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In the course of a quarrel, Mark, who was nineteen years old, shot his brother William, about two years younger than he, and his friend, Ferdinand, approximately the same age.
Read before The Chicago Academy of Criminology, April 9, 1936. Originally published in “Die Psychoanalytische Bewegung,” Vol. II, January, 1930. Translated by Betsey Libbey.
Mark was sentenced to a long term of imprisonment. In this sentence great weight was placed upon the fact that some months before the murder he had bought a revolver in the criminal quarter where he loafed about freely and that he had practised target shooting.
Mark made two confessions but later he withdrew the second one. According to the first statement he was with his brother William and his friend Ferdinand in his parents' apartment. His brother reproached him for the disorderly condition in which he left the bookshelf. A quarrel arose, then a fight, in the course of which in a senseless rage he shot at his brother and then at Ferdinand who intervened. According to the second statement, he had shot first at his friend Ferdinand and only then at his brother who rushed in at that moment. In this second statement he explained that his excitement had been caused by the slanderous remarks which Ferdinand is said to have made about Mark's former girl friend. The cou