Kleptomania

“ The word kleptomania is used to indicate the habit of stealing, by those persons with whom wealth precludes the ordinary temptation to the act. Certain women of position are regularly watched by clerks in stores because they are known to carry off laces, ribbons, etc., when they fancy themselves unobserved. ”

“ His fingers gripped at the air as he spoke.
"Paul," he begged hysterically, "don't give me away! I give you my word of honor—I give you my word as a Porthoning—I can't help it! You know what they call the damned thing when women have it—kleptomania, isn't it? I tell you I can't see these things without that same horrible, fascinating, cruel instinct! My hands are on them before I know it. But——" he broke off. "It's sending me mad, Paul; for, as I live, I never put hands on that brooch!" ”

“ With him moral insanity, dipsomania, kleptomania were psychiatric myths and misnomers invented to shield depravity and crime. He fought out his convictions on this line throughout a vigorous life, and, carrying these triumphantly into the forum often won there popular acquiescence, as in the case of Guiteau." To him belongs the credit of establishing in this country a microscopic study of the brain; that which made the Utica asylum a great school of instruction. ”

“ The nobleman to whom I referred makes no objection to being thus deprived of his booty; which, for one thing, appears to show that the temptation is intermittent, and partakes at least of the character of a disease."
"But are there not diseases which are only so much the worse diseases that they are not intermittent?" said Miss Clare. "Is it not hard that the privileges of kleptomania should be confined to the rich? You never hear the word applied to a poor child, even if his father was, habit and repute, a thief. ”

“ It is true that many in this group of offenders leave off the habit when they grow older—that is, outgrow it; still there are others who become habitual thieves when older and finally are detected and remanded to some penal institution. One form of stealing is known as kleptomania, an abnormal disposition to steal. This will not be discussed here, more than to say that a child who is a kleptomaniac should not be kept in a public school, but placed under a private tutor who can give especial and continual attention to the cure of his habit or, more properly speaking, his malady. ”

“ We never think of punishing the grocer for selling unhealthy but palatable food, but we are very severe on the men who sell palatable but demoralizing drink. Men have frequently been cured of kleptomania by a term in jail, and of lying and loafing by the contempt of the people among whom they live, and the same rule applied to drunkards would be equally satisfactory in its results. ”

“ Kleptomania.—A marked propensity to theft. “There are persons,” says Rush, “who are moral to the highest degree as to certain duties, but who, nevertheless, lie under the influence of some vice. In one instance, a woman was exemplary in her obedience to every command of the moral law except one—she could not refrain from stealing. ”

“ Now this, as I think, suggests the problem which puzzles us at times. A man develops some vicious propensity, for which we were quite unprepared. In some cases, perhaps, he may show homicidal mania or kleptomania, or some of the other manias which physicians have discovered in late years. They say, though the lawyers are rather recalcitrant, that a man suffering from such a mania is not "responsible" ”

“ That is, I have not the same right to give away foolishly that I have to keep wisely."
"Then," resumed Roger, who had evidently been pondering what Lady Bernard had previously said, "you would consider what is called kleptomania as the impulse to steal transmitted by a thief-ancestor?"
"Nothing seems to me more likely. I know a nobleman whose servant has to search his pockets for spoons or forks every night as soon as he is in bed."
"I should find it very hard to define the difference between that and stealing," said Miss Clare, now first taking a part in the conversation. ”

“ But the nervosity of the present day stimulates, on the contrary, erotic kleptomania. People steal one another, now from the same kind of hysteria which makes thieves of Parisian ladies in the fashionable stores ”

“ On the one hand, even if in the Fijian there were disease, the question of insanity could not arise in regard to a matter considered by his society to be one of indifference. It would be absurd to talk of homicidal mania, of nymphomania, and of kleptomania, as forms of insanity, where murder, promiscuous intercourse, and stealing are not condemned. On the other hand, the assumption that insanity is always due to disease is not merely an unproved, but an improbable supposition. There must, of course, be some defect of organism ”

“ It is the pleasure and excitement of stealing, not the desire for the object stolen, which distinguishes the kleptomaniac from the ordinary thief. Usually the kleptomaniac is a woman, with an insane desire to steal for the mere sake of stealing. The morbid craving for excitement which is at the bottom of so many motiveless and useless crimes, again and again has driven apparently sensible men and women to ruin and even to suicide. ”

“ If a woman possessed an "ego" she would have the sense of property both in her own case and that of others. The thieving instinct, however, is much more developed in men than in women. So-called "kleptomaniacs" (those who steal without necessity) are almost exclusively women. Women understand power and riches but not personal property. When the thefts of female kleptomaniacs are discovered, the women defend themselves by saying that it appeared to them as if everything belonged to them. ”

“ If they are less able to resist in such things, they are equally less able to resist in other things. In handling those thefts which were formerly called kleptomaniac, and which, in spite of the refusal to use this term, are undeniable, it is customary, if they recur repeatedly, to see whether pregnancy is not the cause. It is well to consider also the influence of menstruation. ”

“ Not a small number of these would-be thieves are kleptomaniacs, and mostly women suffering under diseases peculiar to the sex, or women in a state of pregnancy, whose blood is more or less driven in unusual quantities into the head, and stirs there passions and desires which they never so feel at other times. ”

“ The announcement that a child of ten years old, recently described by the Willesden magistrate as "a remarkable example of a child kleptomaniac," has been handed over to an eminent specialist in psycho-pathology, has not yet received the attention that it undoubtedly demands. It is true that, in the beautifully alliterative phrase of one of our contemporaries, "with the exception of a penchant for petty peculations" the young offender "has always been a model girl, industrious and truthful," thus justifying the belief of the eminent specialist, that he could "wipe out the original sin" in her. ”

