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This book is a splendid contribution to the field of criminology. It is the account of a research project which by means of the psychoanalysis of a certain few criminals undertook to reconstruct their personality patterns in such a manner as to understand the genesis and the development of their criminal tendencies; and it illustrates the general principle that the reviewer has had occasion to emphasize through the years: that a single patient thoroughly studied is worth thousands of patients only superficially known and statistically treated.
It is surprising, in the few cases undertaken for analysis, the great number of problems that were presented, and also, what is more to the point, the great amount of illumination that was thrown upon these problems. The net result of the reconstruction of these personalities in the light of the psychoanalytic findings only emphasizes the perfectly inadequate and hopeless state of the present-day concepts which govern our dealing with crime and criminals, and gies some idea of the long road we must travel if those conditions are to be materially bettered and results which we are always hoping for are ever to be really attained.
The authors by no means offer in their book the suggestion that they have the absolute solution of the many problems that crime presents nor that they have a method by which the criminal can be cured of his antisocial propensities, but it can be said that unless we have the sort of knowledge about the so-called criminal that this book discloses we can never hope to develop a program that will reasonably exhaust the possibilities of prevention or cure.
One of the exceedingly interesting chapters of the book deals very largely with the interrelation of the psychogenetic factors with the social factors that make for crime and one has as a result a conclusion which, to be sure, is very old in point of time but is very new in the way in which it is illuminated by actually analyzed case material, namely, to the