerousness traces the history of the category of antisocial personality disorder, showing its emergence to be linked to particular kinds of governing, rather than simply to advances in the human sciences or as a means of social control. The book examines key legal and institutional developments in Australia, the UK and the US and also parallel developments within psychiatry and psychological medicine. Applying a social theoretical analysis to this material, the author challenges our assumptions about the formation and control concepts of dangerousness and personality. Contents: Introduction; 1. Law, psychiatry and the problem of disorder; 2. Histories of psychiatry and the asylum; 3. The borderland patient; 4. Counting, eugenics, mental hygiene; 5. The space for personality; 6. Surfaces of emergence; 7. Personality and dangerousness.