There is a silent revolution taking place in our understanding of psychopathy and psychopaths.
And yes, they are not what you think.
Psychopathy and sociopathy are considered to be old, out of fashion terms for what came to be known as antisocial personality disorder.
However, there is a wide consensus that psychopathy is the extreme end of antisocial personality disorder, kind of an exaggerated version of an antisocial person. The same way that a malignant narcissist is an exaggerated, caricatured version of a typical narcissist.
So today we are going to use the term psychopath, the word psychopathy, even though I must warn you, these are not clinically accepted terms. Sociopath is completely out of favor.
We are learning new things, amazing things, about psychopaths.
And I propose psychopaths.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. I'm a professor of clinical psychology in a few distinctly non-psychopathic universities around this shrinking globe.
Before we proceed, on this channel, there's a psychopath and antisocial playlist. I recommend that you watch it. It contains many things which may come as a surprise to you.
What are we learning? Why am I so excited? There's a paradigm shift.
First of all, the distinctions between secondary psychopaths and primary psychopaths have become so extreme, so demarcated, so delineated, so very clear and obvious, that many of us, scholars in the field, are beginning to reconsider the family kinship of primary and secondary psychopaths.
We are beginning to believe that maybe these are species that have nothing to do with each other. Two distinct species. Not variance on the same theme, but totally different tunes.
Secondary psychopaths, for example, are anxious. Secondary psychopaths experience shame. Secondary psychopaths are impulsive, way more antisocial than primary psychopaths. Secondary psychopaths are impulsive. They're capable of experiencing emotions.
None of these things apply to primary psychopaths.
So what used to be common ground, a common denominator between primary and secondary psychopaths, is shrinking fast.
In a minute I will explain what is a primary psychopath, what is a secondary psychopath?
All psychopaths are capable of cold empathy. Cold empathy is a combination of reflexive and cognitive empathy.
But there's a big group of psychopaths who are capable of typical run-of-the-mill common empathy, known as affective or emotional empathy. Most secondary psychopaths actually can and do experience empathy the way you do.
So this places a huge question mark on whether psychopathy is an empathy deficit or whether we should redefine or relabel psychopathy, empathy deficit disorder, as some scholars are proposing.
Next, we are beginning to believe that overt, grandiose narcissists may actually be psychopaths. There's a debate whether they are secondary psychopaths, primary psychopaths, but definitely psychopaths.
And that the only true variant or true variation of narcissism, of pathological narcissism, is what used to be called hitherto covert narcissists, vulnerable, shy and fragile.
Narcissism, pathological narcissism is a compensatory mechanism intended to disguise a deep-set sense of shame and inferiority and to somehow cope with a bad internalized object, voices that tell the narcissist that he is inadequate, a loser, ugly, stupid, a failure, unworthy, and so on.
And finally, there is a growing realization that all of us can and do become psychopathic at times when we are subjected to threat or to stress or to tension or even to extreme anxiety.
We all have a psychopathic protector self-state, a self-state that protects us and is a bit psychopathic.
This is very evident and manifest in borderline personality disorder.
When the borderline is confronted with extreme tension, stress, anxiety, fear of abandonment, separation, insecurity, and so on so forth, many a borderline become secondary psychopaths.
They transition to a secondary psychopathic self-state, and then they act out, they are reckless, defiant, indistinguishable from a psychopath.
And this is just a smattering of new understanding and realizations and discoveries in the very exciting field of psychopathy.
I'm going to refer to several very recent studies in this video, starting with the study titled Unzipping empathy in psychopathy: empathy and facial affect processing in psychopaths.
This article was published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews in 2021, and the main authors are Rinders and Terburg.
And they say in the study that psychopaths fail to automatically and deeply process emotional facial expressions and information of others.
It seems that there's a failure in what some people call mirror neurons. It seems as a failure in the ability to decipher or decode body language, facial expressions and micro-expressions of other people.
And immediately some of you would say, well, that's very reminiscent of autism spectrum disorder.
Yes, but there's a big difference. People with autism spectrum disorder experience this failure with others, with all others, with all other people who are non-autists.
Psychopaths experience this failure only with people they deem useless, unimportant.
Psychopaths are goal oriented. They have very short-term thinking. They want money. They want sex. They want power. They want access. And they want it now.
They have difficulties with impulses and delayed gratification. Even primary psychopaths do so.
They immediately divide humanity into those people who can get me where I want to go, those people I can have sex with, those people I can take money from, those people who can elevate me to a position of power and authority, and those people who are useless to me.
