Pathological Stealing as a Reparative Move of the Ego

As stealing fulfills a utilitarian function, pathological stealing refers to an activity in which there is no conscious useful purpose served by the article stolen. The article itself usually becomes a source of nuisance soon after the commission of the act, and is soon lost or misplaced. This term may be preferred as “cleptomania” is neither a form of mania, nor a clinical entity.

A number of proposals have already been advanced in explanation of this symptom. It is a striving for a lost sexual satisfaction; the stolen property may symbolically represent milk. It may be the expression of a desire (an oral longing) for objects corresponding to higher levels of organization—feces, penis, or child— and is dependent upon the fixation points of the patient (4). Abraham (1) equated the cleptomaniac's acts with stealing a penis, especially prevalent in women afraid of open aggression and convinced of their own childhood deprivations. It may represent doing a “forbidden thing secretly,” such as masturbation. Fenichel (4) reported a case in which pathological stealing represented a perversion itself with orgasm during the act. In his masterly “Fear of Castration in Women (7),” Rado described cleptomania as a derivative of masochism. His conception of masochism arising as a superstructure from an underlying fear of castration is strikingly evident in some patients. Although considerably modified by Rado in subsequent publications, his initial data still hold many illuminating observations for points of departure for new investigations. To summarize his observations: The sight of the penis for the girl constituted a psychic trauma, a narcissistic shock with a loss of self-esteem and the sanguinary fantasies of castration appeared as a consequence of this shock. There resulted an inhibition of active desire for gratification up till then discharged in masturbation. However, the child impeded in its active pleasurable activities gained pieasure from painful excitement. The “inte