Characterization of Psychopaths

• (Hervey Cleckley) The psychopath is an intelligent person, characterized by a poverty of emotions, the absence of a sense of shame, egocentricity, superficial charm, lack of guilt, lack of anxiety, immunity to punishment, unpredictability, irresponsibility, manipulativeness, and a transient interpersonal lifestyle

  “What the psychopath believes he needs to protest against turns out to be no small group, no particular institution, or set of ideologies, but human life itself. In it he seems to find nothing deeply meaningful or persistently stimulating, but only some transient and relatively petty pleasant caprices, a terribly repetitious series of minor frustrations, and ennui

  Like many teenagers, saints [author’s emphasis], history-making statesmen, and other notable leaders or geniuses, he shows unrest: he wants to do something about the situation.”

• (Alan Harrington) The psychopath, is the “new man”: a psychological superhero free from the shackles of anxiety and remorse. He is brutal, bored, and adventurous. But also, when the situation demands it, beatific

• The defining characteristics (from the Big Five Model of personality) of Psychopaths tie into Neuroticism and Agreeableness.

• From the Psychopathic Personality Inventory, the following characterize psychopathic personality:

  • Self Centered Impulsivity
    • Machiavellian Egocentricity
    • Impulsive Nonconformity
    • Blame Externalization
    • Carefree Nonplanfulness
  • Fearless Dominance
    • Fearlessness
    • Social Potency
    • Stress Immunity
  • Coldheartedness

• Language, for psychopaths, is only word deep. There’s no emotional contouring behind it. A psychopath may say something like ‘I love you,’ but in reality, it means about as much to him as if he said ‘I’ll have a cup of coffee.’ … This is one of the reasons why psychopaths remain so cool, calm, and collected under conditions of extreme danger, and why they are so reward-driven and take risks.

• Psychopaths exhibit a marked absence of feeling, a singular lack of understanding others.

  • On the outside they seem so ordinary. Yet scratch beneath the surface, peek inside the crawl space, as it were, and you never know what you might find
  • The pattern of neural activation in both psychopaths and normal people is pretty well matched on the presentation of impersonal moral dilemmas—but dramatically diverges when things start to get a bit more personal.
  • Dazzling and remorseless on the one hand. Glacial and unpredictable on the other
  • That said, when emotions are the primary focus, psychopaths can show a normal emotional response.

They survive by moving around. They don’t have the same need for close relationships that
normal people do. So they live in an orbit of perpetual drift, in which the chances of running into their victims again is minimized.

But they can also turn on the charm. Which, in the short or medium term, at least, allows them to stay in one place for a sufficient length of time to allay suspicion—and cultivate victims. 

This extraordinary charisma—and it
borders, in some cases, on the supernatural: even though you know they’re cold as ice, and would kill you as soon as look at you, you sometimes just can’t help liking them—acts as a kind of psychological smoke screen that
masks their true intentions.

Links §

• The Wisdom of Psychopaths — What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success by Kevin Dutton