Forensic Psychology in Germany by Heather Wolffram

Author:Heather Wolffram
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

The Case for Psychiatrists as Experts

Although Stern’s paper at the 1926 Congress had acknowledged a crucial role for both psychologists and psychiatrists in the courtroom, his first respondent, Moll , was not nearly so generous in his assessment of psychologists’ forensic aspirations. As Stern commented in a report on the proceedings, Moll had used his paper as a polemic in which he attacked Stern’s new book and underlined the ability of medical and psychiatric experts to deal with problems of a purely psychological nature.73 By the time of the Congress, Moll had worked as both a psychiatric and psychological expert for around thirty years, providing opinions in a number of trials in which the testimony of juvenile witnesses played a crucial role, including the Sternberg and Lützow trials. In his response to Stern, also titled “Concerning Psychological Assessment of Young Witnesses in Sexual Trials,” Moll argued that expertise on the credibility of child witnesses in sex abuse cases must remain in the hands of psychiatrists. The psychological expert as conceived of in Stern’s paper was the academic psychologist, a figure whose knowledge, as far as Moll was concerned, was more theoretical than practical. Although Moll conceded that such psychologists had enriched science, he was adamant that they should not be consulted as forensic experts.74 In particular, Moll was concerned that if Stern’s recommendations were adopted, there was a danger, given the labile connections between the normal and the pathological in mental life, that psychologists would end up as experts in pathological cases.75 Better, Moll insisted, to use psychologically-trained psychiatrists than psychologists, whose lack of psychiatric training might lead them to overlook signs of pathology. Furthermore, Moll was convinced that Stern’s recommendation to include psychologists in pre-trial interrogations was misguided and impractical. This was, on the one hand, because jurists and police officers were, according to Moll , not nearly so naive about suggestive questioning as Stern had implied and, on the other, because finding a qualified interrogator in the countryside would be problematic.76 Finally, Moll felt that Stern and other psychologists had over-emphasised the suggestibility of young witnesses. Not only did Moll’s own research on adult witnesses imply that the problem of suggestibility was not exclusive to children, but psychologists’ reliance on the general rather than the specific, that is, the statistical results of experiments like picture tests rather than individual case studies, ignored the differences in individual children’s suggestibility and credibility.77

In the course of his paper, Moll mobilised several sex abuse trials in which he had provided expert testimony on witness credibility in order to undermine Stern’s claims about children’s suggestibility and to insist on the need for individual assessment of witnesses. In a case that played out in Berlin, for instance, Moll stated that he had been called on to assess, from the standpoint of the psychiatrist, the credibility of a sixteen-year-old girl who claimed that her step-father had molested her between the ages of eight and fourteen. Pointing to the manner that individualised psychiatric assessment required familiarity

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