From Psychoanalytic REVIEw, XI, No. 3, July, 1924.
PSYCHO-GENETICS OF ONE CRIMINAL
BY THEODoRE SchroeDER
This is to be a study of the determinants of a psychoneurotic's
compulsion as a professional criminal. This career lasted to the age
of thirty-six years. At that age a religious revival produced a con-
version and a change of life. My acquaintance with him began after
has seventieth year. I have one other detailed study of a somewhat
different case. These two cases, coördinated with my general under-
standing of psychologic mechanisms as revealed by psychoanalytic
procedure, encourages me to attempt some helpful general sugges-
tions for minimizing the development of the anti-social type.
THE FAMILY ENVIRONMENT
Our man (M. T. H.) will be called Mace for short. He was
born in Pennsylvania in 1847. His father had been the owner of
four stage lines, but through dissipation became bankrupt. He died
of tuberculosis, and penniless, at forty-four years of age. During
the last years of bankruptcy and physical incapacity, he was sup-
ported chiefly by his wife and daughter. The father was very cruel,
sometimes beat the older boys with a stove poker, and was also
“very rough * in his treatment of the mother of Mace. “Maybe
that cruel spirit got into me,” said Mace as he was telling me of his
childhood. The father was often drunk for weeks at a time, and
would seldom come home during the continuance of the spree. Our
hero was the ninth of ten children born to his mother. The mother
and eight children outlived the father. At the time of the father's
death our boy was six and the mother about forty-three years old.
She lived to her eighty-fourth year, that being some years after
Mace's conversion at a Methodist revival.
Mace's eldest brother, Elijah, was a stage driver from his four-
teenth year. He also was a drunkard, but lived to be about sixty
years of age. Elijah's only child had to be taken over during infancy
by Susan, a sister of Mace and of Elijah. This child, Clara, became
an efficient wife to a locomotive engineer.
Susan, the elder and only sister of Mace, became a seamstress
and was married to the foreman of a carriage factory. Her only
277
278 THEODORE SCHROEDER
son died. Then she reared Clara, as her own child. Susan lived
until her seventieth year. She is reported to have been an unsatis-
factory wife. The account suggested to my mind that she was
probably the victim of erotic inhibitions. The other aspect of her
inferiority-superiority conflict found expression in a sensitive pride,
and in extravagant social ambitions, which were never realized.
Like many another inferior, she turned to religion as a booster for
grandiose cravings. After Mace's conversion she joined him in
evangelistic work to promote his extravagant heresies.”
Little is known of the careers of John and David, the two next
older brothers. David is supposed to have lived until nearly eighty
years of age. John may still be alive. He was a very large man and
a great fighter. The last that Mace knew of these brothers, they
were just average laboring men. David is said to have used rather
more intoxicants than were good for him.
During the Civil War Ben, another brother, and the above-named
three older brothers all joined the Union army. Ben saved his
money, learned the miller's trade, went into business, and died young.
He married a thrifty Quakeress who was an efficient mother. She
gave birth to a son about the time of the father’s death. The father
is said to have died as a result of cholera contracted during army
life. This only son of Benjamin married a woman of wealth and is
reputed to be among New York City’s millionaires. Although
reformed now for almost forty years, Mace is not yet on speaking
terms with this prosperous nephew, whom he knew when they both
were poor. Frank, the brother just older than Mace, became a
horseman, and was just an average workman. Little more is known
of him.
The only child younger than Mace was called Dee, perhaps an
abbreviation for Demorris or Demorest. He also was a heavy
drinker, but it is believed by Mace that Dee never did enough drink-
ing to lose his job. He was a mine foreman and so far as is known
may be still living. So much has been given as shedding some lights
on the family environment of our subject.
ORGANIC INFERIORITY
Mace was born a weakling, and now is only five feet and one-half
inch high. Not until three years of age did he begin learning to
1 See: Psychology of One Pantheist. PsychoANALYTIC REVIEw, 3:314–
328, July, 1921.
