Positivist School, Freud, Maternalism and Andrea Yates
Tiffin University
Jordan Mayr
March 19, 2016
Who is Andrea Yates?
Andrea Yates is a convicted murderer, found guilty of killing her five children by drowning them in a bathtub in her home – the Harris County Police Department described the murders as “systematic” and “methodical.” Yates is well known as after she was convicted of the murders, a retrial was conducted and a jury reversed the decision finding Yates not guilty of murder on the basis of insanity. She was committed to North Texas State Hospital for the treatment of her insanity, postpartum depression, and psychosis which she was diagnosed with after the birth of her fifth child. During the retrial, Yates and her attorney cited that Yates needed to kill her children to save them from Satan and herself as she felt she could not properly care for them.
Positivism
Positivist school criminology is the approach to understanding why crime exists and occurs by searching for the cause of such behavior; theorists attempt to use biological, socio-economical, psychological, phrenological and environmental means to determine why people exhibit criminal behaviors. “This school changed the focus of criminological interest from the acts of crime to the individual criminal. The positivist way of studying criminal behavior brought into focus the lasting controversy between nature and nurture in criminal causation” (Shichor 2010, pp. 216). Positivist school studies are theoretical in nature as opposed to empirical as there hasn’t been many quantifiable findings from the theories that have been presented. The approach was first used by Cesare Lombroso (The Criminal Man) and Adolphe Quetelet, both who attempted to study the causation of criminal behavior in individual people based on statistics and the aforementioned factors surrounding people at the time, however their findings have always been argued since they are not calculable. Despite many arguments against Lombroso and his theories, he is classified by many as the founder of positivist criminology. Later in Lombroso’s career he made some modifications to his original thesis and included social and environmental factors as causal explanation of crime, “he and his fellow positivists continued to see the main causes for criminal behavior in the individual rather than social factors” (Shichor 2010, pp. 218). This is when Lombroso posited that there are three main classes of criminals: born criminals, insane criminals, and criminaloids. Defined by Lombroso, the criminaloids class is a large general class of criminals who do not display noticeably different physical characteristics or recognizable mental disorders, but their mental and emotional makeup are such that under certain circumstances they indulge in vicious and criminal behavior (Ayugi 2007, pp. 4). This paper will seek to successfully portray why Andrea Yates falls under the criminal classification of Lombroso’s criminaloid at the hands of her failed attempts at maternity, her depression and her psychosis.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud begins to play with the idea of psychology in an attempt to determine cause of criminal acts. This begins the process of intermingling psychology into the world of law. In his essay “Criminality from a Sense of Guilt,” Freud suggests that feelings of guilt originate from repressed anti-social cravings – these cravings are what cause people to lash out and exhibit criminal behaviors. According to Freud, an individual who is punished for acting out feels relieved temporarily from their unconscious sense of guilt (Slovenko 2004, pp. 571) and, “the theory explains why so many offenders commit inept crimes and practically invite apprehension” (Slovenko 2004, pp. 571). This theory could explain why Andrea Yates calls the police and her husband right after she killed her children – it was even documented that Yates felt a sense of guilt for the way she was raising her children and that she was allowing Satan to enter their home, killing them was the only way to relieve herself of that guilt.
Maternalism
Definitions of maternalism in relation to Andrea Yates show that Yates’ was trying to achieve expectations of motherhood in the society in which she lived. Sonya Michel, in Maternalism and Beyond, writes,
“In our 1990 article ‘Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920’, Seth Koven and I defined as maternalist ‘ideologies that exalted women’s capacity to mother and ex- tended to society as a whole the values they attached to that role: care, nurturance, and morality’. Our definition grew out of an analysis of women’s political mobilizations from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries in Western Europe and North America. ‘Maternalism’, we argued, ‘always operated on two levels: it extolled the private virtues of domesticity while simultaneously legitimating women’s public relationships to politics and the state, to community, workplace, and marketplace’” (Michel 2012, pp. 23).
Yates faced circumstances of depression, psychosis and postpartum depression, while also facing the certain expectations of maternity in the United States, which caused her to commit the murders of her children when she failed to meet said expectations. It was documented that Yates starved one of her children; she was possessed by Satan and the only way to save her children was to kill them; she saw television cartoon characters who told her she was a bad mother; she felt she had not been a good mother and that her children were not developing correctly (McLellan 2006, pp. 1952). Combined with the passing of her father, all of the circumstances laid out in front of Yates caused her to act out viciously – she attempted suicide on two occasions, she plotted to drown her children on another occasion but decided against it, and as we know Yates did eventually murder her children.
Conclusion
The vast majority of America’s child homicides are “white-trash” infanticides (Picard 2001, pp. 29) – that is, the profile of a murderous mother is most commonly poor and/or consequently uneducated. Andrea Yates did not fall into this calculated demographic as she was neither – she was a graduate of the University of Houston and a trained nurse; her husband was an engineer for NASA. When Yates was dealt a hand of severe PPD and psychosis paired with the death of her father, she continued down a path of believing she herself was a bad mother and she was disabling her children. Guilt festered and Yates’ response was to lash out in violent behavior. As defined by Lombroso’s criminaloid class, Yates was not easily distinguishable as a murderer when compared to the mother’s like her, but her emotional and mental makeup was such that she allowed guilt to consume her. As Freud explained, the repression of her guilt led to antisocial behaviors such as being in a catatonic state, two separate suicide attempts, and horrific dreams of stabbing and drowning her children. When Yates did finally kill her children, she sought the attention and the punishment for her actions immediately, finally allowing her to break free from the chains of her guilt.
References List
Ayungi, R. J. (2007, November 27). GPR 200 Criminology and Penology – Positivism Criminology [Word document].
Biography.com Editors (n.d.). Andrea Yates Biography. Retrieved March 19, 2016, from http://www.biography.com/people/andrea-yates-235801
McLellan, F. (2006). Mental health and justice: the case of Andrea Yates. Lancet, 368(9551), 1951-1954. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(06)69789-4
Michel, S. (2012). Maternalism reconsidered: Motherhood, welfare and social policy in the twentieth century. Retrieved March 19, 2016, from https://books.google.com
Picard, A. (2001). Could you too be a killer mummy?. New Statesman, 130(4545), 29.
Shichor, D. (2010). The French-Italian Controversy: A Neglected Historical Topic in Criminological Literacy. Journal Of Criminal Justice Education, 21(3), 211-228. doi:10.1080/10511253.2010.488109
Slovenko, R. (2004). A History of the Intermix of Psychiatry and Law. Journal Of Psychiatry & Law, 32(4), 561-592.