Pathology of Lying, Accusation, and Swindling: A Study in Forensic PsychologyHealy, William
Science
Pathology of Lying, Accusation, and Swindling: A Study in Forensic Psychology
Healy, William
Criminal psychology; Swindlers and swindling
Causative Factors: Our study of causation in this case, as we
intimated at first, is necessarily incomplete. But some things,
probably explanatory, stand out very clearly. Heredity is
moderately defective. Inez was the outcome of an unfortunate
pregnancy and was a poorly developed infant. She suffered early
from a number of illnesses, which, however, left no perceptible
physical defects. Her unusual relationship to the other
children, based on the difference in age, was perhaps a starting
point for the development of her inventional theories of her own
origin. She has given us many hints of this in speaking of her
earliest remembrances of hearing the Smiths whispering something
about adoption, and of her feeling that the other children were
too old for her to belong to their family.
Then we insist on the positive bearing which this woman's native
traits have had in the production of her career. Her facility
with language marks her as possessing one of the chief
characteristics of the pathological liar. Added to this she
showed the other personal traits which we have described in
detail, leading to her success in misrepresenting herself. Her
strongly developed physiognomy has caused many people to believe
her older than she stated, but still one has seen such lineaments
belonging to girls of 17.
The bearing which the accident at 18 had upon the case it is
impossible for us to estimate. Her family are very clear on this
point; they maintain that all her bad conduct has developed since
then. Through unwillingness, or barely possibly real amnesia for
the injury, Inez has not helped us to know the facts. Dr.
Augusta Bronner, who has studied this case with me, cleverly
suggests that just as anyone becomes confused in distinguishing
really remembered experiences from what has been told by others
was one's experience, so Inez gets confused between what has
really happened and what she herself has told as having happened.
This finally involves a pathological liar in a network which is
difficult to untangle. Part of the causation of the present
lying, then, is the extensive lying which has been done
previously.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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