All 5 Uses of
psychopathic
in
The Devil in the White City
- They later adopted the term "psychopath," used in the lay press as early as 1885 in William Stead's Pall Mall Gazette, which described it as a "new malady" and stated, "Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath."†
p. 87.9 *psychopath = someone with a chronic mental disorder that leads to violent social behavior
- They later adopted the term "psychopath," used in the lay press as early as 1885 in William Stead's Pall Mall Gazette, which described it as a "new malady" and stated, "Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath."†
p. 88.0
- Half a century later, in his path-breaking book The Mask of Sanity, Dr. Hervey Cleckley described the prototypical psychopath as "a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly....So perfect is his reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or how, he is not real."†
p. 88.1
- People exhibiting this purest form of the disorder would become known, in the jargon of psychiatry, as "Cleckley" psychopaths.†
p. 88.2psychopaths = people with a chronic mental disorder that leads to violent social behavior
- It is one of the defining characteristics of psychopaths that as children they lied at will, exhibited unusual cruelty to animals and other children, and often engaged in acts of vandalism, with arson an especially favored act.†
p. 352.4
Definition:
someone with a chronic mental disorder that leads to violent social behavior
(previously a medical diagnosis which is now replaced with "antisocial personality disorder")
(previously a medical diagnosis which is now replaced with "antisocial personality disorder")