They empathize with the first group, and they do not empathize with the second group.
They're able to read the body language and facial expressions and micro-expressions of the first useful group.
And they totally ignore or even rendered unable, incapacitated, when it comes to decoding and deciphering the body language and facial expressions of people who cannot help them to obtain goals, who are useless in this.
Another article is titled Refining the link between psychopathy, antisocial behavior, and empathy: a meta-analytical approach across different conceptual frameworks.
It was published in Clinical Psychology Review in 2022, and the lead authors are Campos, Passos, and others.
This study found that high psychopathy samples and antisocial groups represent distinct empathy profiles.
It's a very polite way of saying that we have been mistaken hitherto.
It's not true that all psychopaths lack empathy. It's definitely untrue that psychopaths lack reflexive empathy and cognitive empathy, jointly known as cold empathy.
And so there are psychopaths who lack emotional empathy and there are psychopaths who do not lack it, have it, actually effective empathy.
So that the author said it's very wrong to use sweeping statements when we talk about psychics.
What we need to do, we need to isolate trait domains. We need to identify traits of psychopaths and correlate them with the existence or non-existence of empathy or with the level of empathy.
So they found out that antisocial related psychopathy traits are only mildly related to empathy deficits.
Pretty amazing. Antisocial people actually possess empathy.
Next, callous affective traits. When the psychopath is callous, he is ruthless, he is merciless, he's pitiless, and so on so forth, he's relentless. These traits are strongly associated with reduced affective empathy, as was to be expected.
Next, non-adaptive interpersonal traits. In other words, traits that undermine or sabotage interpersonal relationships, traits such as disinhibition, impulsivity, meanness, when you're nasty, when the psychopath is nasty, these traits are negatively related to both empathy domains.
So there's a reduction in both domains with nasty people, disinhibited people.
And finally, adaptive boldness traits. Boldness traits are fearlessness, stress immunity, ability to withstand stress, bravery and social charm. These traits, adaptive boldness traits, are not associated with cognitive empathy impairment.
So we're beginning to fine tune our understanding of the relationship between empathy or lack thereof and various subtypes of psychopathy. It's a much more nuanced picture than we used to have.
On to the next article titled Primary and Secondary Psychopathy Traits, Investigating the Role of Attachment and Experiences of Shame.
The authors are Kiganides, Rennie and McPake.
And it's a pretty amazing article because it's among the first articles that I came across, which attempts to link the experience of shame to psychopathy.
Now we have a mountain range of articles and studies and books connecting shame or a kernel of shame and the defense against shame known as pathological narcissism.
Many scholars, myself included, claim that narcissism, pathological narcissism is chiefly a reaction to shame and grief.
So it seems that this might be true when it comes to psychopathy as well, which is absolutely earth shattering.
Because the going wisdom is that psychopaths are unable to experience several types of negative affects they are unable to experience shame, remorse, regret and so on as distinct from borderlines can experience this, and even some narcissists can experience this.
But psychopaths cannot.
This was the received wisdom, the accepted wisdom.
But now we are beginning to dismantle this monolithic view of psychopaths and beginning to understand that at the core of psychopathy, exactly as in pathological narcissism, there is something resembling shame or there is shame itself.
And of course, this immediately casts in sharp relief the idea that overt grandiose narcissists are actually psychopaths, united by a common foundation of shame.
Primary and secondary psychopathic traits have been documented even in general populations and there have been several studies which linked psychopathic traits with attachment problems for example psychopathic traits are elevated in several insecure attachment styles, such as dismissive avoidant attachment style.
There were other studies linking shame to general psychopathic traits in the healthy normal population.
But there has been no study which examined the specific role of attachment, avoidance, and anxiety, and experience of shame, in the expression of these psychopathic traits, how they actually come into action, how they're manifested, how they are perceived by others and so and so forth.
And so the study says, regression analysis indicated that demographic variance, age and gender, explain the largest variance for primary psychopathic traits, while the attachment dimensions, anxiety and avoidance, explaining the largest variance for secondary psychopathic traits.
Characterological shame had a direct and indirect effect on both primary and secondary psychopathic traits.
The findings highlight the need to examine psychopathic traits in community samples as a multidimensional, with a particular focus on also assessing attachment dimensions and shame subtypes.
The next article is titled, Primary and Secondary Variance of Psychopathy in a Volunteer Sample are Associated with Different Neurocognitive Mechanisms.
