2.2 Psychological Theories

The mind's account: psychoanalytic (the weak-or-strict superego, the unconscious guilt's roundabout self-punishment — Freud's school, names only); learning theories (behaviourism's reinforcement — the rewarded stealing; Bandura's social learning — the modelled violence of home and screen); cognitive development (Kohlberg's moral stages — the pre-conventional juvenile stuck at "not getting caught"; the moral-reasoning deficit findings); personality-and- impulsivity (the low self-control trait — the psychology's strongest single predictor; the sensation- seeking of adolescence); intelligence-and-school failure (the contested IQ link — mediated through school failure and its alienation); attachment theory (Bowlby's broken bonds — the unattached child's empathy deficit; the affectionless psychopathy's old clinical pictures). The juvenile synthesis: the psychological risks cluster in the school-age years — the intervention's window is the classroom-and-counselling, not the cell.