You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Punishment as an Etiological Factor in Crime.
The Criminal and the Super-Ego.
The Impulsive and Habitual Criminality.
Criminality and the Sense of Guilt.
Criminal Phantasies and the Mental Content of the Criminal.
A Tentative Classification of Criminals.
In the face of the failure of the social and legal sciences to throw any significant light on the problem of crime, credit must be given to psychiatry for what positive contributions have so far been made along that line. It was psychiatry that has long insisted that criminality is in the main an expression of a diseased personality at the psychological level, the criminal act in itself being largely an unconsciously motivated psychic reaction. On the other hand, it must be admitted, that the psychiatric literature bearing upon the problem of criminology has to date not been very fruitful. On the one hand, it has submitted a certain number of studies on individual criminals, almost entirely descriptive in character, and giving but little insight into the personality of the criminal; on the other hand, it is filled with theories and speculations based on analogies and comparisons with neuroses and psychoses, but not on any careful psychopathologic studies of individual criminals. The two extremes can be bridged and some definite concepts arrived at by transferring the study of the criminal from a purely descriptive level to a more intimate interpretative level; and then develop concepts that will accord with the established premises. The following remarks are reflections based on an intimate study of a large number of individual criminals. The individual chapters are not directly connected with each other, and only suggest the type of problems that psychiatry will have to attack if it is to clarify the problem of crime.