ABSTRACT
When dealing with the psychological and psychiatric aspects of crime it seems advisable to take a course which may seem contrary to common sense and natural expectation, i.e. to begin with the psychiatric, pathological part of the subject and to leave the psychology of the normal lawbreaker to the end. Our justification lies in the regrettable fact that the concept of mental health is so very difficult to define 1 and that it is therefore largely limited to what remains after deducting all those cases where mental ill health is generally assumed. This, as should be stressed already now, does not mean that we regard the pathological section of offenders as numerically stronger than the normal one—the opposite is true. Within the field of the pathological, we shall also deal first with the most seriously abnormal group, that of the psychotics, and proceed from there via the less extreme groups of neurotics and psychopaths to the mental defectives, of whom there are many classes of varying degree of abnormality. This procedure is, of course, again the reverse of the statistical picture since cases of psychosis are very rare among the general population as well as among criminals, whilst neuroses and psychopathic states are more frequent and the great majority of criminals can be regarded as mentally normal.
