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
At the time of her failure to do well in school work her internal
conflicts were especially acute. There was before her
continually the success which the other members of her family had
made, which she herself admired, and for which she was ambitious.
She hid at that time the cause of her nervousness and failure;
there was the danger of its being discovered. After thus
reviewing her case with us, Janet reiterated that she was sure
her tendency to prevaricate came on at the time when she first
began her bad sex habits.
This girl was probably not much of a day-dreamer. She denies
being so, saying she had always been too busy for such to be the
case. We also obtained corroboration of this from others who had
closely observed her. She says she had lived no specially
imaginative life beyond occasionally thinking of herself as a
well-to-do lady with many good clothes to wear, or sometimes
lying in bed and imagining she had a lover there. Further
inquiry into her imaginative life seemed futile because she was
not trained in introspection and because even in her frankest
moments we were always afraid that she might fall into her
strongly formed habit of prevarication. We ascertained that in
her home life special efforts had been made to keep her busy and
she could not be regarded as a dreamer. Janet strongly denied
the periodicity in her lying which her mother maintained, but the
girl did state that her periods of sex temptation were mostly
just preceding her menstrual period.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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