Moral insanity
Moral insanity ( English for moral nonsense , moral insanity ) is a historical term from psychiatry and philosophy .
The term was coined around 1835 by the English doctor James Cowles Prichard and denotes not only a state of cold feeling, cruelty and absolute selfishness , combined with a severe lack of moral judgment , but was also used generally for personality disorders at the time. Today this term is obsolete.
A famous person who was diagnosed with "moral insanity" in the 19th century was Duchess Sophie Charlotte von Alencon , the former fiancée of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Sophie Charlotte's biographer was able to convincingly reconstruct how much the diagnosis was instrumentalized in this case to dissuade the stubborn Duchess from her desire to get a divorce in order to marry a doctor. The diagnosis served as the basis for the forced admission to a sanatorium of the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing .
literature
- Philosophical Dictionary. 18th edition. Alfred-Kröner-Verlag, Stuttgart 1969, ISBN 3-520-01319-3 , p. 412,
- Peter Schneider: Bad character means mentally ill? In: Tages-Anzeiger . February 18, 2009. (On the problem of the term)