Kamal Ghorui
Norman Bates in Psycho, Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. We owe our understanding and dread of ‘psychopaths’ to these bad men. But Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen, assistant professor at University of Toronto Mississauga, says our fears are unfounded. In his book, Psychopathy Unmasked: The Rise and Fall of a Dangerous Diagnosis, he argues psychopathy – the disease – and psychopaths don’t exist.
It takes courage to say that when your peers have written tomes on psychopathy. The word ‘psychopath’ occurs pretty often in books now. It’s actually caught up with ‘psychotherapist’, which had a strong lead from 1970. Plus, psychopaths are the delight of crime reporters and readers alike. So, what does Larsen know that others don’t? Before going there, let’s fix what psychopath means outside cinema. In his 1993 book, Without Conscience, Robert Hare described them as 1) social predators, 2) capable of charming and manipulating others, 3) ruthless, 4) lacking in conscience and feeling for others, 5) contemptuous of social norms and expectations. That’s Chigurh, alright.
The idea of psychopathy has been around for 240 years, although US doctor Benjamin Rush called it “anomia” first. In 1786, he described it as loss of ability to distinguish between good and evil. By 1940s, psychiatrists believed it was a neurological problem – psychopaths had shallow emotions and the ability to mask this “disability”, to appear normal. Chigurh again.
By the time Psycho released in 1960, the word psychopath had already hit its first peak in medical and other literature. The “era” of notorious serial killers like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, that lasted till the 1980s, was starting. Research suggests this was partly the effect of disturbed families: shell-shocked fathers carrying trauma home from WW2. Leaded petrol, which has been linked to crime waves, may have had a hand, too. India phased it out between 1994 and 2000.
So, what with serial killers – real and fictional – around, psychopathy does seem like a very real problem. But Larsen wants proof. “We have never convincingly documented individuals with a disorderly psychology that renders them incapable of empathy, emotions, impulse control and so forth,” he writes. Although there have been “hundreds of empirical studies” since the 1990s – postSilence of the Lambs – “virtually every single claim about psychopathy has been either thoroughly refuted or failed to find empirical support in experimental settings.”
Was Bundy – who confessed to 30 murders – a psychopath? Larsen says he had all kinds of mental health problems, including low self-esteem, delusions and violent sexual urges. “Most (if not all) serial killers we know of, never appear to be clear cases of psychopathy once we begin to scrutinise their psychology.”
If psychopathy is not a real disease, how has it entrenched itself in medical literature? Larsen says it’s because of the tough-on-crime approach of the 1990s. It became a convenient “wastebasket” diagnosis that you could stick on anyone, if no other explanation was found for their behaviour. In fact, a 2012 study found psychopathic traces in a third of 42 former US presidents, including Kennedy and Reagan.
Larsen says the problem isn’t just that psychopathy is a myth, but that its diagnosis can unfairly target people who pose no “extraordinary threat to public health and safety”. Instead of making society safer by identifying possible serial killers, it is a “vessel for unjustified legal discrimination”.
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