Pathological Lying, Accusation, and Swindling | Page 5

paranoia, whom we had not seen for a period during which she had concocted a new set of notions involving even her own claim to royal blood, confronting us with a merry, significant smile and the remark, ``You don't believe my new stories, do you?''
A short statement on the relation of lying to delinquency may be of interest here. Ferriani's discussion[4] of the lying of 500 condemned juvenile offenders, with classification of their lies, ranging from self-defense, weakness, and fancy, to nobility of purpose, does not include our field. Nor does he leave much room for appreciation of the fact we very definitely have observed, namely, that plenty of young offenders are robust speakers of the truth. Our analysis[5] of the delinquencies of 1000 young repeated offenders carefully studied by us does not tell the proportion of truth tellers as distinguished from liars, but it does give the number in which lying was a notable and excessive trait. The total number of males studied was 694, of females 306. Ages ranged from 6 to 22; average about 16 years.
[4] loc. cit.
[5] Vide p. 140, in chapter on Statistics, William Healy, ``The Individual Delinquent.'' Little, Brown, and Co. Boston, 1915.
MALES FEMALES
Lying--counted only when excessive and a 104 80 notorious characteristic of the individual, (15%) (26%) False accusations--only recorded when of an 5 16 excessive and dangerous sort, (.7%) (5%)
The exact number of pathological liars is not determinable in our series because of the shading of this lying into other types. It would be safe to say that 8 or 10 of the 1000 were genuine cases of pathological lying according to our definition, that 5 more engaged in pathological false accusations without a notorious career in other kinds of lying. Examples of borderline mental cases showing fantastic lying and accusations are given in our special chapter. Some of the cases of pathological lying given in this work do not belong to the series of 1000 cases analyzed for statistical purposes. The extraordinary number of times several of these individuals appeared in court (resembling in this respect the European case histories) shows that the total amount of trouble caused by this class is not in the least represented by their numerical proportion among offenders.
We have purposely limited our own material for presentation. Here, as elsewhere, we insist on the value of genetics and consequently have busied ourselves at length with those cases where we could gain something like an adequate conception of the antecedents in family and developmental histories and where some measure of the psychogenetic features could be taken. Cases of older individuals with their prolonged and often picturesque careers, equivalent to those recounted in European literature, we have left strictly alone. One ever finds that the older the individual the less one can learn satisfactorily of beginnings of tendencies, just on account of the unreliability of the principal actor in the drama. The cases of older swindlers at first sight seem to offer much for the student of criminalistics, if only for purely descriptive purposes, but in the literature we have failed to find any satisfactory studies of the formative years of such careers. By taking instances of younger pathological liars, such as we have studied, the natural progress into swindling can be readily seen.
In court work we have been brought face to face with many cases of false accusation and, of course, with plenty of the usual kind of lying. Where either of these has been entered into by way of revenge or in belief that it would aid in getting out of trouble, no further attention has been paid to it from the standpoint of pathological lying. Our acquaintance with some professional criminals, particularly of the sneak-thief or pick-pocket class, has taught us that living conditions for the individual may be founded on whole careers of misrepresentation and lies--for very understandable reasons. Self-accusations may sometimes be evolved with the idea of gaining directly practical results, as when a lover or a comrade is shielded, or when there is danger of a larger crime being fastened on the self-incriminator.
In selection and treatment of our material we have confined ourselves as closely as possible to the definition first given in this chapter--a definition that after some years of observation we found could be made and held to. While we would not deny that some of our cases may eventually find their way into an insane hospital, still none of them, except some we have enumerated under the name of border-line types, has so far shown any indication of this. That some of our cases have more or less recovered from a strongly-marked and prolonged inclination to falsify is a fact of great importance for treatment and prognosis.
We see neither reason for including insane cases nor for overlapping the already used