KLEPTOMANIA. — Irresistible impulse to steal, linked to mental illness. Sometimes it may appear in obsessive psychosis (q.v.), driven by the fixed idea that irresistibly takes root in the mind, dominating the course of thought and binding the will (obsessive kleptomania); more frequent in senile dementia, paralytic dementia (q.v.), hysteria (q.v.), manic excitement (demential kleptomania).
Kleptomania unfolds through a sequence of stages: an obsessive idea of theft, growing to an anguished state; an internal struggle to resist the obsessive impulse; the act of theft, which, by its characteristics (illogical, useless, sudden) and by the social and moral standing of the subject, reveals the vice of the will to which it is bound. Immediately after the act comes inner satisfaction from the release of the obsessive state. Kleptomania must be distinguished from the theft committed by the moral madman, who steals in obedience to a disease, thus distinct in terms of ethical perversion.
The vitiated consent of the will removes from the kleptomaniac all legal and moral responsibility.