Psycho-Genetics of One Criminal

This is to be a study of the determinants of a psychoneurotic^ compulsion as a professional criminal. This career lasted to the age of thirty-six years. At that age a religious revival produced a conversion and a change of life. My acquaintance with him began after has seventieth year. I have one other detailed study of a somewhat different case. These two cases, coordinated with my general understanding of psychologic mechanisms as revealed by psychoanalytic procedure, encourages me to attempt some helpful general suggestions for minimizing the development of the anti-social type.

Our man (M. T. H.) will be called Mace for short. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1847. His father had been the owner of four stage lines, but through dissipation became bankrupt. He died of tuberculosis, and penniless, at forty-four years of age. During the last years of bankruptcy and physical incapacity, he was supported chiefly by his wife and daughter. The father was very cruel, sometimes beat the older boys with a stove poker, and was also “very rough” in his treatment of the mother of Mace. “Maybe that cruel spirit got into me,” said Mace as he was telling me of his childhood. The father was often drunk for weeks at a time, and would seldom come home during the continuance of the spree. Our hero was the ninth of ten children born to his mother. The mother and eight children outlived the father. At the time of the father's death our boy was six and the mother about forty-three years old. She lived to her eighty-fourth year, that being some years after Mace's conversion at a Methodist revival.

Mace's eldest brother, Elijah, was a stage driver from his fourteenth year. He also was a drunkard, but lived to be about sixty years of age. Elijah's only child had to be taken over during infancy by Susan, a sister of Mace and of Elijah. This child, Clara, became an efficient wife to a locomotive engineer.

Susan, the elder and only sister of Mace, became a seamstress and was