Criminal Psychology by Hans Gross (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

state of affairs. One after another, people are fooled, until finally the world believes what it is told and the court hears the belief sworn to as absolute truth. It is, perhaps, not too much to say that we are far more deceived by appearances than by words. Public opinion should least of all impose on us. And yet it is through public opinion that we learn the external relations of the people who come before us. It is called vox populi and is really rot. The phrases, “they say,” “everybody knows,” “nobody doubts,” “as most neighbors agree,” and however else these seeds of dishonesty and slander may be designated—all these phrases must disappear from our papers and procedure. They indicate only appearances—only what people wanted to have seen. They do not reveal the real and the hidden. Law too frequently makes normative use of the maxim that the bad world says it and the good one believes it. It even constructs its judgments thereby.

Not infrequently the uttered lies must be supported by actions. It is well-known that we seem merry, angry, or friendly only when we excite these feelings by certain gestures, imitations and physical attitudes. Anger is not easily simulated with an unclenched fist, immovable feet, and uncontracted brow. These gestures are required for the appearance of real anger. And how very real it becomes, and how very real all other emotions become because of the appropriate gestures and actions, is familiar. We learn, hence, that the earnest assertor of his innocence finally begins to believe in it a little, or altogether. And lying witnesses still more frequently begin to hold their assertions to be true. As these people do not show the common marks of the lie their treatment is extraordinarily difficult.

It is, perhaps, right to accuse our age of especial inclination for that far-reaching lie which makes its perpetrator believe in his own creation. Kiefer[338] cites examples of such “self-deceiving liars.” What drives one to despair is the fact that these people are such clever liars that they make a game of the business. It is a piece of luck that these lies, like every lie, betray themselves by the characteristic intensity with which they seek to assume the appearance of truth. This important mark of the lie can not be too clearly indicated. The number and vigor of lies must show that we more frequently fail to think of their possibility than if they did not exist at all. A long time ago I read an apparently simple story which has helped me frequently in my criminalistic work. Karl was dining with his parents and two cousins, and after dinner said at school, “There were fourteen of us at table to-day.” “How is it possible?” “Karl has lied again.” How frequently does an event seem inexplicable, mysterious, puzzling. But if you think that here perhaps, “Karl has lied again,” you may be led to more accurate observation and hence, to the discovery of some hiatus by means of which the whole affair may be cleared up.

But frequently contradictions are still more simply explained by the fact that they are not contradictions, and by the fact that we see them as such through inadequate comprehension of what has been said, and ignorance of the conditions. We often pay too much attention to lies and contradictions. There is the prejudice that the accused is really the criminal, and that moves us to give unjustified reasons for little accidental facts, which lead afterwards to apparent contradictions. This habit is very old.

If we inquire when the lie has least influence on mankind we find it to be under emotional stress, especially during anger, joy, fear, and on the death-bed.[339] We all know of various cases in which a man, angry at the betrayal of an accomplice, happy over approaching release, or terrified by the likelihood of arrest, etc., suddenly declares, “Now I am going to tell the truth.” And this is a typical form which introduces the subsequent confession. As a rule the resolution to tell the truth does not last long. If the emotion passes, the confession is regretted, and much thought is given to the withdrawal of a part of the confession. If the protocols concerning the matter are very long this regret is easily observable toward the end.

That it is not easy to lie during intoxication is well known.[340] What is said on the death-bed may always, especially if the confessor is positively religious, be taken to be true. It is known that under such circumstances the consciousness of even mentally disturbed people and idiots becomes remarkably clear, and very often astonishing illuminations result. If the mind of the dying be already clouded it is never difficult to determine the fact, inasmuch as particularly such confessions are distinguished by the great simplicity and clearness of the very few words used.

Section 109. (2) The Pathoformic Lie.

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.

Section 110. (a) Sleep and Dream.

If a phenomenon occurs frequently, its frequency must have a certain relation to its importance to the criminalist. Hence, sleep and dream must in any event be of great influence upon our task. As we rarely hear them mentioned, we have underestimated their significance. The literature dealing with them is comparatively rich.[342]

The physician is to be called in not only when we are dealing with conditions of sleep and dream which are in the least diseased, i.e., abnormally intense sleepiness, sleep-walking, hallucinatory dreams, etc., but also when the physiological side of sleep and dream are in question, e.g., the need of sleep, the effect of insomnia, of normal sleepiness, etc. The criminalist must study also these things in order to know the kind of situation he is facing and when he is to call in the physician for assistance. Ignorance of the matter means spoiling a case by unskilful interrogation and neglect of the most important things. At the very least, it makes the work essentially more difficult.

But in many cases the criminalist must act alone since in those cases there is neither disease nor a physiological condition by way of explanation but merely a simple fact of the daily life which any educated layman must deal with for himself. Suppose, e.g., we are studying the influence of a dream upon our emotions. It has been shown that frequently one may spend a whole day under the influence of a dream, that one’s attitude is happy and merry as if something pleasant had been learned, or one is cross, afraid, excited, as if something unhappy had happened. The reason and source of these attitudes is frequently a pleasant or unpleasant dream, and sometimes this may be at work subconsciously and unremembered. We have already shown that so-called errors of memory are to a large extent attributable to dreams.[343]

This effect of the dream may be of significance in women, excitable men, and especially in children. There are children who consider their dreams as real experiences, and women who are unable to distinguish between dreams and real experience, while the senile and aged can not distinguish dreams and memories because their memories and the power to distinguish have become weakened.[344]

I know of an eight-year-old child who after dinner had gone looking for chestnuts with a man. In the evening it came home happy but woke up in tears and confessed that the man in question had raped it. Another case concerns a great burglary which had caused its victims considerable excitement. The second day after the event the ten or twelve-year-old daughter