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PSYCHO-GENETICS OF ONE CRIMINAL 279
walk. He still remembers that, even long after that time, he often
stumbled and fell because of his “wabbly legs.” His small size and
his delicate appearance gave everyone the impression that he was a
girl. This unusual characteristic apparently pleased the childish
vanity of the mother, who therefore prolonged the youngster's
infancy. He did not wear boy's clothes until seven years of age.
Until that time strangers always addressed him as a girl-child. When
at seven years of age he began to wear pants, he for the first time
became definitely conscious of being a boy, and somewhat vaguely
conscious of what that meant by way of distinction from being a girl.
As an infant he approached near to continuous crying. As a child,
Mace suffered from constant “blues.” The physical inadequacy
was here the basis for a great feeling of inferiority and its later
morbid, and morbidly increasing efforts toward compensations.
As he came to know how children were born into the world he cursed
his parents and God, “for hours at a time” for having allowed him
to be born. He says that no one could beat him swearing, he doubt-
less having received many impressive lessons from his father, the
drunken stage driver. In later years he would not acknowledge his
mother as such, except in the sense in which Jesus did, as just one
of humanity. While yet providing for her physical necessities he
would not own her as a mother. To him she was just “Martha.”
This condition continued even after her death. When pressed for
information as to his mother he will pretend not to know what you
are talking about, and may finally say: “Oh you mean the woman
who raised me?”
In the physical inferiority, we find the organic contribution to
his unusually intense emotional conflict, between a resistance to the
authority of the mother and an equally morbid need and desire for
her approval. In the emotional turmoil produced by the unintelligent
management of him, by those who had the immediate charge of the
child’s development, we will find the psychologic contribution to the
intensification of that feeling of inferiority, and the determinants of
the precise method by which he later sought compensation, or relief,
through crime. Already we see the beginnings of the conflict which
first made him pathologically dishonest and after his conversion left
him pathologically honest. The organic inferiority, coupled with
the parental and family defects of training, created the psychologic
preparedness for an extraordinary career.
280 THEODORE SCHROEDER
CHILDHooD TRAINING
Mace's father was an Irishman and reared as a Roman Catholic,
but did not go to church. The mother was a descendant of French
Presbyterians and was a very strict sabatarian. On Sundays all joy
was prohibited to the children and attendance upon church and
Sunday school was compulsory. The mother is also thought of, by
Mace, as a great prophetess, one who often seemed by superhuman
powers to foretell coming events. Mace now claims that at four
years of age, he too began to settle his own future career, by reso-
lution and prophecy. Even now at seventy-five years of age, when
he relates these childhood resolutions, many of which really were
prophetic of his destiny, it is apparent from his intonations that they
must have been charged with an extraordinary affect-value. Among
others he resolved that he would have more liberty when he got
big, and would never compel anyone to go to Sunday school or
church. Judges who parole convicts on condition of their going to
church, may learn a lesson herefrom.
The troubled mother was irritable and often punished Mace. At
five years of age he received from her a very severe whipping for
stealing a nickel. She then prophesied that Mace would end his
days in prison or on the gallows. This stuck in his memory. Here
we have a suggestion administered to the child under such circum-
stances as to give it a very great affect-value. Inevitably this pro-
duced also an intensification of his feeling of inadequacy and of his
resistance to all his mother's moral demands. In these two factors
I find an important contribution to the predisposition for a criminal
career, as the easiest answer to his emotional needs. A successful
criminal is one who escapes the restraint of rules and laws made by
others.
At six or seven years of age he had his hands tied behind him,
and at other times he was tied to a bedpost to keep him from taking
things which it was thought he should not handle. He often said to
himself: “Scoldings do not hurt. Whippings do not last long, and
they won't kill. I’ll be still here and soon I'll be bigger and do as I
please.” He now says that sheer resentment for such treatment
produced an intensified urge to steal.
