The Mask of Sanity. Hervey M. Cleckley

in progress. Almost on his arrival detection met him, and hard on its heels came prosecution from home in consequence of the jaw-breaking. To these difficulties charges for his latest bigamy were added. As such disasters began to accumulate about Max, his legal wife, finally aroused, decided for the moment to lend her influence to the punitive forces.

      In the court action that followed, the present and third bigamous wife received an adequate sentence to the state penitentiary, and for a while Max’s own fortune seemed none too bright. Wrought upon by his protestations, however, and perhaps influenced as well by the disappearance of her rival from the scene, his old protector, the legal wife, was won over and began to work with her husband. Soon matters were arranged for him to escape the ordinary consequences of his deeds and be sent again to a psychiatric hospital. His last admission, with which this account began, was the result.

      Safe in the familiar harbor of a psychiatric hospital, he was for a week or more friendly, cooperative, and apparently content. He was at all times shrewd, somewhat witty on low levels of humor, and entirely free from ideas or behavior suggesting any recognized psychosis.

      He became very friendly with me at this period and talked entertainingly and with enthusiasm about his many adventures. He denied all misconduct on his part but admitted that he had often been in trouble because of his wife and others. It was not the denial of a man who is eager to show himself innocent but the casual tossing aside of matters considered irrelevant or bothersome to discuss. After briefly laughing off all his accusations, he at once shifted the subject to his many triumphs and attainments.

      Telling of his early life in Vienna, his birthplace, he spoke of his excellent scholarship in the schools, his pre-eminence at sports and of the splendid figure in general he had cut as a youth in that gay and urbane city. In none of these statements did he lay in details such as might be expected of a man developing a delusional trend. No psychiatrist, and few laymen for that matter, would have had the least difficulty in recognizing all this as “tall talk” designed to deceive the listener and to put the talker in a good light. All the patient’s reactions showed that he himself was far from being taken in.

      His birth and upbringing in Vienna coincide with the facts as obtained from his army records. His alleged experiences at Heidelberg are recorded many times on his own testimony. He described himself as a distinguished student in that honorable university, referring to Kant and Schopenhauer and several of the Greek philosophers as special subjects of his study. He spoke also of a deep interest in Shakespeare during his student days and sought to give the idea that he was celebrated among his fellows for his knowledge of the Bard.

      The shrewdness and agility of his mind were prettily demonstrated in these references to the picturesque and traditional gaieties of student life, to the works of the philosophers and poets. No less vividly and convincingly did he reveal an utter lack of any real acquaintance with all the subjects about which he boasted himself learned.

      He knew the names of a half-dozen Shakespearean plays, several catch-penny lines familiar to the man on the streets, a scattering of great names among the philosophers. Not only was he totally ignorant of the systems of thought for which his philosophers are famous but also even of superficial and general facts about their lives and times that any person, however unintellectual, could not fail to remember if he ever had the interest to read of such matters. Of Shakespeare he knew practically nothing beyond the titles that rolled eloquently from his tongue and a few vague and jumbled conceptions that have crept into the ideologies of bootblacks, peasants, and street gamins the world over. Furthermore, he had no interest, as contrasted with knowledge, in any matter that could be called philosophic or poetic. He liked to rattle off his little round of fragmentary quotations, the connections and the connotations of which he realized only in the most superficial sense, to contribute a few pat and shallow saws of his own which he showed that he believed were highly original, iconoclastic, and profound, to boast generally of his wisdom and then go on to descriptions of his other attainments and experiences.

      To my surprise, he was several times taken by psychiatrists who studied him briefly and by social service workers as a man of some intellectual stature. His story of Study at Heidelberg, though usually discounted, was, if the implication of the psychiatric histories is correctly read, sometimes taken as true or probably true.

      Although my actual contact with Heidelberg is superficial enough, I had no difficulty in demonstrating in the patient a plain lack of acquaintance with the ways of life there. The general plan of study and the physical set-up of the university, matters that would be familiar to anyone who had been an undergraduate there, however briefly and disinterestedly, were unknown to Max. He showed that he had probably passed through the town and that he had heard and still clearly remembered gossip and legend from the streets of Vienna about the university and its customs, but he had no more real understanding of it than a shrewd but unlettered cockney would have of Cambridge.

      This phase of his examination provided, in my opinion, a striking example of the ambiguity inherent in our word intelligence, Here was a man of exceptional acumen. His versatile devices to defraud, his mechanical inventions to overcome safeguards which ordinarily protect slot machines and other depositories of cash, and his shrewd practical reasoning in the many difficulties of his career demonstrate beyond question the accuracy, quickness, and subtlety of his practical thinking. His memory is unusually sound; his cleverness at manipulating bits of information so as to appear learned is exceptional. He is not a man to be taken in by the scheming of others, though he himself takes in many. One can truthfully say about him that he is bright as a dollar, smart as a whip, that his mind is like a steel trap, etc.

      His ability to plan and execute schemes to provide money for himself, to escape legal consequences, and to give, when desirable, the impression that he is, in the ordinary sense, mentally deranged, could be matched by few, if any, people whom I have known. In such thinking he not only shows objective ingenuity but also remarkable knowledge of other people and their reactions (of psychology in the popular sense) at certain levels, or, perhaps one should say, in certain modes, of personality-reaction. He stands out for the swiftness and accuracy of his thinking at solving puzzles and at playing checkers. At any sort of contest based on a matching of wits he is unlikely to come off second best.

      To consider his intelligence (or should one say wisdom?) from another viewpoint, from that of the ordinary man’s idea of what is good sense about working out a successful plan of life on a long-term basis, only the story of his career can speak adequately. Be it noted that the result of his conduct not only brings trouble to others but almost as regularly to himself.

      To take still another point of view and consider him on a basis of those values somewhat vaguely implied by “intellectuality,” “culture,” or, in everyday speech, by “depth of mind,” we find an appalling deficiency. These concepts in which meaning or emotional significance are considered along with the mechanically rational, if applied to this man, measure him as very small, or very defective. He not only appears ignorant in such modes of function but stupid as well. He is unfamiliar with the primary facts or data of what might be called personal values and is altogether incapable of understanding such matters. It is impossible for him to take even a slight interest in the tragedy or joy or the striving of humanity as presented in serious literature or art. He is also indifferent to all these matters in life itself. Beauty and ugliness, except in a very superficial sense, goodness, evil, love, horror, and humor, have no actual meaning, no power to move him.

      He is, furthermore, lacking in the ability to see that others are moved. It is as though he were colorblind, despite his sharp intelligence, to this aspect of human existence. It cannot be explained to him because there is nothing in his orbit of awareness that can bridge the gap with comparison. He can repeat the words and say glibly that he understands, and there is no way for him to realize that he does not understand.

      I believe that this man has sufficient intelligence, in the ordinary sense, to acquire what often passes for learning in such fields as literature and philosophy. If he had more stability and persistence he could easily earn a Ph.D. or an M.D. degree from the average university in this country. If he had this stability and became a doctor of philosophy in literature, the plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Joseph Conrad or of Thomas Hardy, would still have no power to move him. He could remember facts and he could