Hitler had ordinary relationships with a number of people contrary to myth, as did Stalin. The historian, Ellie Cawthorne, points out he was politically psychopathic but there is no evidence he was clinically psychopathic.
I have long queried the diagnosis over a number of years and the very concept, which is popularly accepted. One problem is, we know nothing of people conceived of as psychopathic and usually know only their behaviour at some point or other. Stereotypes of the condition are well known-such as Hannibal Lecter. I also suggest that such categorising does not really help us understand human nature but distract from developing our understanding. Such understanding is one dimensional.
The concept tends to separate apparently violent individuals from the rest of us. We are not violent they are. They are a special kind of human being called psychopaths-the direct opposite indeed of seers and saints. But people are made up of many things. Saints were and are saints only for part of the time. .
"One problem is, we know nothing of people conceived of as psychopathic and usually know only their behaviour at some point or other. "
There is a distinction to be made between movie psychopathy and psychopathy as an actual personality trait. Like many stereotypes, it is (thankfully!) very wide of the mark.
We do, in fact, know a lot about people who are to some extent psychopathic. I'd look at the literature on what is called the "Dark Triad", three personality traits that are characterised by callousness, which is described as acting without taking into account the anticipated effects of our actions on others. (Psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism)
Like many psychological constructs, it's better conceived as a dimension than an entity, so it's not really accurate to talk of people 'conceived of as psychopathic' except in the sense of movie script writers. At one end of the scale is what we might think of as common or garden thoughtlessness, while at the other are things like violent and dangerous criminals.
It's a fascinating research area, and one, which greatly interests me in the context of fitness to practice as a health professional. I look forward to people weighing in with research and, to a much lesser extent, with ideological opinions.
Furnham A, Richards SC, Paulhus DL. The Dark Triad of Personality: A 10 Year Review. Social and Personality Psychology Compass. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd (10.1111); 2013 Mar 5;7(3):199–216.
Thanks, but do you not think that this kind of parcelling up traits can be misleading. I can in a single day be extremely kind to one person and comparatively savage to another. When running a business, my head partially filled with the need to make money, I can be standoffish to the point of insenstivity. At each point, where situation meets values such as time, money, and others needs, I can be viewed as bearing some of the traits you itemise. At other times I do not bear any of them. How much does the observer's value system play a part?Someone who has never run a business would judge me harshly. Someone else might acknowledge those dependent on me for them to keep their jobs, homes and families.
The historian in question points out that Hitler was ideologically disposed to a certain plan and seems to have been convinced he had limited time to enact that plan (something I noticed, alongside of the collapse of his health and his being fed excessive amounts of amphetamines by his physician) making him dismiss the death of millions. Ok, this is a poor excuse but other war leaders have acted in the same fashion. Were they psychopathic? Jingis Khan is feted in Mongolia. He killed or had killed almost as many people as Hitler, and did not blink when ordering the death of hundreds of thousands, and yet he expressed plans for a future glorious world of peace and had a brand of ethics. He was deeply loved by those closest to him.
Machievelli after all expressed a particular kind of politics and rule. I suggest all contains elements of human nature and we lose something by determining it pathological (if we do).
Traits are general predispositions, not invariable response sets. Callousness is the degree to which the effect of your behaviour on others is ignored in your decisions. It's variable not just between people but within people.
Personality traits become pathological only when they produce an adverse impact on the person's life or on the lives of others. By this token, six million Jews slaughtered pretty much counts, as do, of course, the victims of the Khmer Rouge, the million Irish who died in the Irish famine, and so forth. The desire to bring about a better world is pretty common. What is lacking in these cases is a sense that it should not be brought about by the slaughter of people. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, there is no path to peace; peace is the path.
Arben, the evidence that Hitler perished as the Russians closed in is overwhelming but nevertheless people like Hitler, who created destructive extremes, are removed from context and present instead paradigms on the separate nature of evil. I believe psychiatry does exactly the same as say the religions that create Satans to symbolise human or supernatural extremes.
I read a recent book on the Dark Triad (mentioned above), selfishness, narcissism and Machiavellian, which example psychopathology but again they are presented theatrically, as alone, without connections to ideas and human life. I am against separating human characteristics in the fashion achieved by psychiatry and religions as this represents what to me is false understanding, conditioned by ideologies. Someone may act in any of the ways above in lieu of their beliefs, belief-systems, work demands or cultural demands. Psychiatry says these are diseases without connection to everyday life and its demands. Psychiatry exists on the lowest level of thinking but presents itself as on the highest level.
Some of Churchill and Roosevelt's acts during the 2nd World War were ruthless and bloody, but as they were the good guys they are not linked to natural, archetypal evil. Neither of course did or could have ordered the Holocaust but the imprisonment of the Japanese American population is often considered racist. That it was probably the correct policy at the time is neither here nor there, as it was subject to abuse. Is the abuse of a policy the same as a policy? I doubt that.
Ronan, the idea you elaborate on above is moral not medical therefore cannot sustain a belief in psychopathology. I honestly hold that harmful characteristics, which by their nature affect the doer and done to, are not within descriptive understandings of separate types but within us all. If some people act through inner drives and areas of insensitivity then these are in all of us just lying latent-thereby waiting for context. Milgam attempted to understand this but his experiments had no moral parameters other than sorting out those affected by authority and those not. A psychopathic type (in modern understanding) might conceive themselves as challenging authority or they might be the authority.
Stanley Wilkin I'm curious about your medicalisation of psychology. Why does phenomenology have to be a medical discipline or entity?
And we certainly are in agreement about the continuum along which 'harmful' characteristics lie, though I think to label them 'harmful' is a judgement call that isn't helpful. We probably diverge because I have no beliefs, honest or otherwise. I'm just a scientist, and regard phenomenology as a science that is finally being recognised as vital to our understanding of mental health.
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