Sometimes I get searches asking “Is sociopathy real?” Sometimes friends say, “You have the strangest interests.” And sometimes I criticize scientists who I feel have emotionally straitjacketed themselves in the pursuit of their vision of science. Also, I believe strongly that any individual is “allowed” to draw conclusions from their own experiences and life. However, for those who believe only what comes with an “official imprimatur”, please check this out:
Research in the real world
Psychopathy and the Law Symposium http://www.psychopathysociety.org/forms/sssp_law.pdf
Mind you, I’m not ceding that their approach is superior to mine. I claim to understand sociopaths from an acting “motivation of the soul” level, which I believe is the deepest level of understanding. However I’m delighted with any high profile, public forays into sociopathy.
It’s interesting to note that non-sociopathic actors can indeed play sociopaths, but sociopathic actors cannot play characters of any real psychological depth. I recently caught portions of two sociopath movies, Catch Me If You Can and Training Day. Catch Me left me thinking that the writer had no real understanding of sociopathy, unless he was intentionally glorifying it. The main character wasn’t written as a sociopath but more as a nice guy with strange talents. Then I found out (just now) that it was written as an apparently autobiographical sketch by the main character (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0264464/). Wow!
I thought Denzel Washington did a good job playing the corrupt cop, Alonzo (though a sociopath of that caliber would most likely have really “dead eyes” in my opinion — I don’t know if that would be playable). Training Day is a true sociopathic study (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139654/). Note that it features multiple socipathic characters, they do in fact run together, they are not all egotistical loners. I should study both of these movies in depth.
It turns out that the Psychopathy and the Law Symposium, above, is simply a warm-up, a pre-conference workshop, for the following:
3rd Biannual Conference of The Society for Scientific Study of Psychopathy, April 16-18, http://www.psychopathysociety.org/forms/sssp_conference_2009.pdf
UPDATE
Over at Lovefraud Blog Liane Leedom, M.D., has three posts covering the above conference:
Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy, meeting highlights: At-risk children
SSSP meeting highlights: The psychopath’s inability to love
SSSP meeting highlights: Psychopathy in women
The Path Whisperer 
The most accurate on-screen portrayal of a psychopath has to be by Peter Stormaer in Fargo (he was the psychopath that didn’t talk much and fed the other guy into the chipper at the end).
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