ABSTRACT
The science of criminology and of the psychology of the criminal can benefit from psycho-analytical teachings in several ways. Psycho-analysis provides criminologists with new psychological points of view for the understanding of the persons they are concerned with. The clinical observations, on which the following psychological study of a criminal is based, do not arise from psycho-analytical practice in the strict sense of the word. They concern the life-history of a man, on whom the author had to make a psychiatric report as an army medical officer in 1918, and whom he see again five years later in peculiar circumstances. The solution of the enigma is to be found in the realm of psychology. The characteristics which academic opinion one-sidedly regards as inborn and therefore unalterable must to a great extent be recognised as acquired in early infancy, that is to say, as being due to the effects of the earliest psycho-sexual impressions.
