Free The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton

ponderings.The physician Benjamin Rush, practicing in America in the early 1800s, provides accounts similar to Pinel’s, of equally abhorrent behaviors and equally untroubled thought processes. To the perpetrators of such actions, Rush accords an “innate preternatural moral depravity,” in which “there is probably an original defective organization in those parts of the body, which are occupied by the moral faculties of the mind.”
    The will, he continues, might be deranged even in “many instances of persons of sound understandings … the will becom[ing] the involuntary vehicle of vicious actions, through the instrumentality of the passions.”
    He anticipated modern neuroscience by a couple of hundred years. The neural tsunami of madness need not, in other words, washapocalyptically up on the crystalline shores of logic. You can be sound of mind and “unsound,” simultaneously.
    Spool forward a century and a half, and across the Atlantic, at the Medical College of Georgia, the American physician Hervey Cleckley provides a more detailed inventory of
la folie raisonnante
.In his book
The Mask of Sanity
, published in 1941, Cleckley assembles the following somewhat eclectic identikit of the psychopath. The psychopath, he observes, is an intelligent person, characterized by a poverty of emotions, the absence of a sense of shame, egocentricity, superficial charm, lack of guilt, lack of anxiety, immunity to punishment, unpredictability, irresponsibility, manipulativeness, and a transient interpersonal lifestyle—pretty much the picture that twenty-first-century clinicians have of the disorder today (though with the aid of lab-based research programs, and the development of techniques such as EEG and fMRI, we’re now beginning to get a better understanding as to why). But interspersed in Cleckley’s portrait are the brushstrokes of what looks like genius. The psychopath is described as having “shrewdness and agility of … mind,” as “talk[ing] entertainingly” and possessing “extraordinary charm.”
    In a memorable passage, Cleckley describes the innermost workings of the minds of these social chameleons, the day-to-day life behind the icy curtain of unfeeling:
    [The psychopath] is unfamiliar with the primary facts or data of what might be called personal values and is altogether incapable of understanding such matters. It is impossible for him to take even a slight interest in the tragedy or joy or the striving of humanity as presented in serious literature or art. He is also indifferent to all these matters in life itself. Beauty and ugliness, except in a very superficial sense, goodness, evil, love, horror, and humor have no actual meaning, no power to move him … He is, furthermore, lacking in the ability to see that others are moved. It is as though he were colorblind, despite his sharp intelligence, to this aspect of human existence. It cannot be explained to him because there is nothing in his orbit of awareness that can bridge the gap with comparison. Hecan repeat the words and say glibly that he understands, and there is no way for him to realize that he does not understand.
    The psychopath, it’s been said, gets the words, but not the music, of emotion.
    I got a distinct taste of what Cleckley was driving at in one of my very first encounters with a psychopath. Joe was twenty-eight, better-looking than Brad Pitt, and had an IQ of 160. Why he’d felt the need to beat that girl senseless in the parking lot, drive her to the darkness on the edge of that northern town, rape her repeatedly at knifepoint, and then slit her throat and toss her facedown in that Dumpster in a deserted industrial park is beyond comprehension. Parts of her anatomy were later found in his glove compartment.
    In a soulless, airless interview suite smelling faintly of antiseptic, I sat across a table from Joe—a million miles, and five years, on from his municipal, blue-collar killing field. I was interested in the way