ABSTRACT
Causation is a many-sided affair; other approaches than the psychological and the sociological have something to contribute to the solution of the complex problems of prevention and treatment. The psychoanalysts are distinctive, however, in the role they assign to unconscious motivation, to the suppressed instincts of childhood that find expression in neurotic anxieties and wayward behavior. The psychoanalytic viewpoint has influenced many investigators who would not class themselves as adhering to the psychoanalytic school. The psychoanalyst regards delinquency as the expression of natural instincts which are normally brought under control in the socialization process. Sociologists and psychologists, on the other hand, commonly regard delinquency as the reaction of the child to conditions that deny him primary psychic or emotional satisfactions, thus creating or at least evoking antisocial attitudes. The psychotic has persistent delusions, cannot grapple with reality, and lives in the clouded world of a distorted imagination.
