Family-Centered Theories

Within the Psychiatric School, the influence of the family on the development of the deviant personality is stressed. Freudians, place great stress on the relationship between children and their parents. The parents, in this view, can be too harsh or too lenient, or too inconsistent in their treatment of the child.

Each situation leads to inadequately socialized children and immature, infantile behavior by adolescents and adults. Since the family is the primary agent of socialization, there is an understandable tendency to look for defects in the home as soon as defects appear in the product of that environment.

The traditional psychiatric theory holds to the idea that early childhood and family experiences shape the personality for deviant or nondeviant behavior M and behavior after these early childhood years is merely the acting out of tendencies formed at that time. Specific family dynamics and early traumatic events are asserted to be characteristic of the development of a terrorism-prone personality by some scholars, and of certain behavior patterns in childhood and adolescence.

Other scientists, in constructing their profiles of terrorists, focus primarily on the emotional backgrounds of the subjects, contending that individuals with emotionally sterile childhoods, inconsistent parenting, absence of stable role models in parents, may seek terroristic activity as a means of psychological stimulation# Hubbard has described the family of the typical skyjacker; a violent, often alcoholic father who uses force but lacks moral authority; a morally upright, often fanatically religious mother who has lofty ambitions for her child and plays the role of the abused martyr.

The conflict between these parents lays foundations for a personality split between identification with the powerful and violent or with their victims, and for divided loyalties between conflicting nations. The young people who are victims of parental emotional abandonment turn to drugs, mindless violence and other forms of what amounts to psychological suicide,” he states. Kirsch has found that children unattached to their parents are much more likely to have delinquent friends than those who do feel parental attachment and that delinquency of companions is strongly related to delinquency regardless of the level of attachment to the father.

The child becomes prematurely autonomous, overtly displaying indifference both to the expectations of parents and to their disapproval. By the time a child is ready to assume adult responsibility, his choices have been so limited by his premature autonomy that he is incapable of making the transition to a nondelinquent role