Latent Delinquency and Ego Development
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.
In 1925, Aichhorn (1935) introduced the concept of “latent delinquency” into the psychoanalytic literature. This is, in my view, one of the most decisive contributions to an understanding of the personality deviations of offenders. Aichhorn recognized that delinquent behavior is often released by experiences which are in themselves not traumatic and he realized that these experiences lead to antisocial behavior if a disposition thereto already exists. He saw this disposition in an arrested personality development. He maintained that the ego of the delinquent is still under the dominance of the pleasure principle and that for this reason impulses are acted out more easily than with a personality whose ego is governed by the reality principle.
This conception is of importance from various aspects. It is fully recognized that a decisive change in delinquency figures can only result from an effective program of prevention. Therefore, if there is a disposition to anti-social behavior and if this disposition is to be found in the personality structure rather than in inherited characteristics, the factors contributing to this development must be understood before effective preventive measures can be devised. From the point of view of treatment, only methods which deal with the underlying disposition will eventually effect a cure.
The conception of “latent delinquency” has not been given the attention it deserves and it therefore seems justified to show its implications in some detail. Aichhorn himself, although working with this hypothesis, never studied the early disturbance in itself, but only stated its implications.
I should like to examine further the hypothesis that environmental factors lead to a disturbance in early instinct modification and object relationships, which results in what I have called the “antisocial character formation” (Friedlander, 1945). The findings of those cases which have been analyzed as well as the findings of a larger number of cases which have been examined, seem to show that this character deviation was the result of a disturbed ego development. This occurs when for various reasons the modification of primitive antisocial instinctive drives has not taken place, or has only partially succeeded. During the first three years of life, a process of education takes place which is more far-reaching than any other educational effort later on, although normally it comes about almost unnoticed. Owing to the child’s absolute dependence on the mother and the strong emotional tie which unites them, the mother’s demands are fulfilled without undue stress, even though each of them imposes a frustration on one or another instinctive drive. Changes in two different directions are being brought about by this early handling. First, the child learns to wait for the gratification of instinctive drives and does so even in the most lenient environment. Second, it learns to accept substitute gratifications, and, slightly later, a deviation of instinctive energy into reaction formation takes place. All these factors are essential for ego formation. We assume that the first distinction between the ego and the non-ego occurs when gratification is not forthcoming and tension rises and causes unpleasant feelings. Each further frustration, if administered by the person whom the child loves and if handled in a way the child can easily endure, contributes to a deviation of energy from the instincts to the ego.
Any factor which interferes with the establishment of a firm mother-child relationship and with consistent handling of primitive instinctive drives will hinder this process of ego development. Separations of any length of time before the age of three, lack of interest or lack of time on the mother’s side, personality defects in the mother which make her inconsistent during the periods of feeding, weaning and the training for cleanliness, all may lead to a disturbance in ego development, which will be the more severe, the graver the environmental defect and the stronger the child’s instinctive drives. This disturbance in ego development runs parallel to the disturbance in establishing object relationships. The relationship to the mother is highly gratifying and this gratification leads to an outward flow of libido and thereby to a strengthening of the object relationship. If the gratification derived from the love object is insignificant or followed by too much displeasure, the self remains cathected to a much larger extent. We observe this result constantly in counseling mothers of children under the age of three. The mother of a one-year-old child, for instance, is exasperated because her child will not eat, and she feels that all her efforts are in vain. She has no influence over the child. The child’s needs are explained to her and this effects a change in her way of handling him. In the majority of cases she comes back after a fortnight very happy not only because the child now eats but because she feels that the child’s relationship to her has changed, not necessarily from hostility to love but from withdrawal to interest.
Normally the child’s ego at the age of three is strong enough to enable him to endure a certain amount of tension and to cope with primitive instinctive urges, the expression of which is not favored by the environment. Object relationships also have to some extent become more important than direct instinct gratifications, at least at certain times and when there is a conflict between the two.
In cases where this early education has failed, a three-year-old child cannot stand tension and easily withdraws to autoerotic activities if the object relationship becomes frustrating. The child then freely expresses undesirable urges, such as aggression.
If a child enters the oedipal phase with an ego thus undeveloped, and, as Aichhorn points out, still more or less fully under the dominance of the pleasure principle, it is very unlikely that this phase can pass without further disturbance. The most important outcome of the decline of the oedipal phase is the consolidation of the superego by a process of internalization and desexualization, which together lead to the oedipal identifications. This process of identification is based on the slow renunciation of oedipal desires. These wishes have to remain active and unrepressed for some time and the ego has to be sufficiently strong to stand the tension of ungratified desires and castration anxiety. If the ego is weak, castration anxiety is unbearable and the oedipal desires are quickly repressed.
