Read Online Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior by Robert I. Simon - Free Book Online Page A

antisocial activities, or simply people that they plainly dislike. Dr. Cleckley’s original research demonstrated long ago that the antisocial behavior of common criminals and the antisocial behavior of psychopaths are different. Criminals often have standards that they will not go beyond, or families to whom they will never be disloyal. Although it may seem contradictory, some nonpsychopathic criminals have principles and a conscience. An example of this distinction can be made in the case of a career criminal who is surprised in the middle of a robbery and kills two officers to escape capture and imprisonment; he views killing or being killed, which he regrets, as an unavoidable occupational hazard both for himself and the police. The criminal psychopath who kills does so casually, or even for no apparent reason. He feels absolutely no remorse, nor does he give the killing a second thought beyond maneuvering to avoid the consequences.
    Psychopaths can be passive or aggressive. Passive psychopaths tend to be parasitic and exploitative of others, whereas aggressive psychopaths commit major crimes. Passive psychopaths (referred to as passive-parasitic, exploitative, or predatory) have frequent scrapes with the law but usually manage to squirm out of serious trouble and punishment. Passive psychopaths commit mostly white-collar crimes. The more aggressive ones, particularly the sexually sadistic, may commit serial sexual murders. Their need for constant stimulation through sexual arousal appears to be a motivating factor in their crimes.
    For the most part, however, the average, everyday psychopath among us (and within us) appears to the outside world as a model of normality. As Cleckley wrote,
    There is nothing odd or queer about him, and in every respect he tends to embody the concept of a well-adjusted, happy person…. He looks like the real thing…. More than the average person, he is likely to seem free from minor distortions, peculiarities, and awkwardness so common even among the successful…. Everything about him is likely to suggest desirable and superior human qualities, a robust mental health.
    Today, psychiatric clinicians question some of the qualities Cleckley attributed to the psychopath. For example, we no longer agree that psychopaths are charming. Some of them, particularly the aggressive ones, have all the charm of a rattlesnake. Dr. Otto F. Kernberg, a widely respected psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, believes that persons with antisocial personality disorder are basically suffering from a severe type of narcissistic personality disorder. They form only exploitative relationships and lack moral principle. Roughly defined, the psychiatric concept of narcissism refers to a person’s sense of selfimportance and uniqueness. Narcissism may be healthy or pathological. In the psychopath, it is pathological in the extreme and is malignantly transformed into living, breathing evil.
    Pathological Relationships and the Emptiness Within
    As noted above, the psychopath typically manifests pathological selfimportance, or narcissism, displayed as excessive self-centeredness. Other characteristic traits are grandiosity (displayed as nonsexual exhibitionism), recklessness, overambitiousness, an attitude of superiority, overdependency on admiration, and, alternating with these characteristics, bouts of insecurity and emotional shallowness. The reckless grandiosity of psychopaths usually causes them to fail at any enterprise, often spectacularly. Clinicians sometimes quip that psychopaths “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory,” and that for psychopaths, “nothing succeeds like failure.” The two fundamental distinguishing characteristics of psychopaths are the inability to feel ordinary human empathy and affection for others and the perpetrating of repeated antisocial acts.
    Why do some people do these terrible things? We now know that empathy has something to do with an anatomical structure, mirror neurons; these