Do You Know A Psychopath?

The study of the psychopath reveals an individual who is incapable of feeling guilt, remorse or empathy for their actions. They are generally cunning, manipulative and know the difference between right and wrong but dismiss it as applying to them.

They are incapable of normal emotions such as love, generally react without considering the consequences of their actions and show extreme egocentric and narcissistic behavior.

For most of us the idea of a psychopath conjures up images from movies like "Silence of The Lambs" and characters with names like "Hannibal Lector." Fortunately characters like Hannibal don’t really exist. Serial killers and people involved in ritual torture are rare, but psychopathic behavior is more common than you might think.

A psychopath will use people for excitement, entertainment, to build their self-esteem and they invariably value people in terms of their material value (e.g. money, property, comfort, etc..). They can involve and get other people into trouble quickly and they seem to have no regret for their actions. To date there is no checklist of behavior and symptoms that will tell you with certainty whether or not a person is a psychopath. But there are warning signs. The following are warning signs:

• Superficial charm and average intelligence.
• Absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking.
• Absence of nervousness or neurotic manifestations.
• Unreliability.
• Untruthfulness and insincerity.
• Lack of remorse or shame.
• Antisocial behavior without apparent compunction.
• Poor judgment and failure to learn from experience.
• Pathological egocentricity and incapacity to love.
• General poverty in major affective reactions.
• Specific loss of insight.
• Unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations.
• Fantastic and uninviting behavior with drink, and sometimes without.
• Suicide threats rarely carried out.
• Sex life impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated.
• Failure to follow any life plan.

The idea that psychopaths eat people is a myth.