But such an ego is not strong enough to maintain an effective defense. The tension of ungratified desires becomes unbearable and the instinctual drives then seek gratification by regressing to a pregenital level. In contrast to the mechanisms at work in obsessional neurosis, for instance, this defective ego permits the gratification of these desires without building up new defenses against them. The relationship to the parents or other adults remains sexualized, usually on the anal-sadistic level and as a result of this the superego is defective. Contact with adults outside the family circle does not lead to the usual identifications of the latency period, which enrich the personality, but remains on the same level as the sexualized relationship to the original love objects. The people in the environment are loved as long as they gratify and hated as soon as they frustrate. The usual reaction of the latency period to the demands of adults is lacking. Since there is no functioning superego, there is no internal demand and consequently no tension between ego and superego to produce guilt feelings. The child’s actions are governed by the pleasure principle, so that only direct prohibition of instinctive drives is successful, and that only temporarily. Although there is intellectual insight into the result of actions, there is no emotional insight. The pleasure of the moment is more important than the threat of displeasures in the future.
This character formation is identical with what Aichhorn called the state of latent delinquency, and our understanding of the antisocial personality has greatly gained by it. I believe that basically it is this character formation which determines whether a person reacts with neurotic or delinquent behavior to inner or outer stress (Friedlander, 1945). The unconscious conflicts which we find in neurotic or delinquent children and adults are identical and so far no specific conflict constellation has been described to explain why one particular person becomes delinquent and not neurotic and vice versa. Even the conflict underlying the actions of the “Criminal from a Sense of Guilt” (Freud, 1916) is found in masochistic character disturbances without antisocial tendencies. Elsewhere I have made a classification of delinquent behavior on the basis of this underlying character disturbance (Friedlander, 1945).
I believe that the age at which the delinquent behavior becomes manifest and the form in which it expresses itself depend both on the degree of this character disturbance and the degree of the neurotic admixtures. There are many delinquents whose behavior is based solely on this disturbed character development. There are others, of a later age, near puberty, who show this character disturbance with an admixture of neurotic conflicts which color the picture. This category includes the cases of obsessional stealing, or wandering, or firesetting. Here the superego functions in relation to certain instinctive urges but not with others. And finally this category also includes those cases of antisocial behavior whose conduct is the result of an emotional conflict of recent origin. The conflict is much easier to unravel in these latter cases than in those with a neurotic disturbance, but the recent conflict is not the sole determinant of their behavior. It was the basic character deviation which prevented the delinquent from making a further elaboration of the conflict and drove him instead into immediate action.
If we are correct in assuming that it is an antisocial character formation which is the basic disturbance underlying delinquent behavior, we should expect to find in the early history of delinquents those environmental factors that are apt to cause the specific disturbance in ego development.
In recent years some observations have been made which seem to confirm the correctness of this assumption. The authors (Carr and Mannheim, 1942) of a statistical investigation, carried out in this country for the purpose of finding the significant environmental factors contributing to delinquent behavior, concluded that their data can only be understood if a “susceptibility” to delinquency exists before it becomes manifest.
Of more significance are van Ophuijsen’s (1945) observations. He states that in his cases of “primary conduct disorders” antisocial behavior starts very early in the form of unmanageableness at home, truancy from school, lying and pilfering. In all those cases he finds gross disturbances in the early family setting, resulting in rejection and neglect of the child. According to his findings, children with conduct disorders are characterized by “abnormal aggressiveness, absence or defective development of guilt feelings and narcissistic self-evaluation.” He connects the absence of guilt feelings with a defective superego development, again due to adverse environmental influences. Van Ophuijsen described another type of delinquent behavior which is related to the influence of one particular person or displayed in one situation only, as for instance at school. These cases, especially the ones in which the delinquency first manifests itself at puberty, have a different pathology, according to van Ophuijsen. Their etiology lies in a disturbed oedipal development or in neurotic conflicts.
