The mother who had been apparently so negligent of causes proved now to be a stalwart in this case and took the girl under her immediate charge. There was steady betterment. The girl went back and finished school and at the end of a year was reported as tremendously improved. There was no further complaint about her lying. We know that after this she long held a good position which any hint of untrustworthiness or lack of capacity would have lost her. Thus the cure of her sex habits brought about cessation of her extreme untruthfulness. --------------------------------------------------------------- Bad sex habits long continued. Case 7. Heredity. (?) Father immoral Girl, age 16 yrs. and criminal. Home conditions. Lack of understanding and supervision. Delinquencies: Mentality: Excessive lying. Dull from physical Early truancy. causes. (Later Running away. quite normal.) --------------------------------------------------------------- CASE 8 Summary: A thoroughly illustrative case of long continued, excessive pathological lying on the part of a very bright girl, now 17 years old. As this young woman has well known, her falsifications have many times militated against the fulfillment of her own desires and interests. In the face of clear apperception of her fault, the tendency to react to a situation by lying sometimes appears to be fairly imperative. The only ascertained bases of the tendency are her early reactions, unthwarted by parental control, followed by habit formation; all in an environment peculiarly favorable to deception. The lying passed over into swindling. Gertrude S., who immigrated from England with her parents ten years previously, was seen by us when she was 17, after she had been engaged for months in a career of misrepresentation which had led her case into the hands of several social agencies. Much difficulty was encountered because repeatedly when people had tried to help her she had led them astray in their investigations by telling ridiculously unnecessary falsehoods. Her parents came to see us and gradually we obtained a detailed and probably quite reliable family and developmental history. About the evolution of the young woman's mental life we have unfortunately had to rely much upon her own word. This has made our studies rather more unsatisfactory than in other cases where corroboration from parents was obtained. However, there is much that rings true and is of interest even in the unverifiable part of the study.