Clinical definition of a sociopath: Does Palpatine fit??

The following information comes from the book, _The Psychopath Next Door,_ by Martha Stout, Ph.D. ... a former professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, as it turns out.

"According to the current bible of psychiatric labels, the _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV_ of the American Psychiatric Association, the clinical diagnosis of "antisocial personality disorder" should be considered (italics mine) when an individual possesses at least three of the following seven characteristics: (1) failure to conform to social norms; (2) deceitfulness, manipulitiveness; (3) impulsivity, failure to plan ahead; (4) irritability, aggressiveness; (5) reckless disregard for the safety of self or others; (6) consistent irresponsibility; (7) lack of remorse after having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another person. The presence in an individual of any three of these "symptoms," taken together, is enough to make many psychiatrists suspect the disorder.

Other researchers and clinicians, many of whom thing the APA's definition describes simple "criminality" better than true "psychopathy" or "sociopathy," point to additional documented characteristics of sociopaths as a group. One of the more frequently observed of these is a glib and superficial charm that allows the true sociopath to seduce other people, figuratively or literally -- a kind of glow or charisma that, initially, can make the sociopath seem more charming or more interesting than most of the normal people around him.... Sometimes this "sociopathic charisma" is accompanied by a grandiose sense of self-worth that may be compelling at first, but upon closer inspection may seem odd or perhaps laughable. ("Someday the world will realize how special I am," or, "You know that after me, no other lover will do.")

In addition, sociopaths have a greater than normal need for stimulation, which results in their taking frequent social, physical, financial, or legal risks. Characteristically, they can charm others into attempting dangerous ventures with them, and as a group they are known for their pathological lying and conning, and their parasitic relationships with 'friends.' Regardless of how educated or highly placed as adults, they may have a history of early behavior problems, sometimes including drug use of recorded juvenile delinquency, and always including a failure to acknowledge responsibility for any problems that occurred.

And sociopaths are noted especially for their shallowness of emotion, the hollow and transient nature of any affectionate feelings they may claim to have, a certain breathtaking callousness. They have no trace of empathy and no genuine interest in bonding emotionally with a mate.

... About one in twenty-five individuals are sociopathic, meaning essentially, that they do not have a conscience. It is not that this group fails to grasp the difference between good and bad; it is that the distinction fails to limit their behavior."


Stout goes on to say that psychopaths are bored most of the time. They don't spend time searching for someone to love, because they cannot love, they don't worry about friends or family members who may be sick or in trouble, because they cannot worry about other people. Since they cannot derive pleasure from human relationship, strategies and payoffs are the only thrills they know. They speak of feeling "empty" and "hollow," and Stout notes that their targets are always human beings, rather than the earth itself or some aspect of the material world. All they can feel toward another person is the cold wish to win. "Evidently, winning in this fashion is all that remains of interpersonal meaning when attachments and conscience are absent."

Stout goes on to report that these people have been shown to have abnormal EEG's. Normal people react more strongly to emotion-related words as opposed to neutral words such as everyday nouns or numbers; sociopaths don't. Also, in studies of blood flow in the brain during various tasks, "sociopaths trying to complete an

 

(1) failure to conform to social norms;

Hmmm... Yes. Palpatine doesn't confrom to social norms. He makes the social norm conform to him.


(2) deceitfulness, manipulitiveness;
YES!!!!!!!


(3) impulsivity, failure to plan ahead;
NO!

(4) irritability, aggressiveness;
I'd say yes even though he is cappable of hiding his anger very well.


(5) reckless disregard for the safety of self or others;
YES, he simply doesn't care.


(6) consistent irresponsibility;
That one is a bit hard. It depends upon definition.


(7) lack of remorse after having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another person. The presence in an individual of any three of these "symptoms," taken together, is enough to make many psychiatrists suspect the disorder.
YES very much so.




6 out of 7 ain't bad as Meatloaf put it.... or was that 2 out of 3?

 

(1) failure to conform to social norms

Not from my point of view. Palpatine the man likes to go to the opera, and he collects art. He doesn't have sex with fourteen-year-olds, he doesn't do alot of degenerate things Lucas could have depicted him doing.

