Any discussion on "freedom of will" and responsibility in connection with an individual of this type is, of course, quite futile and really of no practical importance. This man ought to be permanently isolated from the community, but not because he happens to have violated a given statute, but because his grave mental defect--in all probability an incurable defect--tends to express itself in criminal traits. Back of this fantastic lying we see again that instinctive craving for compensation by means of a resort to the imagination and fantasy, a subterfuge rendered easy by those inherent defects enumerated in connection with the preceding case. All the frankly psychotic manifestations, such as his delusional ideas and his grave affection of the lower extremity which served to put him in a hospital for the insane, were, of course, entirely malingered. This brings us to the subject of malingering proper. III In malingering we see the application of deceit and lying to a definite situation. That which is a habitual type of reaction in some individuals, as was illustrated in the foregoing cases, comes to the fore in others only under certain stressful situations of life. While in the habitual fabricator the most prominent motives are those of an egotistic nature, a craving for self-esteem as compensation for an inherent defect, in the malingerer we see a resort to this form of reaction as a means of self-preservation, as a means of escape from a particularly painful situation. There was a time in the history of psychiatry when malingering was a frequent subject of discussion in psychiatric literature. This was due not so much to any inherent practical importance of the phenomenon of malingering as such as to the faulty conception that this phenomenon was something which by its very existence ruled out the existence of mental disease. More scientific studies of personality which led to a direction of our attention to the malingerer rather than to malingering as an isolated mental phenomenon brought with it a complete change of attitude towards the entire subject. Today, far from harboring the notion that malingering and mental disease are mutually exclusive, we are beginning to look upon malingering itself as the expression of an abnormal psychic make-up. Furthermore, far from believing, as of old, that the proverbially insane is supposed to be totally devoid of discretion in his conduct, we know that there may be a good deal of method in madness, and that even the frankly insane malinger mental symptoms when the occasion requires it. No experienced psychiatrist would today, for instance, consider the oft-quoted story of the alleged madness of Ulysses as evidence of malingering.