ABSTRACT
The influences in a child or adult that originated in the inheritance can seldom be completely separated from the influences emanating from the environment, especially as ordinarily children spend their most formative years in close company with their parents. The inheritance is not, of course, limited to physical traits. Our minds are also endowed at conception with a psychological inheritance. On the whole medical psychologists have tended in their work to belittle the importance of heredity, but an increasing number among them are studying psychological inheritance. Many psychological factors can account for the damming up of sexual energy, and this can be followed by an explosion in the form of criminal sexual conduct. In that somewhat heavy language which those associated with modern psychology tend to use, ‘the achievement of adequate maturation, regardless of the chronological age at which it occurs, is the significant factor in the behaviour changes of criminals’.
