Recent psychological studies of crime have pointed with increasing frequency to the necessity of studying the criminal's milieu. In this volume the unconscious attitudes toward crime and criminals, arising in each member of society and coalesced into law and mores, are given a full-dress treatment. The writer, a lecturer in criminology at the University of Geneva, a lawyer with psychoanalytic training, has done signal service in exploring the powerfully motivated interactions of the criminal and his society. Without an understanding of unconscious factors, which are woven into the very fabric of the judicial process, neither a successful therapy of the criminal on a wide plane nor an adequate preparation for a program of prevention of delinquency can be accomplished.

In the analysis of unconscious determinants in actual procedures in criminal practice as well as public participation in crime, the author investigates several specific reaction-formations of importance: justice