This bright and pleasant young man volunteered information about numerous acts in the past which had not been detected. He had occasionally stolen, usually taking articles of little value, from friends and from stores. No evidence of any distinct motive or any strong thrill of adventure could be brought out in connection with the petty thefts. He had also, with gracious and “between us as gentlemen” approaches, put pressure on a number of his father’s friends to “lend” him small sums which he never thought of repaying. During the previous summer he had, by complicated and ingenious schemes, secured sugar for a Negro man who made whiskey illegally. In this way he obtained several hundred dollars, nearly all of which he squandered aimlessly and unexcitingly while on house parties with a group he liked to impress. Though he worried little about getting caught, he had proceeded with some caution and cunning. Even his closest acquaintances had not suspected him. Earlier, when rationing was in effect, he devised a method of stealing gasoline from an uncle who managed a business considered important in the war effort. Through this connection he gained access to relatively large quantities of gasoline and, by careful planning and clever execution, made off with a few gallons at a time until he accumulated enough to bring substantial sums on the black market. Though a member of the honor council in high school, he had never hesitated to cheat on examinations, He did this not only when he felt he might otherwise make a bad mark but also routinely somewhat in the manner of a gentleman paying respect to what he regarded as the conventions, This practice had not been officially detected or become widely known among his classmates.
Pete did not bring out these facts painfully and with reluctance. It was not as though he were taking advantage at last of an opportunity to unburden himself by confession. Apparently he had never been burdened. Nor did he show that boastful relish sometimes seen in people who seem proud and defiant about the delinquent acts they confess. In a gentlemanly way he seemed to be discussing ordinary matters of a conventional life.
He had repeatedly spoken of his remorse about the forgeries at college and spoken convincingly of his resolution never to make such mistakes in the future. In telling of his earlier delinquencies, which had never been discovered, he did not spontaneously bring out an opinion that this sort of behavior also should be avoided. When reasons for this were suggested, he readily agreed. There seemed, however, to be little shame or real regret and no effective intention that would last much beyond the moment of its utterance.
Though a considerable number of delinquencies and examples of very badly adapted conduct emerged as this patient was seen over a period of time,* it is not these in themselves that so strongly suggest he shows the disorder called psychopathic personality. What is most suggestive of this disorder is very difficult to convey, for it came out in attitudes disclosed as he talked about his emotional relations, his principles, his ambitions, and his ideals. It is easier to demonstrate such things by citing concrete acts or failures to act than by commenting on what has been merely spoken and what from this and the accompanying expressions, tones, etc., has been sensed or surmised. It may be worth while, however, to attempt a few points.
Pete’s Love Life
This attractive and fine-looking young man had been going out with girls for several years. Apparently they found his attentions welcome. Though he sometimes spent the evening alone with a girl, he still preferred double-dating or getting together with several couples. He had almost entirely escaped the shyness and unpleasant selfconsciousness that trouble so many boys in their teens. He had never attempted sexual relations and seemed to have less than ordinary conscious inclination in this direction. No overt homosexual inclinations could be brought out in ordinary interviews or with the patient under intravenous Amytal or hypnosis.
For over a year Pete had been going regularly with the daughter of a millionaire who had recently moved to Florida from the Midwest. Jane was only 16 years of age. Though not an only child, she had been born very late in her parents’ lives and after her sister and two brothers were almost adults: The siblings had long ago married, leaving her to grow up as the center of her aging parents’ concern and attention. This situation may account for the early overprotection and domination Jane experienced and for her tendency toward social withdrawal and her deep and painful insecurity.
Her parents, by now quite old, set in their ways, and out of touch with Jane’s world, sensed something wrong and set out on the disastrous course of pushing her, managing her, and trying by an irresistible tour de force to make her precipitately into a reigning belle.
A few years earlier her mother had nagged her day and night about overexerting herself and had insisted that she have breakfast in bed and not arise until 10:30 A.M. She had also insisted that she take tomato juice between meals (for vitamins) and milk (for calories). There had also been arguments about taking a nap every afternoon, swallowing numerous vitamin pills or unneeded laxatives, and carrying out all sorts of quackish health rituals which had attracted the mother. Now this frustrated, frightened, and unprepared girl was pushed suddenly into equitation instructions, tennis every other afternoon, private lessons in Italian, and elaborate parties with imported champagne. The mother took her to New York and arranged some rather artificial frolics at the Stork Club and El Morocco. There were also yachting parties during which this sensitive girl tried valiantly to make conversation and carry out the motions of gaiety from Daytona to Miami. Jane seemed like a gun-shy yearling pointer and promptly developed nocturnal enuresis.*
The more difficulty she showed in handling herself, the more vigorously her mother pushed her, and the more she suffered and showed her terror. Most of the young men herded by the mother’s almost ferocious efforts and by all sorts of indirect bribery to these overdone parties made almost open fun of Jane. Her uneasiness and dutiful but brittle efforts to carry out a false role led them to speak of her as a “drip.”