By the frequent repetition of such experiences there came a large
increase in his feeling of inadequacy, and the fear-psychology, which
he could overcome only by the courage of despair. This fear
naturally became attached to the hard experience of poverty. A little
later all such factors combined, determined a conscious resolution to
PSYCHO-GENETICS OF ONE CRIMINAL 281
steal, in order to escape the evidence and inconvenience of a damna-
ble poverty and to demonstrate his emancipation from the mother's
moral tyranny, and his own independence of authority in general.
This feeling of inadequacy having become morbidly intense,
naturally presented as one of its aspects an equally morbid desire to
have at least the mask, giving the outward appearance of being a
gentleman of leisure. When extreme morbidity was reached, this
need would be satisfied at any price, even though it be through acts
usually classified as criminal. His lack of education seems to have
left a criminal career as the only way in which he could mask even
in outward appearance, his morbid fear of poverty, and his equally
morbid need for resisting the mother's moral authority. With an
educated cunning the same morbidity would probably have made him
one of our “captains of industry,” or a morbid puritan reformer.
DEVELOPMENT OF YoUTHFUL SYMPATHIES
The family's extreme poverty made the mother very sympathetic
with tramps and beggars. In spite of her own great need, or perhaps
because of the fear imposed thereby, whenever a tramp appeared
she would say that she hated to think of any of her children being
hungry and denied food. Accordingly she always gave them some of
her meager store. Thus poverty and begging, and the menial work
which the mother was compelled to do, acquired a major importance
in the emotional associations of this child's psychology. He gives
abundant evidence of the influence of that conflict, even upon his
present conduct. The family poverty probably acquired more emo-
tional importance in the case of Mace than in the case of his brothers
or sister, because he was the youngest and for that reason the most
helpless, and longer dependent upon the widowed mother. Also
more than they he had an organic inefficiency as a potent basis for
the feeling of inadequacy.
When four years old a negro came to beg and was helped. This
seemed to have especially impressed Mace. The concept of a negro
having thus been invested with great affect-value may account partly
for his continuing attraction by, and frequent affiliation with negroes.
At the time of this negro's visit, Mace made a resolution that he
never would become a beggar, and be like that most unfortunate
negro. He seems to have found an exalting feeling of relative
superiority, compensatory for his feeling of inadequacy, from the
thought that the negro was more unfortunate than himself. Here
was one even inferior to himself on whom he could vent the extrava-
282 THEODORE SCHROEDER
gant self-pity for which he had found no other adequate outlet. He
is often a philanthropist in a small way, while yet living on twenty-
five cents a day in spite of war prices. He never asks for alms, and
may go without food for a week unless “God provides.” When
God does seem to provide, by inducing some unsolicited gifts, Mace
is moved to tears. Thus he shows how intense remains his childhood
emotional conflict over begging. He professes to hate religious
people who ask for money. In spite of great present religiosity he
never makes contributions to “beggars of God.” The very morbid
feeling of inferiority, first attached to begging and to menial work,
now became the investiture of mere incidentals to its pains, such as
the evidences of poverty. Thus these morbid feeling-valuations
promoted a career of crime, whereby one might, at least, have the
appearance and leisure of affluence, and some of its reality, and yet
insure an escape from the disgrace of being counted among the
inferiors, who beg or work.
So also did he satisfy his strong emotional resistance to a com-
pliance with his mother's desire that he be conventionally moral and
respectable. Once he resolved never to work. The world owed him
a living as much so as the wealthy parasites and he proposed to col-
lect it. Here is another youthful resolution, so charged with dy-
namics, that it led to crime, and again it was based upon his inferi-
ority-feeling. He hoped to find other ways “superior * to those of his
mother's drudgery, to escape the terrible humiliation of having his
mother's child denied necessary alms. At the same time he would
escape the humiliation of doing such humble and “disgraceful"
scrub work as the mother was obliged to do for some time before and
after the father's death. The only example of anything better, that
came to his attention, was the idle ease of the rich. To imitate that
now became as intense as his morbid feeling of inferiority. Thus
crime was a protection against a morbid fear of poverty, and its
humiliating necessity for “degrading ” work. With an adequate
education, he might have sought relief through a miser's hoarding,
and with a high order of cunning his morbidity could easily have
made him a multi-millionaire, and a morbid lover of law and order,
as against industrial revolutionists. In these two resolutions, not to
beg and not to work, and being charged with great affect-value, are
the seeds of his criminality. Often he expressed the determination
to steal, rather than to beg or work.
