Childhood: W. H. B. Stoddart. Delinquency and Mental Defect (IV). British Journal of Medical Psychology, 1923, Vol. III, p. 188.

Delinquency refers to the tendency to commit crimes and not to the misdeeds themselves. Morality is simply the control of instincts and is responsible for the Freudian conception of repression. Idiots and low-grade imbeciles have less control of their instincts and are more immoral in the widest sense than normal children. On the other hand, the moral tone of high-grade imbeciles and backward children is equal to or even in advance of normal children of their own intellectual mentality. This is a strong argument against the existence of 'moral imbecility', which means innate delinquency with little or no intellectual defect. In progressive degeneration of the nervous system the control of the instincts is lost in the reverse order of its evolution, the last control to come being the first to go. Stoddart notes that the usual misdeeds of the child have an unconscious sexual meaning. the objects stolen or destroyed have a phallic or womb symbolism. In the author's experience the thefts are invariably related to the castration complex. Destructiveness symbolizes sadistic attacks on the mother. Delinquency may be a psychoneurosis occurring in an intellectually normal child, curable by psycho-analysis. In Stoddart's experience psychoneuroses are chiefly found among the educated intellectual classes.