Malingering, it will be seen later, appears to certain individuals to be the only possible means of escape from and evasion of a stressful and difficult situation of life. The lack of _critique_ which permits such an abortive attempt at adjustment and the inherent weakness and incapacity to meet life's problems squarely in the face which drives them to resort to such a means of defense are some of the traits of character which serve to distinguish these individuals from what is generally conceived to be normal man. The extent to which lying and allied behavior depend upon unconscious motives has never been so well illustrated as in recent psychoanalytic literature, especially in a paper by Brill.[1] This author is so thoroughly convinced of the value of conscious lying as an indicator of unconscious strivings and motives that he frequently asks his patients to construct--artificially--dreams which he finds to be of valuable aid in the analysis of the patient's unconscious. After citing a number of examples Brill states: "These examples suffice to show that these seemingly involuntary constructions have the same significance as real dreams, and that as an instrument for the discovery of hidden complexes they are just as important as the latter. Furthermore, they also demonstrate some of the mechanisms of conscious deception. The first patient deliberately tried to fool me by making up what he thought to be a senseless production, but what he actually did was to produce a distorted wish. He later admitted to me that for days he was on his guard lest I should discover his inverted sexuality, but it never occurred to him that I could discover it in his manner. That his artificial dreams have betrayed him is not so strange when one remembers that _no mental production, voluntary or involuntary, can represent anything but a vital part of the person producing it_." Were this thesis on malingering to succeed in nothing else than in bringing home to our legal brethren this important truth of absolute psychic determinism, that a man is what he is and acts as he does because of everything that has gone before him--because of ontogenetic as well as phylogenetic instinctive motives--it will have fully established its _raison d'être_. For a realization of this truth would at once annihilate from our minds that deceptive notion of the "freedom of will" upon which our laws are based, and will be certain to bring about a more enlightened solution of the problem of the criminal, all attempts at which, we are constrained to state, have thus far[A] undeniably been huge failures.