ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a critical analysis of the ‘psychopath’ as a function of criminal liability within the medical and social gaze. Robert Hare, the famous advocate of psychopathic diagnoses, has suggested that “[t]he public is becoming increasingly more fascinated with psychopaths, both as villains and antiheroes”. Whether they be the beguiling, homicidal caricatures caught on screen, those in board rooms, propagating the narcissistic push and shove of Capitalism or “the sociopaths next door” whose traits are “conveniently invisible to the world”, the psychopath is now firmly with and without us. So intolerable is the notion that there is a “spectrum of psychopathy along which each of us has our place” (Dutton, 2012, p. 10) that a criminal offender diagnosed as psychopathic – both adult and adolescent – is more likely to receive capital punishment. The medical evidence in such cases tends to suggest that the psychopath poses “a continuing threat of violence [to society], even while confined in maximum security prisons”. In England and Wales, where capital punishment is antithetical to the best interests ethic upon which medicine is based, psychiatrists instead ask: “how do we deal with [these] strange creatures … in a manner that does not make monsters of the rest of us?”
