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Finally we have a work on the criminal by one of the outstanding psychoanalysts, based upon personal experience, citing the actual analysis of cases and written in coöperation with an attorney at law of Berlin.
From the authors' experience they divide their criminals into two main groups: the one which contains the vast majority of cases in which the crime is the outcome of mechanisms which are precisely parallel to those seen in the neurotic, and the host of which, therefore, needs to be treated. For this group of criminals the whole theory of punishment, reformation, and the like is inappropriate. Then there is the other group of cases which the authors think a very small one, in which the criminal is, from the standards of the structures of his intrapsychic system and their relations to one another, a perfectly normal individual. This means concretely that he has a superego which was introjected from his surroundings and that his surroundings were the surroundings of criminals in which the standards of the criminal prevailed, and therefore his criminal conduct is in accordance with his ego-ideals. Inasmuch as there are no intrapsychic conflicts resulting from his criminal acts, the individual is, based upon his previous condition, a normal person. For this group alone punishment, in accordance with the theory of the criminal law, is efficacious.
At the close of the book, where the authors discuss the modifications of the criminal law and practice which would be desirable, based upon the understanding of the criminal which results from psychoanalysis, it becomes apparent that an amount of change, really a revolution in the nature of public opinion and in the relation of the public to the criminal, must be brought about, which is so colossal in magnitude that it seems as if one could hardly look far enough into the future to see it happening and it becomes exceedingly discouraging to move along a pathway where one can expect only to meet results several generations h