Based on an interdisciplinary approach, the article examines the peculiarities of a person’s thinking and behavior, depending on the level of involvement and the nature of his relationships in the macro- and microenvironment, as well as during the period when he is in captivity of obsessions (obsession) or himself; examines the stages of a person's mental activity when he has the idea of committing a crime, and the reasons that gave rise to it; the dynamics of the maturation of such motivation and the factors contributing to its materialization are analyzed. The conclusion is substantiated that the state of obsession, the costs of the state and society act as a starting point for the origin of the rudiments of the idea of committing a crime in an individual, which is actualized over time, after which it transforms into a specific criminal plan when he is in himself. Being in this state, an individual mentally creates a scenario of a future crime, develops an algorithm for its implementation, considers the conditions under which the intended act may be committed, calculates the possible risks of its commission, provides options for his post-criminal behavior, etc. After being formed at the mental level, this scenario is recorded in a person’s long-term memory, where it is stored in an alert state, and when a suitable situation occurs, a trigger is triggered for its implementation. On the basis of these premises, as well as a number of other arguments, the article hypothesizes that any intentional crime (with the exception of situational and committed in a state of passion), be it murder or rape, robbery or theft, etc., is essentially only a retransmission of the scenario of a specific crime, once created by an individual on at the cognitive level and extracted from the subconscious at the right moment for its practical implementation. In other words, the emergence and development of criminal motivation is not a momentary intellectual and volitional act, but a time–stretched thought process aimed at finding optimal ways to meet certain needs of an individual that he could not (did not want to) implement within the framework of the law. At the same time, the space-time gap between the moment of the origin of the idea of committing a crime and its actual implementation can be short-term, medium-term or long-term.²