It was authored by McCrory, Putnam, sorry about that, Hoffman and others, and published in Biological Psychiatry and Cognitive Neuroscience Neuroimaging in 2018.
And so the article accepts the distinction between two subtypes of psychopathy primary psychopathy and secondary psychopathy.
Now, before we proceed, there is a god-awful confusion in the literature.
Primary psychopathy and secondary psychopathy are usually associated with what is known as Factor 1 and Factor 2 types of psychopath in the PCLR test of psychopathy, invented by Robert Hare.
And so, Robert Hare's test distinguishes these two subtypes, and they were given the names Factor 1 and Factor 2, and then later primary and secondary.
But there's a whole group of scholars who use the terms secondary and primary in a different way altogether, and this creates enormous confusion in the literature.
The second group of scholars, who reject the work of Hare and Babiak and others, and these are the scholars much more closely associated with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual committee.
This second group of scholars, they use secondary and primary to distinguish between psychopaths who experience anxiety, these are secondary psychopaths, and psychopaths who do not experience anxiety and fear, these are primary psychopaths.
So you can see there are several definitions for each and every one of these subtypes.
But we will stick more to the definition according to Robert Hare and try to somehow combine it with the other definition.
So primary psychopathy is a form of psychopathy which involves low anxiety.
And it is widely perceived to be a genetic disease, or at least a disease with a pronounced hereditary component, a genetic predisposition, which affects the brain.
So it's a kind of brain disease or brain abnormality.
Indeed, numerous brain abnormalities have been spotted in brains of psychopaths.
The only problem is, of course, causation. We don't know if the psychopathy caused the alteration in the brain or whether the different brain engendered the psychopathy.
The direction, the error of causality is not clear.
So we are forced to talk about correlation and correlation is never causation.
Be that as it may, people with primary psychopathy are usually less actions, they're fearless, they are defiant, they're reckless, they're dangerous, and they have abnormalities in the brain, which are widely attributed to genetic malformations, mutations even, genetic predisposition.
Secondary psychopathy involves high anxiety, and it is the belief that secondary psychopathy is a reaction to environmental adversity, adverse childhood experiences, ACEs.
Similarly, in narcissism, some forms of pathological narcissism develop in adverse environments, environments which involve classical abuse like physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, and so on, and other types of narcissists have evolved in environments which were not classically adverse, although in my work, even these environments should be perceived and are perceived as adverse.
Okay, back to psychopathy.
Primary psychopathy is associated with reduced neural activation to other's emotions.
When primary psychopaths are confronted with other people's emotions, even in photographs, even in reality, be that as it may, they don't react. There's no neural activation. It's as if this part has been disabled.
This is especially true when primary psychopaths are confronted with distress, with pain, with hurt of others.
When they see other people distress or in pain, they find it funny.
There is therefore a close affinity between primary psychopathy and sadism, and indeed in malignant narcissism, we find the confluence of narcissism, sadism, and primary psychopathy.
It has been proposed that secondary psychopaths have different neurocognitive correlates, which is a fancy way of saying that when a primary psychopath is confronted with someone else's distress or pain, they're likely to either not react or find it funny, whereas a secondary psychopath may even empathize and react emotionally.
So you're beginning to see that there is a vast abyss. There's a huge gap between primary and secondary psychopaths, even neurologically, and there's a lot of neuroscience now which goes into the differences, neurocognitive mechanisms involved, and so on and so forth.
Psychopathy historically and traditionally was considered a kind of mental illness or personality disorder later on associated with criminal behavior or violent behavior. That is expressly untrue. The vast majority of psychopaths are not criminals and never engage in violent behavior.
What distinguishes individuals with psychopathy from peers is the fact that they lack empathy. They have shallow affect and they treat other people callously.
We have many other mental health disorders and many other types of personality and characters and temperaments where there is disruptive behavior. It's a kind of disruptive behavior disorders. Psychopathy is a member of this family.
But you don't have to be a psychopath to misbehave. Misconduct is not the domain or the monopoly of psychopaths.
And so the difference, the distinction, the differential diagnosis, if you wish, between psychopaths who misbehave and non-psychopaths misbehave is the way they misbehave.
Psychopaths misbehave, especially primary psychopaths, misbehave with reduced empathy. They show no emotions, or if they show emotions, it's usually rage and hatred. And they treat other people ruthlessly and callously.
And this is what is known as Factor 1. This is Factor 1 of Hare's Psychopathy Checklist Revised, PCLR.
But within the PCLR, there is another type of psychopath. This is known as Factor 2. And it involves an etiologically nonspecific range of antisocial behaviors coupled with all kinds of lifestyle factors.
