The Mask of Sanity

by Hervey Cleckley

  The jail, George said, was crowded, and the jailer, who knew him to be a good fellow, placed him in a cell on the women’s section of the building. The bars of his cell were about six inches apart and so, according to his story, he was separated from and yet provocatively close to the women prisoners. These, his neighbors, were seven girls ranging from 14 to 20 years of age and awaiting transportation to the women’s reformatory.

  He said that at night, when the lights were out, these girls would disrobe and, coming to the bars, would entice him, calling him “pretty boy” and “country boy” and otherwise teasing and challenging him until he began to indulge in sexual intercourse with them between the bars in order to make them leave him alone. He says that he continued this practice with each of them every night during the rest of his sojourn there, the transactions taking place always in the dark and through the separating barrier. From one or all of these women he says he caught the gonorrhea which now troubled him.

  He appeared to be no little proud of this story, which, however, is probably no more accurate than his stories of exemplary behavior and hard work or his frequently expressed intentions to conduct himself like a sensible person. Prolonged observation of the patient in the hospital showed him to be more prone to drift about street corners and bars, to indulge in petty gambling or theft, to cadge and impose on chance acquaintances, or to raise some puerile and futile clamor than to seek intercourse with one woman, much less with many.

  Since this last admission, his story has been the same as before. On recovering from gonorrhea, he was, after being found sane and competent, given freedom of the grounds. He soon left without permission and was found in the hands of the police. Back again on a closed ward he was dissatisfied and with irrefutable arguments pointed out the incongruity of his being assigned to a place among men content to sit all day in silence staring blankly at nothing or who murmured incessantly that their heads were full of gold, radium, and diamonds, that they had no stomachs or intestines, that the Masons were playing on their sexual organs by radio, that they were sickened by the odor of the bells.

  It was here, however, that George had to be kept, a perfectly clear-minded person, neat, polite, and quick witted, in striking contrast to his fellows, whose lips moved inarticulately as they responded to hallucinatory voices and some of whom urinated and defecated on themselves, sought to eat dead roaches, etc.

  This was not, of course, an ideal environment for him. He was therefore sent back to the parole ward time after time, only to prove himself unadaptable after periods ranging from a few days to a few weeks. When put on the closed ward among better adjusted patients with schizophrenia or dementia paralytica, men who worked on a farm detail or at woodwork, he took advantage of his situation and escaped. During much of his time in the hospital it has therefore been necessary to keep him among the actively disturbed, badly deteriorated patients where supervision is complete and possibilities of escape are limited.

  When last heard from, he was again hospitalized. Opportunities are continually offered him to improve his situation. From time to time parole is restored, and occasionally his wife takes him home on furlough. Always, however, he causes trouble for himself and others and always for no discernible purpose.

  The last news of him was that he violated his parole by leaving the hospital. After sustaining himself by his customary activities for a week or ten days and staying clear of the police, he again came to grief. With the aim evidently of stealing a hen or a few fryers or perhaps to evade pursuit, he slipped into a Negro farmer’s chicken house. Having brought along a bottle and perhaps being delayed by needs to avoid detection, he drank injudiciously. Next morning he was found in the coop, where he had apparently wallowed and groped through the night. Called by the farmer, attendants brought him to the hospital. Here on a closed ward we find him, among helpless, irrational people and subject to the strict control and attention required for those who cannot direct themselves.

  Though he left school after completing the eighth grade, he writes letters which would do credit to a college graduate. In these he insists on having his freedom, stating that his difficulties in the past have been minor and that he is ready and thoroughly able to settle down to an exemplary life. He often stresses the fact that his wife and children need his protection and support. His family history is entirely negative. Parents and grandparents were hardworking, sober folk, liked and respected in the little rural community in which the present generation lives. One sister and three brothers are leading normal lives there today.

  10. Pierre

  Some of the patients who have been presented give concrete and abundant evidence in their behavior of a serious maladjustment and one of long duration. The diagnosis of antisocial personality can seldom, if ever, be made with confidence except on such a record. Many persons at some time in their lives steal, cheat, lie, forge checks, indulge in foolish or destructive conduct, behave regrettably while drinking, and engage in unfortunate or paradoxical sexual activity. It can hardly be denied that some of the most stable and admirable of people have, during the course of achieving maturity, done all these things and worse. One important point that distinguishes the psychopath is his failure to learn and adopt a better and more fulfilling pattern of life. Another and perhaps a more fundamental point, which will be elaborated subsequently, is that psychopaths give a strong impression of lacking the fundamental responses and emotional susceptibility which probably play a dominant part in helping other people avoid this type of maladjustment.

  It is perhaps worthwhile for us to consider now a patient whose record so far may not establish him beyond question with our group of those clinically disabled but whose inmost reactions, in so far as one can judge them, strongly indicate that his disorder is the same and that his subsequent career will unmistakably place him.

  Not long ago his parents made an appointment for him by mail. They accompanied him from a thriving community in northern Florida where for the last sixty years the members of this family had been sober and respected citizens. There was a good deal of pride in these people, not a vain or pretentious self-esteem but a modest dignity that seemed to be cherished more as a responsibility than as an ornament.

