Word: masking
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Fright. In Pittsburgh, Saloonkeeper Carlo Colombo, 45, looked up from his bar, was frightened to death by a man who entered wearing a mask of Adolf Hitler...
With his face hidden behind a mask made of a ripped Pullman pillowcase (to thwart photographers), Earl Browder stepped off a train last week at Atlanta, Ga. He was shackled to two Negro prisoners, escorted by G-Men. His destination: the U. S. Penitentiary at Atlanta. The Kansas-born Communist leader and onetime Presidential candidate was going to prison for passport fraud. Sentence: four years. By good behavior he could get out in three years, four months...
...never existed, but he might have. His career is a selection of typical incidents from 15 psychopathic case histories vividly presented in The Mask of Sanity (C. V. Mosby Co., St. Louis; $3) by Dr. Hervey Milton Cleckley, professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of Georgia School of Medicine. His case histories read like snatches of William Faulkner rewritten by a less talented hand...
...word "psychopathic" has been kicked around a good deal by the learned doctors. In The Mask of Sanity, Dr. Cleckley tried to show a class of psychopaths which differs clearly from neurotic alcoholics, psychoneurotics, criminal sex offenders, ordinary criminals, differs also from obvious psychotics or lunatics. The mark of his class is an apparently aimless search for disaster, a sort of continual social and spiritual suicide. These semi-suicides are often, but not always, heavy drinkers. But whereas the neurotic drinker -the classic alcoholic-drinks to avoid reality, to escape feelings of failure, humiliation or inferiority, the disaster-seeking psychopath...
...this curious disorder, Dr. Cleckley has coined a fancy name: semantic dementia-meaning inability to grasp the ordinary meaning of life as lived by human beings. It is as though, behind the mask of sanity, the emotional mechanism had collapsed, leaving these semi-suicides incapable of love, joy, sorrow, aspiration, regret. When examined in hospitals, they are often alert, bright, cheerful, amiable, sometimes haughty and aloof; but they usually think very highly of themselves, are always wholly callous to the distress they cause others. To the knowing psychiatrist, their eloquent admissions of error and promises to reform are catchwords which...