Secondary psychopaths are much closer in behavior, in lifestyle, in emotions, in cognitions, in antisocial propensities and tendencies. Secondary psychopaths are much closer to other people who misbehave, other people with disruptive behavior.
Primary psychopaths are a species apart. They're aliens, they don't share humanity or humanness with others.
And to lump together secondary psychopaths and primary psychopaths seems to be a serious methodological and diagnostic and nosological mistake.
That's why we can safely say that borderlines who are highly, highly emotional and to some extent, empathic, borderlines transition to a secondary psychopathic self-state because secondary psychopaths do possess emotions and a modicum of empathy.
Psychopathic traits are captured by factor one and factor two symptoms and they're continuously distributed in the population. They can be reliably measured and so this is an instrument that can be easily validated and has been validated pretty extensively.
And yes, there is a small subgroup of individuals. And these individuals tend to have criminal psychopathy.
And these individuals are usually factor one but not all factor one turn out to be criminals even if most psychopathic criminals are factor one you understand this confusion there's a confusion here.
And so there is, in factor one, attenuated physiological and neural responses to affective stimuli, including stimuli, indexing other people's stress.
This is a form of blunted reactivity to other people's stress. This is a form of blunted reactivity to other people, other people's needs, other people's well-being.
It's as if other people are irrelevant to the primary psychopath's life, existence, goal orientation, and attainments.
It's not that they use other people. They do that.
It's more that they regard other people as props or objects or random happenstance. People happen to be there the way I don't know plants happen to be there and so if people are in distress it doesn't register because the very existence of other people doesn't register.
Individuals with high levels of factor one find it unproblematic to aggress against other people because of that.
And so originally in the 1940s, we are talking Cleckley and others, we'll discuss this in a minute, but originally the description of psychopathy entailed a marked lack of anxiety, coupled with a lack of consideration for others.
Because you don't perceive others as existent, they cannot threaten you. Non-existent objects cannot threaten you. Even objects cannot threaten you.
And so if people are perceived as inanimate, inert props or random objects scattered around, they don't constitute a threat. You will never pay the price for your actions. There will never be any consequences.
There's a sense of immunity and impunity. Anxiety is reduced to the point of elimination together with fear.
That was a classical picture of psychopathy.
Indeed, a psychopath who is callous, a psychopath who is unempathetic, a psychopath who is ruthless and relentless, usually would not be an anxious psychopath.
The common sense rendition of psychopathy went. It's like the psychologists say we don't even need to check that, we don't even need to verify that, it's clear.
I mean this psychopath is in your face is clearly fearless some of them even use the word brave but it's not true accumulating recent evidence suggests that behaviors of psychopaths that look callous and unempathetic and ruthless and so and so forth, co-occur with high levels of anxiety.
I even suggested in my work that the same way pathological narcissism is a compensatory mechanism for shame, psychopathy is a compensatory mechanism for anxiety.
And so secondary psychopaths especially definitely experience high levels, clinically significant levels of anxiety. That has been documented.
But we're beginning to understand that primary psychopaths also experience anxiety, albeit repressed, Freud would have said, unconscious anxiety.
And so when we are confronted with the population of psychopaths, we immediately divide them into callous, unemotional ones, and impulsive antisocial ones. Factor one, factor two, primary, secondary.
And this distinction has served us well for quite a while.
But we are beginning to question it and beginning to doubt it.
Factor two psychopaths have a specific lifestyle which involves antisocial choices and behaviors and an antisocial mindset. Factor one psychopaths are goal don't care about society. They don't care about other people.
But is there really any difference here?
Factor one psychopaths are likely to be defiant, contumacious, hateful of authority. They're likely to be reckless. They're likely to be aggressive and violent. And all these things are dissocial. All these things are antisocial. This is a form of dissociality.
So we could say that facto two are antisocial as a lifestyle choice, as a predilection, as a propensity. They have a tendency to be antisocial, while Factor 1 are equally antisocial, but as part of a strategy of obtaining goals.
This distinction is much more minor than the previous distinction we've made between Factor 1 and Factor 2.
And this distinction brings into play grandiosity and to some extent narcissistic traits.
And so we're beginning to see that Factor 1, psychopathy, is a bridge, a bridge between borderline personality disorder, emotional dysregulation, secondary psychopathy on one hand.
So there's borderline secondary psychopathy complex on one hand.
