Studies in Forensic Psychiatry by Bernard Glueck (best black authors txt) 📕

episode for which he is unjustly made to suffer ten years’ imprisonment was a trumped-up affair on the part of the sheriff, who was bound to make a case out of it. He married the girl with the best of intentions, and when arrested was with her on the way to the Atlantic coast, preparatory to sailing for Paris, where he intended to give her a splendid time. She testified against him at the trial because she was scared into it by the officials, and, being naturally of a weak nervous organization, she gave in. He was certain he was going to die if he had to serve out his sentence, because prison life is so different from the life he has led in the past. He is entirely too refined to be able to stand the rough life of imprisonment. Referred the examiner to the Austrian Embassy, which could readily establish his noble descent and get him out of this terrible predicament. When, later in his sojourn here, he was interviewed by several gentlemen from the Austrian Embassy he maintained the same attitude of wronged innocence, notwithstanding the fact that these gentlemen confronted him with an undoubtedly genuine photograph of himself, obtained from the Austrian police. It seems that he was quite a famous character in Austria, and had served a sentence there under a different name for a similar offense (white slavery). Soon after his arrival at the Government Hospital for the Insane he began to scheme for his escape, and on one occasion attempted to saw the guards in his room with an improvised saw. He likewise began to associate freely with the more dangerous element of the criminal department of this hospital, quite likely with a view towards getting assistance for his escape. He spoke with reluctance of his ideas concerning the inventions, adding that he had decided to quit talking about these things, because, although he is quite convinced of the extreme value of these original ideas of his, people have told him he was crazy wherever he expressed them. As an illustration of some of these extremely valuable original ideas the following may be mentioned. It concerns a bed-bug trap which he invented, and which he described as a paper pocket which is placed in the bed and scented with oil of pine so as to attract the bed-bugs. These make their home in this paper pocket and lay their eggs there, after which it is removed and burned. In the course of time (about two months) he fully recovered from that serious leg affliction from which he stated he had been suffering since the age of nineteen.

When an attempt was made to obtain his past history it was soon discovered that it was so fantastically colored with fabrications as to be entirely worthless, so far as a reliable account of his past life is concerned. As an instance of pathological lying, however, it was a masterpiece. He was requested to write out briefly his past life history, and in this abbreviated form it covered twelve closely-typewritten pages. We will not burden the reader with a complete reproduction of his story, although I assure you it makes very interesting reading material, but will simply review it briefly.

He speaks of the confession made to him several years ago by the lady whom he had always looked up to as his mother. She told him that she was only his foster-mother, and that in reality he was the son of the Austrian chamberlain and a famous countess. The latter turned him over into this lady’s care when he was quite young, following her divorce from the chamberlain. She furnished him with the authenticated proof of the fact that he was entitled to a fabulous fortune left by his parents. Unfortunately the lady died after a brief illness, during which he practically sacrificed his life to save her, and thus his most important witness is forever inaccessible. The papers which could readily prove his noble descent were, most unfortunately, taken from him when he was arrested and are probably destroyed by this time.

His foster-mother, he states, was regularly supplied with funds by his real mother, gave him an excellent education and traveled with him extensively. In a plea for clemency he dwells upon the fact that his father died insane, that he himself suffered from epilepsy in his youth, and that at the age of twenty he spent a year in an insane asylum in Austria.

As an instance of his tendency to dramatization, of the part his ego plays in the recital of his past exploits and of the tendency to crave sympathy and compassion, a characteristic quite common to these pathological swindlers, the following, his own description of the circumstances which brought about his admission to the Vienna Insane Asylum may be quoted:—

“While on vacation, I met at Wertersee, which is a fashionable summer resort, a girl with the name L. Adle von D. I had left my tutor behind. She was the first girl I met, and my romantic character, my easily-excited nervous system, overpowered me and I fell in love, in love as deep as a man can fall. A few months after that I was engaged to her, and we should have been married on the 23d of April, 1899. On the 22d of April my beautiful beloved bride was riding horseback with me in the park, when at once her horse frightened, threw her off, dragged her for a distance and then left her behind, a motionless, bleeding mass. I saw right away that she was dead, lost to me, lost forever; there was but one way not to lose her, and that was to follow her soul, and that as quickly as possible. There in the park beside her I took my pistol and shot myself. The public had gathered and stopped me, and then I don’t know what happened. I only remember that I was ill for a long time, and then I was ill again, and they told me L. was alive, and then I found out that she was not alive and I was ill again.”

