Fresh Thinking

Abstract

Fresh Thinking Stewart Justman (bio) Cleckley's Mask of Sanity is indeed a brilliant and seminal work, but to read it is to recognize that the condition delineated in its pages differs importantly from the psychopathy most of us have in mind today, and certainly from the psychopathy Hare had in mind when he devised Psychopathy Checklist-Revised in "an attempt to develop a new research scale for the assessment of psychopathy in prison populations."1 Cleckley's psychopaths stay out of prison as a rule, instead passing into and out of psychiatric hospitals in what Cleckley depicts as an absurd, unending cycle. Such crimes as they commit are almost never crimes of violence, and they appear to Cleckley, and the reader, not so much as threats to society as irritants and provocateurs—dishonest and callous to be sure, but foolish, even preposterous, self-defeating, and not much of a danger to the world around them. Although they do cause trouble, many of their characteristic acts—such as lying, offending decency, stealing from relatives—seem beyond the law's reach, and when they do end up behind bars, it is more likely to be in the local jail than the state prison. They themselves are often the primary loser by their antics (as Cleckley emphasizes), and even the authorities regard them more as nuisances than threats to the community. Like the doctor on a house-call who slithers on the floor like an alligator in a bog, they certainly lack shame; and if they lack guilt as well, they have less to feel guilty about than someone who commits major crimes. Compared with psychopathy as now understood, the deeds of Cleckley's patients read like misbehavior. Cleckley surveys their careers with sympathy, but also with a note of ironic wonderment. The Mask of Sanity first appeared in 1941, and it seems to me likely that the conditions which at that time channeled the enactment of the disorder into the absurdities and improprieties depicted so vividly by Cleckley are no longer in effect. Psychopathy is not only describable by different constructs but may vary with historical conditions. As Widiger and Crego note, "many of the traits emphasized by Cleckley no longer apply … and many traits not recognized by Cleckley have gained prominence." Moreover, the same traits may be expressed differently, which is why people can score high on Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, whose constituent items derive from Cleckley, without resembling Cleckley's absurdists at all. We find many of this sort in Hare's Without Conscience. Certainly, I do not claim that psychopathy is distinguished by a lack of guilt. On the contrary, I conclude explicitly "that antisocial actors may or may not lack guilt—as in the Robins study—and that psychopathy by whatever name should not, therefore, be defined by an imputed incapacity for guilt." It is in an effort to dislodge the stereotype or settled notion that lack of guilt is the psychopathic mark of Cain that I offer many examples, one fictional, of persons who do seem to act like psychopaths but nevertheless show a degree of guilt or moral inhibition. One such is the infamous patriarch of The Brothers Karamazov, held up by Cleckley himself as "remarkably like a psychopath in the full sense" but (as I argue) not necessarily [End Page 113] immune to guilt. Examples or cases have the merit of bringing the discussion down to mother earth, and in that spirit I offer, near the end of my article, the instance of Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land, whose youth was a veritable handbook of warning signs and who seemed destined for a life of violent psychopathy, but comes to lament that he set "such a bad example" for his younger brother. Telling of a youth who appears totally "unable to feel guilt or to learn from experience and punishment" (as DSM-II [which was in effect at the time] puts it) but in time becomes both responsible and concerned for others, his memoir exposes the fallacy of imputing a profound constitutional defect [such as lack of guilt] on the basis of behavior. We should be careful about...