Have you ever seen a 30 (something) year old mother throw a temper tantrum? Here is my temper tantrum… Yes, I am aware I don’t make as much sense when something angers me, but dang these things are so misleading. I don’t like it when people purposely try to mislead you!
The reading clearly points out the biggest problem with the word psychopath; it doesn’t have a clear and universal meaning. If we break apart the definitions we can see that clearly each behavior is a matter of degree, and while we would assume that for this particular word that would be a severe degree we cannot measure the degree by those words. Therefore, if someone was assessed based upon these definitions, it would depend just as much on the assessor as to the assessed as to if the person was deemed to be a psychopath. Also a clear problem with the definition is that the word assesses a problem, but the person doesn’t have the problem without the actions that create the problem.
I also had a little bit of a problem with the idea expressed that it was a moral problem, as morals are created by a society and breaking the rules of society (no matter how horrible we see them to be) is not a clear method of something being wrong with an individual, as morals are something that we are not born with but taught to observe. A good teacher will teach us the why’s and we will feel guilty if we do not follow the rules of society, but in of themselves the morals are nothing but what we decide they are. An example would be having sex with children, at a point in our own history it was normal to marry and begin having children as soon as possible, by the standards of the day it wasn’t against the rules it was rather normal. However, if a ten year old girl was to marry and have children by the standards of today the people involved would be criminals.
The sections with numbers (i.e. persistent aggression after third grade is predictive of continued aggressiveness & 40% of 8 year olds with conduct disorder are repeatedly convicted) had me searching for my old psychology book. I am not sure where these studies came from, but there are a few leaps that are taken for such conclusive statements to be made. (I didn’t find my psychology book by the way, but I will keep looking.) There is no way to know this information in such definitive numbers, not all aggressiveness in children will be seen, not all will be reported, some will be reported wrongly, and so forth. Then with adults we are assuming the same types of things, which the criminal in fact did the crime (we can say they were convicted, but that isn’t a true indication that they in fact did the behavior), that the person was caught and so forth. In addition to these short comings we once again have labels that are a matter of opinion, not of fact. I am just not comfortable with the way the data is presented. (What was the amount of people that were looked at to come up with these numbers? What was the specific criterion for deciding if someone was “aggressive?” Is it aggressive to get mad and kick a dog? If so how many times must the action be repeated for it to be persistent?)
I did find the brain scans interesting, but once again without knowing the situations I don’t feel they really show anything. If the stimulus was different it would be natural for the “lighted” regions to be different. How many were done to make sure that this was an indication of a biological difference? It is also interesting to know that when brains have trauma a personality can change. However, I wonder what this means for others, after all since we “train” our brains in different ways through the way we learn things and the connections where we learn things does this indicate that we all work this way, or just this man? (Not for the personality change itself, but this type of change to the negative behaviors.)
Cleckley’s characteristics seem to have the same problems mentioned before, they are not specific enough. As you read the list you can see some you have done at some point in your life, at what level does it take you out of a normal range to one that is classified as a psychopath. All in all the reading was interesting, but I just can’t have that much faith in the processes that have been brought up. There are too many holes, and some I am sure could be fixed knowing more about the processes used, but some are quite large problems that make you wonder if they can be fixed at all.
