ANTISOCIAL behavior: DELINQUENCY AND CRIME 403 



answer them. This is because the factors producing the 

 results always proved to be many more than any theory 

 suggested. One of the greatest of medical cHnicians used to 

 say that for therapy it is generally not so important to know 

 that a man had some particular disease as to know what 

 particular man had the disease. Just so for the effective 

 handling of conduct disorder; only it is necessary to go a 

 step further and to ascertain, if possible, not merely what 

 was the special make-up of this given individual who 

 committed the offense, but also under what environmental 

 conditions he hves or has Hved, and what have been and 

 what are his mental experiences. Now, reactions between the 

 individual and his environment, back and forth, are not so 

 simple, and involve an immense amount of circular response, 

 that phenomenon so famihar to biologists. It becomes a 

 highly complicated affair when the mental life and conduct 

 tendencies of human beings, under the complex conditions 

 of the human social environment, are the matters under 

 consideration. 



The methodology which is evolving in the modern case 

 studies of antisocial behavior takes the best possible 

 cognizance of the structural and functional physical make-up 

 of the individual; his mental make-up from the standpoint 

 of normality versus defect or aberrational tendency; his 

 ideational life; his outer circumstances, present and past; 

 his many mental and emotional experiences derived through 

 family life, education, companionship; and the inciting 

 circumstances of the special antisocial offense which may 

 be the immediate problem. 



It is a far cry from the many theories of crime and classi- 

 fications of criminals to modern case-study methods, and 

 from general assumptions concerning treatment, such as 

 have led to the building of institutions and whole penal 

 systems, to careful observation of the outcomes of different 

 forms of treatment in series of differentiated cases. The 

 latter represents the approach of science to any problem 

 of control. To develop remedies for crime and delinquency we 

 need adequate diagnoses and research into etiology, case by 

 case, and the closest study of results. Beginnings of this 



