Man A Machine by Julien Offray De La Mettrie (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1912). Occulture historian James Webb named La Mettrie’s book as the probable source for Graeco-Armenian teacher George Gurdjieff’s thereapeutic metaphor that “man is a machine.” This edition has philosophical and historical notes by Gertrude Carmen Bussey; Frederick the Great’s eulogy; the essays ‘Man a Machine’ and ‘The Natural History of the Soul: Extracts’; and appendices that includes analysis of La Mettrie’s metaphysical doctrine. Gurdjieff’s comment is often taken as both thereapeutic metaphor and a social commentary on our social trances of automatism and overidentification. Luckily, things are so great now that we have no need whatsoever for such impractible insights.
The Essential Moreno: Writings on Psychodrama, Group Method, and Spontaneity by J.L. Moreno MD, edited by Jonathan Fox (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1987). In the 1960s, a new wave of creative psychotherapy and experimental psychology flourished that today has been largely forgotten or marginalised. This seminal collection on Moreno’s dramaturgical method outlines how he fused together aspects of philosophy, psychology, and sociology into a new therapeutic treatment orientation - and how he then applied this to common problems such as early onset psychosis and marital breakdown. Highly recommended for those working with Moreno’s insights or for fans of David Fincher’s film The Game (1997) with actor Michael Douglas.
Biosocial Bases of Criminal Behavior edited by Sarnoff A. Mednick and Karl O. Christiansen (New York: Gardner Press, 1977). Edited book monograph collections are where good ideas go to die and to be unread outside field/discipline specialists. Biosocial criminology likewise today is often disavowed in university criminology departments in contrast to cultural criminology, victimology, and other forms. You can however still find some interesting studies. The five chapter long Factors Predictive of Asocial Behavior: A Prospective Study examines a range of factors: high-risk and low-risk familieis; electrodermal response patterns; school behaviour; and intelligence. I never heard about this work during my 2002-04 postgraduate studies whilst in the now former MSc in Strategic Foresight at Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology - in part because anything that combines genetic / hereditarian and social learning (in part environment) based approaches so explicitly is just too controversial.
The Mind Stealers: Psychosurgery and Mind Control by Samuel Chavkin (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978). The paranoid 1970s were the United States era of the Vietnam War’s end; MK-Ultra behavioural modification experiments revelations; Watergate; and the transition from managed Keynesian to a neoliberal political economy. One indicator of this shift is a Kuhnian paradigm shift period in psychiatry and experimental psychology about how to use this growing, cumulative knowledge base to deal with the era’s crime-social problem nexus. Much of this research was conducted covertly on prison inmates and other sub-populations due to the complexities of the human research ethics involved and the difficulties in obtaining Institutional Review Board clearances. The literature from the late 1970s when the MK-Ultra behavioural modification experiments began to reach the broader public is very explicit about what the research aims and objectives of this Lakatosian research programme under the Central Intelligence Agency’s Dr Sidney Gottlieb was. In a word: eye-opening.
The Psychology of Serial Killer Investigations: The Grisly Business Unit by Robert D. Keppel and William J. Birnes (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2003). For the period of 1995 to 2019, I had a mentor-mentee relationship via email with the Temple of Set founder Lt Col. Dr Michael A. Aquino (Curriculum Vitae). In about 2016-17, the conspiracy theory / parapolitics author Randy “Rocket” Cody” alleged that Dr Aquino was really the Zodiac Killer who terrorised San Francisco in the late 1960s—and who was never formally identified or captured.
“Sure,” I thought. “I’ve seen Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of Silence of the Lambs (1991), Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986), and of course, David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007). The Zodiac Killer liked films; Dr Aquino liked films; and I was a La Trobe University BA student with a cinema studies / film criticism major.
“With this ‘logic’ alone it could not be confirmation bias or pattern evidence: he must positively be the Zodiac Killer, right? I’ve been talking to the real Zodiac Killer for 24 years - just after talking to the late Robert Anton Wilson for his 1995 book Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death for Perth’s REVelation Magazine in which RAW did some social engineering and told me at the interview’s end that I had in fact been talking with several people - not just him. It has to be true, right?”
Of course as a PhD qualified political scientist I am not a criminologist or a forensic psychologist, so I cannot make such a positive identification. It is however an amusing counterfactual to consider - so I am writing a draft academic journal article about it as an experiment in qualitative process tracing. I’m making this up as I go along (to quote Indiana Jones from Steven Spielberg’s film series).