Sunday e-mail

What to expect this week; five bullet points

Once again, thank you for subscribing to Crime & Psychology!

Our first Wednesday newsletter was about the psychological origins of the European witch-craze in the Early Modern period. I’ve always found that the more I read about the witch-craze, the more interesting it becomes. Perhaps you found the same.

This week’s newsletter is a little more psychological, and a lot more contemporary. We’ll be dealing with one of the most influential modern theories of crime, proposed by Hans Eysenck in his important book, Crime & Personality. There will be a small piece of Psychology research you can try yourself, if you like.

Remember, if there are any particular topics that you’d like to see in Crime & Psychology, just let me know, and I’ll see what I can do. If you’re happy, I’m happy. You know that.

Jason

This week’s bullet points are all about Hans Eysenck:

1.      He has the reputation of being the most-cited author in all of Psychology - even more than Sigmund Freud himself. This is partly because he wrote something like 75 books, and ten or fifteen times that number of papers. It’s fair to say that not every citation has been altogether admiring in tone.

2.      Owing to his apparently right-wing political views, Eysenck was at least once called a ‘Nazi sympathiser’. This wasn’t just social-media-style name-calling, either: it must have been genuinely hurtful. Eysenck’s grandmother was murdered in a concentration camp during the Second World War.

3.      Mention Eysenck’s name at a meeting of psychologists, and you’ll liven up the conversation no end. He was always a controversialist. He got into trouble for defending Sir Cyril Burt, his PhD supervisor, from accusations of falsifying data; his attacks on psychoanalysis; his insistence on using biology to explain human behaviour; and, well, for being Hans Eysenck.

4.      Eysenck took an eccentric interest in such marginal areas as parapsychology and astrology. He believed that the latter made proper, testable, scientific predictions of the sort that, say, Freudian theory does not.

5.      Even after death, Eysenck has managed to stay in the headlines. Twenty-six of his papers were recently declared ‘unsafe’. They dealt with the link between smoking and cancer.