And narcissism, on the other hand, the bridge connecting narcissism to borderline secondary psychopathy is primary psychopathy, it seems.
People with secondary presentation do not appear to be callous and unempathetic. On the contrary, they appear to be anxious and vulnerable. They show distinct behaviors and psychiatric features.
But any clinician would tell you that this description is far from adequate. It's not enough.
Even in secondary psychopathy, these psychopathic elements, psychopathic trait domains, are pretty emphasized, pretty unusual. Let's put it this way. Not emphasized, but unusually high compared to the general population.
This is why I'm saying it's safe to lump together secondary psychopathy with borderline.
Anyone who has lived with a borderline, anyone who has worked with a borderline can tell you the borderline often becomes psychopathic, secondary psychopathic.
And on the other hand it's safe to lump together overt grandiose in your face defiant narcissism with primary psychopathy, factor one.
Additionally, as I mentioned, the etiology is different.
Whereas among primary psychopaths, we don't find much by way of adverse childhood experiences, we find a lot of it in secondary psych.
Here I beg to differ with the mainstream.
I think that all cluster B personality disorders and many other mental issues emerge from adverse childhood experiences and or adversity and dysfunction in the family unit.
I claim that many behaviors which are not perceived as abusing, many traits which are not perceived as dysfunctional, and many circumstances which are not perceived as adverse actually are.
For example, if the child is spoiled, pampered, overprotected, in my lexicon, in my dictionary, in my worldview, that's adversity. These are adverse circumstances. It's a form of abuse.
If the child is not allowed to separate from the parent, from the parental figures, that's abuse.
If the child is instrumentalized, for example, in order to realize the unfulfilled expectations and dreams of the parent, that's abuse.
If the child is parentified, that's definitely abuse.
In other words, I disagree that there are two developmental paths. One of them involves adversity and one of them does not. One of them involves abuse and one of them involves adversity and one of them does not. One of them involves abuse and one of them involves pampering, spoiling and overprotectiveness.
I disagree with it. I think all these behaviors are actually abusing. All of them are traumatic and all of them constitute adversity.
Okay. So, psychopathy is a set of personality traits and behaviors. Their trait domains and their behaviors.
Shallow affect or even flat affect, affect lack of empathy impulsivity antisocial behavior manipulativeness machiavellianism egocentricity charm manipulative charm and so on so forth.
All of them are common in both primary psychopathy and secondary, but they are much more pronounced in primary psychopathy.
And psychopathy generally, especially psychopathic traits, have a negative impact on the individual. There are adverse outcomes academically, occupationally, interpersonally, family unit, and so on so forth.
Psychopaths suffer the consequences of who they are, the consequences of their essence.
There's a lot of work by Baker, MatthewBabiak, who used to be a collaborator of Robert Hare, Weiss and others.
There's a debate within the field whether psychopathy should be conceptualized as a categorical or a dimensional construct.
In other ways, whether there's a spectrum of psychopathy a continuum of psychopathy or whether it is a yes or no situation either you're a psychopath or not like pregnancy.
And there's a debate Harris, Salfati, and Forth, Drislane, many others have debated this.
Some researchers argue that psychopathy is a two-dimensional construct, primary and secondary, end of story.
Actually, Karpman, the famous Karpman of the Karpman drama triangle, Karpman suggested in 1941, Cappan cited 1941 studies in relation to this.
So the debate goes back all the way to 1941.
And Levenson also did a survey of the literature in 1995 that found that this debate has been going on for very, very long time.
There's not disputing the fact that psychopaths display antisocial behaviors. They're basically antagonistic and hostile, similar to narcissists. They have reduced empathy or no empathy in primary cycles. They have problems in interpersonal conduct, affective impairment. All this is agreed.
It's not a question of making a list of what a psychopath looks like, or what are the traits that constitute psychopathy.
There's a wide agreement on this, basically, characteristics such as grandiosity, manipulative behaviors, superficial charm, lack of remorse and guilt, emotional detachment, and so and so forth.
Karpman was the first to describe all this, long before Robert Hare.
But the problem is not phenomenology.
The problem is not observing psychopaths. We would all agree, had we observed psychopaths collectively, we would all reach a common ground, a common description.
The problem is the etiology, and the problem is the underlying psychodynamics.
It is safe to say that some psychopaths are actually narcissists, or more precisely, some narcissists are actually psychopaths. They have a different internal dynamic and a different background in childhood. And others are more borderline.
So if I had to rewrite the book, I would say that there are borderline psychopaths and narcissistic psychopaths. I think this captures it much better than primary and secondary.
