Unmasking the Psychopath: Antisocial Personality and Related Symptoms

This book is a "must read" for anyone living in the real world. Everyone, but especially parents, teachers and employers need to be able to identify and protect themselves against sociopathic predators. This is one of several tools available to help cope with these extremely difficult and dangerous people.

This book is a compilation of twelve scholarly articles by different authors. The first article in the book was written by Robert Hare, who is also the author of "Without Conscience", a very readable book for laymen on psychopathy. Dr. Hare's writing style is very clear and to the point, and his work can be read by anyone. Hare writes about how as a young psychologist he worked in the prison system, and began learning about psychopathy in felons. Hare's paper explains what he has learned in twenty years of studying the psychopath. The fifth paper, "Ego Dysfunction in Psychopathic Psychiatric Inpatients" was very interesting to me. This paper delves into the "how" and "why" of psychopathy and validates many of my own thoughts on the subject. Authors Dorr and Woodhall's article states that narcissistic, borderline, and antisocial (psychopathic) personality disorders blend into one another. On the subject of pathological lying: "Patients often seem to exhibit selective perception of reality. When confronted about antisocial behaviors, such as lying, intimidating others, or blatantly manipulative behavior, our patients seemed to have little or no recall of the situation as staff members viewed it." Regarding substance abuse: "All patients abused alcohol and drugs to the extreme." Narcissism: "...most of the patients had such a narcissistic sense of omnipotence that they had great difficulty acknowledging that anyone else was important enough to deserve to be listened to in the first place, especially when the feedback was negative! To be wounded by negative feedback requires seeing others as separate from the self and important in their own right." In "Manipulativeness in Entrepreneurs and Psychopaths" Ethel Spector Person repeats the idea that "there is a continuum between the narcissistic personality and the antisocial personality". If you are interested in personality disorders and psychopathy, and have read the few popular books available on the subject, you may want increase your knowledge by reading this book. I learned a lot.