Uma história das ligações entre a psicologia e o direito em Portugal : Perícias psiquiátricas médico-legais e perícias sobre a personalidade como analisadores

Tese de Doutoramento em Psicologia, apresentada à Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação, Universidade do PortoSearching for the evolution of the relations between psychology and law in Portugal foucauldian methodology was used in order to enlighten some characteristics of the Portuguese disciplinary diagram, from the late XIX century until the year 2000. The exam of criminals was used as an analyser. With it, discursive productions from criminal law and policy were analysed, as well as those from socio-political context, from mental medicine and psychology. It was possible to testify the birth of institutions like the Institutos de Medicina Legal (IML) and the Instituto de Reinserção Social (IRS), allowing for the intervention of different technicians/experts. In order to grasp the way convergent and divergent points were established considering the different instances of discourse. we chose to analyse the documents produced by them. The empirical research was deployed upon those institutions archives. From the 4,215 processes inspected at the IRS 24 were selected, those containing the expertise request, the expertise and the judicial sentence, and submitted to intensive analysis. Considering the years 1967 to 2000, 1,875 processes were selected at the IML, the universe from witch a random stratified proportional sample of 319 expertise reports was extracted, which were submitted to extensive analysis. All these materials were scrutinized through content analysis, initially following a close procedure and then an open one, yielding 19,136 recording units. Results show political interference in mental medicine and IRS, embodied in the new social defense ideas. They also showed convergent and divergent points between mental medicine and psychology, and these with the law. The possibility of psychology's discourse contamination by law discourse is discussed, as well as the effects of transmitting negative information on the experts decision making processes. At last, intervention and research ideas were presented as suggestions to further exploration in this domain