I should be inclined to a different interpretation of the causation of these delinquencies. When antisocial behavior is manifest from the age of four or five onwards, the character defect is very pronounced and superego formation is therefore correspondingly defective. In such cases the environmental disturbances are always obvious. In other cases where delinquent behavior occurs only in relation to certain persons, the character defect is less pronounced and a partial superego development has taken place. When the delinquent conduct does not appear until puberty, the character defect is slight and normal or abnormal conflicts lead to anti-social behavior instead of to neurotic manifestations. I have usually found that the conflicts leading to the antisocial manifestations are the usual ones met with in adolescence: severe frustrations of the desire to be grown up, events in the home which tend to increase incestuous desires, such as the birth of a sibling, and so on. Despite the fact that the home environment of these cases is not a severely disturbed one, nevertheless we usually find typical antisocial rather than neurotic reactions in their early histories.
Lauretta Bender (1947) describes “psychopathic personalities” among children seen at Bellevue Hospital, whose main characteristic is their inability to fit into any community. Her own investigations and those of her co-workers confirm the fact that this personality development predominates in those children who, up to the age of five, were unable to establish object relationships because they were separated from their mothers and were in institutions or foster homes where there was frequent change of the adults in their environment. Lauretta Bender maintains that the disturbance occurs very early, before the oedipal phase, and that it is closely linked to separation from the mother at this early age.
Bowlby (1944), investigating the early family setting, with special emphasis on the mother-child relationship, of 44 juvenile thieves, found that in a highly significant number of cases there were early separations from the mother with a subsequent disturbance of the establishment of object relationships, while in his control group of otherwise disturbed but non-delinquent children this factor played a very minor part.
A recent study at a child guidance clinic of the home backgrounds of delinquent children and adolescents showed that of 34 cases, 12 had been separated from their mothers before the age of four, or had never known them, and were living in institutions or foster homes. In all these cases there was a frequent change of adults in the child’s environment before the age of five. In a further series of 12 cases there were gross disturbances in the family setting before the age of five, such as psychotic mothers, desertion by the father, separation from the mother and living away from home after the age of six, illegitimacy and so on. In 10 cases only were the children living at home and had not been separated from their mothers, and of these homes only two could be regarded as stable. In these two cases the delinquent behavior became manifest in adolescence for the first time, under provocation, and disappeared after management of the environmental and inner disturbance. The factor common to the other eight homes was the lack of interest in and the inconsistent handling of the child, a lack of tradition in the home and frequent changes of residence, which is rather rare in the rural population of the clinic district.
In most of the cases we had difficulty in getting a detailed social history covering our essential data of the first five years, not so much because the parents were uncooperative (although this factor played a part as well), but also because the mother did not remember what was to her quite unimportant. This attitude is in great contrast to that of parents of neurotic children, where with very few exceptions the parents are as interested in providing us with facts of the early history as we are in receiving them. The same contrast exists in the actual home background. Out of 33 cases of neurotic children, 32 cases showed a stable home background and an uninterrupted mother-child relationship.
In recent years the study of the early mother-child relationship has received such attention, and it is to be hoped that follow-up studies of children observed during the first years of life will contribute substantially to the elucidation of this problem. Spitz’s (1945) investigations have already shown the relationship between ego development and the presence or absence of the mother or a mother substitute during the first year of life.
A further confirmation of the basic character disturbance in delinquents can be found both in the treatment results and in the recommendations for treatment of those who deal with large numbers of delinquents. Aichhorn (1935) has always maintained that the first step in the treatment of delinquent personalities was the establishment of an object relationship, and he draws attention to the difficulties of doing so because of the delinquent’s inherent inability to form relationships which can endure frustrations. Van Ophuijsen (1945) states that in all cases of “primary conduct disorder” the treatment plan consists in the establishment of a relationship with the child. He maintains that this may take a long time but that it must be the essential part of every treatment plan.
We would expect that a character disturbance of the type described can only be rectified by a process of re-educating the child by means of an emotional relationship to an adult who represents a parent substitute. If the assumption of a basic character disturbance is correct, the result of this process of re-education will depend on the age at which the child is diagnosed as being antisocial, regardless of whether treatment is undertaken by working with the parents, with the child or with both, or whether it is being done in a foster home or an institution. Naturally, treatment can be more effective before or at the beginning of the latency period than at any later time.
We are all familiar with the picture of the antisocial child during the late latency period and prepuberty, with his narcissistic self-evaluation, his impulsiveness and his inability to establish object relationships which endure frustrations. It would be valuable to be able to diagnose the disturbance at a much earlier age, between four and six years. This may appear difficult, as at this age both normal and neurotic children are also still narcissistic and impulsive. But the history of the primary antisocial child even at this early age is very typical. The parents complain that such children have always been disobedient, destructive and unmanageable. They lie with unconcern, pilfer, run away and tend to stay out later than is permitted. In addition to this there may be other behavior disorders, but it is the combination of the unmanageableness with lying and running away, and the attitude of the parents towards the child which point to an antisocial character disturbance.
