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The vicissitudes of the strivings for dependency play an important role in the psychopathology of delinquency. The delinquent, because of his experience, and by projection, sees the world as hostile. He has had bad objects,—his infantile and unnurturing parents,—as models and he has felt severe deprivation. Never able to give up his fantasy of omnipotence, which he regards as his only safeguard, he has not delegated omnipotence to parental figures or their substitutes. He cannot tolerate partial power. His dependency needs are intense but felt as an exquisite threat against which he defends himself by reversal and projection in the formula: 'I do not need you or depend on you or love you; I am omnipotent; I hate you. You, the adult, are malevolent, so I can fight you without guilt.' Action has become a means of evasion of reality rather than of adaptation to it (the negative alloplastic reaction). External controls are not internalized, and indeed their very validity is denied in a way that interferes with reality testing. Reality is ignored to such a degree that psychosis may be simulated; in this state, aggression or other acting out is substituted for psychic symptoms or secondary elaborations.
This acting out, since it does not solve the fundamental problems of the individual, causes a continuing lack of socialization and therefore of opportunity for development of the various ego