The Mask of Sanity

by Hervey Cleckley

  Many people, perhaps most, who commit violent and serious crimes fail to show the chief characteristics which so consistently appear in the cases we have considered. Many, in fact, show features that make it very difficult to identify them with this group. The term psychopath (or antisocial personality) as it is applied by various psychiatrists and hospital staffs sometimes becomes so broad that it might be applied to almost any criminal. Granting the essential vagueness of the term, and disputing no one’s right to it, I (who am using it only for convenience) maintain that the large group of maladjusted personalities whom I have personally studied and to whom this diagnosis has been consistently applied differs distinctly from a group of ordinary criminals. The essential reactive pattern appears to be in many important respects unlike the ordinary criminal’s simpler and better organized revolt against society and to be something far more subtly pathologic. It is my opinion that when the typical psychopath, in the sense with which this term is here used, occasionally commits a major deed of violence, it is usually a casual act done not from tremendous passion or as a result of plans persistently followed with earnest compelling fervor. There is less to indicate excessively violent rage than a relatively weak emotion breaking through even weaker restraints. The psychopath is not volcanically explosive, at the mercy of irresistible drives and overwhelming rages of temper. Often he seems scarcely wholehearted, even in wrath or wickedness. Jenkins,147 in making distinctions between the dyssocial type of sociopathic personality and the antisocial type, brings out important points. Criminals, despite the fact that they break the laws of society, are often loyal to each other and can sometimes pursue a common cause consistently. Jenkins distinguishes these as dyssocial personalities from the truly antisocial personalities who cannot maintain loyalty even to each other in a common defiance of society or in any consistent revolt. A few brief examples may illustrate important distinctions:

  A bright and attractive young man who for some years now has shown typical features of the psychopath obtained a new job. As so often in the past, he began almost at once to succeed and to excel his fellow salesmen. Soon he was regarded by the company as the best man in his line, full of promise for much greater tasks and opportunities in the near future. He regularly earned a good deal more than any of the other salesmen, had an ample income for his family, and seemed on the sure road to high success.

  His sales records, already surpassing all competitors, soon began to increase still more, finally becoming almost unbelievable. A short time later it became evident that something was wrong. His apparent straightforwardness and his confident explanations kept the company confused for a while longer. His ingenious methods delayed discovery that, in dealing with a less brilliant and resourceful man, would have been made much earlier.

  It was eventually established that he had been selling the commodities with which he dealt at prices below cost. Thus he had sold widely and on a vast scale, and his commissions had increased proportionately. By intricate and exceedingly well-planned tactics, both in the field and at the central office, he had covered up all discrepancies until the company had to sustain a heavy loss in setting matters right.

  To a man far less clever and scheming than this one, the obviously inevitable discovery and the consequent personal loss to himself would be easily discernible. The factual aspects were not simply overlooked in his reasoning, but something about them failed, however, to enter into his reactions, something that would not have failed to make the ordinary criminal (or the average man) behave otherwise. Such incidents abound in the histories of these patients. They do not seem to be seeking punishment or retribution to allay feelings of guilt. I can find no real evidence to support the assumption that these people are burdened with profound remorse of which they are unconscious.

  * * *

  A few more brief episodes deserve attention:

  A boy in his teens comes into the office. He has been there a number of times before and realizes that much of his story is known to the physician. On being asked how he has spent his time, he replies in the most natural manner that he has been reading Dickens.

  As the subject is developed he says that he has devoted most of his leisure time during the summer months to this literary recreation. He has found it interesting as well as useful and stimulating. After a good deal more discussion, in which he gives not the slightest sign of pretense or of uneasiness, he says that he has about completed all the novels Dickens wrote.

  It is very easy to demonstrate by specific questions that he never read one volume, that he only recalls two or three titles and has no firsthand acquaintance with any of the material. On being confronted with his idle and unnecessary fabrication, he casually admits it but seems to feel no need to account for such a falsehood. He showed no indications of even slight shame or of definite chagrin at being detected.

  * * *

  A man almost 30 years of age whose wife has seriously threatened to divorce him many times in the past but who has been brought back by his eloquent and extremely convincing expressions of rare, romantic love, of devotion beyond the experience of most couples, is now succeeding in his work and apparently has given up all the old habits which made life with him unbearable.

  His duties take him out of town for a number of days each week. It eventually becomes apparent that he has married a girl in one of the cities to which his business takes him. Great difficulties arise and violent feelings in the girl’s family are demonstrated. He had represented himself to her as divorced long ago from a shrew who mistreated him, made off with his property, and who left his heart hungry for real love. He spoke so casually and convincingly of many things nonexistent that one might say the new bride knew his entire life in every detail except one—that nothing he had told her was true!