In most cases the diagnosis can also be established by examining the child. Between the ages of four to six, the difference between a neurotic and an antisocial child is rather striking, especially if the diagnostic procedure includes observation in the treatment situation, either individually or in a group.
I should like to illustrate certain points regarding early diagnosis by a short case history which is typical of the early manifestation of an antisocial character formation.
We first heard about Peter when he was five and one-half years old. His mother had come for advice about the feeding difficulty of her second son, aged one. After a few weeks when this had disappeared, she confided to us that she was also worried about the older boy, whom she had previously described as perfect. He had started school but was having reading difficulties although he appeared to be intelligent.
At this stage the mother did not admit any difficulty at home and it was not until much later that we heard about certain behavior disorders which had existed ever since early days. He was dry and clean before 18 months, but at that time he began smearing with feces. Threats and punishment succeeded in putting a stop to this habit but nothing could prevent him from being destructive. Toys were so promptly destroyed that the mother no longer bought him any, and he could not be left alone in a room for fear he would damage everything in it. In further interviews with the mother it appeared that the destructiveness had not disappeared at the age of four, as she told us at first, but that he still had phases when he would destroy his own toys and everything else he could lay his hands on. He had always been very disobedient and his behavior had now reached a stage where neither friendliness nor strictness was of any avail. His behavior had become more difficult at four-and-a-half after the birth of a younger brother.
We also learned in time that the teachers were not so much concerned about the boy’s inability to read as about his behavior in class. He was a disturbing influence in the group because he prevented other children from learning either by drawing attention to himself or by being aggressive to them.
When Peter was first seen at the clinic, this information was not available and therefore his difficulty in learning to read (he had an I.Q. of 140) appeared from the description as a neurotic learning inhibition.
During the first interview the boy gave the impression of being a friendly, uninhibited child. He came into the room with great pleasure and without any embarrassment, and immediately concentrated on the toys, talking quite freely while doing so. He did not settle down to any play activity, but investigated everything in the room, as is not unusual in a first interview. The only salient features during this interview were that his free and easy behavior, his lack of embarrassment and his free talk did not fit into the picture of a neurotically disturbed child and that his talk and behavior were on a superficial and social level, and had no relationship to the interviewer.
During the following interviews he displayed two different attitudes. During most of the interview he was friendly on a very superficial level and talked freely, revealing fantasies and ideas about religion which were very much in the foreground at that time. He maintained that ghosts urged him to be naughty, but that he was always very good. At the end of the second hour he suddenly decided that he wanted to take one of the toys home with him, and when it was explained that toys remained at the clinic he became aggressive and threatening, saying that he would not come again if he could not have it. He admitted that this was the way in which he behaved at home, but he took the toy with him when he left, without my noticing it. This aggressive behavior repeated itself during the following sessions, appearing sometimes at the beginning, but more often at the end of the session, when he declined to leave. On many occasions he would empty the content of all the toy shelves on the floor in one quick sweeping movement, usually after he had helped to put the toys back. Invariably when it was time for him to leave he would invent many things which he had to do before going.
While there was still no relationship to me during his friendly behavior, the first sign of an object relationship revealed itself in these brief episodes when he became aggressive and unmanageable.
It was months before Peter established a relationship to me which was genuine and not intended to deceive me. When that stage was reached the mother stopped his coming. Half a year later we heard that he had stolen outside the home.
During the interviews we were able to observe closely the boy’s behavior at home and at school, his relationship to his parents and brother, as well as the other inter-family relationships, and could confirm the diagnosis which was made after the third interview before the pertinent facts of his history had been made available. The diagnosis was based on this failure to establish an object relationship as well as on the way he behaved toward the instinctive desires aroused in the treatment session, namely to take home a toy. This desire is universal in children who come to the clinic, but only antisocial children express it in this way, by stealing what they cannot get by bribery. Sometimes, during the course of treatment, neurotic children may insist on taking something home with them, but they are then easily satisfied with a substitute and their reaction relates only to material brought forward in one particular session.
The attitude of children with a pronounced degree of antisocial character formation is so typical even at an early age that we have postulated a definite diagnostic entity for them, namely, that of “Primary Antisocial Conduct.” In some cases, especially with children under the age of five, there are still doubts about the future development. These we would classify as “primary behavior disorders with antisocial traits.”
