Excerpt: ...defensive denials of delinquency. We were asked to decide about this girl's mentality and to give recommendations for her treatment. We need take little space for describing the case because the facts of development and heredity and of earliest mental experiences are not known by us. The case is worthy of short description as exemplifying a type and as showing once more the frequent correlation of lying with other delinquency, and especially with sex immorality. We found a girl in good physical condition, small ...
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Excerpt: ...defensive denials of delinquency. We were asked to decide about this girl's mentality and to give recommendations for her treatment. We need take little space for describing the case because the facts of development and heredity and of earliest mental experiences are not known by us. The case is worthy of short description as exemplifying a type and as showing once more the frequent correlation of lying with other delinquency, and especially with sex immorality. We found a girl in good physical condition, small for her age, but without sensory defect or important organic trouble. Hutchinsonian teeth. High forehead and well formed features. Expression old for her years and rather shrewd, and notably unabashed. No evidence of pelvic trouble. Clitoris large. All the other examination negative. Mentally we found her rather precocious. Tests well done. Reads and does arithmetic well for her age, in spite of much changing about and other school disadvantages. No evidence whatever of aberration. The examiner noted that she seemed a queer, sophisticated child, laughing easily and talking fast and freely. Evidently tries to put her best foot forward. Cooperates well on tests. On the Aussage' test this little girl did remarkably well both as to the details and general ideas expressed in the picture. Absolutely no suggestibility shown. The examination was made before our later methods of scoring this test, and the inaccuracies were not counted, but even so the positive features are of interest, namely, the good memory and non-suggestibility . We found this youngster all along to be evasive, shifting and self-contradictory, even on vital points. She glibly stated anything that came into her mind, and ideas came very rapidly. She told us stories that with a moment's thought she must have known we could discover were false. This child was a foundling, and was adopted by people whose family was broken up by death when she was about 6 years old. By the time she...
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