Pilfering Urges

Is shoplifting an illness?

In the early 1950s, Lady Isobel Barnett, wife of the lord mayor of Leicester, became a celebrity in Britain as a panelist on the BBC's version of What's My Line? Last month Lady Barnett, 62 and widowed ten years, faced a panel herself: a jury considering charges that she shoplifted a tin of tuna and a carton of cream worth about $2. She admitted slipping the items into a cloth bag pinned inside her coat, but insisted it was an oversight, and she told the court the cloth bag was where she kept a flashlight as protection against muggers. Lady Barnett was convicted and sentenced to pay $650 in fines and court costs. Said she: "I have only myself to live with, and I can live with myself." Four days later, she was found electrocuted in her bath, apparently a suicide.

The story was front-page news in Britain. The day after her death, one tabloid ran a purported interview with Lady Barnett, complete with the headline "PLEASE HELP ME--I CAN'T STOP STEALING." The shopkeeper who had turned in Barnett received abusive letters. Wrote Novelist Penelope Mortimer, in the Evening Standard: "Isobel Barnett's disguise had been cracking for some time. No woman of her intelligence steals so clumsily unless she wants to get caught."

Amidst all the hoopla, one main question emerged: Is compulsive shoplifting an emotional disorder or just common thievery? Daily Mail Columnist Lynda Lee-Potter said she had interviewed dozens of alleged women shoplifters and found a strong pattern: most were widowed or emotionally neglected by their husbands, and they felt no sense of dishonesty; the thefts were frequently a thrilling escape from monotony and depression, and occasionally were sexually arousing. According to Lee-Potter, one woman told her, "I got an orgasm every time I slipped something into my handbag."

Psychiatrists think that kleptomania--compulsive theft for neurotic rather than economic motives--is a symptom of many different kinds of emotional stress, so they have no standard profile of the kleptomaniac. Many say the disorder is associated with depression and a sense of entitlement; the shoplifter is in effect saying, "I have been treated so harshly that I deserve the things I take." Says New York City Psychologist Donald Kaplan: "It is a kind of unconscious moral reasoning, demanding restitution." Adds Vanderbilt University Psychiatrist Pietro Castelnuovo-Tedesco, "They feel they have been victims of theft in the past, and they are simply evening the score."

Other psychiatrists reject the guilt free explanation and insist that the disorder involves heavy guilt, compulsive risk-taking and the desire to be caught. Says Jon E. Gudeman, psychiatrist at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center: "Some feel unworthy and feel a need to be punished." Irene Stiver, a psychologist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., says that many well-off patients in therapy admit to kleptomania, but only after several months of treatment. "It is the risk-taking," she says, "the excitement of getting away with something." Maurice Lipsedge, a consultant psychiatrist at Guy's Hospital in London, thinks shoplifting by women has a good deal in common with male exhibitionism: both are risky acts indulged in by the middleaged, and usually lead to punishment that comes somehow as a great relief. Says Lipsedge: "It's akin to any high-risk activity, like gunrunning or gambling."

Many in Britain think shoplifters should be offered special treatment, perhaps a discreet warning for a first offense. But dissenters argue that given such an opening, every thief would quickly develop symptoms of kleptomania when caught in the act. Whatever effect Lady Barnett's death may have on the reform of shoplifting laws, some noncompulsive thieves added a ghoulish touch to the debate: while members of her family were attending a memorial service, thieves broke into Lady Barnett's manor house near Leicester and stole $14,400 worth of silver.

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