To what extent can a criminal action be positively attributed to a particular psychological cause at a specific moment in time? By using a prominent case of matricide from 1870s Vienna to draw out just how urgent and messy this problem was, my paper explores how Viennese jurists used contemporary theories of mind to evaluate individual culpability in the courtroom. How were the circumstances of a culprit’s life history––upbringing, family life, education, social position–– exculpatory or explanatory of the mental events that eventuated a criminal act? I look at how jurists used contemporary theories of psychology to disambiguate juristic from medical expertise and to insist on the primacy of the latter over the former in legal practice. To the extent that the relationship between mental events and criminal acts could be approximated, it fell to the jurist to interpret the specific moment of a crime in relation to the "total development" of the mind of the accused. I explore how the idea that the totality of an individual’s life history should serve as the explanatory framework for interpreting the subjective moment of a criminal act. Psychology furnished legal thinkers, I suggest, with a manner of understanding and operationalizing the historicity of personal identity before the law.