  Before this bigamy and its serious complications can be settled, evidence emerges that he has also married another young lady in still another city where he spent time each week. Unbelievable as it may appear, a third bride, also legally married, soon comes into the picture. All three of these had been wooed with what seemed touching sincerity and wed within the course of a single month. None of these four women found him a man of intense sexual passion or judged him as one who might seek so many wives because of more than ordinary erotic needs. An intentional “despoiler of women” of the familiar type (perhaps with elements of masked homosexuality) would probably have seduced the wives of others but scarcely would have let himself be caught with four ladies legally married to him at one time.

  * * *

  A boy expelled from prep school for many antisocial and delinquent acts is talking with his father. Where, the father asks, are the clothes which were taken to school but are not now to be found in his baggage? The son, with no hesitation but with indications of regret and apology, explains that his baggage fell off the bus while crossing a bridge. Efforts to regain the baggage were successful, despite the current, but the suitcases had come open from the fall and all the clothes were lost.

  The father has already received information from the school explaining that his son sold the rather valuable clothing from time to time and often for ridiculously inadequate sums. The boy had no particular visible need for the money he got. Sometimes this was squandered on treating a crowd of fellow students to soft drinks and candy bars. He did not, however, seem either especially generous or eager to establish himself in the good graces of the others.

  I have tried to emphasize the point that most typical psychopaths, despite their continually repeated transgressions against the law and the rights of others and their apparent lack of moral compunction, seem to avoid murder and other grave felonies that remove them indefinitely from free activity in the social group. Most of these people carry out antisocial acts that would seem to make it likely for them to be confined most of their lives in penal institutions but often succeed, through the efforts of their families or through their equivocal medicolegal status, in escaping punishment altogether or in being released long befor
e the expiration of ordinary terms of confinement. It should be emphasized, nevertheless, that there are other typical psychopaths (antisocial personalities) who, in addition to the usual and familiar pattern of incompetent maladjustment and deliberate folly, proceed to carry out crimes of the greatest magnitude, including premeditated, unprovoked, and trivially motivated murder.

  When such crimes are committed and he is convicted of them, the real psychopath usually seems as free of remorse, as unperturbed, and as secure in a callous equanimity as when he has been detected in forgery, theft, adultery, or perjury—or after he has squandered in some idle and transient whim all the funds upon which his wife and children are depending to keep them from hardship and bitter poverty over the next few years.

  The reactions of a young man convicted of murder some years ago are illustrative. The reports indicate that he had enjoyed the advantages of wealth and a highly respectable family background but suggest that he had shown capricious irresponsibility and repetitious, unprovoked, antisocial activities over a long period.

  After learning that his mother was going to take a trip by airplane, he made some careful and rather elaborate plans. These included taking out flight insurance on her life for a considerable sum of money and payable to himself. He also succeeded in placing a time bomb in his mother’s luggage and set it to explode during the flight. His efforts were successful. The plane was demolished and all persons aboard, including his mother, were killed. Some of this young man’s reactions, as reported by the press, suggest that the chance of obtaining the insurance money was perhaps less stimulating to him than what he took to be the sporting qualities and challenges of the exploit. He apparently had no grudge against his mother or other reason to wish her ill.

  Accounts in newspapers and magazines of this young man’s trial suggest an insouciance and easy equanimity under circumstances that would naturally evoke extreme remorse, dread, and other desperately serious emotions. He often seemed to be enjoying his role and to delight in having the opportunity to be at the focal point of so much attention and publicity. He appeared to be entirely free of sorrow over the death of his mother and also free of shame at being proved guilty of such a horrible and unprovoked mass murder.

  In Newsweek magazine the following items were reported:226

  At times, he watched the proceedings with wide, staring eyes that showed no emotion; at other times he read a book, The Mask of Sanity, by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. When the verdict was announced he bit his lower lip, but otherwise remained impassive. His wife, Gloria, 22, the mother of his two small children, broke down and sobbed hysterically. (p. 38)

  Some accounts of this trial lead one to feel that the murderer might have found amusement, or some other sort of satisfaction, in what he regarded as an important and dramatic role and one in which he could display himself to advantage.

  Some psychiatrists might say that this young man’s apparent nonchalance under these circumstances should be taken as indicating that he was motivated by an unconscious sense of guilt which he now found satisfaction in expiating. Perhaps so. But I remain skeptical of this hypothesis until I see some concrete evidence of its validity. Evidence, let us remember, cannot be obtained by free surmises and interpretations based on the projection of mere assumptions into a theoretically constructed but still invisible unconscious. The attitude of this young man toward his brutal and senseless crime and toward the death of his mother, it seems to me, is consistent with the amazing lack of capacity for love and normal human feelings that is typical of the psychopath. His amusement and apparent satisfaction in his prominent role in court also impress me as typical of the psychopath’s egocentricity, his relish for many of his uninviting and antisocial deeds, and his feeling of petty satisfaction in cleverly carrying out acts that would overwhelm others with tragic sorrow and humiliation.

