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In this study we shall consider the postulates (a) that each social group establishes what constitutes criminal activity and (b) that very similar attitudes prevail toward the act of masturbation and the criminal act. We also shall seek understanding of criminal activity by comparing it to hysterical, obsessive, and schizophrenic manifestations. No clinical description of cases will be undertaken, as this would render our paper too lengthy.
We aim to demonstrate that:
Criminal acts convey an element of the enactment, consciously or unconsciously, of a bisexual fantasy.
Crime and masturbation show a great many common elements, such as solitude, secrecy, punishment, retribution, the “forbidden,” masochism and autoerotism.
As with the compulsive personality, criminal acts and rituals are integrated within the total personality; such intimate union between the criminal and his deeds appears to be almost of a mystical nature.
In common with the schizophrenic, the criminal reveals a great deal of autism and concrete thinking; there also is evidence of primary modes of thinking.
The criminal act can be understood as a tentative psychic restitution, perhaps intermediate between hallucination and delusion.
There are two types of memory: abstract memory in the obsessive, graphic memory in the hysteric and in the schizophrenic.
We shall view crime simply as human behavior and shall not evaluate it from a legal, moral, or social standpoint. Our aim is to understand this behavior and not to judge it. Behavior can best be understood by viewing it as conduct having an origin, an aim, and an object. In this context, criminal activity is characteristic of a restitutive process. The origin of the act may be a partial instinct, repressed