The Loeb-Leopold case - The Clarence Darrow Collection

The Loeb-Leopold Case
was approaching adolescence. It was a time when he
was taken from that home shelter, from the shelter
of this governess and from her domination and con-
trol, from the woman who up to that time had
solved all of his problems with the world.
That was gone, and he suddenly was put in an
environment, a fourteen-year-old boy in college,
associated with boys of eighteen, nineteen, twenty
and twenty-one, facing the necessity for meeting life
as these boys and young men were meeting life, and
thereby being put in a position where excessive demands
for adjustment to life would be suddenly
placed on him. He already had started in as a child,
as a schizophrenic personality, whose tendency toward
schizophrenia had been cultured and fostered
by the particular type of care and attention and lack
of understanding which he had received from his
governess. I continue the reading:
We would again emphasize the fact that we are not
here describing dementia praecox, but only a reaction
type. There will, therefore, be no subdivision into the
types of that disease. It will, however, be necessary
to speak of the deterioration, so-called, that seems to be
the logical outcome of the psychosis.
First, it should be said that the intellectual mechanism
remains undamaged, though this is not always easy of
demonstration because the patient is more or less inac-
cessible to study and examination. The difficulty is in-
creased by the fact that absorption in the dream world,
which we find characteristic of the schizophrenic per-
sonality, is here exaggerated to such a degree that the
no