Personality and Dangerousness Genealogies of Antisocial Personality Disorder

In the aftermath of the Port Arthur shootings, Dunblane or the schoolyard killings in America, communities try to come to terms with private and public trauma and there is a need to understand what kind of person can commit such terrible acts. The problem of how to understand dangerousness often centres on the role of the mental health and criminal justice systems and it is from the intersection of these two institutions that the categorisation of dangerous persons has emerged. This 2001 book traces the history of the category of antisocial personality disorder and shows how it is linked to particular kinds of governing. It examines key legal and institutional developments in Australia, the UK and the US and also parallel developments within psychiatry and psychological medicine. Applying a social theoretical analysis to this material, McCallum challenges our assumptions about the formation and control concepts of dangerousness and personality.

Introduction; 1. Law, psychiatry and the problem of disorder; 2. Histories of psychiatry and the asylum; 3. The borderland patient; 4. Counting, eugenics, mental hygiene; 5. The space for personality; 6. Surfaces of emergence; 7. Personality and dangerousness.

Personality and Dangerousness, first published in 2001, traces the history of the category of antisocial personality disorder, showing its emergence to be linked to particular kinds of governing, rather than simply to advances in the human sciences or as a means of social control.

David McCallum is Associate Professor in Sociology at Victoria University in Melbourne. He is the author of The Social Productions of Merit (1990) and numerous chapters and articles on the history of human sciences and government.