Although Peter’s home background was one of the least disturbed in our group of cases, it was not difficult to understand how the boy’s ego development had been disrupted. His mother was a young and attractive woman, with little emotional control. She had a good relationship with her husband, who shared her attitude of unconcern about the children whenever their own emotions were involved. They had both very much wanted the oldest child and were glad that he was a boy. But the mother’s handling was very inconsistent from the beginning. She smothered the child with affection one moment and was very harsh with him when he was tired or when he annoyed her. Her husband had grown up with a very strict stepfather and his only interest in the boy was to punish him. Both parents had high ambitions for the older boy until the younger child was born. Then the father openly preferred the baby and Mrs. X had very little time to spend on Peter. She also told him that now he would not be able to go to the university because there would not be enough money for both of the children.
Mrs. X’s attitude toward the clinic was also rather typical. She was superficially co-operative and did not break appointments as long as she mainly came for advice about the baby’s feeding difficulty. But as soon as Peter started to come regularly, she was late for her appointments and often failed to come. She was more interested in showing off the younger boy than in giving information about the older one, and it became clear that she was quite unable to avoid having scenes with Peter. She was insincere with us and induced the boy to lie for her. In the end she kept the boy away just when he had established a relationship with me and was himself very eager to come and frightened that he might not be allowed to continue. Half a year after the end of the observation, when the boy had stolen from a neighbor and the school became aware of his pilfering, the headmaster informed us that the mother had rejected his suggestion that she should come to the clinic but had asked him whether he could see her regularly. He agreed, but she never came again.
The relationship of this mother to her child was not one of simple rejection. She certainly had a strong emotional relationship to him, but one which was based first and foremost on her own narcissistic needs. She was not only unaware of the child’s needs, she disregarded them as soon as they ran counter to her own desire of the moment. The father’s relationship was very similar to hers, with the added difficulty that he openly preferred the younger child. The mother’s relationship to the younger child was the same as that to the older. She showed him off as part of herself and was impatient when he presented any difficulty. Peter was, of course, very jealous of his younger brother, but this acted only as an aggravation of his already existing disturbance.
Under these conditions the early instinct education could not proceed satisfactorily because of the constant oscillation between too much frustration and too much gratification, which disturbed the ego development. The correspondingly defective superego development is shown in the boy’s inability to conform to rules at school and at home, and in his lack of guilt feelings when he was destructive. Peter could not learn because his interest was still centered round the direct gratification of pregenital instinctive drives.
In summary, I should like to emphasize that Aichhorn’s conception of “latent delinquency” has directed attention to the study of the underlying basic disturbance in the delinquent personality. The most important result of these studies is the elucidation of the effect of gross environmental disturbances on the child’s ego development, and the subsequent disturbance of superego function. Studies of the early home background of later delinquents have already given ample proof that the cause of the antisocial character formation lies largely in the environment. Any effective program of prevention will have to make use of these observations, and plans for treatment should be based on the idea of helping the offender to establish a relationship with one adult who can then undertake the process of education which has not taken place in infancy. In those cases where there is a neurotic admixture as well, the treatment of this condition will have to be deferred until after the education process.
One rather interesting conclusion could be tentatively drawn, namely, that the idea current in the literature of delinquency that constitutional factors play such an important part in the development of antisocial behavior may be fallacious. We can point to the early environmental factors responsible for the faulty development underlying delinquency with even greater certainty than to those which cause neurotic disturbances.
REFERENCES
Aichhorn, A. (1935). Wayward Youth. New York: Viking Press.
Bender, L. (1947). Psychopathic behavior disorders in children. In: Handbook of Correctional Psychology, ed. R. Lindner & R. Seliger. New York: Philosophical Library, pp. 360–377.
Bowlby, J. (1944). Forty-four juvenile thieves: Their characters and home life. Internat. J. Psycho-Anal., 25:107–128.
Carr, S. & Mannheim, R. (1942). Young Offenders. New York: Cambridge.
Freud, S. (1916). Criminals from a sense of guilt. Standard Edition, 14: 332–333. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
Friedlander, K. (1945). The formation of the antisocial character. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1. New York: International Universities Press.
Spitz, R. (1945). Hospitalism. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1. New York: International Universities Press.
van Ophuijsen, J. H. W. (1945). Primary conduct disorders. In: Modern Trends in Child Psychiatry, ed. N. D. C. Lewis & B. L. Pacella. New York: International Universities Press.