This good and essentially normal girl, in the midst of constant mockery which she, unlike her mother, often detected, found herself attended by Pete. He was without mockery. Nor did he, like some of the condescending youths drawn by parental largess, attempt lovelessly to feel her breasts and to initiate her into the intimacies of a soul kiss. Pete behaved “like a gentleman.” He was cordial and polite, and he treated her mother and father with a respect that seemed properly deferential in contrast with many in that brash, immature gang who came for the handout and the opportunity for mockery.
He was more acceptable also than the snide older men who were inclined to show her attention. Among these she encountered a few partial and cynical homosexuals who apparently enjoyed any travesty on what ought to be a normal coming together of girl and boy. Jane did not know which ones were the homosexuals or scarcely even that there was such a thing as homosexuality, but she sensed under their superficial politeness what seemed like subtle attitudes of defeatism, condescension, and only formality where it is natural to seek warmth. They gently mocked her taste in reading and in music and were politely supercilious about her clothes and about how she rode a horse.
After them it was almost a joy to be with Pete. Her parents, too, found him respectful and a lad of fine, manly qualities. He was obviously intelligent, and he lightly and unpretentiously expressed in words principles of the highest, truest order.
Too much a child still and too backward to seek a mature heterosexual role, too inexperienced to recognize or even to imagine what a genuine lover might offer or seek, Jane found Pete the most acceptable companion available. Unacquainted with the feelings and attitudes of young men in normal love, or even with milder but real interests of this sort, she had no frame of reference in which to evaluate her chief suitor’s monumental inadequacy. She had, in, fact, little means even of perceiving it.
Pete himself discussed his girl without the slightest awareness that he lacked any requisite of a romantic lover or of a satisfactory husband. Both of Jane’s parents encouraged his attentions. An impressive mahogany speedboat and a new Cad
illac convertible were virtually put at his disposal. He found himself not quite the possessor of these and of many other luxuries but conspicuously in the center of them. It would not be difficult to imagine such a situation turning an ordinary boy’s head, confusing him with grandiose fancies, and, perhaps, initiating a career of delinquency.
Perhaps such an explanation is correct, but I am not convinced. Pete was not dazzled and swept off his feet. He was not, it would seem, particularly excited. He expressed a liking for Jane and her family and showed evidence of being attracted by the outer appearance of things in this rather glittering world. There was no indication that wild passions for wealth had been aroused and a steady young man lured off toward false goals. Nothing seemed capable of arousing any real drive or passion in Pete, much less a wild one. The pseudoideals about wealth and prestige and the halfhearted impulses of which he spoke had existed long before he knew Jane. They were, however, at best tepid and unsteady aspirations, not strong or really purposeful drives, not constantly beckoning temptations deflecting natural aims. Pete might let himself drift toward a fortune and, when caprice stimulated him, even paddle a bit toward this goal or effigy of a goal, but he was not the sort of man to swim with frantic vigor toward either positive or negative shores. Fortune hunting might come nearer to arousing him than another aim, but even this did not challenge him to life and human purpose or bring to birth a long-range plan of action. Even in this direction he found nothing to which he could commit himself in actual emotion.
Though his plans were not definite, Pete admitted he felt he would like eventually to marry Jane. He had not weighed his chances to do so very carefully but he felt they were good. “Oh, yes indeed!” he replied, when asked if he were in love with her. As his feelings about her were discussed, it remained impossible to detect any sort of affective content to which those words might refer. The more one investigated Pete’s attitude, the more strictly verbal his statement appeared. His reply was a reflex response, the carrying out of a superficially polite routine, a purely formal nod doing justice to vague conventions more or less to the effect that of course one loved a girl if he were seriously considering her for a wife. Pete approved of such conventions. Rather proudly, he denied any outstanding physical passion for her or any specific attraction of this sort. He had sometimes held her hand and he kissed her good-night. These contacts, one would judge, were little more stimulating to him erotically than such doings between brother and sister. The idea of kissing her as a lover would have seemed to him vaguely repellent, perhaps “common.” He was more neutral, however, than negative toward this as a possibility and seemed pleased that he could say he had never given such things much thought. He was consecrated to higher and more practical aims.
As the discussion of his attitudes toward his girl developed, it became increasingly apparent that he neither liked nor disliked her. He had not questioned his heart particularly along these lines or so formulated it to himself, but it was plain that she was little more than something incidental in the eventualities toward which he felt himself drifting and was willing to drift. When this was suggested to him, he agreed that it was correct, with no shame or sense of having been detected in anything to regret or explain.
“Many people put too much emphasis on love, it seems to me,” Pete said, not argumentatively or even with strong conviction but somewhat gropingly, as if he were feeling his way toward some position on which he could base his comments. It was not hard to believe he might just as readily have drifted into the opposite position.
“I don’t feel the way so many other people do about love,” he continued. “Other things, it seems to me, are a lot more serious and important.” On being urged to make this point more concrete, he added, “Well, for instance, if a boy and a girl decide to marry and unite two families so they can own a good insurance business or a big pulpwood mill.”