Of course, the entire episode is a fabrication. The patient admitted quite as much, but the interesting thing in this episode is the fact that it illustrates how rigidly dependent lying is upon unconscious motives. Had this episode really taken place, the patient, because of his particular make-up, would have acted, in all likelihood, just the way he behaved in his fantastic adventure.

After his year’s confinement in the insane asylum his foster-mother traveled with him in France, England, Egypt, and Turkey, in order to divert his mind. Finally arriving at Transylvania, he became infatuated with a poor girl named P., whom he christened L. in memory of his former love, and married. The highly dramatic adventures of this second matrimonial venture are altogether too numerous to describe in detail. He describes in a very dramatic style how this lady was kidnapped from him by a family of New York artists and spirited away across the ocean; how after awakening from his unconsciousness, induced by some dope administered to him in a tea which he had with these artist-friends the night before, he at once made for the dock, arriving there just as the ship carrying his wife was disappearing from sight; how he pursued them across the Atlantic, to England, the continent, and so on, finally locating them in Cape Town, South Africa; how upon arriving there he was mortally wounded to find his beloved wife performing upon the stage of a cheap, dirty place. An excerpt from his description of this eventful voyage is as follows: “We passed Las Palmas, Asuncion, and St. Helena. Christmas and New Year’s were celebrated on board the ship, but I did not care much for it. I was too much in distress. Would I find her there? Would I reach her in time? How would I find her? Would she be alive? My excitable fantasy awakened in me the most terrible suspicions. I suffered dreadfully, and it seemed to me we would never arrive. But we did at last, and some time in the beginning of January, 1906, I landed in Cape Town.” This is how he discovered her: “I knew I was going to see something terrible, but I remained there—I had to. There were the rope dancers, the clowns, and the music, but I had no interest in them. I was waiting for L., my wife, and she came. On a small, mean stage L., my beloved wife, appeared with painted cheeks and shining eyes, dressed up in tights. She was dancing a mean dance and singing an obscene song before an audience consisting mostly of drunken sailors. So I found my wife L. and the music played. It was surely wonderful that I could control myself at such a moment. At once it seemed to me that I had no reason to be astonished. I was quiet and decided and waited until the show was over, and after the show I went behind the stage, and when my wife came out, laughing and happy, with a couple of other girls, I stepped near her and said simply ‘L.’ She gazed at me and fainted.” Thus he finishes another tableau in his adventurous career. Several other similarly dramatic adventures follow in his history, the last of which landed him, wholly unjustifiably, in prison for ten years. When asked why all his love adventures ended so disastrously, he replied: “Doctor, all my life I have been suffering from a ‘superaltruistic monomania to help girls in distress,’ and that is how I’m repaid.”

Any discussion on “freedom of will” and responsibility in connection with an individual of this type is, of course, quite futile and really of no practical importance. This man ought to be permanently isolated from the community, but not because he happens to have violated a given statute, but because his grave mental defect—in all probability an incurable defect—tends to express itself in criminal traits.

Back of this fantastic lying we see again that instinctive craving for compensation by means of a resort to the imagination and fantasy, a subterfuge rendered easy by those inherent defects enumerated in connection with the preceding case.

All the frankly psychotic manifestations, such as his delusional ideas and his grave affection of the lower extremity which served to put him in a hospital for the insane, were, of course, entirely malingered.

This brings us to the subject of malingering proper.

III

In malingering we see the application of deceit and lying to a definite situation. That which is a habitual type of reaction in some individuals, as was illustrated in the foregoing cases, comes to the fore in others only under certain stressful situations of life. While in the habitual fabricator the most prominent motives are those of an egotistic nature, a craving for self-esteem as compensation for an inherent defect, in the malingerer we see a resort to this form of reaction as a means of self-preservation, as a means of escape from a particularly painful situation.

There was a time in the history of psychiatry when malingering was a frequent subject of discussion in psychiatric literature. This was due not so much to any inherent practical importance of the phenomenon of malingering as such as to the faulty conception that this phenomenon was something which by its very existence ruled out the existence of mental disease. More scientific studies of personality which led to a direction of our attention to the malingerer rather than to malingering as an isolated mental phenomenon brought with it a complete change of attitude towards the entire subject.

Today, far from harboring the notion that malingering and mental disease are mutually exclusive, we are beginning to look upon malingering itself as the expression