International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1934)

166 THE CINEMA IN EDUCATION Psychoanalysis, in fact, may do much for the mental education of such children by suppressing dangerous inhibitions and liberating energies which are imprisoned and are more or less anti-social, and which must be given a possibility of outlet that is at least adequate to the necessities and requirements of codified morality, or which must be subjected to the domination of the conscious and moral personality. It may do much, whether these children are simply pseudo-abnormal, in which case the pshyco-analytical procedure will be easier, or whether they are genuinely abnormal, in which case the psycho-analytical procedure although still undoubtedly useful, must be subordinated to other medicopedagogical criteria of not less importance. This psycho-analytical procedure must therefore tend first of all to the evacuation of those ldeo-affectional complexes which are dangerous because they have an anti-social and criminal content, in order afterwards to obtain the strengthening of the inhibitory mechanism by developing adequate critical and moral restraints. In this way, this procedure may serve both to modify and improve, by a process of graduation and refinement, all that collection of instinctive manifestations and emotive dispositions, primary or derived, which constitute the so-called paleo-psyche, and to strengthen the inhibitory and resistance capacity of the neo-psyche, thus encouraging the development of the individual's capacity of adaptation to social life. In other words, although we are confirmed constitutionalists in the matter of the aethiology of crime, we cannot refuse to acknowledge that the method which enables us to provoke the evacuation or sublimation of those complexes which have most to do with the encouragement of the realization of criminal tendencies, is undoubtedly a work of great and certain educational efficacy. Since we are quite in agreement with those specialists (De Sanctis, etc.,) who hold that psycho-analysis may also help to liberate a young person who is a criminal or has gone astray from those instinctive obsessions which are consequent on particular reactions connected with more or less conscious trauma, and which exercise a harmful influence on the conduct and on the capacity of adaptation to social life, we are of the opinion that the educational cinema may serve this purpose very well. To this end, however, it is necessary that the educational cinema should be developed on the foundation of an exact knowledge of criminal anthropology in general and of that which constitutes the particular dynamism of the most common criminal manifestations. It is only in this way that the educational cinema, by acting with precision on the special anthropo-psychologica! situations which are most frequently encountered at the base of the mechanism of development of the various criminal manifestations, will find its task easier and success more certain. All this is still to be done ; and those concerned must get seriously to work and experiment with the use of this new means for the training of juvenile degenerates and criminals, which may help to make more and more efficacious the prophylaxis and therapy of universal criminology, which, by the merit of Fascism, is being carried on in Italy by a really perfect organization. (1) B. Dl Tullio. Manuale di Antropologia Psicologia criminale applicata alia Pedagogia emendativa, alia Polizia ed al Diritto Penale e Penitenziario. (Manual of Criminal Anthropology and Psychology Applied to Emendative Pedagogy, to the Police and to Penal and Penitentiary Law). Anonima Romana Editoriale, Rome, 1931.