I found an interesting article while browsing EBSCOhost for fun (yes, I have "boring" interests sometimes). The article is called "Psychopathy, Sociopathy, and Crime," and it was written by David T. Lykken and published in the first issue of the 34th volume of Society in November/December 1996.
In it, Lykken makes some interesting contentions: that some psychopaths are not dysfunctional. Their characteristic fearlessness and adventuresomeness actually leads them to good roles in society.
Lykken wrote:
As used by the media, "psychopath" conveys an impression of danger and implacable evil. This is mistaken, however, as Cleckley made very clear. Like the unsocialized sociopath, the psychopath is characterized by a lack of the restraining effect of conscience and of empathic concern for other people. Unlike the ordinary sociopath, the primary psychopath has failed to develop conscience and empathic feelings, not because of a lack of socializing experience but, rather, because of some inherent psychological peculiarity that makes him especially difficult to socialize. An additional consequence of this innate peculiarity is that the psychopath behaves in a way that suggests that he is relatively indifferent to the probability of punishment for his actions. This essential peculiarity of the psychopath is not in itself evil or vicious, but combined with perverse appetites or with an unusually hostile and aggressive temperament, the lack of these normal constraints can result in an explosive and dangerous package.
Here Lykken seems to mean that, although all primary psychopaths fail to develop a conscience and empathic feelings for other people, not all of them are "evil." However, in combination with a tendency towards aggression or perverse desires, a psychopath would feel few emotional restraints against acting on their impulses. The distinction is that not all of them have such impulses.Lykken wrote:
In marked contrast to these dangerous characters, and illustrative of why psychologists find such fascination in the psychopath, is the case of Oscar Schindler, the savior of hundreds of Krakow 'Jews, the protagonist of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. Opportunist, bon vivant, ladies's man, manipulator, unsuccessful in legitimate business by his own admission but wildly successful in the moral chaos of wartime, Schindler's rescue of those Jews can be best understood as a thirty-five-year-old man's response to a kind of ultimate challenge: Schindler against the Third Reich. Any swine could kill people under the conditions of that time and place; the real challenge—in the words that his biographer may have put in his mouth, the "real power"—lay in rescuing people, especially in rescuing Jews, Some parts of Spielberg's film do not fit with my diagnosis of Schindler as a primary psychopath, in particular, the scene near the end in which Schindler breaks down in tears while addressing his Jewish workers, British filmmaker Jon Blair, whose earlier documentary film Schindler was truer to history than Spielberg's feature film, noted this same discrepancy. "It was slightly out of character, and, of course, it never actually happened," Blair said.
So Schindler was an unemotional person with many of the traits of a psychopath, yet he chose a good course of action despite his postulated lack of true empathy, possibly for the fun of the challenge.Lykken wrote:
Some other biographies of colorful primary psychopaths include N. von Hoffman's Citizen Cohn, Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, and Daniel Akst's Wonderboy: Barry Minkow, the Kid Who Swindled Wall Street. Some historical figures who, I believe, had the talent for psychopathy but who achieved great worldly success include Lyndon Johnson, Winston Churchill, the explorer Sir Richard Burton, and Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier.
The fact that many of these illustrative characters were not adjudicated criminals reminds us that we are talking here about a class of actors rather than a pattern of actions. Psychopaths are at high risk for engaging in criminal behavior, but not all of them succumb to that risk. Even the identical twins of criminal psychopaths, with whom they share all their genes and many of their formative experiences, do not necessarily become criminal themselves. To mention Churchill, Johnson, Burton, and Yeager in this context may seem especially surprising, but all four set out as daring, adventurous, unconventional youngsters who began playing by their own rules early in life. Talent, opportunity, and plain luck enabled them to achieve success and self-esteem through (mainly) licit rather than illicit means. Johnson and Burton were borderline psychopaths, if we can believe their biographers, while Churchill and Yeager seem merely to have shared what I call the "talent for psychopathy." What I believe to be the nature of this talent will be explicated later in this article.
19 Nov 2005, 6:23 pm
