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19th March 1953
My dear Scott:
The discussion last night1 did not cheer up until the very end and then I was unable to go over the ground to my satisfaction. Thank you for your contribution, which as usual was full of interest. I think I can recapture some of your remarks.
I feel that there is this essential difference between the criminal and the lunatic; the criminal is not so ill in that at the moment of crime he has hope of an escape from madness or lack of contact or aphanasis etc., and he or she forces the community to meet the symptom. The contact between the criminal and society is very much part of the antisocial's illness. The lunatic, on the other hand, is ill and either gets cared for because of being a nuisance or because of society's distress or society's irritation at parasitism which lunacy brings with it.
In my opinion the difference between prisons and asylums, which may in fact, be very similar, can only be satisfactorily described in terms of this difference between the criminal's relation to society and that of the lunatic. In terms of childhood illness this means that the antisocial child, often a hopeless case, always gets attention, whereas the mad child finds it very difficult to get proper attention. Indeed madness is not recognised in childhood by society and treatment for the mad child is often lacking unless the child can turn round into being antisocial. Do you agree with this sort of statement?
Another comment you made was related to the difference between the first and the subsequent interviews. I think you realise that it was deliberate on my part, as it always is, in these cases, that I did everything I damned well could in the first interview, much more than I would do in any psycho-analytic interview, and then I deliberately did less and less. By the time the child had looked at me and had begun talking to me instead of communicating with me as with an internalised figure, I quickly became human, which means only very ordinarily unders