The sociopath can sit still, inhibit immediate aims, defer gratification [‘to a degree’, ‘enough to pass’, corresponding to their location on the SAPness (socially adept psychopath) scale. What all psychopaths have in common, is not liking or wanting to restrain themselves. PW]. Indeed, if he did not have these abilities (which most latency-age children also have), people would not confuse him with an adult even with his adult-looking body (which most latency-age children do not have, and which has more to do with why latency-age children are not confused with adults than people realize). [So, Kegan is saying that it is the sociopath’s adult looking body that gets him into the door of adult life which he is actually unsuited for and absolutely untrustworthy in. I agree of course.]
Rober Kegan in “The Child Behind the Mask: Sociopathy as Developmental Delay.” In W. H. Reid, J.W. Bonner III, D. Dorr, and J.I. Walker (Eds.) “Unmasking the Psychopath“. (New York: W.W. Norton), 1986. (1986), p. 68. https://pathwhisperer.info/2009/09/03/not-frat-boy-behavior-sociopathic-behavior/
43. For example, Robert Kegan has posited, based in part on EEG studies, that psychopathy is caused by an abnormally slow rate of brain development, and that psychopaths, in effect, are frozen in time with the egocentricity, impulsiveness, selfishness, and unwillingness to delay gratification of normal adolescents. Kegan Robert G. The Child Behind the Mask: Sociopathy as Developmental Delay. In: Reid William H, et al., editors. Unmasking the Psychopath: Antisocial Personality and Related Syndromes. Vol. 45. 1986. [Google Scholar]. Though this explanation might be consistent with parts of the paralimbic thesis discussed in Part V below, it is clinically inconsistent with the fact that signs of psychopathy have been detected in very young, preadolescent, children. As Hare put it, “[F]ew parents of a ten-year-old psychopath would confuse him or her with an ordinary ten-year-old.” Hare, Without Conscience supra note 40, at 169.
THE CRIMINAL PSYCHOPATH: HISTORY, NEUROSCIENCE, TREATMENT, AND ECONOMICS
Kent A. Kiehl and Morris B. Hoffman
Author manuscript; available in PMC 2014 Jun 16.
Published in final edited form as: Jurimetrics. 2011 Summer; 51: 355–397.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4059069/#R18
The Path Whisperer 