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Jack was born in 1896 and lived with his parents and two-year-older brother on a farm on the edge of a little country town near the sea. His paternal grandparents came from England, and were normal. Six of their eight children were normal. One daughter after her husband's suicide went into a depression of several months during which she sat quiet with a blank expression and talked strangely. She was kept at home, recovered completely, later married again, and has been well ever since. Jack's father, after the birth of the first son, suffered a “nervous breakdown from overwork on the farm” and was kept in bed for a number of weeks. He has been well since, but is inclined to be “nervous.” On the mother's side the family history is negative.
There seems to have been nothing abnormal about Jack's boyhood except that he was very sensitive. At the age of five he pulled back his foreskin and told of it to another small boy. The latter spread the news, and Jack was greeted by the chanted chorus: “Jacky skinned his dink.” This bothered him horribly; it never occurred to him that perhaps the other little boys had done the same; he only felt he was different and naughty.
His brother Tom was two years older, enough to always be bigger, rougher and stronger, and he never wearied in asserting his superiority. He delighted in stumping the leader and expected Jack to be able to equal his stunts. He bullied Jack too, and although in their fights Jack gave a good account of himself, he felt that he was contending against superior odds and it seemed that the other boys sided with Tom against him. Tom resembled physically the mother and her family while Jack looked like his father. On this account the mother and her relatives favored Tom, while the father and his favored Jack, but since many of his mother's family lived