Please allow Mr. W. H. M. to pass out the gate at once free. Very respectfully, W. W. Please don't delay this one minute. Thus we see that the entire content of this man's delusional fabric is intended, first, to serve the purpose of annihilating the painful reality, and, second, to substitute for it a beautiful world in which he finds himself free and young again, enjoying his fabulous riches and many blue-eyed beauties. It is the only compromise possible for him, and the fact that it is nothing but a day-dream does not in the least detract from its compensating possibilities for this individual's painful reality. This man's mental disorder has been so obvious ever since its inception that the question of malingering never suggested itself to anyone, and yet the underlying mechanism in this case differs in no particular essential from the cases usually considered as malingerers. In both instances the psychosis represents an attempt to get away from a painful reality by individuals who are quite incapable of meeting such reality face to face. A more detailed consideration of Freudian psychology, especially such as concerns the subjects of determinism, defense, and compensation, would give one a still clearer insight into the subject under discussion, but to do so would lead us considerably beyond the scope of this paper. From what has been said thus far it will be seen that the mental processes underlying the mental state of malingering differ in no essential from those operative in the human mind generally; that man in his endeavor to reach a satisfactory compromise between the two underlying principles of his conduct,--_i.e._, that of pleasure and reality,--frequently resorts to his fantasy; that malingering in its broader sense,--_i.e._, the attempt to evade reality,--is a common mode of reaction in primitive man, the child of today and in the undeveloped mind, in all of these instances signifying an inability to meet stern reality in the face, and that, therefore, malingering, when it does occur, should at least not be looked upon as an aggravating circumstance, which is not infrequently the case when the malingerer happens to be facing a court of law. That this mode of reaction is at times resorted to by individuals who had always been looked upon as being far from incompetent only proves that under special stress, especially mental stress, man readily sinks to a lower cultural level and resorts to the defensive means common at this level. Clinically, malingering is to be considered from three distinct viewpoints:-- 1. Malingering in the frankly insane; 2. Malingering in those apparently normal mentally; and 3. Malingering in that large group of border-line cases which should rightly be looked upon as potentially insane and as constantly verging upon an actual psychosis.