- Position‹2 of 2
- Crime is caused by the individual
- Argument‹3 of 3
The Psychodynamic Theory of crime
The Psychodynamic Theory of crime describes Sigmund Freud's approach to psychology and puts this approach in the perspective of crime. This theory utilizes Freud's Id, ego, and superego and states that crime must be related to an imbalance in one or more of these.
The argument
The psychodynamic theory of crime locates the cause of deviance inside the individual, and specifically in the structure of the personality. It is based on Sigmund Freud's account of the id, the ego and the superego. Freud believed these three forces exist in all humans, and the theory of crime follows from what each is taken to do. The id represents a person's most basic desires and impulses — the drives that seek satisfaction without regard to cost or permissibility. The superego represents morality, the internalised sense of what may and may not be done. The ego is the understanding of societal norms, the part of the personality that operates in the world and has to reconcile the other two with what circumstances allow. Crime, on this account, is what happens when that reconciliation fails, and it can fail in two ways. There may be open conflict between the three forces, so that the person is pulled in incompatible directions and acts on whichever pressure prevails in the moment. Or there may be an imbalance between them — an id unusually strong relative to a weak superego, so that impulses meet little internal resistance, or a superego so punitive that the ego cannot manage the pressure it generates. Either the conflict or the imbalance could produce delinquent and deviant behaviour. What makes this a theory of individual causation is where it puts the explanation. The forces exist in everyone, so the difference between the offender and the law-abiding person is not exposure to different circumstances but a different internal configuration. Poverty, neighbourhood and opportunity are not doing the explanatory work; the arrangement of the personality is. That is why the theory sits on this side of the debate. Crime is caused by the individual because its origin is a structure each person carries — and the offender's behaviour follows, on this account, from how that structure is balanced in them.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Many critics of the psychodynamic theory point to its near impossibility to research or test in a quantitative manner. Many people also point out it's lack of effectiveness in understanding how to stop crime because it is such a subjective process that really can only tell why a crime occurs after the crime has already occurred.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The tripartite model is a theoretical construct rather than an observed structure. Id, ego and superego cannot be measured independently of the behaviour they are invoked to explain, so the premise supplies a vocabulary rather than a finding. [Rejecting P2] Because any offence can be redescribed after the fact as an imbalance among the three forces, the claim is unfalsifiable: it accommodates every case and predicts none, which is why it yields so little guidance on preventing crime.