[Review of the book Crime and the criminal

Abstract

Reviews the book, Crime and the criminal by Dudley M. Schoenfeld. This intriguing book is dedicated to the theory that crime is an illness and that psychiatry, therefore, has an important place in the administration of criminal law--not only in the correction of asocial tendencies of the criminal after conviction but also in his detection and apprehension through postulating his motives and "mental make-up." Although the author's approach is fundamentally Freudian, Gestalt psychologists will be interested in his statement that we must not only consider the criminal but also his relationship to the victim and, if we are to arrive at an understanding of the crime, discover what factors in the latter make him vulnerable to attack. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)