As in many other forms of human expression, there is a stage in the
telling of lies where the normal condition has passed and the diseased
one has not yet begun. The extreme limit on the one side is the harmless
story-teller, the hunter, the tourist, the student, the lieutenant,--all
of whom boast a little; on the other side there is the completely insane
paralytic who tells about his millions and his monstrous achievements.
The characteristic pseudologia phantastica, the lie of advanced
hysteria, in which people write anonymous letters and send messages to
themselves, to their servants, to high officials and to clergy, in order
to cast suspicion on them, are all diseased. The characteristic lie of
the epileptics, and perhaps also, the lies of people who are close to
the idiocy of old age, mixes up what has been experienced, read and
told, and represents it as the experience of the speaker.[341]
Still there is a class of people who can not be shown to be in any sense
diseased, and who still lie in such a fashion that they can not be well.
The development of such lies may probably be best assigned to
progressive habituation. People who commit these falsehoods may be
people of talent, and, as Goethe says of himself, may have “desire to
fabulate.” Most of them are people, I will not say who are desirous of
honor, but who are still so endowed that they would be glad to play some
grand part and are eager to push their own personality into the
foreground. If they do not succeed in the daily life, they try to
convince themselves and others by progressively broader stories that
they really hold a prominent position. I had and still have opportunity
to study accurately several well-developed types of these people. They
not only have in common the fact that they lie, they also have common
themes. They tell how important personages asked their advice, sought
their company and honored them. They suggest their great influence, are
eager to grant their patronage and protection, suggest their great
intimacy with persons of high position, exaggerate when they speak of
their property, their achievements, and their work, and broadly deny all
events in which they are set at a disadvantage. The thing by which they
are to be distinguished from ordinary “story-tellers,” and which defines
what is essentially pathoformic in them, is the fact that they lie
without considering that the untrue is discovered immediately, or very
soon. Thus they will tell somebody that he has to thank their patronage
for this or that, although the person in question knows the case to be
absolutely different. Or again, they tell somebody of an achievement of
theirs and the man happens to have been closely concerned with that
particular work and is able to estimate properly their relation to it.
Again they promise things which the auditor knows they can not perform,
and they boast of their wealth although at least one auditor knows its
amount accurately. If their stories are objected to they have some
extraordinarily unskilful explanation, which again indicates the
pathoformic character of their minds. Their lies most resemble those of
pregnant women, or women lying-in, also that particular form of lie
which prostitutes seem typically addicted to, and which are cited by
Carlier, Lombroso, Ferrero, as representative of them, and as a
professional mark of identification. I also suspect that the essentially
pathoformic lie has some relation to sex, perhaps to perversity or
impotence, or exaggerated sexual impulse. And I believe that it occurs
more frequently than is supposed, although it is easily known in even
its slightly developed stages. I once believed that the pathoformic lie
was not of great importance in our work, because on the one hand, it is
most complete and distinct when it deals with the person of the speaker,
and on the other it is so characteristic that it must be recognized
without fail by anybody who has had the slightest experience with it.
But since, I have noticed that the pathoformic lie plays an enormous
part in the work of the criminalist and deserves full consideration.
TOPIC IV. ISOLATED SPECIAL CONDITIONS.