ABSTRACT
On occasion one writes a paper that instills a sense of pride, even years later. This is mine. It appeared in a thematic collection of papers on “wickedness” edited by Ansar Haroun in Psychiatric Annals in 1997. Although morality is outside the paradigm of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, the psychodynamics of the psychopath and the sadist, often causing fear and anger in others, stimulate a reactive countertransference to idealize or condemn—evoking the literary stature of the Marquis de Sade or the mythic evil of Charlie Manson. Moralizing about psychopathy is an ever-present potential contaminant of scientific research on psychopathy, especially since the principal impairment in psychopaths is one of empathic judgment. Can we think objectively about a clinical problem that by its very nature is partially defined by community morals?