  These parents were truly concerned about their son. A dozen or more letters and reports from schoolteachers, from the family physician, the rector of the church, the scoutmaster, a high school coach, and others, arrived before the patient. From this material came many facts and opinions. The patient’s remote antecedents had lived in or about Charleston, S.C., in colonial times. They had never been famous for wealth or political influence, but in the Revolutionary War, as well as in the War Between the States, they had played a part which rooted them deeply in sectional traditions of distinction. In Florida, where this branch of the family had moved almost twenty years before the present century, they had established a good name and a sound, unsnobbish sort of prominence. Unlike the fictional Southerners preoccupied with (frequently exaggerated) glories of the past, the ____’s had continued to live primarily in the present and to live rather effectively.

  One school teacher who had done graduate work in psychology gave a good deal of consideration to this boy’s name, which, as a fair equivalent, we shall give as Pierre.

  As she pointed out, an Englishman can be called Percival, Jasper, Evelyn, or Vivian without much risk, but in the ordinary American community such a name might endanger a boy’s soul. This young man had been christened Pierre ___ ___ ___ probably not as an extravagant gesture toward the exotic or to past glories but almost as a matter of course. Such given names had been customary among these descendants of early Charleston Huguenots, and the present generation felt nothing conspicuous in what to them was so familiar and commonplace. In these parents speculation probably never arose about how a French name might sound to the fellows who played football in the vacant lot by the gashouse and “rabbitted” sissies with brickbats. In agreement with his thoughtful teacher’s final conclusion, I am incline
d to believe that his name, despite its potential dangers, caused the patient little difficulty. Even before he began school he was always called Pete. And his family conformed to this custom.

  After his parents had been interviewed separately and together, Pete came into the office. He stood about 6 feet tall, held himself well, and appeared more mature than would be expected of an 18-year-old boy. He at once impressed me as being enviably at his ease. Though not extraordinary in its features, his face was pleasant, candid, and alert. As our conversation progressed, indications of excellent intelligence soon appeared, along with suggestions of a character forceful but not undesirably self-assertive or aggressive.

  Pete expressed disappointment about having had to withdraw from college and seemed remarkably frank in discussing the causes of his predicament. His story was the same incomprehensible story already heard from his parents and corroborated by the several detailed reports.

  A forged check had brought Pete before the dean. He did not deny his guilt but, in a straightforward way, seemed ready to meet the consequences like a gentleman. The dean was puzzled not that a young man might forge a check but that it should be this particular man with his fine record, his appearance of sincerity, and his brave way of handling a situation presumably painful and embarrassing.

  Several points made the incident difficult to explain. The check had been cashed at a little tavern by the gates of the college, a place virtually integral with the campus where students were intimately known to the cashier and the waitresses. The owner of this place, a college-life character for generations, prided himself on calling the freshmen by name and on his closeness to the boys. It would have been easy for Pete to cash such a check at dozens of places where his chances of escaping detection would have been vastly better. He had, it would seem, picked the place where his misdeed could most easily be traced to him. Furthermore, he had not chosen as victim someone unlikely to find him out but the father of a girl he had been dating regularly during the seven months he had been at college. In forging the name, he had taken no great care to disguise his handwriting or to make a good imitation of the real signature.

  There was difficulty in conceiving of a possible motive. With the dean Pete seemed thoroughly at ease. In a manly, well-controlled manner he expressed his profound regret and his willingness to make restitution or to submit to any penalty. The check amounted to only $35.00 and could scarcely represent an urgent need or something deeply longed for. Pete’s allowance, although not injudiciously large, was a little more than the average among his fellows. Despite his apparent frankness he could give the dean no substantial reason for the self-damaging act by which he had neither gained nor hoped to gain anything of consequence. During a prolonged consideration of the affair, Pete remained so calm, so free from ordinary signs of guile and excuse-making, that those in authority could not dismiss the possibility of some point that this boy might, through honor or chivalry, be concealing. No definite hypothesis of this sort could be devised, but the dean, despite such plain indications for drastic action, decided to temporize. Meanwhile, another forged check, this time for $15.00, showed up. This was drawn on the account of a lady in his hometown, an intimate friend of his mother’s. While judgment was pending, two more forged checks were discovered—one for $15.00, another for $23.00.

  Even now the authorities found it difficult to regard this boy as an ordinary forger. He showed nothing in common with people who are placed in the category of the delinquent. Instead of being expelled, he was allowed to withdraw from college.

  He had made a good academic record during his seven months as a freshman and was popular with the students. Letters were contributed in his behalf by the high school principal at home, by his minister, a former Sunday school teacher, a scoutmaster, and even by the mayor of his hometown. All of these expressed confidence in Pete as “a splendid young man of high moral standards … a regular fellow,” “a fine Christian character,” “a well-behaved and clean-minded boy who deserves every consideration.”