There was nothing that suggested active cynicism in this young man. He was shaping up something that might pass in his awareness as a sort of goal. In a sense his attitude was idealistic. It was at least the shadow or verbal form of what might be called an idealistic or what he seemed to consider a “higher” type of impulse, but the shadow was, I believe, without substance. Even here one felt an affective hollowness, a lack of the energy that goes into purposive human functioning, and to such a degree as to convince one that this verbal evaluation could never muster sufficient strength, could never matter enough to him, to become a real goal or to make him work toward it consistently or with enthusiasm.
* * *
His other activities, convictions, and relations gave indications of a similar deficit in his functioning. In response to leading questions he mentioned numerous “ambitions.” He was not at all evasive, and he seemed entirely unaware that his inmost self might contain anything incomplete, pathologic, or deviate. In fact, one felt that nothing could really embarrass this bright, agreeable, and poised young man.
“Another thing I’d like when I get older is to be a vestryman in the church,” he said, with what looked a bit like enthusiasm. I believe, however, that enthusiasm is a misleading word. His tone of voice, his facial expression, and the myriad other subthreshold details not clearly perceived, in which we feel out our evaluation of a person’s reactions, all suggested affect. But this affect did not, it seems, extend deeply enough into him to constitute enthusiasm or anything else that could move a person very much. Nor do I believe that what affect might have been present will be capable of directing him toward any consistent aim. A well-made cardboard box carefully gilded could scarcely be distinguished by visual perception from a cubic yard of gold.
I do not think his expressed wish to become a vestryman can be accounted for by a desire on his part to impress people that he was penitent about the forgeries and meant to compensate for them in the future. I think this wish was as real as anything could be real for this person. It had been a feature in his plans over some years.
In discussing his motives he said, “I don’t exactly know why it seems such a good idea to be a vestryman. It just seems to me sort of pleasant and I think I’d like it. It might strike you as a little odd, too,” he continued thoughtfully, “because I’m really not very much interested in religion. Now Jack ___ and Frank___ are terribly interested in religion. They’re all the time talking about it and bothering themselves. I’m not like that a bit. I can’t see any point in making such a commotion about something of that sort.”
To the next question he replied: “Oh I don’t mean that I don’t absolutely and completely believe every word of the Bible. And I believe everything the church teaches. Of course I believe things like that.” I hardly think he was trying to deceive me or, as this is ordinarily understood, trying to deceive himself. A person to whom rigid theological beliefs give comfort might deceive himself in order to overlook implausibility in what he would like to assume is true and might, I am sure all will agree, do so without being quite aware of it. This boy did not seem to have any such need. It seemed, with due respect to the difficulties of putting such concepts into words, rather a case of there being nowhere within him ally valid contrast between believing and not believing or even between a thing of this sort being so or not so.
“Probably why I want to be a vestryman,” he went on, “is because people seem to think a lot of them, consider them important, and sort of look up to them.” There was no sign of irony, playful or otherwise, toward the social group or toward himself. Sincerity is a word which for most people implies positive emotional reactions. Not merely in this boy’s superficial attitude, yet in a peculiar but important sense, one could say there was a striking lack of ordinary insincerity.
In discussing his relations with others he admitted a decline in his affection for his father. He expressed no negative feelings and said he felt, perhaps, he loved his father about as much as, and probably more than, one might expect of the average boy of his age. “But, being perfectly frank, I can’t say I love him the way I do my mother. I
am crazy about mother. She and I are very close to each other.” By leading questions it was brought out that he estimated his love for his mother as deep and genuine. He rated it as a feeling not less strong than the maximum that an ordinary person can experience, though he was not boastful or extravagant in phrasing his replies. A few minutes later he mentioned, among other people, the mother of a male friend.
“Oh, Mrs. Blank is a wonderful person. She and I get on perfectly. She understands me. I love Mrs. Blank better than anyone.”
“Do you love her better than your mother?”
“Yes,” he replied without hesitation, “I love Mrs. Blank a great deal more than I do Mother. I couldn’t love anybody as much as I do Mrs. Blank!”
He had been frequently thrown with this lady, but apparently his relations with her were superficial and there was no evidence of particular or uncommon affection on her part toward him. She had no idea that he would express himself about her in such a fashion.
A little later he said that his ideal of what a woman should be and of the sort of wife he would like was embodied in the fictional Scarlett O’Hara. It was pointed out that this character was thought by some to be portrayed as amazingly selfish, frigid, dishonorable, ruthless, faithless, and petty and that, furthermore, she was scarcely the sort of woman to make a husband happy. He did not deny any of this. Mrs. Blank, who in his own appraisal and in reality was honest, faithful, gentle, and, in nearly all important respects, the opposite of Scarlett O’Hara, was now recalled to him and he was asked how he could choose both these incompatible figures as a single ideal. He then said that maybe he was mistaken about Scarlett. He had read the novel and remembered it in detail.
The Mask of Sanity Page 13