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'Ils parlent trop vite, ces messieurs. Ils parlent bien, mais ils parlent trop vite. On peut pas s'expliquer avec eux.—ANATOLE FRANCE: Crainquebille.
Criminology has not got much further in the psychological ætiology of crime than the classification of the different types of criminals and the description of the mental symptoms of individual types.
If we consider these descriptions in the light of psycho-analysis we see that the most relevant data are those relating to the infantilism of the criminal. Havelock Ellis writes in his book on criminals as follows: 'We observe in the criminal symptoms of inhibited development. To a certain degree he remains a child all his life, a physically matured child, with a strongly developed capacity of doing evil. This is part of the atavism of the criminal. The frequently observed intelligence of the child-delinquent is rarely to be found in the adult criminal. This is apparently due to arrested development at an early age …'
Brouardel, among other psychiatrists, has also observed and stressed the frequency of infantile and feminine character traits. Dostoyevski in his House of the Dead says of the convicts: 'children, proper children they were, in spite of their forty years of age.'
Most of the other character traits of criminals: the lack of moral sense, intellectual backwardness, slyness, vanity, improvidence etc. are in the main merely expressions of this infantilism.
Vambéry, on the other hand, states quite rightly that 'all these qualities, to a greater or lesser extent are to be found in all human beings, even in the most honest'. Provided, of course, that this can be verified by scientific methods the mere fact that these qualities are more pronounced in a large number of criminals would in itself be important and also practically useful in the fight against crime. But even this does not explain the psychological genesis of crime.
Psycho-analysis has made it possible to extend investigations also in that direction.