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Mythos and Mental Illness: Psychopathy, Fantasy, and Contemporary Moral Life

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Abstract

Medical accounts of the absence of conscience are intriguing for the way they seem disposed to drift away from the ideal of scientific objectivity and towards fictional representations of the subject. I examine here several contemporary accounts of psychopathy by Robert Hare and Paul Babiak. I first note how they locate the truth about their subject in fiction, then go on to contend that their accounts ought to be thought of as a “mythos,” for they betray a telling uncertainty about where “fact” ends and “fantasy” begins, as well as the means of distinguishing mental health from mental illness in regard to some social roles.

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Notes

  1. P. Pinel, “Section IV: Mental derangement distributed into different species: Second species of mental derangement,” in A Treatise on Insanity (London: Messers Cadell and Davies, Strand, 1806), p. 150).

  2. H. Hervé, “Psychopathy Across the Ages,” in The Psychopath: Theory, Research, and Practice (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007), p. 31.

  3. As defined in the DSM-IV-TR, narcissistic personality disorder, like psychopathy, is defined as a “pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy that begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts” (p. 714). See also M Stout, The Sociopath Next Door (New York: Broadway Books, 2005), pp 27–8.

  4. Foucault came closest to a proleptic critique of the contemporary definition and institutional function of the concept of psychopathy in the essay, “The Dangerous Individual,” in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, trans. A Sheridan et al. (New York: Routledge, 2004), p 148, 151.

  5. When I asked a forensic psychologist how she interpreted category 11 on the PCL-R, “Promiscuous sexual behavior,” she replied that the typical way to handle it was to give a 0 to someone who had about the same number of sexual partners as the rater, a 1 to someone who had a few more partners than the rater, and a 2 to someone who had significantly more partners than the rater.

  6. G. Lombroso-Derrero, Criminal Man According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso (London: Putnam, 1911), p xxv.

  7. The quotation comes from Lombroso’s introduction to the English summary of his masterwork, Criminal Man, published in 1911 by his daughter, Gina Lombroso-Derrero.

  8. I do not mean to suggest here that some ultimate factual certainty about psychopathy, in which the concept is separated clearly and certainly from “fantasy,” might be attainable, and that clinicians such as Babiak and Hare have failed to attain it. Rather, my aim is to note how remarkably unclear and uncertain the fact/fantasy distinction becomes in spite of clinicians’ claims to scientific objectivity, and then to probe this lack of clarity and certainty, this blurring of discourses that I characterize as a mythos, for insights into some prominent features of contemporary moral life.

  9. This short list is, of course, by no means comprehensive, but it gives some sense of the marketability of guides to detecting and dealing with dangerously antisocial individuals. See also D. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind is Designed to Kill (New York: Penguin, 2005).

  10. N. Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterology (New York: Harmony, 1990), pp 6–7.

  11. See K. Haltunnen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 36.

  12. M. Seltzer, True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 16.

  13. R.D. Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p 2; italics added. Subsequent references to this work appear in the text.

  14. P. Babiak and R.D. Hare, Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Goes to Work (New York: Harper Collins 2006), p xiii. Subsequent references to this work appear in the text.

  15. P. Babiak, “From Darkness Into the Light: Psychopathy in Industrial and Organizational Psychology,” in The Psychopath: Theory, Research and Practice, eds. H Herve and JC Yuille (London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associations, 2007), p 412. Subsequent references to this work appear in the text.

  16. P.D. Kramer, Against Depression (New York: Viking, 2005), p. 10.

  17. Ibid., 92.

  18. A. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2003), 2.

  19. Ibid., 30.

  20. L. Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 16.

  21. C. Guignon, On Being Authentic (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 44.

  22. Ibid., 82–3.

  23. R.D. Hare, Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (Toronto: Multi-Health Systems, Inc., 1991), p. 2.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Toronto, 910 2nd Street West, Northfield, MN, 55057, USA

    Geoff Hamilton

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  1. Geoff Hamilton
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Correspondence to Geoff Hamilton.

Appendix

Appendix

The Psychopathy Checklist—Revised

  1. 1.

    Glibness/superficial charm

  2. 2.

    Grandiose sense of self worth

  3. 3.

    Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom

  4. 4.

    Pathological lying

  5. 5.

    Conning/manipulative

  6. 6.

    Lack of remorse or guilt

  7. 7.

    Shallow affect

  8. 8.

    Callous/lack of empathy

  9. 9.

    Parasitic lifestyle

  10. 10.

    Poor behavioural controls

  11. 11.

    Promiscuous sexual behaviour

  12. 12.

    Early behaviour problems

  13. 13.

    Lack of realistic, long-term goals

  14. 14.

    Impulsivity

  15. 15.

    Irresponsibility

  16. 16.

    Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

  17. 17.

    Many short-term marital relationships

  18. 18.

    Juvenile delinquency

  19. 19.

    Revocation of conditional release

  20. 20.

    Criminal versatility22

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Hamilton, G. Mythos and Mental Illness: Psychopathy, Fantasy, and Contemporary Moral Life. J Med Humanit 29, 231–242 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-008-9066-0

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