After reading about the book, The Psychopath Test, Kayt Sukel, a Psychology Today blogger, wondered if psychopaths were, in fact, everywhere. So she asked Joshua Buckholtz, a neuroscientist. He said that psychopathy needed to have meaningful diagnostic boundaries. Buckholtz told her “a true psychopath is going to show high aggression, low empathy and high narcissism in all contexts.”
I wondered about that description. Here at Lovefraud, we know that psychopaths are capable of faking love and concern, quite convincingly, when it suits their purpose. How does the expert account for that?
Read Psychopaths everywhere? on PsychologyToday.com.
Link supplied by a Lovefraud reader.
Da Poeta
I completely agree with the blogger. Even some of my professors treat this diagnosis like a joke and people who suffer from it like “boogeymen”. It’s just ridiculous. It’s a real disorder that we need to start taking seriously, or they’re just going to keep doing what they do. There needs to be a more objective measure of psychopathy and less sensationalized hollywood crap. End rant. 🙂
skylar
The terminology needs to be nailed down. We often say Passive Aggressive when we are talking about COVERT AGGRESSIVE.
Though the spath might engage in some passive aggressive, so do many other people, such as depressed people. Covert aggressive is a spath trait. They plot and manipulate all day long.
I think part of the reason people have a hard time nailing down the traits is because our culture is psychopathic and nobody wants to admit it. We admire traits which lead to winning “AT ANY COST”.
The term, “all is fair in love and war” comes to mind. A psychopath must’ve coined that term. All is NOT fair in love and war.
Ox Drover
You are right there Skylar! Totally 100% right!
Da Poeta
The terminology needs to be gotten rid of all together. The terms psychopath and sociopath are just too stigmatized. And laymen use them regularly without having any idea what they actually mean.
Yeah, most people don’t know the difference between an actual psychopath and someone who acts psychopathically because of the situation. Are they really psychopaths, or just people who got caught up in a lifestyle?
skylar
Da Poeta,
I understand what you mean about lifestyle. I think you are talking about fence sitters. They are people who are empty of morals, values and opinions. So whatever is going on, they just follow along. Though on their own, they wouldn’t necessarily do evil. In fact, even the selfish ones, like my sister can be unselfish when under the right influence. But like, my sister, if a spath comes along and tempts her, she’ll jump right on the band wagon and it FEELS FINE to do evil. In fact, she sees nothing wrong with being evil.
She told me.
😯
behind_blue_eyes
Hence really back to the simplest definition centered around lack of empathy.
20years
It seems to me that there are two kinds of people (not that I like to be so binary usually) who have opinions/definitions of psychopaths/sociopaths: the ones who have studied psychopathy/sociopathy in books or institutions, and the ones who have had personal relationships with it.
I honestly think that the ones who have had personal relationships with it know it best, but each side can learn from the other. It is because we have seen it with its mask off, so we get the “covert” bit. We have had the jarring and dissonant experience of seeing it in different settings, mask on, slipping for an instant (inadvertently or just enough for US to see but no one else… as a sick threat to keep our stress up and make us look crazy)… or mask off altogether (this one done in private).
We talk to each other, we know this is the same play but with different actors, so now we know WE are not crazy or imagining it.
The task now is to get the ivory tower experts to take us seriously, as well as the clueless others who have not (yet) had a personal brush with it or an awakening to it.
slimone
George Simon, the guy who wrote the ‘Character Disturbance’ book has an interesting way of classifying aggressive personalities, from the neurotic (ie, unconscious form) of passive-aggressiveness, through character disturbed aggressives, to full on disordered individuals. I found it really interesting to read about all the different styles of aggression, from ‘reactive’ to ‘predatory’.
Reactive aggression is the kind ‘normal’ folks have to a real threat. Predatory means there is no threat, and the aggression is being used to satisfy the needs of the individual, with intent to victimize others’.
He lists aggression types : Overt, with open attempts to win, dominate, control. Covert, with subtle or concealed attempts of same. Also Active aggression- trying to get something you want by actively doing things and employing tactics to victimize. And, finally, passive- trying to avoid things you DON’T want by resisting cooperation with others.
He chooses the term Predatory Aggressive to describe someone (a personality pattern), who can use ALL of the aggression tactics, as a psychopath, believing them to completely lack any degree of empathy (as Oxy wrote, about empathy existing on a continuum). That is his criteria for a psychopath. Lacking, not limited, empathy.
He observes that disturbed and disordered character individuals display all the same ‘basic’ thinking, attitude, and behavior dysfunction. But the thing he uses to classify them from mildly disturbed in character, to fully disordered is empathy.
Further, he writes that these types can be more antisocial and out of control types: violent, physically abusive, law-breakers. Or they can be like Bernie Madoff, and have the ability to ‘channel’ their aggressions, more readily fitting into society, and flying under the radar of the law.
How he presents it it is pretty simple: empathy, and the degree to which we possess it identifies where any of us fall on the continuum of being character deficient. The more we lack empathy, the more character disturbed we are.
I recommend. Good and interesting read.
Slim
Ox Drover
I also have that book, Slim and started reading it, but put it down before I finished it and read what my late husband would call “chewing gum for the eyes”—just something that is a “story” to sort of take a rest from reading about psychopaths and such.
Went outside today in the sunshine (with a hat and plenty of sun screen) to rake leaves out of the flower beds and blow leaves off the deck. I’ve spent too much time inside and it is time to get OUT!
What I did read of the books was good as for CONTENT and I agree with is theories, but I do find his style of writing somewhat difficult to sift through. It is WORTH it though because the content is VERY good and helps us to realize that NOT ALL PSYCHOPATHS ARE EXACTLY ALIKE, and that there are different kinds of aggression/violence and varying levels of empathy from almost none to too much…Dr. Baron-Cohen also makes this point as well. A lower autistic has little to zero empathy, but they are not violent, whereas a psychopath has very little to zero empathy but they are abusive and violent and have “duping delight”–i.e. enjoying hurting others.
behind_blue_eyes
20years;
I agree with you 100%. The problem is though that Academia is filled with narcissists who don’t like to listen to those without an equivalent “education. In retrospect to my situation with a sociopath, one of the issues was that my psychologist did not quite understand sociopaths. Yes, he saw a manipulative, disordered person, but he saw “borderline” not sociopath.