Primary and secondary are meaningless words. Borderline psychopath and narcissistic psychopath, they give you the sudden enlightenment and insight as to what makes these psychopaths tick.
And there are other types, of course, there's a sadistic psychopath and the anxious psychopath, but they are subtypes. They fit into the broad categories of emotionally dysregulated, impulsive psychopaths, borderline psychopaths, and rootless goal-oriented dysempathic psychopaths which are the narcissistic psychopaths.
And so we need to rewrite the book because we are beginning to realize that many of the stereotypes that made their way that invaded that penetrated the literature are nothing but stereotypes they're wrong they're absolutely wrong.
Secondary psychopaths for example are antisocial. They have a highly specific lifestyle and they are irresponsible, they are impulsive, and they're incapable of long-term planning. They're erratic, they're aggressive.
And this is the exact opposite of a primary psychopath.
Primary psychopath usually is goal-oriented and very persistent, perseveres, plans ahead, is cunning, is scheming, and so on so forth.
And so are overt or grandiose narcissists. Overt grandiose narcissists make it to the top. They become presidents. They become chief executive officers. They become movie producers.
Understanding the similarities and differences between the different forms of psychopathic traits is very crucial because right now we're in a muddle, we're in a mess. It's a mess right now.
And the word psychopathy is misused and abused, devalued and deformed, mutilated and transformed, depending on the bias of the scholar or the self-styled online expert, another chaotic scene in its own right.
There are negative impacts on the individual, but even more so on the community, on other people.
We need to understand these people in order to design coping strategies or even more importantly protective defensive strategies against them. These are predatory types, even the borderline. They're all predatory types.
So there's an avalanche and explosion of studies trying to do exactly this, create a new nomenclature, a new nosology, a new classification of taxonomy.
ChristianSalf, Selkin Mayer, numerous studies, Lados, Eysenbart, Selk, Selkin, Mayor, numerous studies, Lodos, Eisenbart, and Craig and so on, Lyon, I meanthe more right.
So it's absolutely an avalanche.
You just go to scholar.google.com and you will find like.
So this community, communal point of view, regarding psychopaths, narcissism, to some extent, borderlines as essentially types of predators.
And we, I mean the community, need protection. We need to erect defenses, we need alarm systems against these people and their risks and we need to match them with protective factors and we need to more deeply understand the mechanisms involved in the development and maintenance of psychopathy and of narcissism.
The interpersonal and effective characteristics of primary psychopathic traits are linked to lower levels of experienced fear and anxiety.
Very important distinction. It is the experience of fear and anxiety that is different in primary and secondary psychopathy, not the actual fear and anxiety.
Similarly, social confidence is much higher among narcissistic psychopaths, also known as Factor 1 or Primary Psychopas. They are much more socially confident. They are the life of the party. They garner attention wherever they go. They are charismatic, they're natural born leaders.
The studies by Kernberg, Falkenbach, Hoffmann, Morrison, Gilbert, and many others.
Behavioral and lifestyle psychopathic features in secondary psychopathy are linked with exactly the opposite.
Delinquency, risk-taking, trait anxiety, whereas the primary psychopath is a winner, a high achiever, high functioning, highly pro-social, communal, collaborates with people, teamwork, creates things, gets on top.
The secondary psychopath is all over the place, totally disregulated, a mess.
And it is a secondary psychopath usually, ironically, that ends up in prison, not the primary psychopath.
We have studies by Geerlings, Grover, Furnham, Hoffman and others on this.
So it's crucial.
This new revolution, this upending of everything we thought we knew about psychopathy, it benefits us, benefits the potential victims of psychopaths.
We are not studying psychopaths because we are intellectually titillated. It's an intellectual challenge or it's fun or its entertainment.
It's again, it's survival. We are being threatened by a pandemic of narcissism and psychopathy.
And we know close to nothing about both these disorders.
When we are confronted with a virus like COVID-19 or polio or whatever.
We get to learn the virus, we study the virus, we analyze it, then we synthesize it, then we create a vaccine or a medication.
Here, we don't even agree on what is the virus. We disagreeall the dimensions and characteristics of the virus, on the origin of the virus, on the actual actions of the virus, on the, on what goes on inside the virus. I mean, we're very far from a vaccine or a medicine or medication. Very far. And if you take into account that the study of psychopathy is at least 150 years old, the study of sadism is at least 140 years old, and the study of narcissism is at least 110 years old. This, ladies and gentlemen is a dismal record of a pseudoscience.