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Her work would take her away from her family as she flew to reform schools and prisons around the country to research cases or testify for the defense. Lewis has spent her career as a psychiatrist studying murderers and searching for scientific explanations for their behavior. … I was convinced, even as a child, that Hitler could not have been born that way. Now I could never know what made him tick. In Lewis ’ memoir, Guilty by Reason of Insanity: A Psychiatrist Explores the Minds of Killers, she recalls stories of the Nazi dictator hanging over her childhood as “a source of fascination and fear.” She was the only student in her elementary school “who did not rejoice upon hearing of Hitler’s suicide. After all, she was horrified when she watched her uncle slaughter a chicken on their farm in New Jersey. Her interest began in kindergarten, when a precocious desire to understand how a human being could be so cruel led her to try to figure out Adolf Hitler. She felt like an outsider, and she credits that feeling of isolation with her lifelong interest in society’s pariahs. A serious, often sad, child, Dorothy was urged by her mother to be more social: “shorten your skirts be a butterfly.” But young Dorothy never felt much like a butterfly. She was tangled in an ambiguous relationship with her older sister, who liked to hide in dark closets, jump out and scream, “The green witch will get you!” But at other times, she helped Dorothy with her French homework, keeping her a week ahead of her classmates. As children were choosing up sides for a game, she remembers praying, “Please God, let me be picked second to last, not last.” The little girl who was the object of so much teasing at school would once again see her prayers go unanswered.Īt home, things were not always easy. ’63, HS ’70, a clinical professor in the Child Study Center, recalls her childhood in New York City during World War II as painful and awkward.

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