88. Ruth, fourteen, Irish, pink-cheeked and blue-eyed, in her first year of High School, the picture of attractive, innocent girlhood, had been taken to the house of detention for stealing a diamond pin and taking money from a teacher’s desk. When her denials were finally broken down by proof, she confessed to a long history of petty thieving, hitherto unpunished and for the most part undiscovered.... Ruth was an intensely egotistic person, desirous of social recognition, approval, personal success; but due to lack of training, unfavorable conditions and an impulsive, impatient make-up had never learned to work for her satisfactions or make her impression on society in constructive ways. She was quickly discouraged and resentful in the face of failure or hardship and at once turned to some pleasure experience as a compensation—something which could be obtained immediately and easily. She used boastful stories and even her own misdeeds to heighten the impression of her importance and superiority. This is a natural reaction in childhood, where immediate gratification is obtained through crying, tantrums, day dreams, purely subjective methods; but they are not appropriate to a developing organism and must be abandoned for an objective dealing with the facts of life. All of Ruth’s normal cravings had been thwarted by her environment. She had lost her love object in the death of her mother. Her family ideals had been shattered. Her father had been exposed as unfaithful to her mother, and a weakling in the battle between the stepmother and Ruth. He was a failure as a provider and did not pay his debts. Ruth was forced to live in a home situation which had for her none of the elements of a home, nothing to be proud of, no loving approval and overlooking of faults, no faith, no support and assurance of safety. She was forced not only to give up her love object but to see it supplanted by an enemy, who also usurped her place and influence with the father. Undoubtedly her sex ideals also met with shock. She became convinced that her father was interested in another woman before the death of the mother. Father and stepmother quarreled and made up—separated and came together repeatedly. She saw marriage as a series of endless petty conflicts. Both of them were churchgoers, given to religious interests. Ruth’s disillusionment with life was complete. There was nothing genuine, no real satisfaction. The father and mother who constitute the bridges over which the emotional life of the child may cross to a more and more social development had blocked normal growth and thrown the child back upon subjective or anti-social satisfactions. One of the defense reactions to such a thwarting of fundamental needs is that taken by Ruth—a cynical, suspicious, critical attitude toward everything and everybody. To want and never get satisfaction is too painful a state to keep up, so the individual criticizes every possible love object that he may make