riginally defective organism. We
finally meet with an illustration of the other phase of his mode of
reaction. Following imprisonment on a charge of robbery, he develops a
psychosis which necessitates his transfer to an insane asylum. Brief as
the description of his psychosis has been, it is sufficient to
illustrate that here we are likewise dealing with a psychogenetic
disorder manifesting itself as a reactive expression of a degenerative
constitution to an unpleasant situation. Shortly after his arrest he is
being operated upon for appendicitis and upon recovery elaborates the
idea that the warden of the jail, one of the members of that large class
against whom he has been warring all his lifetime, takes this
opportunity of placing poison in his body. He sees and hears people
around his cell whom he recognizes as Secret Service men sent down from
Washington to torture him. On his transfer to our Hospital he readily
carries over his delusional ideas to the officials here. He is simply
being persecuted by a bunch of anarchists, who are trying to down him
and make life miserable for him.

It has long ago been questioned by psychiatrists whether these so-called
delusional ideas of this class of patients deserve to be endowed with
the value of delusions. Let us not forget that a similar attitude toward
officialdom exists in the minds of criminals enjoying a respite from the
law. It is the officers of the law, society's institution for the
prevention and punishment of crime, that these people have to fear, and
when they speak of being persecuted by those who have their care and
safe-keeping in hand, it is not, necessarily, a pathological
manifestation. The only difference between such paranoid ideas in the
criminal at freedom and the one in confinement is that in the latter
case, coupled with the stress of confinement, the stress of a forced
routine existence, these ideas assume enormous proportions and in some
instances become supported by fallacious sense perceptions. Their
exaggerated self-consciousness, their great tendency to introspection, a
tendency which is very much enhanced by confinement and plenty of
leisure time for such indulgence, and their paranoid attitude toward law
and its officers, makes it possible for them to endow the least
significant occurrence in their environment with a personal note of
prejudice. The least deviation from the normal routine has a meaning to
them, a meaning which is readily interpr