PSYCHIO-GENETICS OF ONE CRIMINAL 283
FINDING BETTER ENVIRONMENT
At about eight years of age sister Susan and a brother kidnapped
Mace from a boarding house at which Elijah was keeping him.
Their motive was fear of the evil influence of drink. Susan put
Mace out in a farmer's family, where he was to help as best he
could in exchange for board and clothes. Here he was often severely
punished. Once, before nine years of age, he was very severely
beaten by this farmer. The immediate cause for this unusual punish-
ment was a false suspicion. The object was to make the boy confess
his supposed guilt of having taken and lost some tool. The farmer
wore out three switches, or sticks, on the boy. Finally “an inner
voice ’’ told the boy to make a lying confession. I suspect that the
descriptive words “an inner voice” are the product of the post-
conversion period. He obeyed the impulse, or the “voice.” Then he
became conscious that never before had he been whipped, to compel
him to lie. Now, out of his resentment to the injustice, but also in
furtherance of the preexisting conflict over the mother's moral
demand, Mace secretly resolved “with great determination,” equal
to the intensity of his resentment and of his feeling of inadequacy,
that he was going to be the greatest liar and deceiver on earth. He
was going to be the worst man that ever walked on the earth. He
consciously included as a part of this resolution the thought of theft,
as a means of livelihood. This was inevitable because the most intense
previous experiences of his life had centered around the forbidden
taking of things.
With pubescence came the intensification of existing urges.
Previously the ability to inflict pain had been the obvious evidence
of superiority, the only practical example to emulate, which effected
him during infancy. The intensified pubescent urge to action now
became coördinated with the great affect-value already given to the
paternal cruelty which had been integrated in his childhood psyche.
Thus we get the determinant for the particular mode of behavior
after which his pubescent activity was patterned. The resultant
cruel conduct increased the necessity for lying to avoid punishment.
Again the inferiority-superiority conflict was intensified. Frequent
repetition meant spiral progression in morbidity. Resentfully he
was compelled to go three miles to Sunday school. Once on the way
home he got the boys in line to kill a turkey. He was the one whose
stone hit the mark and ended the turkey's life. In such circumstances
we find the inconspicuous emotional accretions which aggravated the
sado-masochist conflict. For this killing of the turkey he also
284 THEODORE SCHROEDER
received a very severe beating, only to intensify his resistance to
conformity, his determination to ignore all rules and laws, and to be
a law unto himself. He says he killed the turkey from “a desire
for revenge,” that is, to vent his wrath at being compelled to go to
Sunday school with suspenders made from bed ticking. These
home-made suspenders were very embarrassing to his budding pubes-
cent vanity, already suffering from a sensitized poverty. They
symbolized the distressing poverty of his mother and the consequent
family suffering. Thus they accentuated once more the feeling of
inferiority. Homespun clothes and bare feet had undoubtedly a
similar effect. In speaking of these things he said: “Lord, but
didn't it use to cut me.” In these mental attitudes and emotional
valuations we can see the growing internal conflict over the mother's
desires, such as that Mace should become a clergyman. Here we
also see an accretion to the extravagant emotional valuation of
wealth which later compelled him to ignore the conventional manner
of its acquisition. Indeed, he could see no moral difference between
his thefts, and the legalized robbery of the wealthy exploiter. At
this time he was acquainted with members of the Molly Maguires, a
terrorist Pennsylvania labor organization. This aversion to Sunday
school was intensified by the rigid inhibitions against play and even
laughter, on the “holy Sabbath.” And yet, the submerged aspect
of his disrupted personality urged him to conform. Crime was a
compromise, giving the outward evidence of affluence and leisure, on
the basis of which conventional approval would follow, at least in
imagination. Also it satisfied his resistance to mother's authority.
