The Guilt-Free Psychopath

The revolution that saw the introduction of an empirical diagnostic system in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd edition, also shifted the focus of diagnostic interest from the psychopathic mentality to the particulars of psychopathic behavior. Usually thought to be an essential or defining feature of the latter is a pronounced lack of guilt—so pronounced it's as if the psychopath lacked even the capacity for guilt. However, reality may not conform to type; and in any case, the consensus that the psychopath lacks guilt probably rests not on close inspection of the subject's psyche but on inference, valid or not, from a pattern of behavior. Central to this article is the behavioral checklist for sociopathy (psychopathy by another name) in Lee Robins' 1966 study of the disorder's course—a checklist that nevertheless contains a "lack of guilt" criterion, and that I test against a contemporary description of the psychopathic mentality to see which better applies to a diagnosed psychopath in Capote's In Cold Blood (1965). The behavioral criteria provide a better fit. It is the Lee Robins specifications that underwrite the purely behavioral requirements for Antisocial Personality Disorder in the Feighner criteria, which in turn underlie the corresponding checklist in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd edition. As an empirical matter, the antisocial person may or may not feel guilt; as an ethical matter, we should hesitate to impute a constitutional defect that can either automatically imply incorrigibility or automatically excuse the actor.