(2) deceitfulness, manipulitiveness

Yes, he shows these. But so do most politicians.

(3) impulsivity, failure to plan ahead

Not at all.

(4) irritability, aggressiveness;
Yes.

(5) reckless disregard for the safety of self or others
Yes

(6) consistent irresponsibility;
No.

(7) lack of remorse after having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another person.

Tough to say. Since we're looking at Palps from a solely Earthly perspective (and not as the Saga's personification of Evil, which he is), it comes down to this, I think:

Palpatine certainly hurts alot of people through proxies. The only time he hurts someone directly without any sort of justification is Luke. 1 murder does not equal a sociopath, imo.

But, the test is at least three, so yes, by modern Earth standards, Palpatine is a sociopath.

However, I strongly hesitate to put things like modern psychological terms into a myth-based story. Palpatine isn't supposed to be a societal deviant; he's supposed to be the Devil. To put a label as common as 'sociopath' on arguably the greatest screen villian of all time waters down the character greatly, imo.

 

Since myths were originally created by human beings, to help human beings understand their experience here on Earth, I think more can be got out of them than that.

When you boil myth down to an absolute: "Well, this is the way it's supposed to be, and we don't consider it any more deeply, because ... because ... because ... we're just not supposed to!" we do both the myth and ourselves a great disservice.

My answers were:

(1) failure to conform to social norms

This one is tough to answer. Whose social norms are we talking about??

Behind the scenes, Palpy does not conform to the social norms of his larger society. He covers up this fact well, but is he conforming on the sly?? Um ... no.

However, Palpatine belongs to a smaller society that, for him, takes precedence. He conforms perfectly to the norms the Sith have set for themselves.


(2) deceitfulness, manipulativeness

Definitely a no-brainer here.

(3) impulsivity, failure to plan ahead

Absolutely not. His scheme to rule the galaxy is a masterpiece of planning.

(4) irritability, aggressiveness

Hmm. I almost feel I need to know more about this criterion. (I haven't read the whole book yet.) If what is meant is that the person has this uncontrollable rage problem, and is doing harmful things out of sudden impulse with no forethought, then it doesn't apply. Palpatine definitely shows impulse control. But are all of his plans motivated by malice and aggressive feelings? Toward the Jedi, yes.

(5) reckless disregard for the safety of self or others

I think Palpy is concerned for his safety. He's obviously concerned for Anakin's safety (for an ulterior motive, yes, but still.) He will risk his life, but it's clear he doesn't enjoy doing it, and he does it only when there is no other way to accomplish his ultimate goal.

(6) consistent irresponsibility

If you define irresponsibility as putting the blame for his actions and their consequences onto others, and not wanting to assume responsibility for the welfare of others -- as his position requires him to do -- I have to give him a yes here.

(7) lack of remorse after having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another person.

Obviously, here he gets a yes.

So, I guess I've given him a three ... and a half, maybe.

Now, according to what is quoted above,
"The presence in an individual of any three of these 'symptoms,' taken together, is enough to make many psychiatrists suspect the disorder." Or, as quoted, this is enough that this "diagnosis" should be considered.

BUT

This author states that the above isn't quite enough, and gives us some more criteria. Lots of people meet the above criteria, but they aren't sociopaths, or people with no conscience.

Let's look at the rest of Stout's criteria for a sociopath:

1.) glib and superficial charm

Well, he has got that.

2.) a grandiose sense of self-worth ("Someday the world will realize how special I am," or, "You know that after me, no other lover will do.")

I think that Palpatine, with his frequent proclamations about "destiny," does meet this criterion.

3.) a greater than normal need for stimulation.

Hmm. I don't think we could possibly ever know this without asking him!

4.) pathological lying and conning, and their parasitic relationships with 'friends.'

OK, I think he's got this one all sewn up ...


5.) psychopaths are bored most of the time.

I don't know. Does Palpy look bored to you? Hmmm ... I'd have to say no on this one.

6.) They speak of feeling "empty" and "hollow"

I think that Palpy does end up feeling empty and hollow. But this can be an end result of the kinds of things he is doing, just as much as it is the cause. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I will go so far as to say that I believe Palpy's hollowness comes more at the end, when all of his machinations have not brought him to where he expected to be. What Stout is saying is that a true psychopath is doing what he is doing BECAUSE of the feeling of being emp

 

No.
Palpatine knows the diffrence between right and wrong.
He just chooses wrong.

