Part 35 (2/2)
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 prost.i.tutes 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 s.e.x, perhaps to perversity or impotence, or exaggerated s.e.xual 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.[1]
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 a.s.sistance. 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 att.i.tude 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 att.i.tudes 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.[2]
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.[3]
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
[1] Cf. S. Freud: Traumdeutung. Leipzig 1900 (for the complete bibliography). B. Sidis: An Experimental Study of Sleep: Journal of Abnormal Psychology.
[2] Maudsley. Physiology and Pathology of the Mind.
[3] Cf. Altmann in H. Gross's Archiv. I, 261.
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 of the victim a.s.serted with certainty that she had recognized the son of a neighbor among the thieves. In both cases there were serious legal steps taken against the suspects, and in both cases the children finally admitted, after much thinking, that they had possibly dreamed the whole matter of their complaints.
The character-mark of such cases is the fact that the children do not make their a.s.sertions immediately, but after one or two nights have pa.s.sed. Hence, whenever this occurs one must entertain at least the suspicion that reality and dreams have been confused.
Similarly, Taine narrates that Baillarger once dreamed that he had been made director of a certain journal, and believed it so definitely that he told it to a number of people. Then there is the familiar dream of Julius Scaliger. Leibnitz writes that Scaliger had praised in verse the famous men of Verona. In dream he saw a certain Brugnolus who complained that he had been forgotten. Later Scaliger's son Joseph discovered that there really had been a Brugnolus who had distinguished himself as grammarian and critic. Obviously Scaliger senior had once known, and had completely forgotten about him. In this case the dream had been just a refres.h.i.+ng of the memory. Such a dream may be of importance, but is unreliable and must be dealt with carefully.
To get at a point of departure concerning the nature of the sleep and the dreams of any given person, we may cla.s.sify them with reference to the following propositions:[1] 1. The vividness of dreams increases with their frequency. 2. The lighter the sleep the more frequent the dreams. 3. Women sleep less profoundly than men and hence dream more. 4. With increasing age dreams become rarer and sleep less profound. b. Who sleeps lightly needs less sleep. 6. The feminine need of sleep is greater. I might add with regard to the last point that the fact that women are better able to endure nursing children or invalids const.i.tutes only an apparent contradiction of this point. The need of sleep is not decreased, but the goodwill and the joy of sacrifice is greater in woman than in man.
The extraordinary things people do in half-dream and in sleep are numerously exemplified by Jessen. Most of them are taken from the older literature, but are quite reliable. A comparison indicates
[1] F. Heerwazen Statistische Untersuchung <u:>ber Tr
that such somnambulistic conduct occurs most frequently among the younger, more powerful, over-strained people, who, e. g., have not slept for two successive nights, and then have been awakened from deep sleep. It is remarkable that they often act intelligently under such circ.u.mstances-that the physician writes the proper prescription or the factory superintendent gives the proper orders, but neither knows anything about it later on. Criminalistically their significance lies on the one hand in the fact that they can be investigated with regard to their correctness; and on the other that they occur to people who had no reason to falsify. If a defendant tells about some such experience, we lack the means and the power to make an accurate examination of the matter, and tend for this reason to disbelieve him. Moreover, his very position throws doubt upon his statements. But this is just the ground for a careful study of similar occurrences in trustworthy people.[1] All authorities agree that actions during sleepiness[2] occur almost always in the first deep sleep, disturbed by dreams, of over-fatigued, strong individuals.
An important circ.u.mstance is the phenomenon cited by Jessen and others-the capacity of some people to fall calmly asleep in spite of tremendous excitement. Thus, Napoleon fell into deep sleep during the most critical moment at Leipzig. This capacity is sometimes cited as evidence of innocence. But it is not convincing.
We have yet to mention the peculiar illusions of the phenomena of movement which occur just before falling asleep. Panum tells how he once inhaled ether, and then observed, lying in bed, how the pictures on the wall went further and further back, came forward and withdrew, again and again. Similar things happen to sleepy people. Thus, the preacher in church seems progressively to withdraw and return. The criminalistic significance of such illusions may be in the observation of movements by people who are falling asleep, e. g., of thieves who seemed to be approaching the witnesses' beds, though standing still.
That sleeping people may be influenced in definite ways is indubitable. Cases are mentioned in which sleepers could be made to believe any story; they would dream of it, and later on believe it. There is in this connection the story of the officer who acquired the love of a young girl in this fas.h.i.+on; the girl had shown definite distaste for him at first, but after he had told her during her sleep,
[1] P. Jessen: Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Begr<u:>ndung der Psychologie. Berlin 1885.
[2] Cf. H. Gross's Archiv. XIII 161, XIV 189.
in her mother's presence, of his love and loyalty, she began in the course of time to return it. It is a fact that certain of our burglars believe similar things, and carry them out in most cases with the a.s.sistance of red light, to which they a.s.sign hypnotic power. They claim that with a lantern with red gla.s.s they are able to do anything in the room containing a sleeping individual, and can intensify his sleep by letting the red light fall on his face, and speaking to him softly. Curiously enough this is corroborated by a custom of our mountain lads. They cover a lantern with a red cloth and go with it to the window of a sleeping girl. It is a.s.serted that when the red light falls on the latter's face and it is suggested to her softly to go along, she does so. Then a pointed stone is placed in the girl's way, she steps on it, it wakes her up, and the crude practical joke is finished. It would be interesting, at least, to get some scientific information concerning these cited effects of red light upon sleeping people.
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