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IF WE CAN BELIEVE THE TRENDY HEADLINES, PSYCHOPATHS ARE EVERYWHERE!
More psychopaths enter the business field, says one study, than go into education. Another asserts that how psychopaths smell is a dead giveaway, as is their phrasing on Twitter. Bestselling books even show how to spot them-especially if your boss is a psychopath. Many of these studies are flawed, but this constant flow of media attention proves that the topic is popular. Still, the label is becoming nearly as vacuous as it was a century ago.
Although psychopathy was one of the first personality disorders that psychiatry formally recognized, it was difficult during the nineteenth century to devise a workable concept. Alienists described it variously as "insanity without delirium,""moral insanity," and "psychopathic inferiority." It became a "trashcan"label for any number of conditions.
This changed in 1941, when American psychiatrist Hervey M. Cleckley published The Mask of Sanity. He viewed psychopathy as the "most baffling and most fascinating" disorder, so he developed a list of traits and behaviors that built a frame for how we now define it. However, few today know much about Cleckley himself, or that he had a hand in some rather notable cases.
THE PSYCHOPATH
Cleckley was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1903. Not much is written about his early life, but while at the University of Georgia, he won a Rhodes scholarship and attended Oxford University. In medical school, he specialized in psychiatry and neurology. Landing a teaching position at the Medical College of Georgia, he became chief of psychiatry and neurology at University Hospital. Here, he found that one out of eight patients was classifiable as a psychopath.
Cleckley was concerned that psychopathy presented "a sociological and psychiatric problem second to none," in part because psychopaths did not seek treatment and their lack of symptoms precluded detaining them against their will. Even if this could be done, Cleckley observed, there were no provisions in prisons or hospitals for dealing with them. Where clinical assessment and treatment were concerned, psychopaths were on a back burner.
"This group," he wrote, "plainly marked off from the psychotic by current psychiatric standards, does not find a categorical haven among the psychoneurotic." Because the syndrome was difficult to spot from outward symptoms, he thought,...