Alexander and Staub have undertaken to explain the unconscious basis of the crisis which is produced in the community when criminals are permitted to go with no punishment or with light punishment. The study of personality genesis shows that the sublimation of primitive impulses is possible on the basis of a kind of primitive “social contract.” The individual foregoes direct indulgences (which have the disadvantage of bringing him into conflict with authority), and substitutes more complex patterns of behavior on the tacit understanding that love and safety will thereby be insured. When another individual breaks over and gratifies his illicit impulses directly on a primitive level, the equilibrium of every personality is threatened. The conscious self perceives that it is possible to “get by,” and this threatens the whole structure of sublimation. The superego tries to maintain order by directing energy against the ego, perhaps subjecting it to “pricks of conscience,” for so much as entertaining the possibility of illicit gratification, and seeks to turn the ego toward activities which reduce temptation. This may involve the reconstruction of the environment by seeking to eliminate the “non-ideal” elements in it, and may be exemplified in the panicky demand for the annihilation of the outsider (who is a criminal) for the sake of keeping the chains on the insider (who is a criminal). Every criminal is a threat to the whole social order since he reinstates with more or less success an acute conflict within the lives of all members of society. The success of the superego depends upon imposing certain ways of interpreting reality upon the self. When reality grossly refuses to conform to the “ideal,” the energies of the self are divided, and an acute crisis supervenes. The superego undertakes to reinforce its side of the contradictory ego trends by punishing the ego, and by forcing the projection of this situation upon the outer world. Certain aspects of the outer world become “bad” because they are connected in private experience with the pangs inflicted by the taskmaster within, the conscience. A strong conscience may enforce this “distortion” of reality upon the self to such a degree that the self acts on quite fantastic assumptions about reality. These are most acutely manifested in such phenomena as confusion states, hallucinations, and delusions, all of which are forms of deformed reality. When reality becomes “ominous,” violent efforts to change may appear futile, and safety is sought in physical flight, or in physical passivity and autistic preoccupation. Since our conceptions of reality are based upon little “first-hand” experience of the world about us, the superego usually has a rather easy time of it.