“ No thief, for example, is such an utter thief—so good a thief—as the kleptomaniac. Until he has become a kleptomaniac, and can steal a horse as it were by a reflex action, he is still but half a thief, with many unthievish notions still clinging to him. ”

“ She steals something she does not need, and she is therefore held to be a kleptomaniac and not responsible.
The poor woman who steals something she actually needs is not a kleptomaniac. I have no doubt that the rich woman who could not resist shop-lifting is a kleptomaniac. ”

“ Then came the kleptomaniacs, who stole from a perverse desire, a new sort of nervous affection which a mad doctor had classed, proving the results of the temptation provided by the big shops. In the last place must be counted the women in an interesting condition, whose robberies were of a special order. ”

“ The painful accuracy which makes some men such deadly bores is a form of monomania. It is the same sort of trouble which afflicts a kleptomaniac. She will steal the veriest trash, just so she can be stealing. He hoards the most useless trifles until his mind is nothing but a garret filled with isolated bits of rubbish that nobody wants to hear, unless one has an essay to write ”

“ For, heartless as man is at times, he detests the idea of prosecuting a woman for the commission of a petty theft, when the end, for her, means the penitentiary. In very many, perhaps the majority of, cases he will be satisfied if his goods are recovered, and permit the thief to go unpunished. This is very frequently the case with that class of shop-lifters called, by courtesy, the "kleptomaniac,"—the wealthy lady who steals what she could easily have purchased. ”

“ Every thought entirely filling our mind becomes true for us and tends to transform itself into action.
Thus if you can make a sick person think that her trouble is getting better, it will disappear; if you succeed in making a kleptomaniac think that he will not steal any more, he will cease to steal, etc., etc. ”

“ Drummond, in presenting you with better evidence than even your own stool pigeon could possibly have given you under the circumstances."
She paused.
"For myself," she concluded, "I claim Kitty Carr. I claim the right to take her, to have her treated for her—her disease. I claim it because the real shoplifter, the queen of the shoplifters, Annie Grayson, has worked out a brand-new scheme, taking up a true kleptomaniac and using her insanity to carry out the stealings which she suggested—and safely, to this point, has profited by!" ”

“ Ferrero, who takes a most unfavorable view of her character and personality, nevertheless explains the secret of her fascination:
Herself utterly cold and callous, insensitive by nature to the flame of true devotion, Cleopatra was one of those women gifted with an unerring instinct for all the various roads to men's affections. She could be the shrinking, modest girl, too shy to reveal her half-unconscious emotions of jealousy and depression and self-abandonment, or a woman carried away by the sweep of a fiery and uncontrollable passion. ”

“ I was overcome; thinking of the morrow night, shame and sorrow smote me. I, her friend!—I, whose assassin dagger lay against my breast! I bent my head, and a sob or a groan, I know not which, burst from the agony of my heart.
But Cleopatra, thinking only that I was moved beyond myself by the surprise of her graciousness, smiled sweetly, and said:
“It grows late; to-morrow night when thou bringest the auguries we will speak again, O my friend Harmachis, and thou shalt answer me.” ”

“ The anxiety excited in the mind of the spectator lest Philoctetes should be deprived of his last means of subsistence, his bow, would be too painful, did he not from the beginning entertain a suspicion that the open-hearted and straight-forward Neoptolemus will not be able to maintain to the end the character which, so much against his will, he has assumed. Not without reason after this deception does Philoctetes turn away from mankind to those inanimate companions to which the instinctive craving for society had attached him. ”

“ I said wearily, for now I remembered.
"It is nothing," she answered carelessly. "After all, thou art my cousin; also, I love nursing—it is a woman's trade. Like enough I had done as much for any slave. Now, too, that the danger is past, I leave thee."
"Thou hadst done better to let me die, Charmion," I said after a while, "for life to me can now be only one long shame. Tell me, then, when sails Cleopatra for Cilicia?"
"She sails in twenty days, and with such pomp and glory as Egypt has never seen. ”

“ Also I heard how the galley that was sent to search for the vessel which carried the Syrian merchant had foundered with all her crew, and the tale that the Queen's astronomer, Harmachis, had flown to Heaven from the roof of the house at Tarsus. And the sailors wondered because I sat and laboured and would not sing their ribald song of the loves of Cleopatra. For they, too, began to fear me, and mutter concerning me among themselves. Then I knew that I was a man accursed and set apart—a man whom none might love. ”

“ For to come low after being great is to learn all shame. Unhappy, therefore, are the Great, for they may fall!
I turned upon the slave with so fierce a word that, cur-like, he sprang behind me; then I passed on to the Alabaster Hall, and was admitted by the guards. In the centre of the hall, near the fountain, sat Cleopatra, and with her were Charmion and the Greek girl Iras, and Merira and other of her waiting-ladies. ”

“ Laugh at yourself, Kelpie. ’Tis the cure for all ills, and it is in my mind that perhaps most evil is caused by folk who take themselves too seriously.”
“You’re daft,” said Kelpie and turned away uncertainly. She should be off about her business and leave Alex to his fate. ”

“ His eyes lighted on the picture of Cleopatra, which hung above the mirror of the dressing-table.
“That’s it!” he cried, with instant conviction. “She looked at that beautiful face and then in the mirror, at her plain features, and she involuntarily cried out for the beauty denied her! Poor woman, to live all her lonely, hungry life, surfeited with wealth yet unable to buy the fairness she craved!” ”

“ Clephane wondered what they had to tell.
Leaning against one of the piers of the nave she evoked all those imaginary confessions, and thought how trivial, how childish they would seem, compared to what she carried in her breast.... What a help it must be to turn to somebody who could tell one firmly, positively what to do—to be able to lay down one’s moral torture like a heavy load at the end of the day! Dr. Arklow had none of the authority which the habit of the confessional must give. ”