the format: It is a free and self-determined space in which its creators can set the scene with a desirable, more or less honest, and more or less polished public persona.
Yet despite all of this, it should not be forgotten that, a mere 20 to 25 years ago, only serial killers and madmen were the objects of such profiles. Over the past quarter-century, this form of knowledge – this pattern for describing human beings – has experienced a rapid and profound transformation. In light of its use today, it would thus be informative to engage with the historical semantics of the concept. In which contexts and at which point in time did the written profile emerge? Who was its author, who was its object, and why was it created? In the sense of a “short, vivid biography outlining the most outstanding characteristics of the subject,” as the 1968 edition of Webster's dictionary defines it,5 the term has a relatively young history (German dictionaries and encyclopedias would not adopt this definition until later on). In the early modern era, the word “profile” was first used in architectural and geological contexts and denoted the contours of buildings or mountain ranges; in the eighteenth century, it also came to mean the side view of a face. It was apparently not until the early twentieth century that the profile was understood in the sense of a tabulated or schematic outline providing information about a person.
If my impression is correct, the word first appeared with this meaning as a technical term in the work of the Russian neurologist Grigory I. Rossolimo, who published an article in 1910 titled “Psychological Profiles.” In this study, which was translated into German after the First World War and adopted by a number of psychologists, Rossolimo designed a procedure for measuring certain aptitudes among children – their attention span, memory capacity, associative ability, and so on – on a scale of one to ten. At the end of this testing procedure, according to Rossolimo, all of the “data points, which represented various levels of development, could be plotted on a diagram and connected to form a curve that would represent a detailed psychological profile” of the subject in question.6 In Russia, these values were used above all to place children with behavioral problems into the appropriate types of schools. “The psychological profile,” as Karl Bartsch noted in his adaptation of the method, “enables us to analyze and clarify the functions of the juvenile mind, and it reveals avenues toward the proper therapeutic and pedagogical treatment of diagnosed disorders.”7
From the beginning, then, the epistemic interest of the profile consisted in providing evaluative information about the identity and behavior of deviant subjects. Bartsch, who refined the interpretation of Rossolimo's procedures and referred to his young patients as “psychopaths,” asked the following about an ill-behaved child with a long history of behavioral problems: “Who can understand him without knowing his psychological profile?” He even calculated a precise relationship between a child's “profile curve” and how institutions should react to it: “All children from the age of 7 who do not achieve a profile score of 4,” according to Bartsch's recommendation, “should be sent to a school for special education.” What was always at stake whenever profiles were created – whenever, as the psychologist Fritz Giese wrote in 1923, “a sort of psychological cross-section could be drawn through human beings” – was the normality and healthiness of those being tested.8
Although the “psychological profile” in the sense outlined above went out of fashion around the year 1930, it soon re-emerged in a new context of knowledge from where it would go on to gain widespread popularity in the late twentieth century. After the Second World War, concerted efforts were made in the United States to get to the bottom of unsolved crimes (especially those thought to have been committed by repeat offenders), and these efforts led to increased cooperation between criminologists and psychoanalysts. Just as conventional police work sought to analyze the material clues left at a crime scene in order to come closer to identifying the perpetrator, by means of fingerprints or bullet shells, the forensic-psychological perspective began to concentrate on immaterial and emotional clues – on the question, that is, of how such things as hatred, anger, rage, passion, or other eruptions of inner feelings might have left traces at the scene of a crime. Although this search for impressions left by the criminal personality – this practice of criminal-psychological ballistics – played a part in solving a number of spectacular serial crimes as early as the 1950s (for instance, the case of New York's “mad bomber,” George Metesky), the method was first described as “psychiatric profiling” in a 1962 essay about notorious arsonists by the psychoanalyst Louis Gold.9
One major difference distinguished the “psychiatric profile” of criminology from the earlier use of the term in applied psychology: it was now the case that unknown persons were meant to be identified by means of this gathering of knowledge. The test was replaced by the manhunt, and a quantifiable scientific statement was replaced by a hypothesis. At this early stage, this new tracking technique depended on the charisma and almost prophetic intuition of individual forensic psychologists such as James Brussel. It was not until the end of the 1970s that “criminal profiles,” as they are now known, were formulated in a systematic manner, and this development took place at a newly established division of the FBI called the “Behavioral Science Unit.” Here, psychologists and criminologists were tasked with testing new methods in response to the rising crime rate in the United States. Ever since the 1960s, according to the FBI, not only had the number of unsolved murders been growing – statistics showed that cases in which the offender was unknown to the victim had increased from 10 to 30 percent of the total. Richard Ault and James Reese, whose foundational essay on the new method appeared in the in-house journal, the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, made the following observation: “As the crime rate grows in this country and the criminals become more sophisticated, the investigative tools of the police officer must also become more sophisticated. One such sophisticated tool … is the psychological assessment of crime – profiling.”10
According to Ault and Reese, profiling would enable detectives to decipher the behavioral patterns and motives of criminals on the basis of clues left behind at the scenes of unsolved violent crimes. One of the directors of the Behavioral Science Unit summarized this strategy concisely: “Knowing ‘why’ will often tell us ‘who.’”11 From the state of the crime scene, detectives could tell whether the offender's methods were organized or unorganized, and on the basis of this simple difference they could begin to narrow down the possible identity of the unknown criminal. Did he live in the immediate vicinity of the victim? Would his apartment be messy or clean? Were they dealing with an eloquent or socially excluded perpetrator? White or black? Fat or skinny (forensic psychologists were convinced that certain mental illnesses manifested themselves in ascetic eating behavior)? At the beginning of their pioneering article, Ault and Reese claim that a series of seven rapes, each with the same recognizable modus operandi, could be solved within a week after the creation of a criminal profile. The latter might contain some of the following conjectured information: “1) The perpetrator's race, 2) Sex, 3) Age range, 4) Marital status, 5) General employment, 6) Reaction to questioning by police, 7) Degree of sexual maturing, 8) Whether the individual might strike again, 9) The possibility that he/she has committed a similar offense in the past, 10) Possible police record.”12
In 1980, the FBI's Law Enforcement Bulletin was devoted entirely to this new form of tracking. Ault and Reese's article is followed by several others in which the concept of the criminal profile is applied specifically to cases of arson or sexual violence. Moreover, the staff of the Behavioral Science Unit began to conduct a long-term series of psychological interviews with convicted mass murderers. In all of this, the ambition to distill individual mental features from a series of crimes was inextricably tied to the
