Hervey M. Cleckley - The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So Called Psychopathic Personality

The Mask of Sanity

An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality

Non teneas aururn totum quod splendet ut aururn.
Alanus de Insulis

Hervey Cleckley, M.D.
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry,
Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, Ga.;
author of The Caricature of Love and of The Three Faces of Eve (with Corbett H. Thigpen)

Fifth Edition: private printing for non-profit educational use
Emily S. Cleckley
Augusta, Georgia, 1988

Fifth Edition
Copyright 1988 Emily S. Cleckley

Previous editions copyrighted 1941, 1950, 1955, 1964, 1976 by the C.V. Mosby Co.

Cleckley, Hervey Milton, 19031984
The Mask of Sanity
ISBN 0-9621519-0-4
Scanned facsimile produced for non-profit educational use.

To L. M. C.

From chaos shaped, the Bios grows.
In bone And viscus broods the Id.
And who can say Whence Eros comes?
Or chart his troubled way?
Nor bearded sage, nor science, yet has shown
How truth or love, when met, is straightly known;
Some phrases singing in our dust today
Have taunted logic through mans Odyssey:
Yet, strangely, man sometimes will find his own.
And even man has felt the arcane flow
Whence brims unchanged the very Attic wine,
Where lives that mute and death-eclipsing glow
That held the Lacedaemonian battle line:
And this, I think, may make what man is choose
The doom of joy he knows he can but lose.

Contents

• Section One:
• Section Two:
  • Part I:
  • Part II:
• Section Three:
  • Part I:
  • Part II:
  • Part III:
• Section Four:
  • Part I:
  • Part II:

Preface to the Fifth Edition

The first edition of this book was based primarily on experience with adult male psychopaths hospitalized in a closed institution. Though a great many other psychopaths had come to my attention, most of the patients who were observed over years and from whom emerged the basic concepts presented in 1941 were from this group. During the next decade a much more diverse group became available. Female patients, adolescents, people who had never been admitted to a psychiatric hospital, all in large numbers, became available for study and afforded an opportunity to observe the disorder in a very wide range of variety and of degree.

This additional clinical experience, helpful comments in the reviews of the first edition, enlightening discussion with colleagues, and an improved acquaintance with the literature all contributed to modify concepts formulated approximately ten years earlier.

In attempting to revise the book for the second edition (1950), I found it was impossible to do justice to the subject by minor additions, deletions, and modifications.

It was necessary to write a new and much larger book.

For the third edition, published in 1955, fewer alterations and additions were necessary. But a number of important changes were made. Some reviewers led me to feel that in previous editions I failed to convey accurately or adequately the concept I had formed. It is not easy to convey this concept, that of a biologic organism outwardly intact, showing excellent peripheral function, but centrally deficient or disabled in such a way that abilities, excellent at the only levels where we can formally test them, cannot be utilized consistently for sane purposes or prevented from regularly working toward self-destructive and other seriously pathologic results. Impressed by its effectiveness as used by Henry Head to distinguish a complex, deep, and obscure type of aphasia, I chose the term semantic to indicate my concept of a personality disorder which appears to have, at least hypothetically, some important similarities. A few readers were misled by my use of the term semantic to believe I claimed that the basic pathology in this disorder, or its cause, is deficiency in the understanding of speech or some other linguistic difficulty.

Some comments, on the other hand, gave me the impression that it was assumed I had found fault with the psychopath because he could not achieve a final and absolute understanding of lifes meaning at levels more or less eschatological. I restated my concept with the aim of making it more explicit, with the hope of being more articulate.

Since the first edition of this book, revisions of the nomenclature have been made by the American Psychiatric Association. The classification of psychopathic personality was changed to that of sociopathic personality in 1958. In 1968 it was changed again to antisocial personality. Like most psychiatrists I continue to think of the people who are the subject of this book as psychopaths and will most often refer to them by this familiar term. Sociopath or antisocial personality will sometimes appear, used as a synonym to designate patients with this specific pattern of disorder.

Although I spared no effort to make it plain that I did not have an effective therapy to offer, the earlier editions of this book led to contact with psychopaths of every type and from almost every section of the United States and Canada. Interest in the problem was almost never manifested by the patients themselves. The interest was desperate, however, among families, parents, wives, husbands, brothers, who had struggled long and helplessly with a major disaster for which they found not only no cure and no social, medical, or legal facility for handling, but also no full or frank recognition that a reality so obvious existed.

Telephone calls from Chicago, Denver, Boston, and The West Indies and letters from Miami and Vancouver have convinced me that the psychopath is no rarity in any North American community but that his problem is, by what seems to be an almost universal conspiracy of evasion, ignored by those therapeutic forces in the human group that, reacting to what is biologically or socially morbid, have sensibly provided courts, operating rooms, tuberculosis sanatoriums, prisons, fire departments, psychiatric hospitals, police forces, and homes for the orphaned, the ill, the psychotic, and the infirm. The measures taken by the community to deal with illness, crime, failure, contagion are, one might say, often far from perfect. It cannot, however, be said, except about the problems of the psychopath, that no measure at all is taken, that nothing exists specifically designed to meet a major and obvious pathologic situation.

Communications from physicians, sociologists, psychologists, students, and others from Europe, some from countries behind the Iron Curtain, and also from India, Australia, and other distant parts of the world continue to arrive. One interesting, stimulating and deeply appreciated comment came a few years ago from a physician stationed in Antarctica. These communications convince me that the psychopath presents an important and challenging enigma for which no adequate solution has yet been found.

Although still in the unspectacular and perforce modest position of one who can offer neither a cure nor a well-established explanation, I am encouraged by ever increasing evidence that few medical or social problems have ever so richly deserved and urgently demanded a hearing. It is still my conviction that this particular problem, in a practical sense, has had no hearing.

Although I still have no effective treatment to offer for the psychopath (antisocial personality), it has encouraged me to feel that this book has, perhaps, served a useful purpose in making clearer to the families of these patients the grave problems with which they must deal. Apparently many psychiatrists, and many other physicians, have over the years advised relatives of psychopaths to read The Mask of Sanity . The response of these relatives has given me deep satisfaction and has helped me to feel that efforts to pursue this study are not in vain. Although we may still be far from the goal of offering a cure, perhaps something has already been done to focus general interest on the problem and to promote awareness of its tremendous importance. This must be accomplished, I believe, before any organized attempt can be made by society to deal adequately, or even cogently, with the psychopath.