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The identity of delinquency and perversion outstandingly corresponds with the clinical picture of female delinquency while it constitutes only one special variant in the more diverse etiology of male delinquency. The adolescent girl in turning away from the mother represses instinctual drives which were intimately related to her bodily care, the total scope of pregenitality. The adolescent boy who returns to pregenital drive satisfactions during transient regressive episodes is still in relative consonance with his progressive sex-appropriate development or certainly not in any fatal opposition to it.
There are two types of female delinquents: one has regressed to the pre-oedipal mother and the other clings defensively to a foothold on the oedipal stage. Offences at each of these levels are essentially different in dynamics and structure. Of the latter type, the author states that in addition to experiencing oedipal defeat at a father's hands, the girl identifies with a mother who is dissatisfied with her husband, shares her disappointment, and thus forges a destructive and indestructible relation with her. The delinquent behaviour is motivated by the need for the constant possession of a partner who serves her to surmount in phantasy an oedipal impasse and to take revenge on the mother who had hated and ridiculed the father. In these girls there is no wish for a baby and, if one occurs, it is an act of revenge or competition. In the girl who has failed entirely to liberate herself from the mother, the male only serves to gratify insatiable oral needs; pseudosexuality is a defence against regressive pulls which are also represented in obsessive wishes for a child.
It seems that a special kind of interaction must be at work between parent and child to prevent the progressive establishment of an independent life in the child—a sadomasochistic pattern which has permeated the instinctual life and adversely affected ego development. Primal ambivalence rooted in th