MODERN SCIENCE AND CRIMINALITY

Evening Star, Issue 21460, 11 July 1933, Page 7

MODERN SCIENCE AND CRIMINALITY

LECTURE BY DR MOORE Last evening Dr Stuart Moore addressed the Dunedin Selbourne Club on psycho-analysis and criminality. Psy-cho-analysis was primarily a method of treating nervous patients, but it had been found to throw light on all human mental activity. Very interesting studies' of the criminal mind had been made by Archhorn, of Vienna, by putting the very worst boys all together in one villa and allowing them as. far as possible to behave as they liked. The result was pandemonium at first, then an interval of quiet, and thou finally behaviour that aimed at inducing the teachers to punish the boys. The culmination was an outburst of helpless rage because they were not punished. Of recent years two women practising in London, Melanie Klein and ; her daughter, Melitta Sehmideberg, had made' individual analytic studies of extremely bad children that behaved in a criminal way and were unmanageable. These children were aged from two and n-half to twenty years. The result of the brilliant work by these women had been an important development and enlargement of, the psycho-analytic theory that had been described by some leaders as equal in quality to the work of Frued himself.

It wasprobably the work that these two and some other women had done in London on unmanageable minors that had led to the unobtrusive foundation of the Institute for the Scientific Study of Criminality in London. ■ This institution , was associated with leading mental specialists in England of different schools of psychological thought. The scope and spirit of the work it intended to do was shown by the fact that such distinguished men on anthropology as Malinowski and Seligman had given addresses to the institute from the point of ciew of anthropology. This institute had no solution to offer for the problem of criminality, but had given an assurance that the subject was being studied with ail organised cooperation of the best scientific minds in England. Mr lan Armour, who was in the chair, called on Mr S. R. White to propose a vote of thanks to Dr Moore.