ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a number of individual psychological perspectives on offending including unconscious motivations, personality, and cognitive processes. In the cognitive tradition, offending has been linked to limited moral development, although only for some types of crime, and cognitive psychology has been more influential where theorists have addressed the role of specific cognitive processes. While the psychodynamic approach is no longer a significant force in criminological psychology it gave rise to a number of hypotheses about the causes of offending that remain important, including the notion that criminality is linked to disruption of early childhood attachments. Defenders of the concept respond that, at the very least, psychopathy is useful as a predictor of criminality and recidivism. H. J. Eysenck's theory shares the psychoanalytical assumptions that offending is linked to stable personality traits and that the root cause of most criminality is the failure to contain immature pleasure seeking and selfish impulses.