  During our numerous interviews, Pete seemed to express himself freely. “I just don’t know why I did it,” he said at first. At other times he said he must have been impelled by desire for money. As the subject was returned to from day to day, his explanation varied. “It seems there was some sort of an impulse I can’t account for,” he once suggested. A few days later it was, “I just didn’t think what I was doing.”

  No one familiar with the whole material of these interviews would have difficulty in seeing plainly that none of these reasons were very pertinent. Pete admitted he had not even spent the money. He had no particular need and no special plans that might call for extra cash. His statement about some impulse is, of course, interesting; but the more Pete discussed this the more evident it became that he was not referring to anything like compulsive behavior in the ordinary psychiatric sense. Apparently he fell upon this remark as upon his other ever-varying explanations in a vague effort to fill out verbally a framework of cause and effect which as human beings we all tend to manufacture when we cannot find it in actuality. There was no specific breathtaking and unbearable drive to do this irrational act and no vivid fulfillment in its accomplishment. He had done it as a lazy man might swat a fly. Pete was not discovering real motives in himself but reaching at random for plausible or possible reasons that might have influenced some hypothetical person to do what he had done. It was rationalization in the purest sense but not adequate enough to convince the patient himself.

  Among dozens of other possible explanations he mentioned that shortly before one of his forgeries he had received a letter from one of his friends in Florida mentioning the friend’s plan for a weekend trip to Miami. Pete recalled a feeling of envy and suggested that he might childishly have felt that he, too, would like to have a sort of treat or adventure or break in the routine. By getting this extra money he would, in a vague way, be keeping up with his friend, having a little lark, or indulging himself in a sort of reward or bonus. Or he might think up some way to spend the money that would constitute an equivalent to his friend’s weekend of pleasure. Under discussion this, too, broke down as a factor of much pertinence. The envious thought of his friend’s trip had been brief and trivial. It had not preoccupied him or exerted strong or persistent emotional pressure as sometimes such apparently illogical and inadequate factors do exert in human behavior. And he had neither executed nor continued to plan any adventure in which the money might be used or wasted.

  The patient realized that all the impulses he mentioned were without strength to drive him into a dangerous or even a mildly unpleasant act. The more one talked with him, the more plain it became that he had realized how readily such forgeries could be detected and laid at his feet and that he had, before and during the acts, been far from unaware (intellectually) that serious and undesirable consequences were likely to follow. There was no question of Pete’s having been merely thoughtless or impulsive in the ordinary sense. He was not negligent in reason and foresight, but somehow the obvious, and one would think inevitable, emotional response that would inhibit such an act did not play its part in his functioning. There had been no anxious brooding over consequences, no conscious struggle against temptation or overmastering impulse. The consequences occurred to him, but rather casually, and he did not worry about them even to the point of carefully estimating his chances of getting away with the forgeries undetected or just what penalties he might face if he failed. He drifted along, responding to rather feeble impulses but without adequate consideration of consequences.

  This boy, as he clearly pointed out, had no inclination to leave college. He had been remarkably free of homesickness and, in fact, happier, he said, than ever before in his life. He had chosen the college himself, largely on the basis of renown and social prestige. Though very much smaller, it was regarded by many as more or less equivalent to Harvard or Yale. He had won a scholarship awarded by a hometown civic group on the basis of character and all-around qualities rather
than on mere superiority in grades. He had no difficulty in passing examinations and obtaining admission at the college of his choice.

  In this discussion several points of interest emerged. Until his last year in high school he had planned to go to West Point. There had never been, he admitted, any real interest in military life, and he frankly stated he had never intended to remain in the army after graduation. The idea of wearing an impressive uniform and the most superficial aspects of being a West Pointer seem to have been almost his sole motive. In explaining his change of mind, he frankly spoke of his desire to be among wealthy and socially prominent people and pointed out the particular advantages of the place he had chosen. Such motives of course may influence in a way most, if not all, people. But this young man seemed influenced to a degree truly remarkable. As the discussion progressed, it began to appear as if such values alone affected him. In the ordinary climber or snob it is usual to find this sort of dominant attitude only under concealment that fools the subject if not the observer. With Pete there seemed to be no awareness that such aims should not be given primacy and, indeed, exclusive sway or that there was reason to pretend otherwise.

  In further talk along this line his fundamental attitude began to shape up into something much less simple than that of the ordinary opportunist or the vulgar schemer. Something distinctly and almost terrifyingly naive emerged behind a readily volunteered and not very appealing life aim. It became clear that this was far from a truly dominant and persistent aim. It had been donned like momentary apparel, somewhat as revelers may try on for a moment paper masks or fancy costumes at a party, only after a moment to discard them. Pete apparently was not an ordinary example of the shrewd opportunist intently set on pursuing a policy of material success with little regard to ethics or esthetics. Gladly, and in a sense, one might almost say, innocently and sincerely, he accepted such a scheme and such evaluations. And these motivations probably influenced his conduct more often than any other conscious motivation. But even here there was no persistence of aim, no goal regularly beckoning, no substantial emotional force driving, even in a poor or perverse channel, toward fulfillment. Such values prompted Pete, but their influence was more that of transient recurrent whims than of adequate human striving.