TUDENTS of juvenile delinquency approach their subject matter from S two angles. Some study delinquency as a social phenomenon and focus their interest on the delinquent group; others put the main emphasis on the exploration of the individual delinquent's personality. Sociologists try to discover correlations between juvenile delinquency and other social factors, such as poverty or bad housing, through manipulation of group data; psychologists and psychiatrists are more inclined to stress the personality factor. Some authors, as Clifford Shaw and his school, have combined these two methods in their work.So far as the term "juvenile delinquency" is concerned, the sociologists have given a fairly satisfactory definition. The White House Conference, 1930, said: "Delinquency is any such juvenile misconduct as might be dealt with under the law" (1). According to this, any juvenile who steals or even only violates the law enforcing school attendance is a delinquent, whether he is normal, feebleminded, postencephalitic, etc. As a legal and sociological concept, delinquency has no particular psychological or psychiatric meaning.Unfortunately, the term "delinquent" is used by psychologists and psychiatrists in a different sense. Often we hear psychiatrists make a distinction between "neurotic" and "delinquent" behavior. Aichhorn speaks of cases of delinquency in which "neurotic factors predominate" and of others in which symptoms of delinquency are not predominantly neurotically determined" (2). Healy and Bronner mention the increasing awareness "of the dynamic factors which may produce neurotics and delinquents" (3). Usually a certain type of acting out of a subject is called delinquency, as compared with the neurotic symptom formation. We have searched in vain for a definition of I 6 * Presented at the 1946 Annual Meeting. cf. (2, p. 41 .)