After his conversion and spiritual rebirth (at thirty-six) he con-
tinually ignored the Sabbath laws and even suffered arrest therefor.
He still refuses to recognize any distinctions between Sunday and
other days. He has arrived at the “sweet bye and bye’’ where every
day is Sunday.
SADoMASOCHIST ConFLICT
We have already had sufficient hints as to the cruelty of Mace's
father. In his seventy-fifth year the hatred of his father is still very
intense. Often he says: “Maybe that cruel spirit got into me.”
He wanted his mother to let the father die, and not gather wood
along the creek to keep him warm and alive. This was before Mace's
sixth year. To this day he refuses to speak of him as “father ” or
even to speak his father's name, and he has assumed a new name for
himself. Cruel violence was the father's only evidence of superiority.
The hope of inflicting pain upon others inevitably became the child’s
PSYCHO-GENETICS OF ONE CRIMINAL 2S5
only known available means of overcoming his own suffering and
feeling of inferiority.
He still remembers that at four years of age, while with his
brother hauling hay, they ran over a dog and killed him. Thus he
shows the great affect-value which he was compelled to attach to such
infliction of pain. He hung the cat by his suspenders and buried it.
At another time, he went after the cows. A pair of twin steers were
in the field eating. He threw a sharp stone just to see if he could hit
one steer in the forehead. He did hit him in the eye and destroyed
it. Here, as on many, many other occasions, he lied to get out of a
scrape. He claimed the horn of the other steer did it. He liked to
kick the cows in the belly. Mace was also fond of playing with
snakes. He liked to get off among ledges of rocks, or wild parts of
nature, and so withdraw from human contacts, which reminded him
of his feeling of inferiority. All nature seemed cruel and he killed,
maimed and tormented all that did not seem pleasant to him, as he
thinks in imitation of nature. In fact he was but acting out his own
nature, as that had developed under the father's unconscious
education.
At school he was a fighter and daredevil, thus strenuously con-
cealing and compensating for his feeling of inferiority. Always he
has exhibited the persistence of a low order of cunning for self-
preservation. Also he was fond of killing skunks in a stone fence,
by the slow torturing method of punching them to death with sticks.
Even now, under obedience to an “inner voice,” he still pronounces,
in the name of God, death penalties upon those who have offended
him. And yet he is constantly talking of love, thus giving expression
to the other aspect of his disrupted personality.
Thrice he nearly committed murder. Once, in a beer-garden brawl
over a prostitute, he pulled a revolver and held it to the head of his
rival. At another time the boarding house keeper intruded into a
dispute between Mace and another boarder. The latter had, without
permission, borrowed and worn Mace's best suit and gotten it wet
and dirty. Upon the landlord’s intercession, Mace grabbed him by
the hair, pulled his head back over the chair-top and held a carving
knife high over his chest and neck. He threatened that he would cut
his heart out and slap him in the face with the bloody thing. Each
time, he now believes, God stayed his hand. The mother's moral
demands were working below the surface of consciousness. Always,
he had a very violent temper. Once he resolved to kill a fellow
laborer whom he disliked, by managing a derrick so as to let a heavy
286 THEODORE SCHROEDER
weight fall on him. Only a foot was crushed. On a farm he killed
sick animals and sold the meat. He felt so repressed as a boy that
he resolved, if he ever got a place of his own, liberty should obtain
there and it did.” Mace also liked to kill chickens in the field, just
because he enjoyed seeing them flutter after being hit with a stone.
As a child, he enjoyed mashing up insects because he thought it
pained them. Likewise, he delighted in torturing snakes before kill-
ing them. When the family pet cat ate the canary, he was glad to
shoot the cat. Such consciousness of power helped to neutralize the
feeling of inferiority, even as later did the power to inflict another
kind of pain imposed by his petty crime. With a conventional
rationalization of his sado-masochist conflict he might have masked his
sadistic pleasures of cruelty behind the moral righteousness of inflict-
ing pain upon humans who inflict pain upon animals.
