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THE THERAPIST PSYCHOLOGIST BOOK STORE
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Guilty by Reason of Insanity: A Psychiatrist Explores the Minds of Killers By Dorothy Otnow Phd Lewis ( Ivy Books )
Release Date: 1999-05-01
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Product Description
A psychiatrist and an internationally recognized expert on violence, Dorothy Otnow Lewis has spent the last quarter century studying the minds of killers. Among the notorious murderers she has examined are Ted Bundy, Arthur Shawcross, and Mark David Chapman, the man who shot John Lennon. Now she shares her groundbreaking discoveries--and the chilling encounters that led to them.
From a juvenile court in Connecticut to the psychiatric wards of New York City's Bellevue Hospital, from maximum security prisons to the corridors of death row, Lewis and her colleague, the eminent neurologist Jonathan Pincus, search to understand the origins of violence. GUILTY BY REASON OF INSANITY is an utterly absorbing odyssey that will forever change the way you think about crime, punishment, and the law itself.
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Amazon.com Review
"We met no Jimmy Cagneys or Robert Mitchums among the inmates in the prisons we visited. We found ourselves, rather, in the company of a pathetic crew of intellectually limited, dysfunctional, half-mad, occasionally explosive losers. Long before these men wound up on death row, their similarly limited, primitive, impulsive parents had raised them in the only fashion they knew.... These brutish parents had set the stage on which our condemned subjects now found themselves playing out the final act. It was a drama generations in the making." Psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis, working in a professional partnership with neurologist Jonathan Pincus, has been steadily accumulating and publishing (in medical journals) evidence that almost all vicious criminals have some combination of (1) a childhood of abuse and/or neglect, (2) brain injuries through accident or abuse, and (3) psychotic symptoms, especially paranoia. This fascinating and well-written book, aimed at a wide audience, takes the form of a memoir in which Lewis tells us about the events that led her to study violent patients and about some of her more interesting cases, especially those on death row. Far from being another shallow "oh wow" book about conversations with horrifying killers, this is a thoughtful, humane examination of the horrible experiences that most murderers have endured, and a penetrating analysis of how subtle signs of brain damage in these people have been missed by other researchers. Lewis has an engagingly humble and personal way of writing about her experiences, which makes her findings all the more credible. --Fiona Webster
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 An Argument against the Death Penalty! ( sylviastel )
Dr. Lewis does a job in explaining her position regarding analyzing serial killers like Joel Rifkin of Long Island. She is a New York City based psychiatrist who believes that serial killers have some brain-damage and it's probably true. In this book, she is more autobiographical at times and also explains her difficult job in analyzing serial killers or killers themselves. I read this book years ago and I vaguely remember it mostly because of Joel Rifkin and other crimes in the New York City area.
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 All Otnow-Lewis, All The Time
In GUILTY BY REASON OF INSANITY (GBROI) author/psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow-Lewis' ostensible goal is to explain in both sociological and neurological terms why certain individuals become killers. While I am not a doctor and cannot vouch for their medical soundness or innovation, the neurological studies conducted by a close associate of hers are interesting. I was, however, a social caseworker for many years and can state that, while the social studies Lewis presents of the killers are interesting in and of themselves, the conclusion at which she then arrives, that brutal and sexually abusive upbringing can produce brutal and and sexually abusive adults, does not exactly break new ground.
But I referred above to Lewis' goal as ostensible, because her real goal in writing GBROI seems to have been the glorification of Dr. Dorothy Otnow-Lewis. While feigning humility by occcasionally referencing her naivete as a young doctor - which, while unstated, of course implies her current savvy - Lewis book reveals her to be the most self-centered, most self-satisified, and most condescending author you are likely to read.
Rather than focusing on the results of her killer/prisoner contacts, which provide a great deal of interesting reading, Lewis feels the need to describe what she is wearing and how the furniture is arranged during the interviews. At one point she spends two pages describing a roach problem she had in one of her offices. A note from Anna Freud declining her invitation to tea, but thanking her anyway, remains in Lewis' safe deposit box. Woody Allen, "dressed in a lucious camel hair coat that came well below his knees" was making a movie at her hospital.
Who cares? Lewis ultimately writes about herself - her childhood, her training, her career - at least as much as she does about the causes of her interviewees' disorders. Her interviews are interesting. She personally is not.
It is, however, her dismissive condescension toward people who actually seem to have done nothing but try to assist her in her work that is the single most infuriating facet of the personality she reveals in GBROI. She conducts an interview to which she has invited a investigator for an attorney. The interview is so intense that Lewis, while glad for the investigator's presence in the event of violence, forgot his name by the time she wrote the book. This is understandable. What is not is Lewis' subsequent decision to refer to him not as - for example - "the investigator" - but repeatedly as "Mr. (What's-his-name)".
At another juncture, to help her understand the childhood of a killer, Lewis requests that his three brothers meet with her. All three agree and travel considerable distances to do so. While she introduces them in her narrative by name, she decides that one of them, Wesley, looks "preppy", after which she refers to him only as "Preppy", never using his given name again.
I find outrageous the fact that Lewis considers this to be acceptable (and I guess humorous). Lewis either does not understand or does not care that referring to these people as she does is condescending and dismissive. She is essentially saying that they are not important enough to bother dealing with by name, or in the investigator's case by profession. And in addition, the nicknames Lewis gives to these individuals are not affectionate. They are snotty and demeaning. So in essence Lewis points out her own importance by demeaning others.
I can not understand how a person in a healing profession and who purports to care about others can do this, but Lewis appears to be taken with herself to the point that, despite her frequent comments about how well she has learned to interview others, she is actually unaware of how other people should be treated.
As I've said, GBROI does contain some fascinating material. I wish there had been more of it, but I suspect that, conversely, Dorothy Otnow-Lewis
was disappointed that she was required to discuss anything than other than herself.
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An Invitation to Voyeuristic Readers ( markalfred )
This book has the attraction of a car wreck. Ooh, look, somebody's worse off than me!
It's interesting in a time-passing way, but the evidently low priority it occupied in the author's and publisher's minds is evidenced by several howling bloopers, of which the worst is on page 187 of the hardbound version, where pathetic proofreading produces the sentence,
"A death row psychiatrist's allegiance is torn between Hypocrites and the state." Umm, really? How about Hippocrates?
If you can get the book free and wish a pastime of creepy head cases, this is the book for you.
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 The Author is Guilty of being Delusional ( weatherse )
I had the misfortune to waste several hours reading this tripe and would have to put it down, shake my head, and marvel at how naive a "trained professional" could be. I am a criminal defense attorney and have become a pretty good detector as to when I am being conned. Dr. Lewis fails to possess this quality and actually manages to feel compassion for someone like Ted Bundy and many other cold-blooded killers that she profiles. Sure, a crummy home life can scar you for life, but there are plenty of people who had crummy lives as children and have managed to live their lives without harming anyone - much less brutally murdering someone. Give me a break - some people just come out of the box broken and the only way to "fix" them is to remove them from society...permanently.
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 Excellent Read, but...
I started reading this book, and found myself unwilling to put it down until I completed it. It confirmed what many of us in mental health services believe- that killers are created, not born. There were a few elements missing that I would have liked to see in the book. I wonder what the prevalence or the changes in killers post-Reagan era, when federal funding was drastically cut to mental health services (especially psychiatric hospitals). I can't help but think if psychotic parents weren't able to have children and torture them, would there be less killers today. I was disappointed to find that Dr. Otnow did not reference any treatments to help her clients. As a therapist, I would want to know if there are effective treatments available to utilize with human beings so damaged. Despite these deficits, it is still a great read.
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Addiction
