The Loeb-Leopold case - The Clarence Darrow Collection

The Loeb-Leopold Case
kind, it would be easy to understand. But when
you cannot find in the crime itself anything indi-
cating what ordinary, normal people would under-
stand as a sane reason, then you have a right to
suspect that there is something wrong. But it is not
conclusive yet.
Then they begin to examine, and, as they did in
this case, they get the man to talk about his likes
and his dislikes, his aims, his ambitions, his child
life, his dreams, night dreams and daydreams, and
the good doctor, and all of them told you, that the
phantasies or daydreams were the things that the
child had which compensated him for his disap-
pointments in his daily facing the situations in life.
They compensated him. How? Because if he
was normal he would have daydreams that would
express his wish fulfillment, and they would be
things that would be present to him along natural,
normal lines.
If there was a discrepancy between the emo-
tional life and his intellectual life, you might find
in those phantasies a clue, and if you found morbid
phantasies, diseased phantasies, and if you further
found that they persisted for a long, long time and
finally were projected into reality, you would begin
to get on warm stuff.
But it may be said in reply that these things
could be invented, the phantasies, their operation,
their application. Fortunately, if your Honor
please, as to the phantasies of Dickie Loeb, you re-
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