ABSTRACT
This chapter provides to the practical assessment of psychopathy, focusing on psychological testing and report writing. It argues that psychopathy assessment always occurs within a context. The purpose of assessing psychopathy varies with the nature of the setting and the referral question. Most psychopathic individuals are chronically deceptive and will lie to and mislead the assessor at every turn. Psychopathic criminals produce significantly more narcissistic mirroring, boundary disturbance, and total primitive object relations than non-psychopathic criminals. The prototypical Rorschach protocol of a small sample of psychopathic subjects evidenced certain abnormal structural characteristics. Psychopathic malingerers will often perform worse than the expected norms for neurologic or psychiatric patients. The construct psychopathy can be integrated into the DSM diagnosis by placing in parentheses the terms mild, moderate, or severe psychopathy after the DSM-5 recognized personality disorder, if one or several exist.
