Pete. And his family conformed to this custom.
After his parents had been interviewed separately and together, Pete came into the office. He stood about six feet tall, held himself well, and appeared more mature than would be expected of a boy still eighteen. He at once impressed me as being enviably at his ease. Though not extraordinary in its features, his face was pleasant, candid, and alert. As our conversation progressed, indications of excellent intelligence soon appeared, along with suggestions of a character forceful but not undesirably self-assertive or aggressive.
Pete expressed disappointment about having had to withdraw from college and seemed remarkably frank in discussing the causes of his predicament. His story was the same incomprehensible story already heard from his parents and corroborated by the several detailed reports.
A forged check had brought Pete before the dean. He did not deny his guilt but, in a straightforward way, seemed ready to meet the consequences like a gentleman. The dean was puzzled, not that a young man might forge a check, but that it should be this particular man with his fine record, his appearance of sincerity, and his brave way of handling a situation presumably painful and embarrassing.
Several points made the incident difficult to explain. The check had been cashed at a little tavern by the gates of the college, a place virtually integral with the campus where students were intimately known to the cashier and the waitresses. The owner of this place, a college-life character for generations, prided himself on calling the freshmen by name and on his closeness to the boys. It would have been easy for Pete to cash such a check at dozens of places where his chances of escaping detection would have been vastly better. He had, it would seem, picked the place where his misdeed could most easily be traced to him. Furthermore, he had not chosen as victim someone unlikely to find him out, but the father of a girl he had been dating regularly during the seven months he had been at college. In forging the name, he had taken no great care to disguise his handwriting or to make a good imitation of the real signature.
There was difficulty in conceiving of a possible motive. With the dean Pete seemed thoroughly at ease. In a manly, well-controlled manner he expressed his profound regret, his willingness to make restitution or to submit to any penalty. The check amounted to only $35.00 and could scarcely represent an urgent need or something deeply longed for. Pete’s allowance, while not injudiciously large, was a little more than the average among his fellows. Despite his apparent frankness he could give the dean no substantial reason for the self-damaging act by which he had neither gained nor hoped to gain anything of consequence. During a prolonged consideration of the affair Pete remained so calm, so free from ordinary signs of guile and excuse-making, that those in authority could not dismiss the possibility of some point that this boy might, through honor or chivalry, be concealing. No definite hypothesis of this sort could be devised but the dean, despite such plain indications for drastic action, decided to temporize. Meanwhile, another forged check, this time for $15.00, showed up. This was drawn on the account of a lady in his home town, an intimate friend of his mother’s. While judgment was pending, two more forged checks were discovered—one for $15.00, another for $23.00.
Even now the authorities found it difficult to regard this boy as an ordinary forger. He showed nothing in common with people who are placed in the category of the delinquent. Instead of being expelled, he was allowed to withdraw from college.
He had made a good record during his seven months as a freshman and was popular with the students. Letters were contributed in his behalf by the high school principal at home, by his minister, a former Sunday School teacher, a scoutmaster, and even by the mayor of his home town. All of these expressed confidence in Pete as “a splendid young man of high moral standards,” “a regular fellow,” “a fine Christian character,” “a well-behaved and clean-minded boy who deserves every consideration.”
During our numerous interviews Pete seemed to express himself freely. “I just don’t know why I did it,” he said at first. At other times he said he must have been impelled by desire for money. As the subject was returned to from day to day his explanation varied. “It seems there was some sort of an impulse I can’t account for,” he once suggested. A few days later it was, “I just didn’t think what I was doing.”
No one familiar with the whole material of these interviews would have difficulty in seeing plainly that none of these reasons were very pertinent. Pete admitted he had not even spent the money. He had no particular need and no special plans that might call for extra cash. His statement about some impulse is, of course, interesting; but the more Pete discussed this the more evident it became that he was not referring to anything like compulsive behavior in the ordinary psychiatric sense. Apparently he fell upon this remark as upon his other ever-varying explanations in a vague effort to fill out verbally a framework of cause and effect which as human beings we all tend to manufacture when we cannot find it in actuality. There was no specific breathtaking and unbearable drive to do this irrational act, and no vivid fulfillment in its accomplishment. He had done it as a lazy man might swat a fly. Pete was not discovering real motives in himself but reaching at random for plausible or possible reasons that might have influenced some hypothetical person to do what he had done. It was rationalization in the purest sense but not adequate enough to convince the patient himself.
Among dozens of other possible explanations he mentioned that shortly before one of his forgeries he had received a letter from one of his friends in Florida mentioning the friend’s plan for a weekend trip to Miami. Pete recalled a feeling of envy and suggested that he might, childishly, have felt that he, too, would like to have a sort of treat or adventure or break in the routine. By getting this extra money he would, in a vague way, be keeping up with his friend, having a little lark, or indulging himself in a sort of reward or bonus. Or he might think up some way to spend the money that would constitute an equivalent to his friend’s week end of pleasure. Under discussion this, too, broke down as a factor of much pertinence. The envious thought of his friend’s trip had been brief and trivial. It had not preoccupied him or exerted strong or persistent emotional pressure as sometimes such apparently illogical and inadequate factors do exert in human behavior. And he had neither executed nor continued to plan any adventure in which the money might be used or wasted.
The patient realized that all the impulses he mentioned were without strength to drive him into a dangerous or even a mildly unpleasant act. The more one talked with him the more plain it became that he had realized how readily such forgeries could be detected and laid at his feet and that he had, before and during the acts, been far from unaware (intellectually) that serious and undesirable consequences were likely to follow. There was no question of Pete’s having been, in the ordinary sense, merely thoughtless or impulsive. He was not negligent in reason and foresight, but somehow the obvious, and one would think inevitable, emotional response that would inhibit such an act did not play its part in his functioning. There had been no anxious brooding over consequences, no conscious struggle against temptation or overmastering impulse. The consequences occurred to him, but rather casually, and he did not worry about them even to the point of carefully estimating his chances of getting away with the forgeries undetected, or just what penalties he might face. He drifted along, responding to rather feeble impulses but without adequate consideration of consequences.
This boy, as he clearly pointed out, had no inclination to leave college. He had been remarkably free of homesickness and, in fact happier, he said, than ever before in his life. He had chosen the college himself, largely on the basis of renown and social prestige. Though very much smaller, it was regarded by many as more or less equivalent to Harvard or Yale. He had won a scholarship awarded by a civic group in the town where he lived, on the basis of character and all-around qualities rather than on mere superiority in grades. He had no difficulty in passing examinations and obtaining admission at the college of his choice.
In this discussion several points of interest emerged. Until his last year in high school he had planned to go to West Point. There had never been, he admitted, any real interest in military life, and he frankly stated he had never intended to remain in the army
