Making sense of “senseless actions” in relation to criminal insanity (opens in new tab)

In the assessment of criminal insanity, delusions play a particularly important role, because they express reality judgments, which, due to their verbalized form, serve well as “evidence” of psychosis. However, psychosis, understood as a fundamentally impaired sense of reality, can also involve disturbances that are neither verbalized nor inferential, but mainly enacted. In this paper, we revisit the psychopathological concept of “senseless actions”, employed by the German psychiatrist Klaus ...