The mask of sanity
An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality Hervey Cleckley, M.D. Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, Ga.; author of The Caricature of Love and of The Three Faces of Eve (with Corbett H. Thigpen) Fifth Edition: private printing for non-profit educational use EMILY S. CLECKLEY Augusta, Georgia-1988 Fifth Edition Copyright 1988 Emily S. Cleckley Previous edition copyrighted 1941, 1950, 1955, 1964, 1976 by the C.V. Mosby Co. Cleckley, Hervey Milton, 1903-1984 The Mask of Sanity ISBN 0-9621519-0-4 Scanned facsimile produced for non-profit educational use
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What Hacker News says
- One might insightfully argue the whole point of the psychopath is precisely that it doesn't show. I recommend Cleckley, whose definition is seminal in The Mask of Sanity, [1] originally 1941 but prefer his 1988 fifth edition especially for its rather disconsolate preface. But even a cursory review of either will trivially show the comparison does not hold.
[1] https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/personality/psychopathy/194... - despite the filename, this is the 1988 edition. I like my paper edition (I made my paper edition) but the PDF will serve well enough for your reference here.
- Not really. It is ill defined in DSM but if you read Harvey Cleckley "the Mask of Sanity" there is a clear coherent syndrome. Basically it is amoral impulse control disorder.
It shows up on fMRI so it is probably more real than half the things in DSM.
- Passion is fine and great in all endeavors. Not being able to acknowledge when you are wrong in small or large is the problem. And it's a problem for both passionate and dispassionate people.
One of the earlier researchers on psychopaths was Hervey M. Cleckley. In his book on the topic The Mask of Sanity one of his vignettes of, I believe, "incomplete manifestation of psychopathology" was of a psychologist who gave public lectures on psychopaths, without apparently recognizing that he was almost one of them.
To sum up the parallel, there are two kinds of people who tend to talk the most about any social or personal ill: those who are worried about the ill, and those who are distracting from the fact that they themselves embody it. (Technically this probably overlaps a bit, as ex-alcoholics are often worried about alcoholism, for example.)
