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
The story of this girl's falsifications and fabrications as
obtained from her people is exceedingly long. As a young child
she was not over-indulged in fairy stories, and the parents
noticed nothing peculiar about her then. She was not regarded as
a child who had any unusual powers of imagination. Somewhere
about 12 years of age, her parents cannot be certain just when,
they noticed she began the exaggeration and lying which has
continued more or less ever since. In the past two or three
years this has grown upon her and she has been making not only
untrue statements, but has been concocting peculiarly long and
intricate fabrications. The curious thing to the family is that
Janet seems to have little shrewdness in lying; of normal ability
in other things, she seems to have the mind of a child in this.
Very many deceptions are discovered in short order, but even then
the girl will sometimes argue at length that what she has said
was really the truth. The parents insist she must know that she
is lying, but her anomalous behavior has been so excessive that
they have long felt she should be studied by a psychiatrist. Her
mother asserts there is some periodicity in Janet's tendencies.
She maintains she has noticed that most of her lies are told in
the two or three days preceding menstruation. (This was
certainly not true during the period we observed the girl.) The
parents are sure there has never been any particular mental
shock, and the mother has always felt that Janet was particularly
free from contamination by bad children. At times she seems to
realize her own bad behavior, and not long ago said she would
become a nun, for in the tranquil life of the convent her
tendency to lying would not be stimulated.
Further inquiry brought out the fact that it was true, as Janet
stated, that in her high school course she became nervous to the
extent of jerking and twitching, and that also for a time she
stuttered. Their physician said, however, that there was no
definite nervous disease.
As a young child the parents never thought this girl in any way
different from the rest of the family. As she grew older she has
been regarded as physically the most robust, but, as she stated
to us, she has done the poorest intellectual work and that has
often been a matter of family comment. The other children are
careful truth tellers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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