, rather than the malingered
symptoms. It is for this reason that today the number of authorities is
indeed small who do not look upon malingering _per se_ as a morbid
phenomenon, as an abortive attempt at adjustment by an individual who is
quite incapable of adequately coping with the vicissitudes of life. In
my own limited experience of several years with insane delinquents I
have yet to see the malingerer who, aside from being a malingerer, was
not quite worthless mentally.

Our discussion of malingering,--_i.e._, of the exhibition of a
fictitious mental state by an individual for the purpose of rendering
more bearable or more pleasant a particularly painful or difficult
situation of life, or for the purpose of entirely annihilating such a
situation and of removing it from consciousness by substituting for it a
state of affairs wholly created from the individual's fantasy,--would
indeed be incomplete if we were to omit from our consideration at least
that much of Freud's psychology as pertains to this subject.

Thus far we have considered principally the views of what may be termed
the descriptive school of psychiatry, though we have briefly touched
upon the instinctive biologic roots of this primitive mode of approach
to the problems of life, malingering of mental symptoms.

With the consideration of the Freudian psychology we enter upon the
interpretative phase of psychiatry and to a very large extent of mental
life in general.

Freud holds that a great part of mental life can either partially or
entirely be summarized under two principles, which he terms the
"pleasure principle" and the "reality principle" respectively.[9] These
two opponents are constantly facing one another in our inner life. The
former represents the primary, original form of mental activity, and is
characteristic of the earliest stages of human development, both in the
individual and in the race; it is, therefore, typically found in the
mental life of the infant, and to a less extent in that of the savage.
Its main attribute is a never-ceasing demand for immediate gratification
of various desires of a distinctly lowly order, and at literally any
cost. It is thus exquisitely egocentric, selfish, personal, and
antisocial. The activities of this "pleasure principle", however,
constantly come into conflict with the "reality principle." The rigid
requirements of our environment, of the social system in which we live,
deny us the fulfillment of