  If there is no positive motivation toward major goals, no adequate inhibition by revulsion from what is horrible or sordid, it is perhaps more understandable that the rudderless and chartless facsimile of a full human being may flounder about in trivialities or in tragic blunders and see little distinction between them.

  35. Other Character and Behavior Disorders, Including Delinquency

  Those who repeatedly commit antisocial acts or continue to carry out behavior in other ways unacceptable to the group and incompatible with good standing among one’s fellows are often referred to as delinquents. Truly felonious deeds are not regarded as characteristic of delinquency so much as repetitiveness in misdemeanor or impropriety. In contrast with the orthodox criminal and to some degree like the psychopath, the delinquent often shows lack of sufficient conscious motivation to account for his conduct. Though delinquency is not a diagnostic term, it has value in that it indicates character and behavior disorders lying between the criminal and psychopathic extremes. Transient episodes of poorly adapted behavior, particularly in the juvenile, are included. Many of the things which the psychopath does are typical of the delinquent but seem to constitute only a part of his life expression, perhaps a relatively small part. Motivation also can often be discovered in the delinquent. Such motivation may be imperfectly understood by the patient and may arise indirectly from circumstances, within and without, which he fails to recognize or to evaluate property.

  Ordinary delinquency might be thought of as a relatively mild disorder with fair prognosis similar in its outer clinical manifestations to the malignant and sweeping disorder found in the full-blown psychopath. As a pathologic reaction, as a kind of maladaptation, there are important resemblances and correlations. Hysterical dissociation and the sort of personality dissociation or disintegration found in schizophrenia also have something in common as well as important differences.

  In one, the disintegrative process is more superficial and self-limited, often of brief duration; in the other, this process may continue until the entire personality is fragmented and no longer recognizable and the organism is incapable of functioning even at the lower levels accepted as characteristic of a human being. In repetitive delinquent behavior the subject often seems to be going a certain distance along the course that a full psychopath follows to the end. In the less severe disorder, antisocial or self-defeating activities are frequently more circumscribed and may stand out against a larger background of successful adaptation. The borderlines between chronic delinquency and what we have called the psychopath merge in this area. Although anxiety, remorse, shame, and other consciously painful subjective responses to undesirable consequences are deficient in both as compared with the normal, this callousness or apathy is far deeper in the psychopath. The deficiency is also far more successfully masked.

  It is worthwhile to emphasize that many who, as they mature, become well-adjusted people and happy and distinguished citizens can look back to incidents of unprovoked misconduct which, if habitual, might constitute delinquency. If such isolated fragments not only persisted but took precedence in the entire life scheme, and became in fact the major expression of the personality, behavior would emerge having much in common with the case histories given in this book.

  Many stable and productive adults are known by me (and others, no doubt, by the reader) who can be clearly identified earlier in life as members of destructive gangs which, on Halloween or on other special occasions, carried out raids in the residential section, hurling brickbats about, smashing windows, removing wrought-iron gates, puncturing automobile tires, and shooting about rather wildly with air guns or small-caliber rifles. Some remembered as special leaders in these activities, as well as in half-serious plans to derail trains or wreck trolley cars by thoroughly oiling the hillside tracks, became properly respected bankers, Rotarians, physicians, deacons, professors, attorneys, and scout masters.

  A happy husband and father who is also an outstanding civic leader recalls with some retroactive bewilderment his membership in a select club at college in which the chief topic at meetings consisted of obscenely boastful accounts of recent enterprises in miscegenat
ion. In this particular setting, that of an isolated rural community in the South in the 1920s, such relations in themselves implied a maximum of scatologic contempt for the partner, a peculiarly derogatory aim in the act, that even the language customarily used in such reminiscences could not adequately convey.

  Another conventional and well-adjusted adult recalls an incident after a beer party following the last football game of the season when a fair proportion of the celebrants went out together to a pasture and there pursued and constrained a number of cows in efforts to achieve sexual relations with the fairly patient but reluctant animals.

  A kindly and eminently responsible medical colleague reports numerous episodes from his adolescent days in a farming community. Among many other fumbling and confused ventures in the masculine approach, he remembers finding amusement and delight in joining with other boys to make the rounds of outlying primitive toilets where young ladies, like all other local people, in response to natural demands, exposed to those strategically placed the most secret regions of the body through familiar apertures, Those who lay in wait now made stealthy use of bamboo switches or small branches to titillate the relatively immobilized and vulnerable ladies at this vividly inopportune moment. Strange girls visiting in the community gave special impetus to these gross but hilarious improprieties.

  Numerous instances come to mind of young girls who, after episodes of damaging promiscuity not accounted for by erotic passion, achieve a better evaluation of such acts and, as they mature, integrate their impulses in such a way as to find security, personal fulfillment, and adequate sexual response in stable and faithful marriages. A transient episode in a woman about 30 years of age is also pertinent to the discussion.