Why must every great leadr be considered mentaly ill?
Think about what that means for a moment. It means that a person with a healthy mental state is simply incapable of doing anything great.
I think that's sad.
And we agree.

 

From his point of view, he's right. Most people consider themselves to be good. Palpatine thought that the Sith were the only ones fit to rule the galaxy.

 

Why must every great leadr be considered mentaly ill?
Think about what that means for a moment. It means that a person with a healthy mental state is simply incapable of doing anything great.


Jesus.

The Buddha.

Mohammed.

Mother Teresa.

Nelson Mandela.

George Washington.

Mahatma Ghandi.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mentally ill?? Naaaaahh.

***

It isn't the fact that somebody chooses to hurt other people. It's why.

 

I just put this up on another thread, but since it's relevant, I'll repeat it here.

This cold detachment and disregard for others with which the Sith pursue their own wants is eerily similar to Hayden Ramsay's view of psychopaths, who, like Thomas Aquinas's demons, pursue their own good with a sense of entitlement: "mine: my right"

Hi.

I've been doing a pile of reading on sociopathy vs. other reasons people choose to commit harmful acts to other people. What I've read (a summary of some of which can be found in my "A clinical definition of the psychopath: Does Palpatine fit?" thread), leads me to believe that, of all the people who commit harm without remorse, only a small subset are true psychopaths. In short, all psychopaths are willfully destructive people but not all willfully destructive people are psychopaths.

Hmm.

I'm going to share a bit more, based on what I've read. I'm fascinated by other points of view, however; this is just what I've read by a few experts who've published mass market books.

Virginia Satir came up with five freedoms expressed by a whole, fully functional human personality. According to her, full personal functionality includes:

1 -- the power to perceive
2 -- the power to think and interpret
3 -- the power to feel
4 -- the power to want and choose
5 -- the power to imagine.

As Martha Stout, Ph.D. defines the psychopath, something is organically wrong with the brain such that it is incapable of higher human emotions ... the love, fear, hate, sadness, etc. as processed by our mammalian, cerebral cortex brain. They possess only the lower sensate focus type of emotion mediated by evolutionarily older areas of the brain. So, if you look at Virginia Satir's definition of a fully human personality, they are missing number three and possibly number one as well. (If you can't feel love or grief yourself, then you may be able to perceive someone else acting lovingly or bawling their eyes out, but the emotion behind that is a nonsequitor to you ... the person may be crying, but you've never felt that emotion and you can't imagine why they are acting so silly. So ... you perceive the person crying but the feeling part of perception isn't there. Psychopaths have, according to Stout, half of number one.)

So, we have two types of criminals. The most common type has all the basic components of normal human personality. They can and do commit crimes just as heinous as a psychopath, but NOT for the reason that they are incapable of feeling empathy. They have the ability -- they are just choosing to turn it off for some reason. Then you have the psychopathic criminal, who does not have the brain circuitry to feel the emotions we do.

Stout defines conscience as "a sense of obligation based in an emotional attachment to another living creature (often but not always a human being), or to a group of human beings, or even in some cases to humanity as a whole." It is the decision to do something because you recognize that a being will suffer if you do not, and you can't abide its suffering.

Stout tells us that about 80% of the criminals currently in prison are of the first type -- completely capable of empathasizing with a being's suffering but willfully choosing not to -- and then usually burying themselves deeply into rationalization and denial. About 20% of incarcerated criminals are of the second type -- having the brain disorder that renders them unable to comprehend the suffering the rest of us experience.

So, I have argued that Palpatine is not a psychopath, not on the basis of his moral relativism, but on the basis of some of what I've just said.

In the dream, whatever he did was the right thing to do simply because he wanted to do it. In the dream there were no rules, there was only power. And the power was his." (p. 83).

Anakin has just seen the world the way that all Sith see it: through the eyes of a psychopath.

Again, nonpsychopathic criminals also see the world this way. The question is not how they are seeing w