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Psychodynamic Theory Of Offending

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When approaching each case, criminalists utilize the factors related to the psychological theories that influence criminals rather than each individual’s traits. That way they are able to make the connections between intelligence, personality, learning and criminal behavior. Naturally each case is also analyzed based on the individual’s traits, however initially to narrow the possible population to decide on a suspect, the professionalists have to go by broader specifications. Using the psychological theories is useful to not only apprehend, prosecute and understand a criminal but also to treat him or her so that after and if they are released back among the general population, they would be able to integrate properly as normal citizens of …show more content…

Some of the flawed characteristics of a person that could imply the motive for a crime are a weak, a deviant and a strong superego. Along with Freud, Megargee and Blackburn also reveal in their work their outlook on the psychodynamic theory of crime. For example, Blackburn claims that people convicted of extremely violent crimes tend to have fewer previous offenses. That aligns with Megargee’s idea that some people cannot properly channel their anger’s expression and do so in a very extreme ways. That flaw could overlap with the flawed superego since an individual would not be able to self-restraint himself in the process of anger expression and go to the unthinkable ways to do that. Freud’s theory is also related to the ‘affectionless psychopathy’ coined by Bowlby (Sammons, n.d.) The latter describes the disruption of the ability to form normal relationships in the adult life to be the result of early maternal deprivation. That, in turn, would potentially encourage criminal …show more content…

The main contribution of the theory, though, is the realization of the possible relationship between criminal behavior or inclinations towards it and flaw in the childhood’s relationships or experience that are related or not to the parents (Sammons, n.d.) The behavioral theory, on the other hand, first explained by Gabriel Tarde, is being utilized in a way that focuses on the behavior modeling and social learning (Psychological theories of crime, n.d.). A major common characteristic of criminals is that they are more likely to be insane, exhibit poor social behavior and be unintelligent. The behavioral theory defines that individuals learn from each other and eventually imitate one another. In particular, relevant to the criminology field is the social learning theory (Psychological theories of crime, n.d.) One of the scientists in that area, Albert Bandura claims that individuals are not born to act violently, but rather they learn that behavior later in life, through family interaction, environmental experiences, and mass

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