After the father's death, sister Susan administered punishments
on the younger children, quite as severe as had been those of the
father. Mace liked to induce his brothers to commit punishable
offenses, for the joy of seeing them beaten. By this means he
achieved a consciousness of power to cause pain. So he achieved a
feeling of power and authority equal to that of the sister's and thus
proved his emancipation from the father's cruel authority and the
mother’s moral tyranny. In all these matters it was the special
quality of the joy he derived therefrom, rather than the acts them-
selves, that enlightens us most as to the youngster's psychology. He
appears to have enjoyed the consciousness of power to inflict pain as
much as he often resented that power when exercised over him by
his father. This illustrates the subjective unity of love and hate.
PENMAN AND FoRGER
Being farmed out to strangers, our child lost about half of the
four months per annum of schooling that might have been available to
him. The prior existing feeling of inferiority now found a new
explanation for him, by reference to his want of education. While
plowing, in his fifteenth year, he heard an inner voice (a subcon-
sciously determined “audible” soliloquy, the product of his inferiority
feeling) reproaching him for his ignorance and especially his inability
to write. With the extravagant intensity of his inferiority feeling,
he determined to master the use of a pen. He resorted to many
ingenious devices to perfect his penmanship. In the course of time
* Anarchism and the Lord's Farm. Open Court, 32:589-607, Oct., 1919.
PSYCHO-GENETICS OF ONE CRIMINAL 287
he achieved such skill that he made money by writing fancy visiting
cards for others.
But also his very intense rebellious and anti-social impulses found
expression through this newly acquired tool. Our boy became an
employee of the Lackawanna Railroad. Bill Halstead, the manager,
was “the only man on earth’’ who could anywhere near equal our
youngster in the use of profanity, at least so he says. Employees
seeking a free ride on its trains then had to get their passes counter-
signed by the manager. When our youngster sought his signature
to a pass, Bill Halstead swore about it, but signed. Our morbidly
sensitive youth resolved that Bill Halstead would never again get
such a chance to swear at him. Thereafter the signature was forged
to many passes, first for himself and later, quite unnecessarily, for
fellow employees. Later our young man got a job, selling some
household articles on commission, and received many advances of
cash on forged orders, and then quit the job. Still later he also
forged checks, and cashed some that another forger had written.
The vehemence with which he resolved upon learning to write, and
the criminal uses that he afterwards made of his skill, all exhibit an
immature effort of the emotions to achieve a compensation for his
morbid feeling of inadequacy. Even to achieve a consciousness of
power through crime, which convinced him that he could defy those
more fortunate persons who protected themselves by policemen,
prosecutors and courts, gave him great satisfaction. In his career
of crime he never once was even arrested. Again he achieved added
consciousness of power by his very success in evading the penalties
provided for his kind. He was enjoying a holiday from mother's
moral despotism.
Homosexual TREND
I have already told how Mace's delicate appearance and undersize
suggested to strangers that he was a girl. Also that he wore dresses
until seven years of age, and only after that began to realize vaguely
that boys somehow were different than girls. When very young it
was “so cute” of him to be like a girl, and so to fool people into
addressing him as a girl. To be mistaken for a girl, and thus to
make himself the center of attention and interest, was highly grati-
fying. In other words, his capacity to mislead gave a satisfying
consciousness of power, both to him and to his disconsolate mother,
and so measurably neutralized the feeling of inferiority. Thus the
period of infancy was unduly prolonged and the excessive weakness
288 THEODORE SCHROEDER
found compensation in his capacity for luring the attention and
astonishment of others. The innocent “little fraud,” so highly
invested with affect-value, prepared a craving for those feeling-tones
which accompanied his crimes.
