psychopathy

Maybe they are just arseholes

sychopath I guess is someone “suffering“ from psychopathy. Psychopathy is considered to be a “personality disorder,” and is at this point that we we start entering what I think is a strange world of half-science and half-fiction. When I say fiction, I don’t have in mind the almost infinite library of famous psychopaths, from Elizabeth Báthory, the Hungarian noble serial killer who tortured and drank the blood of her very many female servants, to our good old friend Teddy, whom we seem obliged to revisit every other year. I am talking more about the point at which science examines a personality and declares it to be at least disorderly.

Sure there have beencountless hard science attempts to qualify and quantify psychopathy. Thousands of American prisoners have been wired up to all sorts of devices that measured everything, from brain activity to levels of sweat, the size of the pupil, whilst stimulated with input that ranged from pictures of terrible car accidents to scenes of war, rape, torture and so on. We are certain that the brains of psychopaths react a little bit differently to “ours” to certain stimuli. Some parts of the brain might not be that involved, or might be more involved to certain situations at which a decision has to be made etc. Usually that decision factors in empathy, that very unscientific unit of measurement of something or other. What’s for sure is that if one was to examine biologically the body and brain of Hannibal Lecter and that of an innocent French peasant girl from the 1800s, they wouldn’t find anything to suggest that our good old sophisticated Lithuanian is any different to Charlotte.

Reading in the Washington Post:

In “Twilight of American Sanity,” Frances says the diagnosis requires the patient to experience significant distress because of his condition. But throughout his life, Trump “has been generously rewarded for his Trumpism, not impaired by it,” Frances writes. “Trump is a threat to the United States, and to the world, not because he is clinically mad, but because he is very bad.”

I appreciate this focus on Trump as a political rather than psychoanalytic problem. There is something too simple about dismissing his misdeeds as signs of mental illness; it almost exonerates him, and us. But Frances’s judgment proves even more damning. He trashes Trump as a “secular antichrist,” a “two-bit, would-be Mussolini,” even an instrument of divine vengeance. “If you were assigned the task of punishing humanity for its original sins,” he thunders, “you could do no better than invent a Donald Trump and give him extraordinary power.”

Reading:

• BEHIND THE MASK: THE MYTH OF THE PSYCHOPATH

  The causes of most psychological disorders are believed to arise from a complex relationship between genes, environmental circumstances, and brain anatomy, but most psychopathy researchers are what the authors call “genetic determinists”: Such researchers argue that the flow of causality in psychopathy moves from genes to brain structure to behavior, even though that flow is unproven in the scientific literature on psychopathy.

• What We Get Wrong About Psychopaths

• Pathological power: the danger of governments led by narcissists and psychopaths