Author's Response

Most of the discussion revolves around two points: (1) the humanistic conflict over the relative importance of societal as against intrapsychic forces in producing criminal behavior, and (2) the presentation's failure to denounce whatever element of retribution is to be found in systems of punishment.

Although the influence of society was never disregarded or even belittled by Freud, his emphasis on internal conflict was necessary to direct attention to an area that had been almost totally disregarded before. The expertise of the analyst today remains essentially in this area, and while it certainly includes the individual's conflicts with the environment, it is the sociologist who has the territorial claim to societal problems on a group scale. When Gladstone felt that a religious revival was necessary and insisted that government politicians should be in the vanguard of this movement, Macaulay objected to the government taking a role in religious education on the grounds that while bread is certainly more essential to society than music, if pianists therefore became bakers society would end up with both poor bread and poor music.

For similar reasons, I have, for the most part, avoided analysis of and opinions about social groupings. My discussions have been fairly limited to problems derived from, or immediately affected by, functioning of the individual psychic apparatus.

Of course, I too believe the socio-economic “have-nots” are entitled to an improvement in their status. I also agree that it seems likely that this would decrease the incidence of criminal activity. However, I do not believe that crime would disappear if economic inequities disappeared. We have long since abandoned Marx's naive conviction that thievery results from socio-economic disparities alone. Dr. Tabachnick's “winners” in our society exhibit a fair amount of criminal or antisocial behavior themselves. In line with one thesis of my paper, it may well be that the more power and prestige they