ABSTRACT
The earliest theories of putatively wrongful behavior—what people now call deviance—typically concentrated on the same question people ask today, although with a somewhat different roster of deviancies: people in past centuries asked about why some people engage in adultery, murder, witchcraft, thievery, disobedience to authority, and the like. Historically, the oldest explanation for deviant behavior was demonic possession. This chapter focuses on and spell out the major explanatory theories of deviant behavior and indicate some of their limitations. Positivism is the approach that seeks to give empirically based, cause-and-effect explanations or reasons for why phenomena in the material world are the way they are. Empiricism holds the assumption that seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting, and smelling convey essential information that gives the observer sense impressions of the way things actually are. Sigmund Freud, regarded his psychoanalytic theory more a manual for the treatment of neuroses than an explanation of behavior.
