Jeffrey Dahmer. Ted Bundy. Hannibal Lecter. These are the
psychopaths whose stunning lack of conscience we see in the movies and in
tabloids. Yet, as this report makes abundantly clear, these predators,
both male and female, haunt our everyday lives at work, at home, and in
relationships. Here's how to find them before they find you.
She met him in a laundromat in London. He was open and friendly and they hit it off right away. From the start she thought he was hilarious. Of course, she'd been lonely. The weather was grim and sleety and she didn't know a soul east of the Atlantic.
"Ah, travelers' loneliness," Dan crooned sympathetically over
dinner. "It's the worst."
After dessert he was embarrassed to discover he'd come without his
wallet. She was more than happy to pay for dinner. At the pub, over
drinks, he told her he was a translator for the United Nations. He was,
for now, between assignments.
They saw each other four times that week, five the week after. It
wasn't long before he had all but moved in with Elsa. It was against her
nature, but she was having the time of her life.
Still, there were details, unexplained, undiscussed, that she
shoved out of her mind. He never invited her to his home; she never met
his friends. One night he brought over a carton filled with tape
recorders—plastic-wrapped straight from the factory, unopened; a few days later they were gone. Once she came home to find three televisions stacked in the corner. "Storing them for a friend," was all he told her. When she pressed for more he merely shrugged.
Once he stayed away for three days and was lying asleep on the bed
when she came in midmorning. "Where have you been?" she cried. "I've been so worried. Where were you?"
He looked sour as he woke up. "Don't ever ask me that," he snapped. "I won't have it."
"What—?"
"Where I go, what I do, who I do it with—it doesn't concern you, Elsa. Don't ask."
He was like a different person. But then he seemed to pull himself
together, shook the sleep off, and reached out to her. "I know it hurts
you," he said in his old gentle way, "but I think of jealousy as a flu,
and wait to get over it. And you will, baby, you will." Like a mother cat licking her kitten, he groomed her back into trusting him.
One night she asked him lightly if he felt like stepping out to the corner and bringing her an ice cream. He didn't reply, and when she
glanced up she found him glaring at her furiously. "Always got everything you wanted, didn't you?" he asked in a strange, snide way. "Any little thing little Elsa wanted, somebody always jumped up and ran out and bought it for her, didn't they?"
"Are you kidding? I'm not like that. What are you talking
about?"
He got up from the chair and walked out. She never saw him
again.
There is a class of individuals who have been around forever and
who are found in every race, culture, society and walk of life.
Everybody has met these people, been deceived and manipulated by them,
and forced to live with or repair the damage they have wrought. These
often charming—but always deadly—individuals have a clinical name: psychopaths. Their hallmark is a stunning lack of conscience; their game is self-gratification at the other person's expense. Many spend time in prison, but many do not. All take far more than they give.
The most obvious expressions of psychopathy—but not the only ones—involve the flagrant violation of society's rules. Not
surprisingly, many psychopaths are criminals, but many others manage to
remain out of prison, using their charm and chameleon-like coloration to
cut a wide swathe through society, leaving a wake of ruined lives
behind them.
A major part of my own quarter-century search for answers to this
enigma has been a concerted effort to develop an accurate means of
detecting the psychopaths among us. Measurement and categorization are, of course, fundamental to any scientific endeavor, but the implications of being able to identify psychopaths are as much practical as academic. To put it simply, if we can't spot them, we are doomed to be their victims, both as individuals and as a society.
My role in the search for psychopaths began in the 1960s at the
psychology department of the University of British Columbia. There, my
growing interest in psychopathy merged with my experience working with
psychopaths in prison to form what was to become my life's work.
I assembled a team of clinicians who would identify psychopaths in
the prison population by means of long, detailed interviews and close
study of file information. From this eventually developed a highly
reliable diagnostic tool that any clinician or researcher could use and
that yielded a richly detailed profile of the personality disorder called psychopathy. We named this instrument the Psychopathy Checklist
(Multi-Health Systems; 1991). The checklist is now used worldwide and
provides clinicians and researchers with a way of distinguishing, with
reasonable certainty, true psychopaths from those who merely break the
rules.
What follows is a general summary of the key traits and behaviors
of a psychopath. Do not use these symptoms to diagnose yourself or
others. A diagnosis requires explicit training and access to the formal
scoring manual. If you suspect that someone you know conforms to the
profile described here, and if it is important for you to have an expert
opinion, you should obtain the services of a qualified (registered)
forensic psychologist or psychiatrist.
Also, be aware that people who are not psychopaths may have some of the symptoms described here. Many people are impulsive, or glib, or cold and unfeeling, but this does not mean that they are psychopaths. Psychopathy is a syndrome—a cluster of related symptoms.
Tags:
behavior,
carton,
dessert,
drinks,
elsa,
everyday lives,
few days,
forensic psychology,
hannibal lecter,
laundromat,
predator,
predators,
psychopaths,
psychopathy,
tabloids,
tape recorders,
ted bundy,
televisions,
time of her life,
translator,
violence,
wallet