During childhood he often stood on a box, and helped his mother
wash dishes. The natural love for the mother was intensified by the
brutality of the father, and by his own inferiority and the consequent
intensified need for depending on the mother. So the performance
of feminine tasks to aid her were accompanied by unusually great
affect-value. This emotional unity with the mother was so impressed
upon the psyche of the child that, at seventy-five years of age, he
still retains a consciousness of being “a feminine spirit.” He now
says that his masculine form as Mace “is the dwelling place of the
femininity of Christ, the beautiful soft and loving spirit within which
is the real self " of Mace. Often he introduces a conversation about
himself and his reform, “Since I came into the life of the feminine,”
etc., etc. The persistence of these feminine feeling-values is shown
also by the fact that in later life, for fifteen years he did the washing
for a coöperative group of men and women of which he was a mem-
ber. He would not allow the women to do it. At seventy-five he
feels that washing and cooking are not properly woman's work, but
man's. For many years he never thought it worth while to vote.
But he did vote when woman's suffrage became an issue, and he
hopes to vote for a woman for President of the United States.
Later on we shall see the relationship of these cultivated, emo-
tionally overvalued feminine attitudes which became inevitably asso-
ciated with and all but controlling for his sexual impulses. We will
also discover here some emotional valuations attached to the art of
deceiving, which valuations became predispositions, or determinants,
of other anti-social responses to painful stimulations and this again
contributed to make the habitual criminal.
He now tells me that: “At eighteen years of age I still looked
girlish. Guess I have never been a real man anyway.”
When as a youth he worked on farms he always ingratiated him-
self with the women of the household by showing eagerness to help
them. At twelve years of age he became conscious of a desire to
practice cunnilingus. He now believes that previously he had never
heard the matter discussed, and so believes that he was just born
that way, I suspect a feeling of sexual inefficiency accompanied by
a small penis had something to do with it. He had his first hetero-
sexual intercourse at eighteen years of age. The woman was an
PSYCHO-GENETICS OF ONE CRIMINAL 289
occasional prostitute. Her wealthy male keeper wanted her to prac-
tice fellatio and she didn't know how. Mace told her she could
practice on him. This she did and by the resultant efficiency increased
her earnings, and in turn contributed to the support of Mace. Thus
he was being supported, as his mother was not, and as a woman
should be, in return for her sex service. Thus again the “feminine "
in him had its way. He practiced cunnilingus in return and enjoyed
it from the start. It gave him a greater consciousness of his unity
with the feminine and a feeling of vanity in his rôle of humiliation,
of masochism, and a consciousness of unusual power to please, or to
withhold an unusual pleasure.
As a boy he had learned at a barber shop how to play a piano.
Also he had learned to sing by practicing in a church choir after his
first conversion at fourteen years of age. Having been sexually
initiated to prostitution these accomplishments helped him to become
an entertainer in houses of prostitution. His devotion to cunnilingus
added to his popularity there. Here, one young man who became
a frequent companion proved to be a homosexual. Mace slept with
him for some time and an effort was made to seduce Mace. He
claims that he has always resisted homosexual temptations. Also he
admits that homosexuality has been a very real temptation to him.
To have a male practice fellatio on him, he says seemed too unnatural.
He has, however, before his second conversion at thirty-six years
of age, often submitted to this practice by women and saw nothing
unnatural or repulsive therein. This fellatio and cunnilingus
induced a greater feeling of unity with women (with the mother)
and such as he craved, than could have been produced by the mascu-
line rôle in normal sexuality. This is partly so because cunnilingus
had some feeling tones in common with the infantile process of
nursing.
After his second conversion he says: “I often had kisses from
the spirit of Christ. I had a feeling of being a woman and welcoming
the spirit of Christ to enter me.” So, too, at seventy-three years
of age he has had waking phantasies of kissing me. While attending
a negro meeting he felt an impulse to go and kiss a male preacher,
and he acted upon it. Something in his appearance seems still to
attract the male homosexual. As he wanders about the big city
going to public parks and prayer meetings he is often approached by
homosexual males.
Even after his second conversion, and during the period of his
pantheistic delusions, he probably had perverted sexual relations.
290 THEODORE SCHROEDER
Once he had told me how a woman once came into his bed. He says
that he did not know she was there for some time. Quite a while
afterward I asked him generally about fellatio as a means for sexual
gratification. He answered: “Maybe that is what she did to me
that morning before I woke up. I do not know. Maybe it was.”
