Psychodynamic Explanations of Offending Behaviour

• Freud's theory of psychoanalysis

  The personality develops from three components: the id, ego and superego, each of which demands gratification
• Superego


  Concerned with right and wrong, likely to be related to offending behaviour
• Underdeveloped (weak) superego


  • If a same sex parent is absent during the phallic stage (when the superego is developing), the child cannot internalise that person's moral code/attitudes as there is no opportunity for identification
  • The consequence is that the person has little control over anti-social behaviour and is dominated by their instinctual id impulses
• Deviant superego

  • Normal identification with the same sex parent during the phallic stage (when the superego is developing) means that the child takes on the same moral code/attitudes as that parent
  • The consequence is that if the parent's behaviour is deviant, the small child adopts similar deviant behaviours and morals
• Gender bias


  A limitation of Freud's explanation of offender behaviour
• Freud's explanation of events during the phallic stage

  • Women should develop a weaker superego than men
  • Because they do not identify as strongly with their same-sex parent as boys do
  • Resolution of the Electra complex is less satisfactory
  • They are also under less pressure to identify with their mothers because of their lower status
• Implication of Freud's explanation

  Females should be prone to more criminal behaviour than males (as they have a weak superego)
• Falsifiability


  The ability to be tested and potentially proven wrong
• Psychodynamic explanations suffer from a lack of falsifiability
• Concepts such as a deviant superego are difficult, if not impossible to prove
• Applications of psychodynamic explanations to crime cannot be tested empirically and can only be judged at face value
• Since psychodynamic explanations are incapable of being proved wrong, they are deemed as unscientific
• Psychodynamic explanations are regarded as pseudoscientific and may therefore contribute little to our understanding of crime, or how to prevent it
• Statistics of the male-female ratios on inmates in prison and research evidence does not support this view
• Maternal deprivation hypothesis

  Bowlby's theory that offender behaviour is a result of affectionless psychopathy
• Affectionless psychopaths

  • Struggle to form relationships with others
  • Unable to empathise with their victims
  • Lack remorse for their criminal actions
• Hoffman (1975) found hardly any evidence of gender differences, and when there was, girls tended to be more moral than boys
• Affectionless psychopathy


  Due to significant deprivation of maternal love during the critical period of attachment formation, leading to a negative internal working model for future relationships and a negative understanding of the world
• Affectionless psychopathy


  Makes criminal behaviour much more likely as they see the world as a hostile place
• Such views represent alpha bias, exaggerating the difference between men and women and devaluing women
• Affectionless psychopathy


  A condition characterized by a lack of empathy and emotional attachment
• Maternal deprivation

  Lack of care and affection from the mother during early childhood
• Bowlby's natural experiment


  1. Analysed case histories of 88 patients in the Child Guidance Clinic in London

  2. 44 children had been accused of stealing (the '44 thieves')

  3. Other 44 formed a control group of non-criminals but emotionally disturbed young people

  4. Bowlby found that 14 (32%) of the 44 thieves could be described as affectionless psychopaths

  5. Of the 14 affectionless psychopaths, 12 (86%) had experienced prolonged separation from their mothers in the first two years of their lives
• Prolonged maternal deprivation

  Causes affectionless and delinquent (offending) behaviour
• Bowlby's conclusion offers support for the idea that prolonged maternal deprivation causes affectionless and delinquent (offending) behaviour
• Conclusions are correlational

  We cannot definitively conclude that the separation was the cause of their offender behaviour
• Bowlby found a relationship between early separation and delinquency
• There may have been a third unidentified variable that accounted for the delinquency
• The immediate cause of the separation (such as neglect or abuse)


  Might have been the direct cause of problems experienced at adolescence rather than the separation itself
• As the separation was not manipulated, all that is demonstrated in the study is an association between separation and delinquent behaviour