Many of my psychopathic patients tell me that they feel sensitive
as long as they witness the sufferings of other people, otherwise
they do not care to know anything about them. They are anxious
to have such things away from them as a nuisance. They insist on
being surrounded only with pleasant things or with persons and
objects that contribute to their health and happiness. Everything
is absorbed by the worship of Moloch Health to whom the patients
sacrifice everything. Pain, suffering, and distress of other people
are looked at only from the standpoint of the possible effect they
may have on the patient’s “precarious health.” Like Nero, who
was probably a psychopathic character, the psychopathic patient
is ready to burn others for his health; if necessary, to torture
“health and happiness” out of his best friends.
One of my patients, who is highly intelligent, tells me frankly
that he uses others to squeeze out of them strength for himself.
As soon as he can no longer get it, or has obtained all he can,
he is anxious to part with them, gets tired of them, and even
begins to be resentful because they are in the way of his health.
Another of my patients was ready to burn parks, stables, and
destroy everything, if he knew that it was good for his health.
Other patients of mine do not hesitate to wake up the whole house
to help them in insomnia or indigestion. Many of my patients take
pleasure in forming acquaintances and even friendship with people,
ask for their sympathy, require their help and assistance, come to
them early in the morning and late at night, disturb their sleep
in the small hours of the morning, display all their symptoms
of indigestion, nausea, eructation, and vomiting. The patients
then turn round, abuse the person who helps them, telling him
disagreeable things, because he is no longer useful. A few hours
later the patients may turn again for help to the same person,
because they find that they could still make use of him.
Psychopathic patients do not hesitate, for the alleviation of their
pains, of depression, of insomnia, to take a bath in the early
morning and wake up all the other patients. They are entirely
absorbed in themselves. Self is the only object of their regard.
A clever lawyer, aptly characterized one of my most severe and
typical psychopathic cases as “egomaniac.” “When you talk of
gravity, ‘I am gravity,’ she claims. Talk of the Trinity: ‘I am the
Trinity.’” As a matter of fact every psychopathic patient is an
egomaniac.
Bacon’s aphorisms about self-lovers may well apply to psychopathic
patients: “And certainly it is in the nature of extreme
self-lovers, as they will set a house on fire, and it were but
to roast their eggs.... That which is specially to be noted is,
that those which are _sui amantes sine rivali_, are many times
unfortunate.”
Driven by the impulse of self-preservation and by the anguish of
extreme fear, the psychopathic patient may be pitied as a most
unfortunate, miserable wretch.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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