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Now, with the return of crime-waves such as swept this country prior to the outbreak of World War II, those engaged in psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and allied provinces of investigation, find themselves confronted with the urgent need to turn their attention more energetically towards possible means by which such a cancer in the social organism may be most effectually extirpated. Here, perhaps more than in any other
department of study or research, the familiar adage applies with revivified force: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. It is a mere truism, of course, to declare that only when we possess a more exhaustive knowledge of the varied causes of criminality can we begin to cope with such an evil on a more extensive and more effective scale.
The most recent book-length study of anti-social trends, Bromberg's Crime and Mind proves to be a soundly balanced and methodically organized inquiry into the etiologic background of criminal proclivity. Rejecting, if only by implication, the celebrated hypothesis of Lombroso to the effect that criminals are born and not made, the author proceeds, calmly and rationally, dispensing so far as possible with merely chimerical theories, to provide us with a profounder insight into the psychopathologico-characterologic make-up of persons who commit offenses against their fellow human-beings. The criminal, as Bromberg sees him, is predominantly a product of his peculiar background and peculiar environment, which in their turn have helped to shape within him the tendency towards anti-social behaviour.
Particularly instructive, no less from a practical than from a more theoretic point of view, is Bromberg's classification and somewhat detailed description of certain fairly well-defined types of criminal individuals. Both by example and by exposition, he acquaints us with the underlying psychodynamic factors operative in the schizoid psychopath, the paranoid psychopath, the aggressive psychopath, the psychopathic