We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that criminals serve as a reflection of our darker desires and societal norms that we both envy and condemn.
Karl A. Menninger's quote reflects on the complex relationship between society and crime, suggesting that criminals provide a contrasting figure against which we define our own values and morals. They embody the actions we may secretly envy, while simultaneously acting as a target for our judgment and punishment, highlighting our conflicted nature and fascination with rebellion against societal rules.
In practice
During a discussion on morality, one could use this quote to illustrate the complexities of human desires.
People repeat in adult life emotions they experience in childhood. Many of the people whom I spent the last 30 or 40 years treating at so much per minute wouldn't have needed any treatment at all if they had had the right care as children.
We have come to see that just as the child must learn to love wisely, so he must learn to hate expeditiously, to turn destructive tendencies away from himself toward enemies that actually threaten him rather than toward the friendly and the defenseless, the more usual victims of destructive energy.
Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
What's done to children, they will do to society.
Our lives are shaped by those who love us as well as those who refuse to love us.
The disposition of noble dogs is to be gentle with people they know and the opposite with those they don't know...How, then, can the dog be anything other than a lover of learning since it defines what's its own and what's alien.
There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.
Remember what is unbecoming to do is also unbecoming to speak of.
A man who goes forth to take the life of another whom he does not know must believe only one thing: that by his act he will change the course of history.
This is what I know. I look like my father. My father disappeared when he was seventeen years old. Hannah once told me that there is something unnatural about being older than your father ever got to be. When you can say that at the age of seventeen, it's a different kind of devastating.
It is a general principle of human nature, that a man will be interested in whatever he possesses, in proportion to the firmness or precariousness of the tenure by which he holds it.
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