Discussion of Seymour Boorstein's Article, A Psychoanalytic Overview of the Offender: Implications for Therapy

Dr. Boorstein's paper contributes towards a more meaningful and promising treatment of offenders. Through uniting familiar psychoanalytic concepts with certain advantages of the “therapeutic community,” he suggests both a deeper meaning of “treatment” in penology and a recognition that a basic reason for the well-known failure of the typical penal institution to “reform” its inmates is the fact that persistent antisocial behavior can typically be traced to faulty parent-child emotional relationships during the child's first few years.

In many investigations of various samples of juvenile and adult offenders, Mrs. Glueck and I have demonstrated that it is at this early stage of the child's apprenticeship to life in organized society that the basic problems and conflicts in the process of socialization must be coped with; and that these fundamentally influence attitudes and conduct in adulthood.

I am somewhat doubtful that “the conflict

between psychiatry and the law over the issue of the offender's responsibility for his actions could be avoided by substitution of the concept of ‘consequences’.”

One wishes that Dr. Boorstein's paper had been couched in terminology more readily understandable by the non-psychoanalytically oriented criminologist and administrator of criminal justice.