Three Cases of Larceny in which the Antisocial Conduct Appeared to Represent an Effort to Compensate for Emotional Repression.

In the lives of each of the three women who are described, all of whom were arrested for larceny of various kinds, there is a history of much emotional disturbance, with neither an adequate emotional outlet nor a satisfactory adjustment. Each had experienced, over periods varying from seven to sixteen years, an emotional conflict that had been revealed to no one. Associated with much repressed desire, there was in two of the cases a sense of shame, while in the third there was a disappointment in the materialization of the dreams of childhood. In all three there was a total ignorance of sex life, and a fear of knowledge regarding it, which resulted in two cases from the sense of guilt that centered about early emotional experiences. One case was considered subnormal mentally; the other two belonged to the superior group of normals.

In the first case, a young woman of 23, it was possible to bring to the surface during two interviews only, an experience of the seventh year that had caused the patient to seek emotional outlet in religious ecstacy by way of compensating for a feeling of guilt and for emotional repression of a different nature. Her larceny, which consisted in cutting a bag from a woman's arm, was an isolated instance of anti-social conduct probably resulting from a temporary inability to find relief through her religion for the unnecessary sense of shame from which she had suffered since childhood. There has been no temptation to repeat the antisocial behavior in the year that has elapsed since the examination was made.

The second case was that of a woman, aged 25, who had stolen from shops what was estimated as $40,000 worth of goods. The immediate cause of her larceny was a conflict in her married life to which she was unable to adjust herself largely because of lack of development in her earlier life. She obtained a feeling of satisfaction through defying the authority of the law by stealing as a compensation for unsuccessfully defying the authority of