The facility with which his imagination, his fantasy, works was
demonstrated by the "ink-blotch" test to which he was subjected. This
test, in brief, consists of a series of ink blotches which are shown the
patient, with the request to describe them as they appear to him. The
following are several of his replies: (1) "A woman sitting on a man,
seems like she's got a little weaving in her hand; a little stick,
sticking out from the weaving, seems like the man's elbow is sticking
out back of the shawl." (2) "It seems to me I have seen a volcano that
looks like that. I think it is a ship out at sea. I can see the
lifeboats lashed to the side, several ripples of water behind." (3) "A
figure of a woman with a hand purse or a disfigured arm near the wrist.
Her mouth is open and she is looking around. The wind carried her hat
off; she has a muff on her right hand. Seems like there is a neck-piece
around the muff."
Notice the detail with which he describes the blotches. In this one
ordinary speech seemed to have been insufficient to describe the blotch,
and he had to resort to a neologism. "Is that supposed to be a
'perpendicament'? It's got a head like a sea devil; the upper part seems
like a peacock trying to peck him in the back of the head."
There remains one other thing to be inquired into in this case, and that
is the history of epilepsy which accompanied the patient. He was never
observed in an epileptic seizure at the military post from which he came
to us, and no seizures were observed in this hospital. His own
statements concerning this are, like everything else he said, quite
totally unreliable. But in repeated examinations he persisted in his
statement that he had had but one "spell" in his life, but that he
frequently suffered from fits of melancholy. In all probability this one
seizure was hysterical in nature, phenomena of which type not
infrequently manifest themselves in the pathological liar, as will be
seen in the next case.
Here one sees how lying, a mental phenomenon which is looked upon as
quite a normal manifestation in a great many people, has reached such
dimensions in this individual and has succeeded in dominating his
personality to such an extent as to definitely remove him out of the
pale of normality and place him within the sphere of the mentally
diseased.
There is, of course, no question here about the genuineness of his lying
as a symptom of mental aberration; _i.e._, the fabrication as manifested
by this individual is something over which he has no more control than
the dementia præcox patient has over his delusions. In both instances
the symptoms are spontaneous and genuine expressions of a pathological
mentality. And yet when such pathological phenomena become manifest in
association with some concrete difficulty in the individual's life, say
in connection with a threatened punishment for a crime committed, the
genuineness of the symptoms is frequently doubted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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