The Mask of Sanity. Hervey M. Cleckley

patient arrived in custody of a policeman. He was still somewhat stimulated from a recent intoxication but, though overbearing and pompous, showed no signs of real drunkenness nor of an officially recognized psychosis.

      Frank took a high-handed manner, swaggered about, finally refused to come back into the hospital, saying that he had no mental disease and that he preferred to return to jail where he would soon be released to carry out important business plans and social activities. He enjoyed the incident, played up his role dramatically, and took a peremptory and haughty tone with everyone.

      Some weeks later after running up big debts, giving several more bad checks, and participating in a series of senseless, bawdy escapades, he was finally returned to the hospital. Three months later he again obtained his discharge on a writ of habeas corpus but not through the same attorney. The story in its broad essentials was repeated.

      Since his last admission, following the exploits just mentioned, he has been true to form. After varying periods on a closed ward parole has been given, he has lost it repeatedly and gone back among “demented” and helpless groups with whom he is, to say the least, not at home. He has continued at all times free from the technical stigmata of psychosis, crafty, intelligent, and superficially cooperative while trying to gain his ends.

      Frank takes advantage of every opportunity to make trouble in the hospital, is rather restless and extremely dissatisfied. He sends frequent letters to women in town to whom he regards himself as paying court. These are written in a neat hand, well spelled and well expressed, and are much better letters than one would look for from a man of his education. They are marked with self-righteousness, extreme egotism, trite sentimentality, and monumental falsehood. His tone is that of a lover who regards his own passion as very high and rare.

      “Only God knows,” he writes, “why I wasn’t left over there among the poppies with my heroic buddies,” falsely describing himself as a captain in charge of 272 men. “My wife never understood me!” he complains in the same letter. What does he expect of her? The question invites meditation.