Emotional Displacement
Definition
William Healy and Augusta Bronner's idea that delinquent acts can substitute for the satisfaction of blocked emotional needs, particularly a need for affection or status that ordinary life has denied the offender.
Related terms
- Id, Ego and Superego
- Freud's three-part structural model of the psyche: the id holds instinctual drives, the ego mediates between drive and reality, and the superego...
- Latent Delinquency
- August Aichhorn's term for an ego that never learned to defer instinctual demands, leaving a young person prone to offending once ordinary...
- Psychopathic Personality
- An early clinical construct describing a person capable of superficial charm and social functioning but lacking remorse, deep emotional attachment, or the...
- Punitive Superego
- An overdeveloped, harshly moralistic conscience that generates chronic unconscious guilt, which some psychoanalytic writers linked to offending committed in order to be...
- Weak Superego
- A poorly formed conscience that leaves too little internal restraint on the id's demands, linked to inconsistent or absent parental authority in...