Word: cleckley
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...never existed, but he might have. His career is a selection of typical incidents from 15 psychopathic case histories vividly presented in The Mask of Sanity (C. V. Mosby Co., St. Louis; $3) by Dr. Hervey Milton Cleckley, professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of Georgia School of Medicine. His case histories read like snatches of William Faulkner rewritten by a less talented hand...
...word "psychopathic" has been kicked around a good deal by the learned doctors. In The Mask of Sanity, Dr. Cleckley tried to show a class of psychopaths which differs clearly from neurotic alcoholics, psychoneurotics, criminal sex offenders, ordinary criminals, differs also from obvious psychotics or lunatics. The mark of his class is an apparently aimless search for disaster, a sort of continual social and spiritual suicide. These semi-suicides are often, but not always, heavy drinkers. But whereas the neurotic drinker -the classic alcoholic-drinks to avoid reality, to escape feelings of failure, humiliation or inferiority, the disaster-seeking psychopath...
...this curious disorder, Dr. Cleckley has coined a fancy name: semantic dementia-meaning inability to grasp the ordinary meaning of life as lived by human beings. It is as though, behind the mask of sanity, the emotional mechanism had collapsed, leaving these semi-suicides incapable of love, joy, sorrow, aspiration, regret. When examined in hospitals, they are often alert, bright, cheerful, amiable, sometimes haughty and aloof; but they usually think very highly of themselves, are always wholly callous to the distress they cause others. To the knowing psychiatrist, their eloquent admissions of error and promises to reform are catchwords which...
...Cleckley, who has observed hundreds of cases himself, believes the number of semantic psychopaths in the U. S. must nearly equal the number of obvious lunatics (more than 500,000). What to do about them? Dr. Cleckley recommends that they be confined in special hospitals of their own. But he is not very hopeful about curing them...