Word: psychopaths
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...psychopath with normal intelligence anxious to get into the Army may, in his few minutes with a psychiatrist at the induction center, fool him completely. But draft-board members in a small community may know that he is a heavy drinker, or has attacked girls, or never keeps a job, or is a thief. In the Army such a man will sometimes win a medal through sheer love of action. More often he is the man who is A.W.O.L. With his quick suggestibility he spreads rumors. He may even sell out to the enemy...
...with poor mental balance may develop hysterical blindness, paralysis, stiff joints, which will genuinely disqualify him as a fighter (hysteria rarely occurs in newly wounded men-presumably because real wounds eliminate them from battle). Another common type of war breakdown is the hallucinatory reliving of terrifying scenes. A psychopath may quit fighting, give way to panic, or commit suicide. Still other men will brood over every step of a battle, with remorse for their own inadequacy, or for having participated in killing...
Hardest class of malingerers to detect are those who pretend to have nervous derangements such as headaches, neuralgic pains, vertigo, fits. Worst problem of all is distinguishing the malingerer from the psychopath. Hysterical vomiting, for example, has no more physical basis than self-induced vomiting, yet morally and medically it requires different treatment...
Preventing idiots and feeble-minded from breeding (although not necessarily by the German method of destroying them) is a principle which most U.S. psychiatrists accept. But few doctors would swallow the Nazi definition of "unfit" or "psychopath." In a 1938 issue of the official Militärarzt (Army Doctor), German physicians were warned against "the most dangerous . . . element, the left psychopathic wing . . . those who . . . promote incitement and rebellion . . . those who, not lacking in intelligence . . . gather about themselves the discontented"-a description which in Germany applies rather better to democrats than to radicals...
...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...