60. Dr. Leopold Drucker - Suggestion and its Forensic Significance

Lecture given at the Vienna Legal Society on December 14, 1892, Vienna 1893

The question of the forensic significance of suggestion phenomena is gaining in importance with each passing day. The fact that people can be induced to commit crimes with the help of suggestion forces us to consider hypnotism in the administration of justice. Legislation must not overlook the fact that acts which are subject to civil law can be carried out under an influence which can reduce responsibility and free will to zero. Dr. Drucker: "Just as the spread of chemistry has brought about the fact that today anyone can produce explosives of the most dangerous kind without any particular difficulty, so that the legislature has found itself moved to create its own law on the production and circulation of explosives, so the spread of the teachings on suggestion and hypnotism will bring it about in a few years that everyone will learn the not difficult art of hypnotizing; after all, hypnotizing is already practiced as a sport in broad sections of the population today, and the stage is already showing how to hypnotize. But once this evil has become naturalized, it is very difficult, almost impossible, to eradicate it. It is therefore one of the duties of the legislator to prevent such conditions." Dr. Drucker very thankfully summarizes the extent to which various countries are already in a position, according to existing legislation, to consider the detrimental consequences of acts performed under suggestive influence as punishable or invalid. Incidentally, I am convinced that this could be the case to a far greater extent if the spirit of the law were more decisive in legal decisions than the letter of the law, or rather: if the latter were used to better penetrate the former. It is possible to witness trials whose course makes the layman shudder at the abundance of legal sophistry employed, and yet which the learned jurist declares to be a matter of course. Professional education sometimes broadens the horizon; often, however, it narrows it so much that the route from Hamburg to Altona is taken via Verona.