e deed, or at any rate justify it.

But why cannot all these manifestations be genuine? Many of us no doubt
recall the effect which examinations have upon certain students. The
emotional accompaniment of the examination, especially the emotion of
fright, causes many a student to forget facts which he knew as well as
his own name, and which he is able readily and fully to recollect as
soon as the examination is over. Are we to assume that these students
are malingering? Decidedly not. Why then should we question at all the
genuineness of a mental disorder developing in an individual who faces
the gallows or a life-long imprisonment? As a matter of fact cases of
pure malingering are among the rarest things which the psychiatrist
observes. Wilmanns,[1] in his study of 277 cases of insanity of
prisoners, found but two cases of simulation, and in a later review of
the diagnoses of the same series of cases, the two cases of malingering
do not appear at all. Bonhoeffer[2] in a study of 221 cases of insane
criminals found 0.5 per cent of malingerers. This is the experience of
everyone who comes in contact with these cases, and there are others who
go so far as to maintain that every malingerer of mental symptoms is
mentally defective.

But let us assume that we have succeeded in convincing those concerned
of the genuineness of the disease at hand; what line of treatment should
be recommended? In the first place, we must remember that the mental
disorder, if it belongs to the group we are discussing here, is the
result of a criminal act, and following in its wake, and that therefore
the plea of insanity as an excuse for the deed must manifestly be
excluded. But may not this type of reaction furnish us an index to the
original personality of the culprit? In other words, should we consider
an individual absolutely normal, if, in reaction to some stressful
situation, he breaks down mentally and develops a psychosis? The
majority of authorities maintain that these individuals are decidedly
abnormal, and that it is only a poorly-knit organism which permits of
that sort of reaction. Birnbaum,[3] for instance, insists that the
possibility of a psychic incitation of a mental disorder is the
criterion of a degenerative soil. This is undoubtedly too extreme a
view, but the more one observes these cases, the more one is inclined to
hesitate in calling these individuals normal in the accepted sense of
the term. Let us assume for the moment