Psycho-Analysis and Criminology a Political Survey1

In many branches of the International Psycho-Analytical Association, and certainly in the British Society up to the end of the second World War, a policy of rigid seclusion and isolationism vis-à-vis other branches of psychology and sociology was pursued with not a little esoteric zest. To be sure, psycho-analysts had always been ready to invade other territories with or without sanction, but they had never been disposed to encourage reciprocity in this respect. In any case, these were mainly armchair invasions. With the exception of some scattered essays in psycho-analytical field-anthropology, they did not involve any special knowledge of the data and technical methods of the cognate sciences concerned. They were in fact mainly forays in search of evidence confirmatory of psycho-analytic conclusions.

This isolation has been dictated in the main by the fear that too close intercommunication with other more superficial and less dynamic disciplines would lead to a watering down of psycho-analytical principles and a bowdlerization of psycho-analytical conclusions—a fear which, though no doubt defensive in origin, was not altogether unjustified. For after twenty-five years' experience of multi-disciplined research it is still my opinion that when psycho-analysis enters into co-operation with other sciences for purposes of research it ends by scaling down its standards to meet the necessities of the most superficial discipline represented in the team.

This self-protective attitude does not however account for the marked abstention of psycho-analysts from work in the criminological field. It is after all only in the past few years that criminology has had any claim to be called a science; even so it has as yet no coherent, integrated theory and such technical methods as it has pursued have never constituted a threat to psycho-analysis, although they have thrown into relief some of the limitations of pure psycho-analysis as a psycho-therapeutic system. I need hardly