Such sexual perversions, in so far as they are the product of a
subconsciously determined compulsion, again intensify the feeling
of inferiority. The compensatory consciousness of power, can be
sought only according to the action-patterns which acquired greatest
affect-values during infancy or childhood. In the case of Mace this
meant that to neutralize the increased feeling of inferiority due to
sexual perversions, he would probably be impelled to still more
strenuous resistance to his mother's moral demands. Thus we ever
proceed in a vicious circle, if once we get well enmeshed in the
psychoneurotic's emotional turmoil.
IN ConcLUSION
If a child is the victim of an organic inferiority, effort must be
made to avoid a resultant feeling of inferiority. Also, anti-social
compensations should be guarded against by encouraging the child
to get compensation by excellence through socially useful activities.
Thus such a child is encouraged to cultivate the mind, or so-called
“altruism" above the average of other children. By thus securing
unusual capacity for manipulation of the mechanical and human
environment, a socially useful neutralization and compensation can
be found against every feeling of inadequacy.
The childhood technique and reaction-patterns, should be in
harmony with the actual sex of the child, and the unduly prolonged
ignorance of sexual distinction will be avoided, if wholesome hetero-
sexual development is to be encouraged.
All violent reactions of the parents, toward childish delinquencies,
must have a great potency in the creation of anti-social reaction-
patterns for the future. Such intensities in the child preclude the
more deliberate and more intelligent consideration of future problems.
Extravagent praise for socially valuable activities, are far preferable
to punishments administered for anti-social activities.
Erroneous foundations for punishment aggravate the undesirable
result. On the whole, negative penalties, as by deprival of a desired
good is less injurious than the positive infliction of pains. No punish-
ment should ever be inflicted in the heat of passion. No punishment
of any kind should ever be inflicted without being accompanied by an
PSYCHO-GENETICS OF ONE CRIMINAL 291
elaborate and honest explanation of why it was thought necessary to
inflict any penalties. Also, why and how a different line of conduct
is better for the child’s development to the accomplishment of more
desirable, mature viewpoint. No punishment must ever be trusted
to carry its own educational message. Of course if we had unlimited
time, patience and wisdom, no punishments would be needed. Then
the deterrent of punishment will be wholly superseded by the lure of
love intelligently restrained. As things are, I consider some mild
positive penalties, intelligently (not passionately) administered to be
a quite unavoidable part of a necessary discipline for the develop-
ment of the socially most useful type. Such can render social service
with a minimum of immature personal considerations; there will be
a minimum of submission to exploitation by the cunning, and a mini-
mum of tendency to exploit others, for mere personal aggrandize-
ment. Here I make no discrimination between the legalized and
unauthorized exploitations.
To WHOM IT MAY CONCERN :
I desire to open an Institute for the Study of Re-
ligious Psychology, from the psycho-genetic and psycho-
evolutionary viewpoint. That means an investigation by
the use of the psycho-analytic method. I am quite willing
to contribute my time without salary. However, I can-
not afford to equip or maintain a suitable office for the
doing of such work. So it becomes necessary that I find
some persons with sufficient money and sufficient scien-
tific curiosity upon this subject, or sufficient interest
in mental hygiene to cooperate with me to the extent of
financing a suitable office.
Some of us are beginning to feel that none of our
urgent economic, industrial, or international problems
will find their better peaceable solution, until the mys-
tic religionist's emotionalism, its underlying immature
desires and mental processes, and its resultant primi-
tive moral valuations are all outgrown, and humanity
achieves a habitual, conscious use of quite mature in-
tellectual methods. The proposed studies are designed
to contribute to that end.
Perhaps you are the person who will help, or will
direct me to some wealthy liberal who might possibly
become interested. If so, then I will be glad to hear
from you. Herewith you will find some information
of my past work. Further information will be cheer-
fully given upon request.
Yours for a saner and better world,
THEODORE SCHROEDER,
July, 1923. Cos Cob, Conn., U. S. A.
292