Part Three: Introduction

In this section I continue illustrating the theme of communication with a child.

In this group I have collected together cases that illustrate the psychogenesis of the antisocial tendency. The antisocial tendency is represented in these cases chiefly by stealing, although other main symptoms that have nuisance value are included.

My intention here is to illustrate the theory that I have propounded to explain the antisocial tendency. This theory is obscured when the case has been mishandled or has become in other ways complex perhaps because secondary gains have become established as a feature. Research into the antisocial tendency is best carried out on the simpler cases or in those cases tackled early, and especially in those in which there is an environmental provision which can adapt itself to improvements that may take place in the child's character and personality as a result of a consultation. In all the cases in this series (XIII-XXI), therefore, it will be found that stealing or some other form of antisocial activity is a feature. This is the kind of clinical material on which I have based the theory that I have stated and which I will restate. It is also the kind of proof which I have used. When a child is stealing and after the therapeutic consultation there is no more stealing, then there is a strong presumption that the work done in the consultation was effective and therefore based on a theory which is not altogether incorrect. I am not dismayed by the fact that there is a vast number of very serious antisocial cases which I would not hope to change in the way that I am describing in this series. The first thing is to establish the possibility of understanding and dealing with the antisocial tendency as it appears in children who are of relatively good environment and, as it often happens, children of one's friends and colleagues.

The theory is not complex and I have been at pains to expound

it in several papers sinc