ently
intelligent man, and many of them are far from suffering from a purely
intellectual defect, should choose a career of crime and in spite of
repeated penalties should keep on recurring to it, has always been an
unsolved mystery to me. I have been especially perplexed about those
cases which repeatedly committed the same crime, and although in some
instances an apparently plausible explanation was found in an existing
psychosis, or strong psychopathic make-up, these explanations were in
many instances unsatisfactory.

Let us see what the repeated commission of theft means to the individual
whose history we have just reported. We have seen that his own
explanation of that series of physical and mental phenomena which always
accompanied the act of stealing were not only very much akin to the
physical and mental state which accompanies the act of sexual congress,
but were actually recognized as such by the man himself. In other words
the motive and instinctive prompting which led this man to the act of
stealing were the same which lead normal men to the act of sexual
congress. It would be inconceivable without further explanation why this
colored boy should repeatedly resort to stealing as a means of sexual
gratification in spite of the trials and tribulations which this carried
with it, when he had all the opportunities to gratify this desire in a
natural heterosexual manner, as others of his race have no difficulty at
all in doing.

The answer lies in the type of sexual gratification which his stealing
supplied. We have mentioned the anal sensations, the feeling as though
there was something in the rectum of which he had to rid himself, and
which for years led him to run to the toilet soon after the commission
of a theft. To one versed in the psychology and manifestations of the
sex instinct this can only mean one thing, namely, that we are dealing
here with a homosexual whose erotic receptors were concentrated in the
anal region, with an anal-erotic.

The possibility of a full, happy, satisfied existence for this
individual lies in the gratification of this biologic, instinctive, and
perverse sex-craving. It is the intense revulsion, the protest of his
whole personality against such mode of sex-expression which brought
about the habitual stealing in this individual. So soon as he discovered
that the emotional accompaniment of the act of stealing served to
gratify this biologic sex-craving he clung to it with the