2 — Disorder of character

Disorder of character, or the inability to come to terms with one's environment, is harder to measure than feeble-mindedness. Nevertheless the last few years have registered great progress in this field, and have shown that those of disordered char-acter among juvenile delinquents are more numerous than the feeble-minded. Dr. Debré and those schooled under him pointed to the disorder of character and described it as states of adjustment which we cannot act upon directly, saying: 'A man is born with his disorder of character as a man is born with blue eyes or black.'

But modern science has shown the error of this theory and its deficiencies: (1) The removal of the endocrine glands, or man-agement with hormone extracts, has brought certain improvements to these essential constitutional problems. (2) Medical research has proved that certain epidemic diseases leave, in patients who recover from them, problems of character exactly similar to what Dr. Debré calls essen-tial constitutional problems. (3) Psychosurgery, too, has proved that the excision of an abscess from the white matter of the brain has improved a patient's character. (4) And the new psychoanalysis has demonstrated that the dis-order of character results from formal psychic complexes which are cured when psychoanalytic treatment can bring them out of their secret hiding place into the view of the conscious mind. This disorder, rooted in the course of a man's life, is most often closely connected with a feeling of bodily or social inferiority, or connected with some tale that the envi-ronment fixed in the youngster's mind. These problems, then, are not essentially constitutional, and they too can be cured.

To those of disordered character

we must attach all the irresolute. This type is deceptive: the impulse in them is invisible, and cannot be brought under control. It fetters them 'like the bouts of malaria,' or like the disease of rheumatism; they are incapable of steadiness in any trade or in any work. You see them led along by their passing idleness, and then into theft, prostitution, and the like.

3 — The corrupt disposition

The other class are those of corrupt disposition, and these, for-tunately, are the fewest in number among juvenile delinquents. These have been granted the smallest measure of the power of dis-cernment. They cannot feel the value of any sentiment or of any moral or social argument. They know neither shame nor love nor pity nor kindness nor fear, and it is very hard to know how to influence them, or what one ought to do for them or with them.

4 — Excessive sensitivity

This type comprises persons who cannot bear social shocks, whether of the family or of the school; you see them run away if they sense the least possibility of mockery or reproach. Their fears are not illogical, like the fears of the irres-olute, but their objects may be trivial and paltry. A pupil of this type does not dare present a low school mark to his parents, and so he takes to vagrancy, steals, and is led into prostitution. And we must not suppose that these fear-ful children are necessarily chil-dren who are not treated kindly in their homes or whom their fam-ilies do not understand; for they are weak and defiant, as others are weak and lying. They cannot bear any strong emotion. And the least deviation from their surroundings is, in their eyes, a strong emotion.

5 — Compensation

There is a class of juvenile delinquents whose case we have not treated before: the 'compen-sating criminal.' Crime, in the eyes of these children or grown ones, is revenge for a harm they

have endured. They often ignore themselves, but they do not forget a harsh experience, even if it befell them long ago. Their revenge is often not injurious. They do not, of their own choosing, speak of a harm that has touched them; it is for the physician or the psychologist to discover this harm. We shall give two examples of compensation:

(a) A boy of fifteen, haughty (a swaggerer), conceited, of a good family, had had early sexual expe-riences in Paris with prostitutes. When his father moved to Alsace, he took his son with him. The boy wanted to play, with the little peasant girls of the neighborhood, the role he had acted with the Parisian courtesans, but he failed miserably. One day he smashed the window of the town hall and tore up the notices and the mar-riage banns posted in the frame; then he went to the cemetery, tore off the wreaths, and defiled the graves. The village rose up in search of the perpetrator of these base deeds. A short time later the municipal authorities received anonymous letters which he had sent. The security forces set about searching for the criminal, in vain. It chanced that he once met one of the gendarmes and shouted mock-ingly in his face. The gendarme rebuked him and seized him, and after a little pressure he confessed, boastfully, to committing these offenses, and he was handed over to justice, which asked Dr. Soren to examine him. The first thing the physician thought of was that early recklessness might be the motive that had moved this boy — the more so after the flippant youngster put on a show of arro-gance, saying: 'Those peasants deserve nothing more than the insult that struck their town hall

and their property!' And after a hypnotic analysis the adolescent boy awoke weeping: 'I have noth-ing to be proud of.' He confessed what lay in the depths of his depths: that he was graceless, ugly, that no girl would