The Loeb-Leopold case - The Clarence Darrow Collection

The Loeb-Lcopold Case
real world may be entirely ignored and the man may
fail to use his powers of perception and grasp. In consequence,
he establishes only scanty and haphazard memories
of what transpires around him and may thus seem
to have lost his memory.
Now, the evidence here with respect to Richard
Loeb is that he started in as a child to have a
peculiar type of phantasy. He had a phantasy of
being in jail, of being looked at by women through
the bars, that he was in a jail yard with women and
men who were naked, and he felt ashamed.
We have, therefore, in him a peculiar type of
phantasy, which is different from the normal phan-
tasies that everybody has, and which have a very
definite function; they cause the development of
ambition, they cause the development of all those
things which will carry the individual forward.
Ordinarily, normal phantasies will do that. But
a phantasy to be normal must be one that has a
definite relation to the environment of the indi-
vidual. In other words, a small child has phantasies
of being a policeman, of being a fireman, or of being
whatever his father is.
If it is a girl, she phantasies the type of person
her mother is. She phantasies herself as being a
wonderful person. She has all sorts of phantasies
which are noble in character and which tend to the
development, to the maintaining of life, so to speak,
and to the enlargement of the individual.
They are also compensatory. As the individual
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