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Moral Insanity

Definition

James Cowles Prichard's 1835 term for a morbid perversion of feelings, temper and habits occurring without any notable impairment of intellect or reasoning.

Related terms

Aichhorn
August Aichhorn, the Austrian educator whose 1925 book Wayward Youth applied psychoanalytic ideas directly to institutionalised delinquent youth in Vienna.
Delinquent Ego (Latent Delinquency)
Aichhorn's term for an ego that never learned to tolerate the delay between wanting something and having it, a disposition that ordinary...
Healy and Bronner (Emotional Displacement)
William Healy and Augusta Fox Bronner's theory that delinquency can function as a substitute satisfaction for blocked emotional needs, based on comparing...
Id, Ego, Superego
Freud's three-part structural model of the mind: the id holds instinctual drives, the ego negotiates between the id and reality, and the...
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...

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