ABSTRACT
Psychiatrist Kate Friedlander’s paper first appeared as a chapter in Kurt Eissler’s Searchlights on Delinquency, published in 1949. In this work she emphasizes the importance of Aichhorn’s concept of “latent delinquency,” that is, an arrested personality disposition still under the dominance of the pleasure principle. She ties it closely to a narcissistically disturbed relationship with the mother during early childhood and points to the centrality of object relations in character pathology. Friedlander correctly presumes that the earlier the disturbance in developmental object relations, the more severe the “conduct disorder”—our current psychiatric term—may be. She also integrates findings from earlier studies of the abnormal attachment histories of antisocial children. She does not disavow inheritance but instead emphasizes areas of development where prevention may work.
