The Language of the Psychopath

Abstract

Personality abnormalities vary considerably in severity of symptoms and degree of maladjustment to society. But as Bromberg (1948) pointed out, “The group that supplies the most comprehensive and unmistakable illustrations of maladjustment to social life comprises those persons referred to as psychopathic personalities” (p. 54). Of all the recognized psychiatric syndromes, that of the antisocial personality, or psychopath, presents perhaps the greatest number of unsolved questions. Although it has long been recognized that each of us possesses an innate capacity for momentary dissociation vis-à-vis the accepted value systems of society and to such a degree is potentially psychopathic, true psychopaths, with their consistently antisocial behavior, present the average observer with a phenomenon so spectacularly alien that it seems almost incredible that such people can exist. And, granted that psychopaths do indeed exist, it is perplexing how they can manage to appear superficially sane, how they are able to wear, as one observer put it, the “mask of sanity.” The true psychopath compels the psychiatric observer to ask the perplexing and largely unanswered question: “Why doesn’t that person have the common decency to go crazy?”¹