Gustav Aschaffenburg

Gustav Aschaffenburg (May 23, 1866 - September 2, 1944) was a German psychiatrist who was a native of Zweibrücken. In 1890 he received his medical doctorate from the University of Strasbourg, and later was an assistant to Emil Kraepelin at the psychiatric university clinic in Heidelberg. Afterwards, he practiced psychiatric medicine at the Universities of Halle and Cologne. In the 1930s Aschaffenburg's academic career at Cologne was terminated by the Nazi edict, Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums, and he emigrated to the United States where he worked as a professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. and at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Aschaffenburg was a pioneer in the fields of criminology and forensic psychiatry. He believed that humans were less influenced by heredity than by one's social environment, and stressed that from a psychological viewpoint, criminal behaviour was a form of socially maladaptive behavior, and not a mental pathological condition. In Germany, he was publisher of a monthly journal regarding criminal psychology and penal reform, and in 1908 published Das Verbrechen und seine Bekämpfung, a highly influential textbook on criminology.

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Gustav Aschaffenburg
 * Biography of Gustav Aschaffenburg, translated by Google